12/14/2016
Politico has published an article by Rutgers "media studies" Professor David Greenberg [Send him mail] titled An Intellectual History of Trumpism . [December 11, 2016]It’s subtitled "Trump’s ideology has deep roots in U.S. history. But this is the first time it’s made it to the White House". The whole thing is deeply wrong-headed — patriotic immigration reform, border control, and protectionism have both been seen in a number of Republican and Democratic Presidencies. (Pick up an American penny, nickel, dime, quarter, half dollar or dollar, and the President staring back at you will have agreed with Trump on a lot of issues — and backed it up with action.)
But here’s Greenberg’s description of the meltdown of the Beltway Right, emphases added.
Just when the Old Right seemed on the verge of extinction, the world changed. First, George W. Bush’s disastrous invasion of Iraq undermined conservative support for the hawkish foreign policy that had been Republican orthodoxy since Reagan. Second, the 2008 crash and the sluggish recovery that followed undercut the enthusiasm — among voters, if not elected officials — for the free trade pacts that market conservatives promoted. (The refusal of the increasingly paleocon House Republican caucus to pass Bush’s Troubled Asset Relief Program in late 2008 was, in retrospect, a harbinger of the fissures that erupted in 2016.) Third, the prospect that whites would soon constitute a minority in an increasingly multiracial, polyglot society inspired a new racial consciousness among whites — as did the election of America’s first black president, who was swiftly branded as un-American by the populist right.There’s a certain amount of truth in this part, but (1) there are no links, and (2) he spelled our name wrong. This is important — a reader told me recently that he was brought to VDARE.com from National Review style conservatism when he read David Frum’s notorious "Unpatriotic Conservatives" article [March 25, 2003, still online] which denounced as disloyal those conservatives who opposed what Greenberg is right to call "George W. Bush’s disastrous invasion of Iraq."For much of the Republican base these multiple shocks discredited the conservative political and intellectual leadership that had failed to deliver on promises to contain immigration, produce prosperity and make America safer. Increasingly unwelcome even in a thoroughly right-wing magazine like National Review (which devoted a whole issue during the primaries to denouncing Trump as a sham conservative), paleocons found new vehicles for their nationalist-populist ideas in The American Conservative, founded by Buchanan and Theodoracopulos in 2002, Breitbart, which evolved from a right-wing curation site into an ideological organ, and VADRE, a webzine founded by the anti-immigration advocate (and immigrant) Peter Brimelow. The resulting cluster of voices, which includes but isn’t limited to the “Alt-Right,” represented a new generation of paleocon thought that stressed its differences with the establishment right on trade, foreign policy, immigration and race.
He looked up VDARE.com (David Frum’s original version didn’t have live links either, but at least spelled our name right) read what we have to say, and reacted by thinking "These guys make sense." (He’s now a donor.)
People will have a hard time doing that if they Google "VADRE" — there isn’t such a thing.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.