I'm not up to speed on Cornel West and Ta-Nehisi Coates, and when I saw Althouse's post I figured I should get some notion of what those ideologues were up to these days. One of the comments led me to
a NYT article explaining how Coates and Richard Spencer both believe in the primal importance of race and the overwhelming power of whiteness, and where Williams quotes Spencer as saying "This is the photographic negative of a white supremacist. This is why I'm actually very confident, because maybe those leftists will be the easiest ones to flip." I suspect that his confidence is not altogether unjustified, btw--fashions can turn on a dime and the people noisiest about being allies typically don't seem to be investing any of
their effort or money in helping individuals. Maybe they hide it very well, not letting the left hand know what the right is doing?(*)
I wrote about the same sort of thing years ago: both right and left in Madison shared a belief in the omnipotence of the USA. If you point out that problem X is beyond our capacity to solve, you get called defeatist or a tool of the oppressors.
"We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century — the blindness about which posterity will ask, "But how could they have thought that?" — lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr. H. G. Wells and Karl Barth." (On Reading Old Books, C.S. Lewis)
(*)"Christ did not love humanity, He never said He loved humanity; He loved men. Neither He nor anyone else can love humanity; it is like loving a gigantic centipede." Chesterton
2 comments:
I read that also, and had the same reaction about Spencer's confidence about flipping people. It seemed unlikely. However, realignments have been odd in other places. America has had its alignments be essentially regional, overlaid on Tory/Whig lines. Left-right has only been since about the 70's, though the noise started in the 60's. But in Europe alliances can change quickly - though those are often regional/ethnic as well.
Figures like Spencer are usually 80% nuts with poor predictions combined with 20% seeing very accurately some things that everyone else disregards. They sometimes get these things right.
Not long ago Instapundit linked a report, IIRC in The Nation, from a leftist who crashed Spencer's recent semi-secret confab in Maryland and came away thinking they had considerable agreement with him on economic policy. The socialist economic platform has also been a point of contention between some alt-righters and Spencer, who they disparage as 'alt-Reich' and a phony. I recall reading that it wasn't uncommon for the Nazis and Communists to 'turn' each other's street fighters in pre-WWII Germany, and they often showed more respect for each other than they did for the Weinmar democrats.
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