European roots of Trump’s ‘America First’ - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#14767229
When I first read FRS's posts in this forum, I thought it was an elaborate joke. It took me a while to realize the extent of the far-right in the US. Now, they are busy spreading their tentacles across the Atlantic to influence European politics.

NEW YORK — The American political scene has never seemed so European.

It may be premature to invoke Tom Wolfe’s phrase that the “dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe.” But the kind of metaphysical distance Wolfe was evoking between Europe’s convulsive politics and America’s comparatively staid variety is collapsing by the day.

The clearest manifestation of this collapse is the transatlantic nationalist movement that sees the far-right leaders in Europe openly feted by U.S. President Donald Trump. Trump treats the former UKIP leader Nigel Farage as an honored guest while his chief strategist Steve Bannon, who has spoken of a “global Tea Party movement,” includes Marine le Pen’s National Front in his new coalition.

Even further to the right of the populist parties, half in and half out of the shadows, there is an aligned network of ethno-nationalists and neo-fascists. These groups, with extensive connections between Europe and America, have supported the populists to boost their own position while promoting more explicitly racist and anti-Semitic policies.

The populist position may be xenophobic and exclusionary — Trump’s proposed ban on Muslim immigration, for instance. But even that was nominally justified on security grounds, not as a question of whether Muslims can be American citizens.

Bannon, who wrote Trump’s inaugural speech with the president’s senior adviser Stephen Miller, is a bridge between the populist administration and more radical ideologues. He is closely aligned with the so-called alt-right, an American political ideology similar to the European “New Right” and identitarian movements.

Despite the “America first” rhetoric, the antecedents of this nationalist philosophy are distinctly European. The reading list begins with the Continental counter-enlightenment philosophers and works itself through to the French nouvelle droite.

Beyond the syllabus, there is Europe’s place in the alt-right mythos as the birthplace of white civilization and therefore a lodestone and spiritual homeland for the alt-right’s white nationalists.

Increasingly, to be in the ideological vanguard of the American right means rejecting the belief in American exceptionalism. “Make America Great Again” may be a useful slogan to rally the plebes. But among the alt-right cognoscenti, few take it seriously.

Transnational alliance

“The ‘alt-right’ or ‘alternative right’ is a name currently embraced by many white nationalists, neo-Nazis and so called ‘race-realists’ along with a number of other groups in a coalition of the far right. Their ideology emphasizes preserving and protecting the white race in the United States in addition to, or over, other traditional conservative positions such as limited government, low taxes and strict law-and-order,” according to the Associated Press definition.

While nationalists promise anti-immigration policies and protectionist economic measures as a boon to their country’s citizens, relying to various degrees on racial and ethnic undertones to make their case, the alt-right dispenses with citizenship altogether and appeals directly to racial identity.

The alt-right’s love of Europeanism blends racial politics with a quasi-religious faith in a pan-European identity. You can hear this clearly when one of the movement’s leading voices, the white nationalist Richard Spencer, praises Trump as the first politician “who’s fighting for European identity politics in North America.”

In his inaugural address written by Bannon, President Trump promised to end the “American carnage” wrought by corrupt elites and the political establishment. The appeal may have relied on lurid nationalism but it was explicitly extended to all Americans. In the alt-right’s hands, however, nationalist politics is just a proxy for the pursuit of ethnic and racial policies.

There’s been a growing transatlantic traffic in white nationalist and far-right activity pre-dating the Trump era, but it has certainly intensified,” said Devin Burghart, vice president of the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, who has been chronicling the American far right for years.

When you get down to it, whiteness is at the forefront. That’s why they’ve developed these transatlantic connections and they share these bonds,” Burghart said.

“It is white nationalist internationalism,” he added. The aim “is to protect the white nation as an idea more than to protect any white nation state.”

European reading list

What the alt-right has taken from Europe starts with the philosophy of aristocratic traditionalism — in its Romantic, modernist and postmodernist strains. Building on that, it adds principles of Europe’s identitarian movements, which promote anti-immigration policies in the language of ethnic self-determination.

It rejects the primacy of the free market, a cornerstone of right-wing politics in America over the past century. Instead, the alt-right favors blending conservative social policy with a strong welfare state, the same position taken by the National Front in France.

The movement’s intellectual and political influences are overwhelmingly European. They include Nietzsche, of course, but also the counter-Enlightenment philosopher Joseph de Maistre, the Scot Thomas Carlyle (“History is nothing but the biography of the Great Man”), leaders of Germany’s conservative revolution such as Heidegger and Oswald Spengler and Italy’s radical anti-modernist Julius Evola. From the more recent past, they embrace the philosophers of the French nouvelle droite such as Guillaume Faye.

It is an unusual reading list for a U.S.-based nationalist movement. Of course, European philosophers and thinkers are bound to influence nearly any American political ideology. But this is something else.

The American conservative movement, to which the alt-right opposes itself as a radical alternative, may have been keen on the Irish political philosopher Edmund Burke. But it also revered the philosophy of the American Enlightenment. Any conservative reading list would have been guaranteed to include works by the country’s founders.

Not so on the alt-right syllabus. There, the attitude toward the founding fathers ranges from measured criticism to outright contempt. One American writer esteemed by many in the alt-right is Francis Parker Yockey. A Prussianist and member of the American Nazi Party, Yockey regarded America’s birth as the original sin that unleashed the dark forces of liberal universalism into the world.

French inspiration

The French nouvelle droite philosopher Guillaume Faye is a primary intellectual inspiration for the American alt-right movement. Faye, whose “Why We Fight” is a call to whites to unite against the “colonization” of Europe by non-whites, is regularly brought to speak before alt-right audiences and his translated work is published on leading alt-right websites.

“Countercurrents,” an influential intellectual journal of the American alt-right, carved out a niche translating work by writers from Europe’s right into English and introducing writers like Faye to an American audience.

Similar work has been done by Richard Spencer, a formative influence on the alt-right and perhaps its most “Europeanist” figure. Despite numerous reports of fallout within the alt-right after Spencer declared “Hail Trump” at a recent event and participants sieg-heiled in the crowd, he doesn’t appear to have been marginalized. As of last week, Spencer was preparing to open up a policy shop and cultural laboratory near D.C. while also launching a new website.

One of the first articles on Spencer’s new site is by Daniel Friberg, a Swedish businessman and CEO of Arktos, a leading alt-right book publisher. Arktos puts out English editions of Faye’s books along with Friberg’s own work “The Real Right Returns” and a host of other right-wing authors. Arktos has “established itself as the principal publisher in English of the writings of the European ‘New Right’ school of political thought,” according to the publisher’s website.

The alt-right appears to view America’s democracy as a failed experiment, an aberrant turn away from older European social orders and the spiritual leadership of its ancien regime.

We will see hopefully in the next few years, maybe sooner than that, a total integration of the European New Right and the North American alt-right,” Jason Jorjani, Arktos editor-in-chief and Spencer’s partner on the just-launched website, recently told the Atlantic monthly.

Continental sensibilities

Not so long ago in America, the display of a preference for European culture and politics signaled left-wing political allegiances. Among Republicans, meanwhile, a view of Europe as terminally postmodern and effete became especially popular after 9/11.

It seems like a grim parody to recall it now but, in 2003, the Republican-controlled Congress protested France’s opposition to the Iraq war by changing the menus in its cafeteria, replacing odious Gallic “French Fries” with rousing “Freedom fries,” nevermind that the potato batonnets hail from Belgium. How completely have the polarities of the political order reversed since then?

In 2017, Democrats in America are hyperventilating over malign Russian influence. It was once common for Republicans to accuse President Barack Obama of not really believing in American exceptionalism. Now the same attitudes they had accused him of harboring — a skepticism about America’s unique position in the world — are ascendant on the right.

Today, the alt-right revels in its continental sensibilities. There is a kind of anti-de Tocqueville sensibility at work here; a “Democracy in America” in reverse. The great French philosopher, after touring the Republic in its early years, offered admiration for the democratic experiment and the protean American identity it had formed.

By contrast, the alt-right appears to view America’s democracy as a failed experiment, an aberrant turn away from older European social orders and the spiritual leadership of its ancien regime.

Jacob Siegel is a New York-based writer who has written for the New York Times, the New York Daily News, Vice and Tablet. He is an author and editor of the fiction anthology “Fire and Forget.” He was formerly a staff reporter at the Daily Beast, covering war and protest politics.

Politico

#14767232
Surely, not even liberals buy this nonsense. You can find all kinds of sites exclaiming the dangers of Nazi's in the US, but they never mention numbers. The reason is very simple. Their numbers are so small that it would destroy the credibility of any story. Quit trying to destroy reason with propaganda, or I guess you can continue and you may create the very thing you say you fear.
#14767234
German Americans (German: Deutschamerikaner) are citizens of the United States of German ancestry and form the largest ancestry group in the United States, accounting for 17% of U.S. population. ... Over 50 million people in the United States identify German as their ancestry.
List of German Americans - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_German_Americans


If all people of German ancestry are Nazis then you guys are in serious trouble.
#14767247
One Degree wrote:Surely, not even liberals buy this nonsense. You can find all kinds of sites exclaiming the dangers of Nazi's in the US, but they never mention numbers. The reason is very simple. Their numbers are so small that it would destroy the credibility of any story. Quit trying to destroy reason with propaganda, or I guess you can continue and you may create the very thing you say you fear.

So what you are saying is that Trump and Bannon at the White House is an illusion? It never happened? And the Trump and Bannon people aren't actively trying to influence elections in France, The Netherlands and Germany?

The first question the Trump team asked the US ambassador in Brussels was when the next country would leave the EU. I'm afraid it's dead serious.
#14767254
So what you are saying is that Trump and Bannon at the White House is an illusion? It never happened? And the Trump and Bannon people aren't actively trying to influence elections in France, The Netherlands and Germany?

The first question the Trump team asked the US ambassador in Brussels was when the next country would leave the EU. I'm afraid it's dead serious.


So, you have decided Trump and Bannon are Nazis and then everything makes sense to you. I understand. I believe Obama is Jesus, therefore all Blacks must be angels. Yep, makes perfect sense.
How about supplying numbers of actual Nazis in the US? If they are such a threat, then surely someone has tried to count them. Should not the FBI have these figures? I went to their site and could not find any. What kind of intelligence agency would not list numbers of a credible threat? Maybe the only threat is in your mind?
#14767549
One Degree wrote:So, you have decided Trump and Bannon are Nazis and then everything makes sense to you. I understand. I believe Obama is Jesus, therefore all Blacks must be angels. Yep, makes perfect sense.
How about supplying numbers of actual Nazis in the US? If they are such a threat, then surely someone has tried to count them. Should not the FBI have these figures? I went to their site and could not find any. What kind of intelligence agency would not list numbers of a credible threat? Maybe the only threat is in your mind?


There are different types of fascists. There is the old type like Spencer who doesn't mind being seen in public with Nazi symbols. And then there is the new type who is smart enough to know that he has to accept a degree political correctness to take power. In these days, even died-in-the-wool racists will go out of their way to show that they love foreigners.

Therefore, statistics on fascists are rather meaningless. You can't see into their head. I have no doubt that both Trump and Bannon have white supremacist tendencies and a fascistoide streak that will come out more clearly when and if the situation should require. There is a far-right continuum that reaches all the way to the nasty extreme of that spectrum. And the entire spectrum feeds into Trumpism, which is willingly accepted by Trump voters. They don't mind rubbing shoulders with hard-core fascists.
#14767557
If these "different kind of fascists" will fight the Islamo Fascists on the other side (like Linda Sarsour of the Women March), so bless them. This thinking is very much resembling what the German 68ers did in the past. They were presumably "anti Fascists" who learned from the past, but they encouraged the Arab fascists (their old allies) under new rallying calls.
#14767563
noir wrote:If these "different kind of fascists" will fight the Islamo Fascists on the other side (Like Linda Sarsour of women march), so bless them. This thinking is very much resembling what the German 68ers did in the past. They were presumably "anti Fascists" who learned from the past, but they encouraged the Arab fascists (their old allies) under new rallying calls.

I guess I'm on the "Islamio Fascists" then, Islam done better for African Americans than White Christianity ever done in 1000 years:

Truth is in favor of you and me; for the truth of our enemies whom we have been serving here in the U.S.A. for over 400 years (whom we did not know to be our enemies by nature) is the truth that the Black Man must have knowledge of to be able to keep from falling into the deceiving traps that are being laid by our enemies to catch us in their way which is opposed to the way of righteous of whom we are members. ~ The Honorable Elijah Muhammad [center-img]http://lh5.ggpht.com/-U7I9T8RRXNY/TmS-o6epUFI/AAAAAAAADaI/_H6Rmz45icA/%25255BUNSET%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800[/center-img]
#14767567
Could be. It may work for your identity issue to deal with alienation and inferiority.

Edit: after the post, made a mental note to watch something on Malcolm X of the Nation of Islam. In the first video that came in Youtube, he defends Islam which never use violence but ironically we know that he himself died by fellow "Black Muslims".

Last edited by noir on 25 Jan 2017 13:43, edited 1 time in total.
#14767609
Therefore, statistics on fascists are rather meaningless. You can't see into their head. I have no doubt that both Trump and Bannon have white supremacist tendencies and a fascistoide streak that will come out more clearly when and if the situation should require. There is a far-right continuum that reaches all the way to the nasty extreme of that spectrum. And the entire spectrum feeds into Trumpism, which is willingly accepted by Trump voters. They don't mind rubbing shoulders with hard-core fascists.


I am trying to point out the danger of what you are saying. The people in the US are inventing enemies to justify their outrage at the view of others. You admit their is no evidence, yet you have no trouble in believing the worst about those you oppose. This is part of entering into a new era where reality is secondary to what we choose to imagine in our heads, which is placed there by a media we know is extremely biased. It verges on insanity. We do not live in a country that Has Nazis on one side and Communists on the other. We live in a country that has a difference on the direction forward and we are refusing to address those differences by escalating them to absurd differences that do not actually exist. By refusing to acknowledge a credible opposition, we can blindly pursue our own path without bothering with reason. We are even naive enough to believe you can do this and not end up with very serious consequences. We are on a road to massive violence if people don't get a grip on their emotions.
#14767614
@One Degree One Degree, here are some numbers:
Survey of 897 likely Republican primary voters, Feb 2016, North Carolina:
Would you support or oppose banning Muslims from entering the United States? 60% Support 23% Oppose 17% Not sure
Would you support or oppose banning homosexuals from entering the United States? 20% Support 63% Oppose 17% Not sure
Would you support or oppose shutting down mosques in the United States? 29% Support 47% Oppose 24% Not sure
...
In general do you think that whites are a superior race, or not? 10% Superior 78% Not superior 11% Not sure

So, 10% were hardcore Nazis, and another 11% tended that way, while numbers in the twenties would support fascistic actions like shutting down mosques, banning homosexuals from entering the country, and more for things like banning Muslims from entering, or creating a database of them. 29% wished the South had won the Civil War (you know, for slavery).

That's among Republican primary voters; the concentration among active Trump supporters will have been higher, though among those who voted for him in the general lower (that includes many lazy Republican voters who don't care about the tendencies to fascism that people like Bannon show, and so go along with it).
#14767621
Prosthetic Conscience wrote:@One Degree One Degree, here are some numbers:
Would you support or oppose banning Muslims from entering the United States? 60% Support 23% Oppose 17% Not sure
Would you support or oppose shutting down mosques in the United States? 29% Support 47% Oppose 24% Not sure
...
So, 10% were hardcore Nazis, and another 11% tended that way, while numbers in the twenties would support fascistic actions like shutting down mosques,.....
and more for things like banning Muslims from entering, or creating a database of them.

These are anti-fascist actions. Islam is a fascist religion, founded by a genocidal, slaver, thieving, paedophile, terrorist fascist. All Muslims, aka Muhammadans, however superficially moderate or liberal endorse these fascist values by their praise for Mohammed.
Last edited by Rich on 25 Jan 2017 14:30, edited 1 time in total.
#14767627
@One Degree, you explain to me what reason there is in the fake news spread by Bannon (and now even the White House spokesman) or the simplistic populism of the alt-right.

This has gone too far already.


Are you assuming my comments were only directed at liberals? They were not. Both sides have chosen fantasy over reality. We each choose to make the extreme position of the other appear to be the only position on that side. I see the liberal transgressions as more dangerous because it appears to me they have the advantage in media control and organization.
#14767629
Rich wrote:These are anti=fascist actions. Islam is a fascist religion, founded by a genocidal, slaver, thieving, paedophile, terrorist fascist. All Muslims, aka Muhammadans, however superficially moderate or liberal endorse these fascist values by their praise for Mohammed.


Prosthetic Conscience wrote:@One Degree One Degree, here are some numbers:
Survey of 897 likely Republican primary voters, Feb 2016, North Carolina:
Would you support or oppose banning Muslims from entering the United States? 60% Support 23% Oppose 17% Not sure



Any objection? After 9/11 there were reports of celebration amongst Muslim community in Brooklyn (yeah, Linda Sarsour of Women March hometown, have you any doubt that her clan were on it? ), she herself is connected with family ties to the Islamists (Hamas). On which parallel world the Americans are living for letting this situation to unfold?
#14767633
Prosthetic Conscience wrote:
@One Degree One Degree, here are some numbers:
Would you support or oppose banning Muslims from entering the United States? 60% Support 23% Oppose 17% Not sure
Would you support or oppose shutting down mosques in the United States? 29% Support 47% Oppose 24% Not sure
...
So, 10% were hardcore Nazis, and another 11% tended that way, while numbers in the twenties would support fascistic actions like shutting down mosques,.....
and more for things like banning Muslims from entering, or creating a database of them.


I started to look through the extremely lengthy link you provided, but gave up when I saw it was simply a press release from a polling group I had never heard of. At a quick glance, it takes the views of 897 people in North Carolina to come up with these results. I do not view this as credible evidence of anything.

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