The New Right's Toxic Addiction to Racial Conflict

I excerpted parts of this from a longer article. 

S E E D E D   C O N T E N T

A former fellow with the Claremont Institute explains how white nationalist dogma sets the terms of political belonging on the MAGA right.

....Musk was able to survive the fallout from his initial break with the MAGA right, because he, like Trump, understands something important about the present moment: There is no more powerful force in the right-wing psyche than racial conflict. It's the reason that Musk is once more viewed as a movement hero on the right—and why the conservative movement remains is in Trump's thrall. Every other issue and consideration is a far-distant second to the specter of the racial conflict that, in the right-wing imagination, is forever looming on the horizon.

This tendency has always existed in the GOP, though under the pressures of maintaining respectability in the political mainstream, gatekeepers in the conservative movement sought to marginalize its uglier manifestations. The racial panics that gained more recent favor in the conservative movement were also somewhat more targeted than the race hatreds that convulsed the right in the 20th century, zeroing in narrow, disfavored groups such as Muslims.

With Trump's takeover, however, the GOP has once more become a clearing house of viral racial animus, building up a far more extensive—and expanding—list of enemies. The centrality of racial conflict also why the efforts of Republicans such as Mike Pence—who recently launched a think tank to reclaim the party from Trump's influence—are doomed to fail. People like Pence want to go back to serving warm beer after Trump has had everyone slamming the hard stuff for the last decade. In 1968, Republican strategist Kevin Phillips said that "the whole secret of politics is knowing who hates who," and no one has embraced that cynical philosophy—or utilized it more effectively—than Trump.

Phillips is an important figure in GOP history because it was his 1968 memo for Richard Nixon's presidential campaign that outlined the "Southern strategy" to exploit racial resentment among certain white voters. Phillips built out his strategy in response to segregationist George Wallace's third-party bid. Wallace, then the Democratic governor of Alabama, ran for president on an openly anti-civil rights platform. By dog-whistling about "crime, decentralization of federal social programming, and law and order," Phillips wrote, Nixon could implicitly appeal to the racial anxieties of Wallace supporters without using the governor's incendiary language, which would jeopardize the support of white moderates. The Southern strategy worked so well that every Republican president since Nixon has embraced it to some extent.

Trump's central innovation in his second term has been to elevate the Southern strategy from a campaign tactic to a governing agenda—a fact the right simultaneously celebrates on its own terms and denies when others notice..... 

.....On one level, this feud among white nationalists is eloquent testimony to how far right the GOP has veered on race; what might have earlier been fodder for an unhinged right-wing Reddit flame war is now a platform for commentators on the right like Rufo to ally themselves with white nationalists who until very recently disparaged his work as an accomodationist obstacle to full-blown "right-wing identitarianism." And by most reasonable measures, both Greer and Taylor are right: racists can have it both ways on the right, and the savvy career move for ambitious white nationalists like Greer is to throw in with the GOP. After all, the people running White House social-media pages have incorporated themes and even music drawn from self-consciously white supremacist scenes. What was once relegated to the fringe is now mainstream on the right.

I know this firsthand, as a former enthusiastic recruit to the MAGA right. I watched this transformation happen in real time from the inside.

I traveled from the edge of the right to becoming a Lincoln Fellow of the Claremont Institute—which, like virtually every other conservative institution today, has given Trump carte blanche under the belief that he is the only thing standing between the West and "race communism" or, more commonly now, "Third Worldism." The nomenclature is always fungible; what's constant is the invocation of a mortal racialized threat to civilization as we know it.

In a nutshell, the right understands itself as being in a struggle against a racial and demographic clock. Without some drastic intervention, a long line of demagogues on the right routinely lament, the United States will be swamped by a coalition of nonwhites, immigrants, and white enablers who will bring about a dark age of acute government dysfunction and naked corruption. The prime directive of this new regime will be the formal persecution of whites, who will become the victims of an ever-intensifying system of racial favoritism that places them at the bottom.

....The price of this sort of cynical demagoguery is steep. The "civilization" that's dogmatically held to be imperiled by brown and foreign-born hordes has degenerated under Trump's watch into a kleptocratic kakistocracy without an analogue in American history. It's impossible, in this compass, to detail all the ways Trump has made American life materially worse and more dystopian while profiting from the collective misery of millions of everyday people. A partial inventory would include monetizing the White House for Trump to make more money than he did as a businessman, Musk's own colossally destructive and deadly reign at DOGE, unleashing new disease threats through sheer incompetence, the relentless onslaught against the environment and wildlife, the unprecedented weaponization of the Department of Justice, the killings of American citizens by federal agents with impunity, and the construction of a digital police state that groups like Claremont, prior to their own MAGA makeovers, would have decried as a civil-liberties travesty.

Yet all this criminal dysfunction is only part of the cost of doing business, so far as the white nationalist right is concerned. Within its charmed Caucasian chalk circle, there's simply no price that's too high for "saving" America from "Third Worldism"—even if the rescue operation turns America into the very sort of squalid authoritarian regime the right associates with that incoherent term. This is also why there is no reason to believe an internal course correction is in the cards. If there is hope, it is in an expanded Democratic coalition that is more amenable to dissent, disagreement, and defectors.

After the cavalcade of race panics, the second most powerful tool in the right's arsenal is the fear of no return: the notion that the mandate of civilizational restoration means that there's no alternative but to be locked in to the right—that changing one's mind is irrelevant, or futile, because one's allegiance is preordained in one's genetic makeup.

Of course, this is another lie—one that appeals to the worst aspects of our nature. The truth is that America's story, at its best, is one of reconciliation. Even George Wallace turned a hard corner later in life and found redemption. It's high time that conservatives in America took due note of how Wallace turned his life around, rather than mimicking his opportunistic descent into bigotry and hatred.