What to Make of the New Right Racists

They are sad, weak, little boys looking for an authority figure. They're also the failsons of the traditional Republicans who now disavow them.

Photo by John Schnobrich on Unsplash

Racism, like misogyny, was both a founding principle of the United States and remains a permanent animator of our politics. And American racism, like American misogyny, has taken many forms, moving from overt to covert to overt again, depending on time and place and context. Whether these ideologies of traditional conservative dominance are overt or not depends on the social permission structure of the country, or of a specific community. And right now, we’re seeing what happens what that social permission structure breaks wide open on the right, elevating a racist, misogynistic and wholly unqualified con man to office primarily because Republican voters enjoy his abuse of immigrants, women, racial minorities, and liberals. We’re also seeing what happens when mainstream media apparatuses have no new playbook for how to respond to this shift to overt bigotry, and choose to elevate odious figures because there is such a dearth of non-odious ones on the American right, and fairness demands that right-wing voices be heard.

The result is that eugenicists like Richard Hanania find widespread approval on the right, and even get bylines in some of the nation’s most venerated newspapers. Online weirdos with names like Bronze Age Pervert publish racist diatribes against Jews, Black people, and other undesirables that are apparently read and appreciated by conservatives with significant political power, who are told to lay in wait for the right moment to carry out genocidal plans. Men who unabashedly support white supremacy and patriarchy have worked in the White House, in the military, at Fox News, at the top tiers of conservative media. The old way — dogwhistle your racism so you can deny it but your supporters understand it — has given way to something much simpler: Racism by megaphone.

Republican politicians and electeds, of course, still use their dogwhistles, they’re just a lot less subtle. And the young mostly-men who make up the ranks of the conservative foot soldiers — the young men working as staffers on Capitol Hill and at right-wing think tanks and at conservative news outlets — seem less and less interested in the old conservatism of “I’m a classical liberal” or “I’m a libertarian” and more focused on something much baser: Fascism, or reactionary autocratic Catholicism, or a politics of brute dominance and racial hierarchy.

You should read Jamelle Bouie’s column this week on the history of the superrich supporting eugenicists, anti-Semites, and virulent racists. The point, Bouie argues, is to continue “the traditional role of supremacist ideologies in the United States — to occlude class relations and convert anxiety over survival into the jealous protection of status.” By bounding “the two things, survival and status, together,” the purveyors of supremacist ideologies “create the illusion that the security, even prosperity, of one group rests on the exclusion of another.”

This is right, and you should read the whole piece. David French’s column on the lost boys of the new right is also interesting, especially insofar as he illustrates how maximalism took over the conservative movement, and how these angry young men who believe themselves to be brave counterculture independent thinkers are in reality weak-willed followers who desperate need a Big Daddy to tell them what to do, feel, and believe.

What conservative men like French seem to be missing, though, is that these overt racists and misogynists aren’t random bigots who have long been on the fringes of the right but now find themselves newly empowered; they are people whose views are the natural extension of social conservatism. Conservatism is an ideology that is, at its heart, based on dominance, hierarchy, and the power of a few over the many. American conservatives, even supposedly moderate ones, have always embraced racist, misogynist, and authoritarian ideologies. How else did they think this was going to go?