A recent article I read quotes David Duke as saying:
“We are determined to take our country back. We are going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump. That’s what we believed in, that’s why we voted for Donald Trump. Because he said he’s going to take our country back. That’s what we gotta do.”
However, all ethical and political considerations aside, I think there is a fundamental flaw in their logic that is pretty much at the root of the problem.
I don’t know where they get the idea that it is their country and their country alone. This is the same problem I had with those “my neighborhood, my rules” billboards. And I’ll say it again – your socks are yours. Your house is yours. They belong to you. But larger, more intangible things, like your profession, your school, and your country, are yours only in the sense of affiliation. They don’t belong to you – you belong in them.
It is not “their country” and nobody else’s. It has never been their country and nobody else’s. If that is their assumption, they are mistaken.
What they are actually trying to get back is a zeitgeist. That is impossible. Even if they were to somehow drag us all kicking and screaming back to the 1950s, they wouldn’t get their zeitgeist back. You know that saying about how “you never step into the same river twice”? That’s why.
Well, they are trying to get that zeitgeist back, in the only way they can: install their politicians in places of power, have those politicians pass laws and appoint officials and judges, intimidate their enemies with their political power and public backing, and establish deep enough roots for both to make their way of thinking socially acceptable again.
Not that they’ll likely succeed, obviously, but that’s what they’re trying to do, and I don’t think it’s absolutely, 100% impossible. But they’re desperate.
Well, they’ve already got a (little p) president who doesn’t dare to call them out by name, even when they commit homicide. Wouldn’t want to lose the deplorable vote.
Agree with the OP. They’re fighting against the running tide of social diversity, trying to cram us all back into a monoculture. They’re treating it all as a zero-sum game, as if progress for minorities must automatically mean a loss of opportunity for their own specific (large) minority.
It’s contrary to the ideal of “e pluribus unum,” and it’s hostile to “equal justice under law.” (There have been some very ugly legal fights to prevent the building of mosques, for instance, that Christian churches haven’t had to overcome. There was a local fight to prevent the building of a Krishnan church, and they pulled out trivial little objections, like availability of street parking, that Christian churches, in the same neighborhood, had never had to answer.)
Among other things, it’s a sad failure to observe the Golden Rule. How would they feel if people treated them that way?
A pandering politician–of which Trump is a master–can always win if he finds enough of the perennially disgruntled, paranoid, so-called ‘disenfranchised’ voters, who are angry at their lot in life to the point that everyone else can go to hell, only I matter. Slogans like ‘Make America Great Again’ play to all those losers, people who, in reality, might be better off if they actually better tended their own gardens rather than whine about what they perceive as ‘immigrants and foreigners’ taking over the country (as if being born in America alone is all what makes you American; or being white automatically entitles use to ‘a fair shake,’ whatever that is). The fact is that fate can sometimes screw you–and often does–but you also make your own breaks, too. There a lot of things I could piss and moan about (these days my health, mainly) but pissing and moaning doesn’t cure anything but give you enough self-pity and angst to envy anyone or anything better off than you.
The alt-right would sound even more radical if rational people had more sense; but when you’re angry and pissed off, sense is usually the first thing you throw in the trash. Their appeal, however, is a double-edged sword, as many who voted for Trump will soon find out–if they have any sense. That is, he’s been in office for eight months blowing hot air and rhetoric, but beyond getting more than a few right-wing judges confirmed, he hasn’t accomplished much (beyond going out of his way to risk a nuclear conflict no one can possibly win, and fomenting just the type of arrogant hatred and violence that infected Charlottesville VA today).
In the end, so many who voted for this demagogue will find the joke was on them: their lot will not improve, the jobs will not come (and those Trump is attempting to recreate would be temporary anyway) and if we all make it to 2020, might finally wise up to wonder what went wrong, why they’re still stuck.
Naturally, they’ll blame immigrants and foreigners and (let’s not forget) the left wing Democrats and media, ignoring that who is sometimes to blame for anything gone wrong in one’s life is staring back at them in the mirror.
Well, theoretically they could reset the laws and court rulings such that things are as they were in the 1950s. There is no flaw in that logic; there is a flaw in the practicality of it actually happening. I think the OP is taking that phrase too literally. There is no law of nature that says that liberal societies can only move in one direction. You know which other country was able to set the clock of liberty back a century or so?
John Mace: Well yes; they can do their best to return the climate legally to an earlier time. But they can’t undo everything from MLK to Rosa Parks to Colin Kaepernick, and the cat is out of the bag, and that ship has sailed, and Bob Marley and everything.
Science has confirmed unequivocally that Jesus Christ was (of course) a black man. We have black generals and Nobel Laureates and authors and Miss Americas. We have people of every race and national background and sexual orientation achieving prominence and heroism and stardom and eminence, and that cat just isn’t going back into that bag. No matter what kind of repressive laws they lie & cheat & use dirty tricks and the “old boy” network to put in place, they will never, ever, be able to make whole classes of proud and beautiful human beings hang their heads or shrink back into subservience and disenfranchisement anymore.
Like, how can they not see that? Even apart from how reprehensible such a goal is, it’s hard to see how they think it’s even possible.
The alt-right is an internet-saavy white supremacist fusion of Chan culture, Red Pillers, and a chunk of Gamergate. It’ a hard right youth movement for the 21st century. David Duke isn’t particularly relevant to them.
Instead of grappling with a material analysis of issues affecting younger generations they prefer embracing a white masculinity that flexes its muscles by dunking on feminists and college activists. They want the benefits of patriarchy without the duties. They talk about reversing the decline of sexual morality in the West while masturbating to Japanese cartoons. They don’t even really like the West. They reject Christian morality, they sneer at the pious, and they get their kicks by transgressing liberal traditions. About the closest they come to intellectual rigor is neo-reaction, but I doubt the West will divide itself into ethno-state kingdoms anytime soon, or that this would make them happy.
One characteristic they share with the old cultural backlash is a confusion over capitalism and Hollywood. They hate what Hollywood makes, but they can’t blame markets for demanding filth, so they blame a Jewish conspiracy instead.
Given their grievances also include atomization, alienation, failure to adhere to masculine gender roles, credentialism, tuition, and corporate malfeasance, they should turn into socialists instead.
The franchise once belonged to propertied white men, like the founders.
When David Duke and utter filth like him says things like taking the country back, they mean, reducing or eliminating minorities, Liberals, non-heterosexuals, and anyone not in their tribe, by genocide if necessary.
Yes, exactly. It’s important to keep in mind, though, that Trump’s act–his dog-and-pony show-- appealed to two general groups, which are distinct, though there’s a lot of overlap: the alt-right, and the dupes. The alt-right responded to the subtext of his dog whistles, and that’s all they ever needed. The dupes are those whose minds have been enfeebled by things like “reality” TV, and so they easily fall for his bullshit. The first group are always going to vote for someone who signals the dog whistles, but it’s the second group who got him just enough electoral votes to squeak by.
What the OP is describing is actually the alt-right’s agenda, not a mistake. They know it’s not “their” country–they aren’t mistaken about that. What they want is to make it “their country.”
Their real mistake is to assume that Trump’s election somehow means that their agenda has validity, or that it’s somehow going to gain wide-spread acceptance. But Trump was just using them to get votes, and he’s not going to go out on limp for them unnecessarily–not as long as he has their votes. Their agenda has no more validity now than it did before, and just as little acceptance throughout the country as a whole.
I myself think that the opening post’s fundamental error, is the presumption that the “Alt Right” is a unified and THOUGHT-BASED group.
That is not a snide insult, it is an attempt to point us back to drawing rational conclusions from factual information, rather than from the ever shifting phantom ground of “things people say” about the world.
I have found, through direct observation over sixty some years, that the great majority of people do NOT carefully inspect and reason through, whatever they pronounce as their beliefs and desires. Instead, like very young children, they hear something or read something which sounds vaguely as though it promises them a reward, and then repeat it back again. This is indeed, why it is so very easy to catch most people in some degree of being “hypocritical,” because they never bother to coordinate one concept they cut and paste into their memories, with all the other ones already there.
Trump himself, shows that propensity in the extreme. He is caught lying almost constantly, less because of any craft on his part, than because he is used to blurting out pretty much anything that crosses his mind, and having the greedy yes-men around him applaud him for his cleverness, while others leap to take advantage of his sloppy verbiage for their own ends.
As someone else said above, I certainly HOPE that these disorganized, violence prone, unthinking fools will fail to accomplish their confused goals, but it is already clear, that due to an extreme and purposeful lack of leadership from the truly conservative Right, a lot of damage is about to be done to American interests, and the American people as a nation by these mentally disturbed people.
This is a case where I’ll make some moral equivalence: “take our country back” has always seemed to me to be an incredibly stupid thing to say. Everyone who says that knows we are divided down the middle, so by definition you’re trying to take the country back from the other half of the people.
I don’t want to take my country back. It’s been mine regardless of who is in the government. It’s mine now. There are some things going on that I don’t like that I’d like to see fixed, but I’ll be okay if they aren’t.
Yes, but Trump monitors certain media and uses the responses he gets at rallies to collect a repertoire of things to say which will push the right buttons for a certain core that support him no matter what. That’s how he just barely survives, politically, because the craven, opportunistic, sycophantic yes-men have to use that core too. Actually, many Republicans were already doing that, just to a less sensational degree. Cruz has always wanted to be able to do what Trump is doing–he just didn’t have the TV base. Trump performs–presents an image that mentally lazy people believe. Basically, that’s how he survived in “business,” too. After his bankruptcies, all he had was an empty image, but that was enough.
I think we are in near complete agreement. Trump won the nomination and the election, because he DID listen and parrot back pretty much everything that sounded righteous and exciting to him. He still does. But he doesn’t bother to coordinate anything.
Some of the more intellectually robust pockets of the alt-right are in it for the long haul. They will point to how radical Islam has encroached upon the first world. They believe in the long run civilizations giving priority to diversity, egalitarianism, etc. are destined to decay and collapse, that this is the course of nature. Many of them are happy enough to see accelerating evidence of social turmoil under Trump and his continual pandering, and don’t necessarily expect much more of him than to serve as a bellwether of their anticipations.
It’s important not to throw labels around. I don’t know what an alt-right is, and I thought David Duke was dead. He doesn’t speak for me or anybody else afaik.
The problem with movements and the modern political discourse is they need an enemy. In an age where real racism is nonexistant, we’re reduced to “unconscious bias” and “white privilege” and other imaginary bogeymen. * You’re racist because of your skin color*; and that’s all there is to it.
Somehow as a society we’ve morphed from Equality for all, being judged by the content of our character, to Whiteness must be Exterminated. Very Orwellion, to hear the rhetoric thrown around.
I like you.