Since Hillary Clinton made her speech regarding the so-called
“alt-right,” there has been much effort on the part of some media observers to
define this enigmatic phenomenon.
Some, however, like “conservative” pundit Jonah Goldberg, aren’t
so curious. At bottom, Goldberg recently assured radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt, the
“alt-right” is nothing more or less than but another manifestation of “racism.”
The “alt-right” consists of people who, in spite of whatever
other differences they may have, “agree…that white culture is inherently
superior” and that there should be “no race mixing with the lower brown
people.”
Both Hewitt and Goldberg
insist that the “alt-right”—people like “leading racist” Jared Taylor and those
who write for Peter Brimelow’s “supremacist” site, Vdare.com—must be driven
from “the conservative movement” and “the Republican Party.”
Some comments:
(1)The very
notion that there is some definable entity that can be neatly packaged with the
label “alt-right” is itself suspect. There is more than one reason for
this verdict:
For starters, and most fundamentally, there can be an alternative right only
if there is a right to
which it is an alternative. The conventional left/right paradigm of American
politics aside, the existence of the so-called “alt-right” is made possible by
the fact that, in the judgment of many, there is no genuine right.
Or, to put this point another way, from the perspective of those
who reject it, the (GOP-based) “right” is actually an alt-left, but a milder (and sometimes not so mild)
variation of the internationalist, progressive left.
Furthermore, if anyone who rejects the GOP from its right can be considered “alt-right,” then
the latter—which would include certain sorts of libertarians and anarchists,
Roman Catholic traditionalists, classical and “paleo” conservatives, as well as
“race realists”—is much more intellectually and ideologically diverse, and much
more difficult to define, than what the Goldbergs and Hewitts would have us
think.
(2)For as much as they fantasize about it, the hard truth for
the Goldbergs and Hewitts is that there can’t be a
Buckleyesque “purging” of the “alt-right” from the “conservative movement” and
Republican Party if, as is the case, adherents of the “alt-right” do not belongto either of these things. As was
said above, many of those described, or self-described, as “alt-right” regard
the GOP and the “conservative movement” as constituting an alt-left and, as
such, an object of contempt.
(3)Further proof that neoconservatism is indeed a species of
leftism is the Pavlovian propensity of its proponents to appropriate the
standard operating procedure of the left by smearing anyone to their right as
“racist.” When, for example, as principled a defender of ordered,
Constitutional liberty as Ron Paul indicated a threat to the political fortunes
of their presidential candidates back in 2011, Goldberg was among those who
spilled ink analyzing the “relationship” between Paul and “the racists,
anti-Semites and neo-Nazis in his coalition [.]”
So, their strategy to brand
those to their right with the “R-word” is revealing as to who and what the
neocons really are. Yet it’s also ironic.
As anyone who has read my work knows, it is not my habit to
level charges of “racism.” In fact, I put the very concept into question.
Still, as long as Goldberg, Hewitt, and other neocons insist upon villainizing
the Jared Taylors of the “alt-right” by branding them as “racist” for their words, they expose themselves that much more
to the same charge: After all, it is neoconservatives, and Goldberg and Hewitt
specifically, who pushed for the exportation of “Democracy” to the Middle East
(and beyond).
Thus, it is neoconservatives who were the most stalwart
advocates of the invasion of Iraq, an event that resulted in the deaths of
hundreds of thousands of people of colour.
The Iraq Body Count Project found that anywhere between 112,000 and 123,000 of
those killed between 2003 and 2013 were civilian noncombatants, many of whom
were women and children.
To this day, Iraq remains a bastion for ISIS. Ancient Christian
communities in Iraq have been eradicated courtesy of this war, and the entire
region has been radically destabilised. As long ago as 2006, the U.N. High
Commissioner for Refugees stated that over three million Iraqis had been
displaced, with 1.8 million fleeing to other countries and 1.6 million being
forced to relocate internally. By the following year, with nearly four million Iraqis
homeless, Iraq produced a larger number of refugees than produced by any
country on Earth.
In 2012, UNICEF published a report in which it declared that
between 800,000 and a million Iraqi children—about five percent of all of the
country’s kids—had lost one or both parents.
The neocons who now sound outraged over an “alt-righter”
claiming to value “white [European/Western] culture” still sleep comfortably in
spite of having deployed the resources of this same culture—including its men,
many of whom themselves became cannon fodder—to the end of decimating the
homeland of just those “lower brown people” who Goldberg criticizes the
“alt-right” for allegedly not wanting to “mix with [.]”
Well, Jonah, if only you and
yours didn’t want to mix with these same poor creatures—if not for your “racism,” your blood curdling, bloodthirsty,
homicidal “racism”—a country and its families wouldn’t be in ruins and littered
with the corpses of people of colour.
Jesus summed up the moral of this story best: With their charges
of “racism,” the neocons strain out the gnat while letting in the camel.