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Here is another dumb article from The Federalist on the Alt-Right:
“Hey, lefties, we finally found your racists for you.
For as long as I can remember, people like me—by which I mean advocates of capitalism and free markets and freedom of speech—have been accused by the left of being secret racists who pine for the gold old days of the antebellum South. Tiresome stuff like this. Then along comes a group of actual, declared racists who really do pine for the antebellum South, and who is one of the main targets of their invective? People like me.
Kind of ironic, eh?
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. …”
Where do I even start? This is such a target rich article.
1.) If there is ANYONE, and I mean ANYONE, on the Alt-Right “who pine for the good old days of the antebellum South,” then it is the Southern Nationalists. I know all these people and NONE OF THEM advocate restoring slavery in the 21st century.
Instead, there are aspects of the antebellum South that we find interesting: the spread of the plantation system from the Caribbean to the South, how that shaped our culture and politics, the ethnic and cultural origins of the Southern people, etc. These are mainly questions about our origins and identity. We find them interesting for the same reasons than Englishmen, Hungarians and Germans are interested in the fall of the Roman Empire and the role that played in the emergence of modern European nation-states.
2.) As it happens, the Founding Fathers restricted US citizenship to “free white persons,” established the first tariff, later the first protective tariffs and enshrined slavery in the Constitution, but let’s continue to indulge the fantasy that mainstream “conservatives” are the heirs of the “colorblind” Founders.
3.) We can’t expect the TruConservatives to understand the inside baseball of a term like “identitarianism,” but the term primarily means a focus on identity, as opposed to “race realism” or HBD, which is more interested in compiling statistics to verify the existence of racial differences. “Identitarians” believe in the existence of racial differences, but are less focused on science than questions of belonging.
4.) The Alt-Right identifies with a concrete constituency – White Europeans – and has a simple program of wanting to “conserve” their culture and racial heritage for posterity. Of course it is a radical idea for mainstream “conservatives” to propose “conserving” anything real or to have anything positive to say about White Europeans as a group, as opposed to Jews who they literally worship, and who are often uncomfortable with their affection.
Every day more people yell at me to show the same zeal for America's inviolability that I do for Israel's, but I will not yield to some mob!
— Conservative Pundit (@DemsRRealRacist) April 5, 2016
5.) The Alt-Right rejects classical liberalism in the sense that nationalists believe individuals are part of a greater whole who share a common fate. This is also a radical idea to mainstream “conservatives” who subscribe to the notion that every “individual” is in total command of his own destiny. Whereas nationalists are motivated by altruism toward other members of their nation, conservatives don’t see a nation at all, but rather a marketplace of atomized individuals driven by “the virtue of selfishness” where value is measured in prices and goods are bought and sold. Their desiccated vision of the world is often described by the Alt-Right as “a Lockean shopping mall.”
People ordering their lives as if they belonged to a greater whole. Just ONE evil the alt-right wants to unleash: pic.twitter.com/tU6Wk88OnW
— Conservative Pundit (@DemsRRealRacist) April 5, 2016
Once you realize man's two noblest drives are hedonism and greed, you have no choice but to be socially liberal and fiscally conservative.
— Conservative Pundit (@DemsRRealRacist) April 4, 2016
6.) In light of European history, the idea that Western civilization is opposed to “tribalism” is laughable. The only response to this is laughter. It is idiotic on so many levels that your jaw drops reading it. The “Western tradition” is not classical liberalism. The Greeks and Romans were certainly not classical liberals. Neither were their Medieval and Early Modern successors. Classical liberalism has been popular in certain parts of the West at certain times, but so has socialism or communism or fascism, etc.
7.) As I pointed out earlier today, mainstream “conservatives” are accustomed to dancing to the Left’s tune because they are driven by fashion and respectability. Their morality is yesterday’s liberalism. They routinely ostracize their own fellow conservatives for violating this or that leftist taboo.