I still think/hope Trump will lose this election, because white bigots do not comprise the majority of American voters (even though white people still do). But I'm genuinely concerned: what is the post-2016 GOP going to look like? I've said for years now that the Democratic Party sucks but it won't improve until the Republicans do, because the Dems know they won't have to; they only need be less noxious than the GOP. And that was when the GOP was still promoting hardcore social conservatism ... but NOT the open, no-dog-whistle racism being brought out into the open by Trump supporters....Spencer began the press conference by noting the “alt-right’s” unprecedented media moment. The movement, which has for years been relegated to the extreme racist fringes of the internet, has broken into the American public’s consciousness, thanks in large part to the “alt-right’s” vocal support of Trump’s anti-immigration platform. “We’re not just some marginal movement that you could dismiss,” Spencer told the room of supporters and journalists. “The fact is our ideas are so powerful that despite the fact that we’re doing all this on a shoe-string, we’re getting at people. We’re affecting them. They know we’re right.”
Indeed, the Trump campaign has helped bring the racist "alt-right" movement into the mainstream -- rubbing elbows with white nationalists, echoing many of their common themes, and demonizing Muslims and immigrants.
That willingness to flirt with the racist fringe is what has captured the imagination of people like Spencer, who see in Trump a "leader" who is willing to shirk norms when talking about race and identity. “He seems to be willing to go there, he seems to be willing to confront people. And that is very different from the cuckold.”
Spencer described Trump’s campaign as a kind of jumping-off point for the “alt-right” -- an opportunity to introduce their pro-white agenda to a broad national audience. “Certainly we have been, you could say, riding his coattails, there’s been more interest in us because we’re generally pro-Trump, because we’re inspired by him and things like that.”
The press conference also featured a significant amount of the explicitly racist rhetoric that one would expect from white nationalists -- Taylor argued that blacks and Latinos are genetically predisposed to have lower IQs and behave less ethically than whites, Spencer waxed poetic about the importance of protecting a white cultural identity in America, and all three speakers expressed concern about the influence of Jewish people in American politics....
Based on a (thoroughly unscientific) perusal of people on Facebook and Twitter, I get the impression that even a lot of right-wingers who ordinarily would deplore open racism are nonetheless circling the wagons in this case, because condemning the racists would require them to admit that Hillary Clinton was actually right about something.
Is the GOP ever (within my lifetime) going to return to its alleged old-school values of "small government, fiscal responsibility and personal freedom?" Is it going to split into two factions -- the old-school values party and the hardcore social-conservatives? Or even splinter into three, with the third branch being the openly racist wing?
And a corollary question: how much worse are the Democrats going to get these next few election cycles, if they know "We've pretty much got a lock on all voters who do NOT want to see white-power ethno-nationalism become U.S. government policy?"
