6. After World War II, as the coalescing right tried to work out an effective alliance, leaders like William F. Buckley faced a problem: intellectual wing of the right had a small audience, while the strongest activist energy came from anti-black racists (esp. in South).
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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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