2. First of all, I should say that everyone should read the @RosieGray piece, which is terrific reporting filled with genuinely eye-poping details. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/rosiegray/katie-mchugh …
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13. The other aspect of the Buckley legend is that even though the people he purged from the right were usually anti-semites and racists, he didn't always purge them for anti-semitism or racism but for other reasons.
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14. Murray Rothbard was purged by Buckley not for consorting with David Duke & the vile stuff in the Rothbard/Rockwell newsletter but in the early 1960s for Rothbard's quite sensible opposition to Cold War militarism.
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15. Similiarly, Buckley & National Review worked hard to keep the John Birch Society (although not its leader Robert Welch) in the conservative coalition until 1965, when the JBS came out against (sensibly!) the Vietnam war.
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16. Jospeh Sobran was doing edgelord stuff for a longtime (in 1979 in National Review he complained about textbooks devoting time to feminists & Hispanics, or "chicks and spics" as he called them). But only became a problem for NR when he opposed the first Iraq war.
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17. I think the true history is this: there was a big purge of the proto-alt-right (the paleo cons) in 1990s spurred on by Iraq war & Wall Street immigration consensus. When politics changed (2nd Iraq war went bad, anti-immigration on right increased) alt-right resurfaced.
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18. A bit tangentially, something needs to be written about the widespread cult of Joseph Sobran that sprang up after Buckley fired him in 1993. Sobran was seen by many as a truthtelling martyr, The alt-right was the return of the repressed, in Freud's terms.
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19. Thinking more on it, the problem with the "alt-right infiltrated conservative movement" frame is that it elides the really sinister role of the donor class. In a lot of ways, the Mercers & the Kochs are a much bigger problem than the alt-right.
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20. By itself, the alt-right is a minor problem: they're small in number, not very bright, and generally goofballs who, as
@RosieGray shows, like to pretend to be vikings at summer camp. The real problem is the big money people who worked to mainstream the goofballs.Show this thread -
21. It's the Mercers and the Kochs who have made a knowing decision to elevate the alt-right, doing so on the probably correct assumption that racism will win a mass base that purely libertarian economic policy never will.
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End of conversation
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The refined conservative movement has to produce sophisticated structures and vocabulary to justify unrestrained personal greed ("freedom") and racism ("cultural identity"), and then is stuck perpetually disowning unrefined people who flock to it but didn't learn the code words.
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