5. By the standards of 2019, the New Deal seems hopelessly compromised by racism. But in 1930s the gingerly steps FDR & (especially) Elinor Roosevelt took on its behalf (notably championing Marian Anderson after DAR incident) earned them enmity of white nationalist right.
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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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