All wrong…

This from Slate.com is good, an interview with a former Breitbart contributor and never-Trumper on Bannon and the alt-right. Thought-provoking in terms of pointing up how ‘appeasing’ the alt-right is a problem in itself with consequences that may be far-reaching. Though as ever, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. So much of this as noted before remains internet froth. But, influence is influence and those who can exert it will exert it even in small ways that may seem relatively innocuous or marginal but may be anything but in the longer term.

Bannon would however be troubling whatever way one cuts it:

I think that Steve will stop if it becomes politically convenient for him to stop. Steve is not a deeply principled guy on politics; it’s not like he’s coming in with this ramrod agenda. He’s coming in and he’s talking about big government spending. He’s talking about trillion-dollar infrastructure packages. If you had to peg Steve down on ideology or philosophy, you’d say he’s sort of like a European far-right leader. He’s more like Marine Le Pen or Nigel Farage than he is like a constitutional conservative. He doesn’t like constitutional conservatism; he thinks that it’s an obstacle in the way of building this new Third Way movement, this independent political movement that is focused on heavy spending—even some redistribution inside the country—but closed borders and tariffs for everybody outside. He calls himself an economic nationalist. They say, “Are you a white nationalist?” and he says, “No, I’m an economic nationalist.” And then when he’s asked about white nationalism and its effect on the far-right in Europe, he says that will sort of fade away as time goes on, and they’ll legitimize. I don’t think so. I’ve never seen a bad movement or a bad person, yet, given power and they become better people.

I’m not prone to hyperbole, but when I hear the term Third Way movements I tend to check for fascists or crypto-fascists or proto-fascists.

And this is interesting too (and echoes in a way the manner in which the Tories and UKIP have sought to portray the Brexit referendum as a sweeping victory when it was in fact remarkably close).

I think it’s wrong politically because I think that everyone’s taking the wrong lessons, right and left, away from this election cycle.
I think on the right, people are taking it like Trump won this big, broad victory; Trump lost the popular vote by over 1 million votes, and he won by very, very narrow margins in places like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Florida. And the fact is that when all is said and done, the groups that are growing demographically in the United States are minorities, women, young people—millennials will be 40 percent of the voting population in 2020. And so if you’re banking on this ever-shrinking group, the alt-right, in order to put you over the top, that seems like bad politics. It’s alienating politics; it’s not something that’s going to help.

By the way – a great definition of the alt-right, and indeed how its supposed defence of ‘western’ civilisation is anything but.

Basically, the alt-right is a group of thinkers who believe that Western civilization is inseparable from European ethnicity—which is racist, obviously. It’s people who believe that if Western civilization were to take in too many people of different colors and different ethnicities and different religions, then that would necessarily involve the interior collapse of Western civilization. As you may notice, this has nothing to do with the Constitution. It has nothing to do with the Declaration of Independence. It has nothing to do actually with Western civilization. The whole principle of Western civilization is that anybody can involve himself or herself in civilized values. That’s not what the alt-right believes—at least its leading thinkers, people like Richard Spencer and Jared Taylor and Vox Day. Those kind of folks will openly acknowledge that this is their thought process.