Post by ck4829 on Dec 24, 2017 13:17:01 GMT
Review: ‘Alt-Right: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump’
Think of this book as a basket of deplorables. It’s thick on illuminating descriptions of renascent white nationalists, gun-enamored militia poseurs, conspiracy-theory mongers, Ku Klux Klansmen and women, Christian Identitarians and proto-Nazis benefitting from and legitimized by the sordid presidency of Donald Trump. It’s thin on explaining why such phenomena persist or have arisen as political thuggery in 21st-century America.
Journalist David Neiwert’s Alt-Right: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump is certainly required reading. He’s a widely respected expert on the American far right, author of five previous books on the right and repression of immigrants, as well as a frequent guest on CNN and MSNBC and a contributor to the Washington Post. The book’s breadth of detail is exhaustive and almost singular in focusing on the racist far-right movement that has often been presumed dead, but got a jolt of growth hormones from the Trump campaign, who mainstreamed what Neiwert calls their “eliminationist rhetoric” as applied to immigrants, people of color and Jews. Some even refer to Trump as “Glorious Leader,” language the author doesn’t harp on but that harkens back to the fuhrerprinzip, or notion of the leader as above all law. Neiwert also notes the munificent funding of far-right causes from wealthy grandees like the Coors family and the Koch brothers.
Where Neiwert is at his best is in charting and quantifying the mainstreaming of white-nationalist ideas, where even Nazis were free to join and lead Tea Party efforts. Teabagger ideology was broadcast not just by lunatics like Alex Jones, obvious racists like David Duke and pervasive social-media trolls, but by seemingly respectable Fox News. The Oathkeepers, in effect a revived ’90s-style militia, could masquerade and be accepted as “just another community-watch organization.”
Trump’s condemnation of “dangerous Mexicans” and his fancied immigrant crime wave won him unwavering support from white nationalists, including Nazi wannabe Andrew Anglin, who wrote on his website “The Daily Stormer” (named after a fanatical 1930s Nazi newspaper), “I urge all readers of this site to do whatever they can to make Donald Trump president.” (Luke O’Brien also ably profiles Anglin in the December 2017 Atlantic.) Peter Brimelow’s white-nationalist website, vdare.com followed suit, headlining “We Are All Donald Trump Now,” while Richard Spencer’s Radix Journal, in acknowledging it considered Trump “a troll,” claimed he was their troll. “We need someone who can break open public debate,” Spencer wrote. “The fact that Trump himself is part of this same farce is utterly irrelevant.”
...
Alt-Right: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump is a thorough review. It’s not the first work to posit the connection between Trump and the mainstreaming of white nationalist movements; Neiwert and Sarah Posner anticipated some of the book’s revelations in an October 2016 article in Mother Jones, as did Andrew Marantz’s October 2017 New Yorker profile of fascist shock-jock and virulent Jew-hater Mike Enoch. But Neiwert’s book masterfully exposes so many of the interstices between Trump, the far-right nationalists and the toxic manipulators of social media, each feeding off the others.
The book, however, never tries to give a theoretical explanation of why such banal ideas fester. Why, for example, does a movement so tied to Christian Identitarianism ignore Jesus’s key injunction that “what you do unto the least of them, you do unto me?” Why the fetishistic clinging to a “white” identity and a “white European” heritage? Neiwert does digress briefly to explore a useful distinction by the psychologist Robert Altmeyer between authoritarian “followers” and “dominators,” the former looking only for order and peace, while the latter lust for power. That might be the beginning of a useful discussion, but it would be aided by referring to some standard works on authoritarianism, such as Theodor Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality and Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism.
indypendent.org/2017/12/right-hooks/
Mirrored at:
tpalladium.freeforums.net/thread/153/right-hooks
pulpitcrack.freeforums.net/thread/34/right-hooks
dreadstate.freeforums.net/thread/49/right-hooks
Think of this book as a basket of deplorables. It’s thick on illuminating descriptions of renascent white nationalists, gun-enamored militia poseurs, conspiracy-theory mongers, Ku Klux Klansmen and women, Christian Identitarians and proto-Nazis benefitting from and legitimized by the sordid presidency of Donald Trump. It’s thin on explaining why such phenomena persist or have arisen as political thuggery in 21st-century America.
Journalist David Neiwert’s Alt-Right: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump is certainly required reading. He’s a widely respected expert on the American far right, author of five previous books on the right and repression of immigrants, as well as a frequent guest on CNN and MSNBC and a contributor to the Washington Post. The book’s breadth of detail is exhaustive and almost singular in focusing on the racist far-right movement that has often been presumed dead, but got a jolt of growth hormones from the Trump campaign, who mainstreamed what Neiwert calls their “eliminationist rhetoric” as applied to immigrants, people of color and Jews. Some even refer to Trump as “Glorious Leader,” language the author doesn’t harp on but that harkens back to the fuhrerprinzip, or notion of the leader as above all law. Neiwert also notes the munificent funding of far-right causes from wealthy grandees like the Coors family and the Koch brothers.
Where Neiwert is at his best is in charting and quantifying the mainstreaming of white-nationalist ideas, where even Nazis were free to join and lead Tea Party efforts. Teabagger ideology was broadcast not just by lunatics like Alex Jones, obvious racists like David Duke and pervasive social-media trolls, but by seemingly respectable Fox News. The Oathkeepers, in effect a revived ’90s-style militia, could masquerade and be accepted as “just another community-watch organization.”
Trump’s condemnation of “dangerous Mexicans” and his fancied immigrant crime wave won him unwavering support from white nationalists, including Nazi wannabe Andrew Anglin, who wrote on his website “The Daily Stormer” (named after a fanatical 1930s Nazi newspaper), “I urge all readers of this site to do whatever they can to make Donald Trump president.” (Luke O’Brien also ably profiles Anglin in the December 2017 Atlantic.) Peter Brimelow’s white-nationalist website, vdare.com followed suit, headlining “We Are All Donald Trump Now,” while Richard Spencer’s Radix Journal, in acknowledging it considered Trump “a troll,” claimed he was their troll. “We need someone who can break open public debate,” Spencer wrote. “The fact that Trump himself is part of this same farce is utterly irrelevant.”
...
Alt-Right: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump is a thorough review. It’s not the first work to posit the connection between Trump and the mainstreaming of white nationalist movements; Neiwert and Sarah Posner anticipated some of the book’s revelations in an October 2016 article in Mother Jones, as did Andrew Marantz’s October 2017 New Yorker profile of fascist shock-jock and virulent Jew-hater Mike Enoch. But Neiwert’s book masterfully exposes so many of the interstices between Trump, the far-right nationalists and the toxic manipulators of social media, each feeding off the others.
The book, however, never tries to give a theoretical explanation of why such banal ideas fester. Why, for example, does a movement so tied to Christian Identitarianism ignore Jesus’s key injunction that “what you do unto the least of them, you do unto me?” Why the fetishistic clinging to a “white” identity and a “white European” heritage? Neiwert does digress briefly to explore a useful distinction by the psychologist Robert Altmeyer between authoritarian “followers” and “dominators,” the former looking only for order and peace, while the latter lust for power. That might be the beginning of a useful discussion, but it would be aided by referring to some standard works on authoritarianism, such as Theodor Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality and Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism.
indypendent.org/2017/12/right-hooks/
Mirrored at:
tpalladium.freeforums.net/thread/153/right-hooks
pulpitcrack.freeforums.net/thread/34/right-hooks
dreadstate.freeforums.net/thread/49/right-hooks