Taylor and Spencer, like many on the alt-right, believe in the relative superiority of different races; social conservatives believe that adherence to traditional Judeo-Christian values would bring about harmony. As the Daily Beast’s Betsy Woodruff prodded Spencer into admitting, the “utopian” alt-right state would include European whites but no Jews.
“Does anyone in this room really think that differences between pygmies, Danes and Australian aborigines are just social constructs?” Taylor asked at one point. “Really? This idea is so stupid that only very intelligent people could believe it.”
…Yet when they got inside the downtown Washington hotel where Spencer, Brimelow and Taylor would speak, reporters could ask whatever they wanted. That was on brand; alt-right figures write and talk constantly and make themselves available to the media. They also seem totally uninterested in dissembling — the more shocking and blunt the answer, the better…
The alt-right doesn’t have a political strategy yet. The Friday news conference was loose, with no real agenda apart from clearing up who represented the alt-right (no one person, said Spencer) and what the alt-right believes. Highly aware of their toxicity, the alt-right’s leaders support Donald Trump but admit that his attitude and elevation of the issues of race and immigration are more important — in the short term — than what he says from week to week. The closest thing to a political ground game on the alt-right has come in the form of clumsy robo-calls from California’s William Johnson…
The alt-right isn’t into American exceptionalism. At the Values Voter Summit, this year and every year, politicos and activists hark back to the founding faith of America’s revolutionaries. Hardly an hour can go by without a nod to John Winthrop’s “city upon on a hill” quote, as handed down (and slightly altered) by Ronald Reagan.
For the alt-right, America is more at risk because it is less providential. “We question America’s founding myth,” Spencer explained. “If you look at the Declaration of Independence, it’s not just the notion of ‘all men are created equal’ that I would object to. It’s also this notion that states come into being as entities for people to defend their inalienable rights. I find that to be total hokum, nonsense. That’s not how any state, including the United States, came into being.”
Brimelow used his briefer remarks to speculate about a balkanized American future, where some states — led by the Pacific Northwest — would declare the experiment over. “I think it will break up,” he said. “In some ways, that’s the best we can hope for.”
…Downtown, the alt-right troika praised Trump not because he was adopting new beliefs, but because he had found and defeated the right enemies.
“I don’t think our support of Trump is about policy, at the end of the day — it’s about style,” Spencer said. “We live in a fragmented, decaying society. We live in a society of moral degeneracy. We’re going to fight our way out it, and sometimes that means using the tools at hand. It’s going to mean unleashing a little chaos.”
