7. To put it another way, post-war right was an alliance of the snobs & the slobs. The concerns of the snobs (Voegelin's critique of gnosticism, Strauss on Hobbes, Weaver on nominalism) had little traction among the slobs organizing white citizens committees.
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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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I also think crime decline/welfare reform in that era reduced salience of race in conservative (and national) debates, and encouraged hope (palpable under W.) of leaving Southern Strategy era behind.
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Yes, George W. Bush's compassionate conservatism was genuine effort to move beyond race on the right. With collapse of Bushism, we're back to 1960s/1970s backlash politics.
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Maybe a collapsing industrial base coupled with nonexistent rural policies for forty years prior lead to this... Oklahoma city bomber radicalization was birthed in this brew
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Not complicated the democratic and Republican Party both co-signed onto the Washington consensus and removed economics from policy prescriptions had turf wars on personalities and things that wouldn’t hurt wall streets bottom line
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Thanks, this really helps be understand how the right in the GWB years was so hawkish, but now anti-war sentiment seems to be distributed across the political spectrum.
Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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The point of it was to hide that none of them had any real problem with the Willie Horton, laughing at gay men dying of aids, welfare queen stuff. They knew their base ate that stuff up and they could scare suburban whites into voting for them with it.
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