Just in case you were looking for a reason to vomit today, here’s Dinesh D’Souza interviewing Richard Spencer.
What’s so great, I asked him, about the white race? Spencer spoke of what he termed its “Faustian spirit. The white race is expansive whether in terms of conquering, in terms of exploration of the seas or space, or scholarship and analysis of science. We possess something that’s peculiar to use, and it makes us special.” And was that something, I inquired, in the genes? “It is,” Spencer replied. “No question. Everything is in the genes.”
Everything? So, for instance, language is genetic? I guess that explains how all those English-speaking parents have children who speak English, and Spanish-speaking parents produce little kids fluent in Spanish. It’s all in the genes.
D’Souza is rather primly disapproving of Spencer throughout the interview, but he doesn’t object to the racism, strictly speaking, but because he declares that Spencer is actually a Democrat, and we know how much he hates Democrats.
In a purely logical sense, Spencer should be a progressive Democrat. Progressive Democrats invented the ideology he espouses, and even today the Democratic Party is the party of ethnic identity politics. Spencer’s problem, however, is that the Democrats mobilize black, Latino and Asian identity politics against that of whites. Since whites are now the all-round bad guy, Spencer’s brand of progressivism is no longer welcome at the multicultural picnic.
…
Why, then, did Spencer vote for Trump? Why does he consider himself on the right? The simple answer is that Spencer has no place else to go, so he is trying to carve out a niche for himself in the only party where he can find some measure of agreement, however small. Trump isn’t embracing Spencer’s agenda; rather, Spencer is embracing Trump’s agenda because his own is politically irrelevant.
Note the cunning trick, there. He is logically a Democrat, in D’Souza’s mind, but then the convicted felon declares that Spencer can only find a small measure of agreement with the Republicans. D’Souza can simultaneously think he ought to be aligned with Democrats, while also saying he has no point of agreement with Democrats. Alrighty then.
WTF does D’Sousaphone think “democrat” means? Let’s help him. Webster’s:
1. a : an adherent of democracy
b : one who practices social equality
Democracy:
1 a : government by the people; especially : rule of the majority
b : a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections
Do I really need to define “social equality”?
I will note that the asshole Spencer could call the US a majority-white nation, but not for long, unless you define Hispanics as white, not to mention Jews …
“Here’s one of the most vile conservatives in America. He’s actually progressive!! Still like progressivism now, millenials??!!”
You’re right, PZ. That did the trick.
Distort D’Newsa is a reliable bellwether for far right media. It’s interesting, very interesting, that he’s laying the groundwork for “Trump wasn’t a Real True Conservative, and the alt-right were actually LEFTISTS!”
I’m not surprised by D’Souza’s “Spencer is a Democrat” because the lie D’Souza has been pushing is that the old “party of the KKK” never switched places with the Republicans and so the Democratic Party is still the party of racism. History ended just around civil rights and the Southern Strategy never happened.
“Progressive” though? That twisting of language by D’Souza is new to me.
They don’t even know what the “white race” is. They’ve been arguing about that for centuries.
I literally LOLed at “Spencer is a Democrat” line but probably I should have seen it coming. However, I think many of the far-right could be economically Democratic, as in that they don’t like tax cuts for the rich and would like to see more social programs (although I suppose they don’t want the non-whites to benefit). I could be wrong though.
@6: “They don’t even know what the “white race” is. They’ve been arguing about that for centuries.”
There is no “white” race because there are no “races” in our species. Which does make it a great thing for idiots to argue about of course.
Of course, PZ has the right to correct me since I accept his expertise in the matter.
Does Spencer know what “Faustian” means? He means to imply that the “white race” has a “spirit” of compacting with the devil?
That doesn’t end well, either, for Faust or anyone else.
It may (or may not) be worth reading the context that brought about this bizarre tap-dance “Spencer ought to be a progressive democrat and it’s only a fluke he’s a trump supporter”:
Just…. astonishing….
So … um… If anyone who knows more about history than I do, wants to talk about ” those of the progressive racists of the Woodrow Wilson era” and explain who they were and what that means, I’ll listen.
Woodrow Wilson for one. Not to mention Teddy Roosevelt.
Wikipedia characterizes Progressivism thusly:
Nothing in that entails anti-racism.
D’Souza is employing the same “logic” as the Q Anon whackos. In his worldview, Democrats are bad, therefore anyone who is bad is a Democrat.
Of course, by his logic, D’Souza is a Democrat. After all, criminals are bad, and D’Souza is a convicted felon, therefore D’Souza is bad, therefore he is a Democrat.
Out of Africa was pretty expansive.
He’s like a creationist who believes that everything exists in an absolute, unchanging state: democrats used to be the racists, therefore, they still are.
It’s crazy to watch all these ultra-conservatives try to put their openly racist allies back in the box… It’s also striking how they refuse to believe that politics could be anything other than a strict binary..
petesh @1
That is what happened to the Irish and the Italians.
Arguing for “racial superiority” is like arguing that, say, a Calico is superior to a Siamese. It’s still a cat, and it’s equal in it’s cat-ness to all other cats. Likewise, humans are all equally human, no one subgrouping or “breed” is superior to any other.
Why the fuck do some of the pale humans think their “whiteness” makes them special?!
@17,
‘Cause they’ve got nothin’ else to feel special about..
Can someone just get Spencer a genetic test so we can figure out what percent sub-saharan african he is? Then the other racist douchebags will turn on him for not being “pure” and he can finally go away.
White people (a group that is a 100% modern invention) have done some great things, and some terrible things, and so has literally every single other group of humans throughout the existence of the species. White europeans have become a lot more prominent in the last few centuries, but that’s largely because of advances in oceanic sailing, projectile weapons and industrialization. They had a few lucky breaks, and they exploited them to out-compete a lot of other people. Freaking white-supremacists and their cherry-picking, willfully ignorant reading of history.
As far is D’Souza goes, I just find him boring. All he does is play word games and cherry-pick facts that either support his narrative, or can be twisted in a way that does. He’s got nothing of substance, nothing of actual value to say. He is the worst kind of low-tier partisan hack (which, I suspect, is why he’s the one interviewing the unabashed nazi, lol).
Despite Dinesh’s false conclusion that Spencer is a Democrst, I do have to admit that he is correct that this racist is not Republican.
Spencer is a totalitarian who desires a white ethnic-collective that places the goals of the state ahead of the needs of the individual. His views nicely gel with Hitler’s utopian dream if a white Aryan volk state.
And here’s the additional scary part. Let’s assume that someone like Spencer achieves power. This individual accepts the scientific racism of the 20th century including eugenics, white racial superiority, social Darwinism, atheism, genetic determinism, etc. White conservatives including devout evangelical Christians would vote him into office rather than a progressive, inclusive democrat (even if he/she is Christian). All Spencer would have to do is advocate for a pro-gun rights judge on the Supreme Court and the evangies would with fervor gladly vote in a bedfellow who is an atheist, racist totalitarian who shares similar cultural values. The German evangelicals voted for der Fuhrer. Dinesh of course casually ignores all this.
ragdish, #20
Agreed. The only thing I would add is that D’Souza would also vote for him over a Democrat. D’Souza is also a white supremacist.
What is with this “identity politics” phrase? America has a deep problem with racism. Seems the people doing “identity politics” are just folks working their arses off to fix it. Guys like Spence and Denser cry fowl because their losing their uber privilege.
The “Faustian spirit”? Didn’t Faust get superhuman powers by making a contract with an agent of Satan? Does that mean that we really are white devils?
Ah yes, white civilization resembles Faust, all right, but not in a good way.
WMDKitty — Survivor asks
They’re snowflakes of course. All snowflakes are white and everyone is special.
Here’s what sickens me about what D’Souza is doing;
Conservatives and Republicans are in a bit of a pickle nowadays. Self-proclaimed white nationalists, fascists, and “race realists” are coming out of the woodwork, proclaiming their support for Trump, supporting most of the same political stances that mainstream Republicans do, and flat-out calling themselves conservatives.
Here’s a quick list of issues that the alt-right and the mainstream right agree on:
– They hate undocumented immigrants, and some other groups of immigrants as well.
– They hate Muslims and claim that Islam is a threat to the country.
– They hate LGBT people, claim that they’re sexual predators, and repeat the same slogans, like “there are only two genders”.
– They oppose gun control and think that gun legislation is a communist plot.
– They hate Black Lives Matter and claim that unarmed black people who are shot by cops deserve to die.
– They hate academia and claim that it’s been infiltrated by “postmodernists”.
– They hate feminism and whine about how oppressed they think men are.
– They defend the Confederacy and think that removing Confederate monuments is “destroying history”.
– They deny the existence of climate change.
– They hate affirmative action and diversity programs.
– They whine about how racist they think everyone is toward white people.
Overall, the alt right’s ideology is in complete opposition to what progressives stand for. It’s also almost identical to the ideology of modern conservatives. Many figures in the mainstream right have received praise from the alt-right for repeating alt-right rhetoric. That includes Laura Ingram, Tucker Carlson, Steve King, and – of course – Donald Trump. There isn’t even really a solid line between the mainstream right and the alt right. There are also intermediary figures like Milo Yoannopolous, Sebastian Gorka, or Steve Bannon. There are also multiple fasicsts and white supremacists running in the 2018 midterms on the Republican ticket.
Mainstream Republicans are shitting themselves over the PR disaster that the alt-right represents for them. The closet racism of the Republican party has attracted open white supremacists. The rise of the alt right vindicates everything that progressives have said about conservatives for the past few decades.
D’Souza’s solution to this is to make an “I know you are but what am I” argument and claim that the alt right are progressives. To do this, he makes a blatant no true Scotsman argument, ignoring the many, many ways that he and Richard Spencer are in agreement and cherry-picking minor ideological differences between them.
I would have hoped that their party attracting self-proclaimed fascists would be a wake-up call for conservatives. I would have hoped that they would realize that they need to reexamine their ideology and confront the racism that’s been bubbling under the surface in their party for years. Instead, D’Souza goes through some twisty mental gymnastics to deny that his party has a problem and projects the problem onto progressives.
Fasicsts and white nationalists are infiltrating the Republican party and turning it into what progressives have always feared it would become. This won’t get better if people like D’Souza offer false reassurances that nothing is wrong with them.
Also, progressives generally like Abraham Lincoln and think he was right to fight the Confederacy to free the slaves. The only people other than white nationalists I’ve seen making that argument about the civil war not being about slavery, or the one about Lincoln not compromising, are southern conservatives who try to whitewash the history of the Confederacy.