Bits and Pieces (x)

So, what's with the emerging Right?

A self-flattering explanation popular among the sanctimonious and disingenuous liberals, like Paul Krugman, is:

"I don't think any kind of economic analysis can explain this. It has to be about culture and, as always, race."

How can one argue with such politically correct brilliance? It's all Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel's fault.

Anyway, who are those homogeneously racist people? What do they believe in?

This is where my latest searches can add some value (particularly for readers of a Marxist persuasion).

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My first finding was written by two young guiding lights of the American alt-right: one (Allum Bokhari) is an atheist of Pakistani/Muslim background and the other (Milo Yiannopoulos) a gay Greek/Briton of mixed Catholic/Jewish background who apparently loves black dick (see also: Twinks4Trump). Liberal identity politics in all its glory.

They don't offer quantitative data, but this is their breakdown of alt-right supporters:

1. The intellectuals.
2. The natural conservatives.
3. The meme team.
4. The 1488rs.

Out of that fauna, liberal intellectuals like Krugman never mention the intellectuals (apparently, their fellow upper-middle class peers, therefore, equally respectable) or the meme team (teens seemingly of diverse ethnic and religious background, sharing a common trait of assholic tendencies). Liberal intellectuals find it safer and more expedient to conflate the 1488rs (the real neo-Nazis) with natural conservatives ("mostly white, mostly male middle-American radicals, who are unapologetically embracing a new identity politics that prioritises the interests of their own demographic"): the American white working class is born.

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So, what do alt-righters believe in?

Obviously, it's impossible to find a common tread given those people's presumably different educative levels.

Still, Jacob Siegel, from Tablet magazine (November 29, 2016) writes of Richard Spencer:

"The night America elected Donald J. Trump president, 38-year-old Richard B. Spencer, who fancies himself the ‘Karl Marx of the alt-right' and envisions a ‘white homeland,' crowed, ‘we're the establishment now.' If so, then the architect of the new establishment is Spencer's former mentor, Paul Gottfried, a retired Jewish academic who lives, not quite contently, in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania."

Judging by Siegel's article, perhaps one could say that Gottfried is some kind of philosopher of Austrofascism, as opposed to Nazism (the 1488rs may be in for a big disappointment). He wouldn't be the first Central European Jewish emigré to the US with those ideas: Ludwig von Mises was another.

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How does Stephen K. Bannon compare to Spencer? Ronald Beiner, from Crooked Timber (January 11, 2017) gives his views. Among other things: "Bannon endorses a quasi-Marxist critique of the kind of Wall St. capitalism that treats people like commodities".

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If one is to believe those two notes, both Spencer and Bannon adopt at least some Marxist rhetoric, however partially and insincerely and opportunistically. And given that they are succeeding, I'd say they may be doing something right. I don't know about the readers, but to me this suggests that there must be some grassroots level disillusionment with capitalism.

But, hey, I'm just a grunt. Of course, the Left cannot do that. Imagine! Anti-capitalism!? We must instead persist on identity politics and Very Serious Economics, a la Krugman, and heed this anonymous American middle class liberal genius:

"Karl Marx was right in parts of his analysis, and wrong in much of his theory. Nowhere was he more spectacularly wrong than in his tenet that the only real change is revolutionary change. The advent of labor unions, and weekends, and workplace health standards, and fire-codes and social security … all constitute real change without revolution. The plight of the worker has not sunk steadily towards ever more misery. Bizarrely, the belief in revolution as the only real change is the only aspect of Marx that Steve Bannon has embraced."

Or his local equivalent, the Australian Greens senator Richard Di Natale:

"Of course the Greens do not support the overthrow of capitalism or any other ridiculous notions of the sort".

Now, the irony is that those libtards think of themselves as smart. God, give me strength to withstand this orgy of ineptitude.