A two-minute guide
to President-elect Donald Trump’s proposed cabinet. Already the
richest in modern history, his picks include an array of the super
wealthy, big business executives and climate change deniers
Alt-right'
groups will 'revolt' if Trump shuns white supremacy, leaders say
Prominent
members of the American far right predict that waning influence on
the president-elect could trigger discord and vengeance within the
movement
Rory Carroll in Los
Angeles
@rorycarroll72
Tuesday 27 December
2016 11.00 GMT
Donald Trump will
disappoint and disillusion his far-right supporters by eschewing
white supremacy, according to some of the movement’s own
intellectual leaders.
Activists who
recently gave Nazi salutes and shouted “hail Trump” at a
gathering in Washington will revolt when the new US president fails
to meet their expectations, the leaders told the Guardian.
The prospect of such
disillusion and internecine squabbling may console liberals who fear
a White House tinged with racism and quasi-fascism. All the more
reassuring because it comes from far-right influencers and analysts,
not wishful progressives.
Instead of enjoying
proximity to power, according to this analysis, vocal parts of the
loose coalition known as the “alt-right” could remain on the
political fringe, wondering what happened to their triumph.
“Their hearts are
bigger than their brains,” said Mark Weber, who runs the Institute
for Historical Review, an organisation dedicated to exposing
“Jewish-Zionist” power. “Saying they want to be the
intellectual head of the Trump presidency is delusional.”
Jared Taylor, a
white supremacist who runs the self-termed “race-realist”
magazine American Renaissance, said the president-elect had already
backpedalled on several pledges that had fired up the far-right. “At
first he promised to send back every illegal immigrant. Now he is
waffling on that.”
David Cole, a
self-proclaimed Holocaust revisionist and Taki magazine columnist,
envisaged the movement sliding into bickering and in-fighting, stuck
in “rabbit warrens” of online trolling rather than policy
shaping.
“In January Trump
will start governing and will have to make compromises. Even small
ones will trigger squabbles between the ‘alt-right’. ‘Trump
betrayed us.’ ‘No, you’re betraying us for saying Trump
betrayed us.’ And so on. The alt-right’s appearance of influence
will diminish more and more as they start to fight amongst
themselves.”
In an email
interview Peter Brimelow, founder of the webzine Vdare.com, which
alleges Mexican plots to remake the US, said Trump’s failure to
deliver “important bones” could trigger a backlash. “I think
the right of the right is absolutely prepared to revolt. It’s what
they do.”
There is, however, a
catch: Weber, Taylor and Brimelow – all classified as “extremists”
by the Southern Poverty Law Center – said Trump’s victory
energised the far-right and that the movement can grow with or
without White House help.
The young crowd that
roared “Hail Trump” at last month’s gathering in Washington
will fight for its beliefs no matter what, Brimelow said. “None of
them were looking for jobs in the Trump administration. These are not
party loyalists. They know they’re entirely outside the
establishment consensus. And they’re used to guerrilla warfare.”
Trump’s
relationship with the far-right – an unruly grouping which includes
opponents to illegal immigration, free trade, police reform,
political correctness, miscegenation and mainstream Holocaust
scholarship – will partly define his administration.
The casino mogul
turned Republican insurgent electrified this group during the
election by calling undocumented Mexican immigrants rapists and
criminals. He vowed to deport 11 million undocumented people, ban
Muslims from entering the US and build a wall on the southern border.
He was slow to disavow an endorsement from David Duke, the former Ku
Klux Klan leader.
He put Steve Bannon,
who turned Breitbart News into a platform for the far right, in
charge of his campaign and rewarded him with a senior White House
post.
A few weeks after
Trump’s victory the innocuously named National Policy Institute,
which espouses an “ethno-state” for Americans of European
descent, held its annual conference in the Ronald Reagan Building a
few blocks from the White House.
Its leader, Richard
Spencer, concluded the event by shouting “Hail Trump! Hail our
people!” and “Hail victory!”, an English translation of the
Nazi exhortation “Sieg heil”. Some audience members gave the Nazi
salute.
Some observers saw
their worst fears realised: unbound, exuberant fascism.
But some of the
far-right’s intellectuals saw something else: self-sabotage and
delusion.
It was an “idiot
conclusion” to a conference packed with other speeches and panel
discussions, said Brimelow, who addressed the gathering.
Taylor, another
speaker, agreed. “It was going very well until (then). Richard
Spencer has said that the way he closed the talk was meant as pure
irony, and I hope that’s the case, that it was all ironic and
over-exuberance. I don’t think that anything that has any whiff of
Nazism is a particularly effective way to bring Americans or even
Europeans to an effective understanding of race.”
Cole said Spencer, a
rising star of the far-right movement, overreached. “He blew a lot
of goodwill ... and became an embarrassment to some of his own
people.”
Spencer and his
supporters will pay for hubris, Cole predicted. “They’ll burn
out. After Trump’s victory they had a belief they were behind it,
or had a lot of clout. All they can hope for is to get something on
the immigration reform/restrictions. Otherwise they’re enjoying the
bragging rights, saying they won it, even though they didn’t.”
Spencer, unabashed,
has continued touring university campuses and is considering a
congressional run in his native Montana. He did not immediately
respond to a request for comment.
If the critiques are
correct he and his supporters will, to co-opt a favoured “alt-right”
term, have a rude awakening. “In the eagerness for hope many have
latched on to Trump. They’re trying to get a step on the escalator.
I’m convinced they’ll be disappointed,” said Weber. Far-right
youths are “on fire” but Trump, he said, will not be able to turn
the clock back to the 1950s, a perceived golden age for white
America.
Taylor said some on
the far-right fell, as did liberals, for what he termed media
distortions. “Donald Trump was never a racial dissident of the sort
that I am. He was never one of us. He’s an American nationalist.
The left was wrong to think that he was dancing to the tune of people
like myself.”
Taylor said the far
right would need patience. “Racial nationalism has not triumphed in
America. It will some day. But to think it has done so (already) is
delusive.”
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