By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, August 31, 2016
Last week saw one of the most remarkable moments of this
most remarkable political season. A major politician defended the conservative
movement and the Republican party from guilt-by-association with a fringe group
of racists, anti-Semites, and conspiracy theorists who have jumped
enthusiastically on the Donald Trump train: the so-called alt-right.
“This is not conservatism as we have known it,” the
politician said. “This is not Republicanism as we have known it.”
The politician was Hillary Clinton, and that’s what’s
astonishing. Clinton is normally comfortable unjustly condemning conservatism
and the GOP for the sins of bigotry and prejudice, not exonerating it. After
all, she coined the phrase “vast right-wing conspiracy.”
Her husband’s administration tried – unfairly – to pin
the Oklahoma City bombing on conservative critics, specifically radio hosts
such as Rush Limbaugh. Less than a decade later, she revived the charge in her
book Living History, tying the
bombing to “right-wing radio talk shows and websites,” which “intensified the
atmosphere of hostility with their rhetoric of intolerance, anger and
anti-government paranoia.” Just last year, Clinton was comparing the entire GOP
presidential field to “terrorist groups” for their views on abortion.
This history suggests that Clinton’s attempt to
distinguish the party of Paul Ryan from the alt-right was not the product of
high-minded statesmanship, but political calculation. The goal was to demonize
Trump so as to make moderate voters feel OK voting for a Democrat.
(Trump is not an alt-righter, but his political
inexperience, his anti-establishment persona, and his ignorance of, and
hostility to, many basic tenets of conservatism created a golden opportunity
for the alt-righters to latch onto his candidacy.)
If I were a down-ballot Democrat, I’d be chagrined. By
exonerating the GOP from the stain of the alt-right, Clinton has made it harder
for Democratic candidates to tar their opponents with it. What’s truly extraordinary,
though, is that Clinton is doing work many conservatives won’t.
There is a diversity of views among the self-described
alt-right. But the one unifying sentiment is racism — or what they like to call
“racialism” or “race realism.” In the words of one alt-right leader, Jared
Taylor, “the races are not equal and equivalent.” On Monday, Taylor asserted on
NPR’s “Diane Rehm Show” that racialism — not religion, economics, etc. — is the
one issue that unites alt-righters.
If you read the writings of leading alt-righters, it is
impossible to come to any other conclusion. Some are avowed white supremacists.
Some eschew talk of supremacy and instead focus on the need for racial
separation to protect “white identity.” But one can’t talk about the alt-right
knowledgeably without recognizing their racism.
And yet that is exactly what some conservatives seem
intent on doing. For example, my friend Hugh Hewitt, the influential talk-radio
host, has been arguing that there is a “narrow” alt-right made up of a “execrable
anti-Semitic, white supremacist fringe” but also a “broad alt-right” made up of
frustrated tea partiers and others who are simply hostile to the GOP
establishment and any form of immigration reform that falls short of mass
deportation.
This isn’t just wrong, it’s madness. The alt-righters are
a politically insignificant band. Why claim that a group dedicated to
overthrowing conservatism for a white-nationalist fantasy is in fact a member
of the conservative coalition? Why muddy a distinction the alt-righters are
eager to keep clear?
In the 1960s, the fledgling conservative movement was
faced with a similar dilemma. The John Birch Society was a paranoid outfit
dedicated to the theory that the U.S. government was controlled by communists.
It said even Dwight Eisenhower was a Red (to which the conservative political
theorist Russell Kirk replied, “Ike’s not a Communist, he’s a golfer”).
William F. Buckley recognized that the Birchers were being
used by the liberal media to “anathematize the entire American right wing.” At
first, his magazine, National Review
(where I often hang my hat), tried to argue that the problem was just a narrow
“lunatic fringe” of Birchers, and not the rank and file. But very quickly, the
editors recognized that the broader movement needed to be denounced and
defenestrated.
Buckley grasped something Hewitt and countless lesser
pro-Trump pundits do not: Some lines must not be blurred, but illuminated for
all to see. Amazingly, Clinton is doing that when actual conservatives have
not.
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