After chatting with Brett Stevens on Twitter, this is my attempt to move beyond the recent tiff and explain why White Nationalism 1.0 failed and how the Alt-Right is moving beyond that now. I’ve outlined the external and internal factors that held the movement back:
Structural Factors
Here’s a summary of the most important external headwinds which held White Nationalism 1.0 back followed by how this changed in the Barack Obama/Donald Trump era.
The Cold War
The Cold War with the Soviet Union that was the driving force behind many of these undesirable racial and cultural changes in the West. For decades, anti-communism was the glue that held together the diverse factions of the Right. The specter of nuclear war with the Soviet boogeyman ensured that foreign policy took precedence over domestic policy in the United States.
Historically speaking, conflict with a European opponent has always driven bouts of racial egalitarianism in the United States. It happened in the aftermath of the American Revolution (Britain), the Reconstruction period (the Confederacy) and the Second World War (Nazi Germany). Usually, these episodes are followed by a longer period of retrenchment (the Antebellum era and the Jim Crow South), but the Cold War stretched the last major conflict out for two generations.
Trust In Institutions
The Greatest Generation which enacted the sweeping changes of the 1960s overwhelmingly trusted the federal government. They had beaten the Great Depression, the Axis Powers and were racing the Soviets to put a man on the moon. There was this naive mindset at the time that America could do anything. This is how we got the War on Racism, the War on Drugs and the War on Poverty.
In retrospect, this was an unusual period in American history when the mass media had been concentrated in a few hands and was trusted because journalists were considered to be objective. The anchors of the Big Three networks had a degree of authority which doesn’t exist anymore. The introduction of cable television, the rise of talk radio and finally the internet has changed the media landscape. A handful of elite media executives no longer have the power to control the narrative.
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