Trump’s Right and The ‘Alt’ and ‘New’ Rights

Dispatches from Deena Stryker

President Donald Trump’s early claims that his wealth enabled him to fund a presidential campaign without needing other contributions is burst wide open in Jane Mayer’s article in the March 27 New Yorker. Trump’s Money Man reveals a White House — and cabinet — whose staff was selected by a multi-millionaire, compared to whom the skin-head, motorcycle riding ‘Alt Right’ are kindergarteners. The media has limited its reporting of White House lore to Steve Bannon’s fascination with a cyclical interpretation of history, failing to reveal the directing role played by the Robert Mercer family. Trump’s rise to power, followed by his immediate betrayal of his core constituency in the healthcare bill, cannot be understood without knowing something of his underground backer, the various contemporary ‘rights’ and fascism’s history. 

MAIN COVER IMAGE: Robert Mercer, enemy of the people and democracy. Shielded by his money, and ensconced at the core of the plutocratic American system, rich nut jobs like these who act as puppeteers for the US population, will bury the human race along with everything else that lives. 

While the European New Right has taken over the left-wing’s commitment to equality, as I will detail later, the American Alt-Right harks back to Europe’s pre-war fascists who were determined to transform a relatively backward country  — Italy — into a modern, technologically advanced nation, harnessing the entire population to that goal. Mussolini’s fascists flirted with Marxism, the dominant non-conformist ideology at the time, however they placed ‘the nation’ above class, while the goal of Trump’s backers is to eliminate the state. After bringing Steve Bannon and Maryanne Conway into the Trump transition, Robert Mercer (cover image above), who believes America could survive a nuclear war, that global warming is a fantasy and for whom individuals are only as useful as the money they make, literally chose each member of the president’s cabinet, financing a campaign to gain their political approval. Knowing this, the effort to replace Obamacare with something that would leave the poorest unprotected is no surprise, nor is Trump’s determination to push through construction of the Keystone and Dakota access pipelines, which benefits investors.

How could it have come to this? The nineteen-sixties call by the American counter-culture for a spiritual transformation was not heard, leaving a left chastened by McCarthyism trading ideals for neo-liberal ‘efficiency’, wanting to believe it would guarantee the greatest good for the greatest number. Then, just as increasing numbers of politically active Americans were becoming aware of the downside of modernity, Muslim refugees from US wars in the Middle East began storming our European allies — much like the GI’s stormed the Normandy beaches during World War II. As a result, and encouraged by the spectacle of Ukraine’s militia, whose ancestors were allied with Nazi Germany and whose strong-arm tactics were crucial to the US-backed coup against the democratically elected, pro-Russian president in 2014, Europe’s anti-immigrant right wing got a new lease on life. In this year’s upcoming presidential and parliamentary elections, European workers are abandoning socialists and communists for parties that increasingly dare to echo fascist memes, although they could look to the ‘New Right’, that abandoned militarism and racism for the left’s major memes of equity, decentralization, anti-globalization and anti-consumerism.

Totally unknown to the American public, the New Right’s program is spelled out in a Manifesto published in 2000 by GRECE, a French think tank founded by the right-wing philosopher Alain de Benoist. This 14,000 word text could have been written by a leftist were it not for its opposition to multiculturalism, which by the way explains its attractiveness to Vladimir Putin. In response to what has hitherto been considered the most progressive view of human relations, the ‘post-modern’ New Right manifesto states:

The French New Right upholds the cause of peoples, because one is only justified in defending one’s difference from others if one is also able to defend the difference of others. This means that the right to difference cannot be used to exclude others who are different. The French New Right respects ethnic groups, languages, and regional cultures, as well as native religions. It supports peoples struggling against Western imperialism. The diversity of the human species is a treasure,  and  ‘universal’, does not oppose difference, but recognizes it. For the New Right, the struggle against racism is not won by negating the concept of race, nor by blending all races into an undifferentiated whole, but by refusing both exclusion and assimilation: neither apartheid nor the melting pot, but acceptance of the other as Other in a perspective of mutual enrichment.” 

Like the Russian President, the New Right opposes multiculturalism, claiming it cannot work, and modernity because it generates alienation.

“Modernity designates the political and philosophical movement of the last three centuries of Western history…characterized by individualization, or the destruction of old forms of communal life; ‘mass society’, or the adoption of standardized behavior and lifestyles; desacralization, which replaces the great religious narratives by a scientific interpretation of the world; rationalization, the domination of instrumental reason, the free market,  technical efficiency and universalization, the extension of a model of society postulated implicitly as the only rational possibility and thus as superior, to the entire planet. 

The American Alt-Right has nothing in common with these subtleties. It is nationalist, as is the religious right. On the other hand, to say it is misogynous barely scratches the surface of its attitude toward women, which tends toward disparagement, as opposed to the religious right’s ‘respect’. But it’s the Alt Right’s demonization of ‘the Other’ that separates  it from Europe’s New Right. For Hitler’s Nazis, the main ‘Others’ were Jews, but their xenophobia included Slavs, Communists and brown people, while the Alt Right is against everyone who opposes its gun-toting, flag waving ‘patriotism’.

Just as blindly, Europe refuses to believe that Islamization is a reality to which it will have to adapt. The EU represents the highest level of civilization the world has ever known, but its population of half a billion has largely deserted its churches, while Muslims tend to practice their faith as they multiply. The North/South arithmetic is unassailable: Europe’s days as the bastion of Christianity are over: its division between Catholics and Protestants, which took centuries to become peaceful, is being replaced by a division between Christians and Muslims. And when a Muslim in London sets up a website to help his fellows find second wives, justifying bigamy by saying it’s better than seeing prostitutes or taking a mistress, he is, after all, only following the liberal injunction to become an entrepreneur….

European progressives argue that headscarves and robes are a convenient excuse for maintaining much of humanity in an inferior condition, while for the new right, the abandonment of traditional social memes in the competition for ‘more’, goes hand in hand with crime, drugs and alienation. Until now, most of the angst over the Islamization of Europe has been about fearing westerners could be forced to obey Sharia law, yet few people know how it differs from “Enlightenment” law.

In the US, Trump’s black and brown voters demand true equality after four centuries of second-class citizenship, while President Putin’s support for Europe’s New Right is partly explained by the fact that Russia has been sharing Eurasia with Muslims for centuries. Following the collapse of the Soviet system and the Yeltsin years of chaos, Putin has increasingly identified Russia as a Christian country, drawing a line between its religious values and those of a decadent, secular West.  When he emphasizes Russians’ shared moral values, he also connects them to the “traditional” values of Middle Eastern, Asian and other non-Western societies:

We see how many Euro-Atlantic countries are actually rejecting their roots, including the Christian values that constitute the basis of Western civilization … People are aggressively trying to export this model all over the world. I am convinced that this opens the door to degradation and primitivism, resulting in a profound demographic and moral crisis, so we consider it natural and right to defend these values.” And he adds: “It’s clearly impossible to identify oneself only through one’s ethnicity or religion in such a large nation with a multi-ethnic population, but people must develop a civic identity on the basis of shared values, a patriotic consciousness, civic responsibility and solidarity, respect for the law and a sense of responsibility for their homeland’s fate, without losing touch with their ethnic or religious roots.

For the people behind the Trump throne, overtures to Russia will be based on the arithmetic of race and religion, as will be efforts to pry it away from China — the ‘yellow peril’. Both the failed healthcare bill and the shrinking of the State Department are about letting the world’s brown populations sink to the bottom, in a desperate attempt to ensure the lasting supremacy of the white world. In this context, the real reason for the demonization of Vladimir Putin is neither his country’s enviable resources nor any military threat, but his vision of a multi-polar world in which the races are separate, but equal and cooperative, and which he refers to as a multi-polar world.

CODA: Ultimate Irony

While Washington continues to tie itself up in knots over the possibility that some Americans have accepted Russian invitations, America’s television channel CNBC publishes the complete transcript of a two-day forum organized in Archangelsk, Russia, by Vladimir Putin on the fate of the Arctic region.  Read it here: CNBC Transcript: Russian President, Vladimir Putin, Finnish President Sauli Niinistö and Icelandic President Guðni Th …, one of a regular series of international business and scientific gatherings held every year, while the American public is told that ‘Russia is Isolated’.

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