{"id":92013,"date":"2016-03-31T07:09:26","date_gmt":"2016-03-31T15:09:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=92013"},"modified":"2016-03-31T07:10:19","modified_gmt":"2016-03-31T15:10:19","slug":"the-intellectual-case-for-trump","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=92013","title":{"rendered":"The Intellectual Case For Trump"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mytheos Holt writes<\/a>: I\u2019m no white nationalist (in fact, being Jewish, I\u2019m pretty sure I\u2019m disqualified), and I regard the ideology with just as much disgust as I do every other form of radical identity politics. That being said, I do have a fairly unique ability to answer this question, and with apologies to Lloyd Bentsen, it can be summed up this way: I know white nationalism. A white nationalist was a friend of mine. Trump is no white nationalist.<\/p>\n

If he\u2019s president, there might well be fewer of them. Why? Well, if you\u2019ll indulge me in just a little more autobiographical navel-gazing, you\u2019ll find out.<\/p>\n

I once met a young woman whom I will call Sylvia, after her favorite poet, Sylvia Plath. At the time, Sylvia had been raised as a member of an infamous white nationalist organization. And I do mean \u201cinfamous.\u201d These weren\u2019t the comparatively well-mannered sorts that attend conferences led by Richard Spencer. These were the sorts of people who probably get raided by the FBI.<\/p>\n

Where I met her was probably the last place you might expect to find white nationalists, closeted or otherwise. Now since I am, as already established, Jewish, this obviously made me initially regard the girl with something less than charity. I was almost afraid to speak to her.<\/p>\n

That is, until I actually did speak to her, in the company of another friend, who had made it his personal mission to deconvert her from her ideology, a task with which I agreed to help, mostly out of morbid intellectual curiosity. When we first spoke to her, Sylvia was fairly careful with her words, and obviously seemed to realize she wasn\u2019t among company who\u2019d take kindly to open admiration of Adolf Hitler. She was, however, more than happy to enthuse about Pat Buchanan, VDare, and restricting immigration.<\/p>\n

Now, at the time, I was fresh off having argued for the Gang of Eight bill until I was proverbially blue in the face, so when Sylvia started talking about immigration, I obviously pounced on this as a first opportunity to break down her worldview. I\u2019m fairly certain that all I managed to do was scare her, though she did actually put up a far better fight than any white nationalist has a right to, probably because, despite her sheltered upbringing, she was off-the-charts brilliant. This instantly registered with me, and was later confirmed when she later revealed she\u2019d learned a new language in only two weeks.<\/p>\n

Over the coming weeks, I continued to send out feelers and message and speak with her online, keeping my ethnic heritage a secret at first so I could probe her ideology without sending up alarm bells. After a while, she got used to me, and we bonded over our mutual love of H.P. Lovecraft and dark internet humor. As a result, she began to open up about her more risqu\u00e9 beliefs. So, this time with more gentle prodding, I started to make her doubt what she\u2019d been taught.<\/p>\n

Of course, at some point I had to reveal that I am a Jew. Needless to say, this shocked her, not least of all because apparently her people train their children to recognize Jewish heritage in someone\u2019s features, yet I had registered as pure Aryan. The realization that \u201cthey can look like us,\u201d to use her words, set off something of a minor existential crisis for her, but I\u2019m pleased to report that she got over it, and that my ethnic revelation actually made her open up more to me rather than less.<\/p>\n

When Two Worlds Collide<\/p>\n

That\u2019s because what shocked her even more than my Jewishness was that I\u2019d known she was a white nationalist and still willingly engaged with her like a human being and an equal. From someone who belonged to a group that she\u2019d assumed held nothing but contempt and malice for people like her, this was the last thing she expected. The feeling was mutual on my end.<\/p>\n

After that revelation, gently poking holes in her worldview was out of the question, as I\u2019d just metaphorically sent a cannonball straight through its foundation. What happened instead was that, with the scales lifted from both our eyes about the other\u2019s decency and humanity, we started dissecting the other\u2019s culture as it actually existed rather than how we\u2019d been taught to believe it did. To make a very long story short, she came away understanding that my people weren\u2019t intentionally hurting her people, and I came away with an appreciation for how much, and how unfairly, her people really were hurting.<\/p>\n

I say \u201cunfairly\u201d for multiple reasons: firstly, because people as brilliant as Sylvia is do not deserve to be written off as incurable white trash. Giving everybody the opportunity to succeed means everybody, even people who were raised in ways we find troubling. One doesn\u2019t have to be willing to offer blanket pardons to the Aryan Brotherhood to see that someone who was merely raised with bad ideas is not necessarily a lost cause, no matter how repellent those ideas are. In fact, lifting people like Sylvia out of circumstances where they think white nationalism is the only solution seems like Americanism at its finest, not a betrayal of the idea.<\/p>\n

The other reason I say the pain experienced by Sylvia\u2019s community is unfair is because when you strip away the swastikas, imitation Hugo Boss uniforms, and Klan hoods, there are things that even rabid, clannish white nationalist society does better than our own. Ironically, given their loathing of other cultures, the biggest one is bilingual education.<\/p>\n

One of the odder things I learned was that Sylvia and every other child in her community had to learn to speak German and English, and achieved total fluency in both by their teens. I\u2019m from California, and our own education system wishes it were that good. We don\u2019t have to excuse, or even tolerate, the massive amounts of bad behavior such people engage in to learn from the few decent things they do. After all, just because Mussolini made the trains run on time doesn\u2019t mean punctuality in public transit is itself bad, no matter how hard the DC Metro system pretends.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, the biggest reason the pain that drove Sylvia\u2019s family and so many like them into the arms of white nationalism is unfair is a pain that I, as a Jew, can empathize with. After all, once many Jews turned to communism as a way of trying to get political rights they didn\u2019t think they could get any other way, and as a way of lashing out at a society that unfairly disdained them and their culture.<\/p>\n

Even though this ideological shift made many people hate Jews more, at least the communists were trying to do something. Only that kind of desperation can make a radical ideology like white nationalism attractive.<\/p>\n

Nationalism Is Backlash to Hatred of Western Culture
\nThis brings me to the first and, arguably, the most important lesson that Sylvia taught me about what drives people into the arms of white nationalism: that urge comes not from economic dispossession, nor spiritual dispossession, but cultural dispossession.<\/p>\n

No, I don\u2019t mean the sort of \u201cwhere has my country gone\u201d ignorance that I and my fellow coastal cosmopolitans like to mock over cocktails. I mean the sorts of people who are attracted to white nationalism are people whose own communities have been hollowed out by economic and cultural forces beyond their control, and who are now adrift in a society they perceive to be universally hostile to their heritage for no good reason.<\/p>\n

That heritage, as white nationalists in America see it, is the heritage of Western civilization. If you wonder what that means (which is reasonable), let me spell it out: It means historically Western European cultural norms. Specifically, norms like respect for agents of the law, aspirational pride in work, willingness to accept the consequences of one\u2019s actions, disdain for laziness and welfarism, and reproductive responsibility (i.e., not having children you can\u2019t afford to keep).<\/p>\n

They respect these norms not merely because these are what their own communities follow, but also because they think these norms make constitutional government, liberty, and classical republicanism possible. If you have to pick between the two, defend the norms every day, since temporary cessations of liberty will naturally recover if they\u2019re still in place, whereas the institutions without the norms will become meaningless: the Constitution will become a pointless scrap of paper to which people pay only lip service, and constitutional government will become bureaucracy hiding behind the fig leaf of a separation of powers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mytheos Holt writes: I\u2019m no white nationalist (in fact, being Jewish, I\u2019m pretty sure I\u2019m disqualified), and I regard the ideology with just as much disgust as I do every other form of radical identity politics. That being said, I … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29615],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-92013","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nationalism"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92013","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=92013"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92013\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":92016,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92013\/revisions\/92016"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=92013"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=92013"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=92013"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}