“White Sheets and Red Golf Caps”–updated

 

“… dressing up economic protectionism, white supremacism,
and tribalism isn't a defense of western civilisation.”

Robert Tracinski ably explains the fetid sewer of support flushed out by Donald Trump – people who understand Western civilisation not as a set of ideas, but as some kind of symbol of their racial identity. They’re calling themselves alt-right; he’s identified them simply as The Other Left. Or even more simply: Yes, The Alt-Right Are Just a Bunch of Racists:

I’m talking about the so-called “alt-right,” which stands for “alternative right,” though I can’t find anything particularly “right-wing” about them—not in the American sense, which has traditionally meant advocacy of free markets, individual rights, and the ideals of our Founding Fathers.
    Frankly, it’s a little embarrassing that we even have to debate this, but by launching his campaign on a “Mexican immigrants are rapists” platform, Donald Trump brought the alt-right out of the woodwork.

And they’re now out.

One astute observation among many: these are people who allow their opponents to define their politics:

The alt-right originated by looking at the left’s caricature of the right as racists and pro-white tribalists and saying, in effect: sure, we’ll be that. …
   The alt-right is enabling this fraud. They accept the left’s intellectual framework and eagerly take on the role of the villain that the left assigned to us. Then they have the effrontery to present themselves as big rebels against the left. What a joke.
    You could argue that the alt-right is a consequence of the left’s abuse of the stigma against racism. By reflexively denouncing as a racist everyone who disagrees with them about economics, and by making every detail of ordinary life into a minefield of hidden racial transgressions, they have burned up their own credibility. In the process, they have weakened the culture’s immune system against racism and made it possible for a young cohort of racists to repackage their odious creed as resistance to political correctness. …
    The alt-right isn’t part of the intellectual traditions of the American right, nor is it an alternative to anything. It’s just the same old white-sheet set, repackaged with red “Make America Great Again” golf caps. They’re serving as ignorant tools of the left, and they should be exposed as such.

If you maybe think he’s exaggerating…

The most important point he makes: “They want to destroy Western Civilisation in order to save it”:

The big fig leaf of the alt-right is that they want to protect Western Civilisation—by throwing out its distinctive ideas and achievements.
    The central theme of the Western intellectual tradition is about rising above tribalism to arrive at universal values. That’s a common theme that connects both secular and Christian traditions in the West. It was the whole distinctive idea behind the Ancient Greek revolution in thought…. Philosophers like Socrates launched the Western tradition by asking probing questions that were meant to sort out which ideas and practices are based merely on historical accident and social convention, versus those that are based on universal laws of human nature.
     Tribalism, by contrast, is the default state of every culture and can be found among every people in every corner of the world. There is nothing distinctively Western about it, and it runs against the whole grain of the Western intellectual tradition.
    So by reverting to tribalism, the alt-right is saying that they had to destroy Western Civilization in order to save it.

Yeah right.

To paraphrase his comment above: “This vile movement isn’t part of the intellectual traditions of Western civilisation, nor is it an alternative to it.”

RELATED POSTS:

• “…there is no reason for believing that civilisation is in any way a property of any particular race or ethnic group. It is strictly an intellectual matter--ultimately, a matter of the presence or absence of certain fundamental ideas underlying the acquisition of further knowledge.”
  “The Universalisability of Western Civilisation” – George Reisman, NOT PC
• “If ‘multiculturalism’ is taken to mean preserving the demographic makeup of distinct ethnic groups or clusters within a larger population, it actually fosters racism rather than diminishing it… ‘Multiculturalism’ of that kind is actually modern tribalism, and the label ‘multiculturalism’ is a vague diversion to hide the tribal nature of it.”
  What is the difference between multiculturalism and genuine racial tolerance? – OBJECTIVIST ANSWERS
• [UPDATE: “Most on the Alt-Right do not only reject the ‘conservative Establishment’ or some other contemporary bogeyman; they also reject the ideals of classical liberalism as such. That rejection grounds the thinking of Jared Taylor, and Richard Spencer, for instance — representative “intellectuals” of the Alt-Right, according to Bokhari and Yiannopoulos. These men — the founders of the publications American Renaissance and Radix Journal, respectively — have not simply been ‘accused of racism.’ They are racist, by definition. Taylor’s ‘race realism,’ for example, co-opts evolutionary biology in the hopes of demonstrating that the races have become sufficiently differentiated over the millennia to the point that the races are fundamentally — that is, biologically — different. Spencer, who promotes ‘White identity’ and ‘White racial consciousness,’ is beholden to similar ‘scientific’ findings.”
  The Racist Moral Rot at the Heart of the Alt-Right – Ian Tuttle, N.R.O.]

[Pic by Shutterstock.]

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