The reactions to Trump’s Poland speech continue to astound me.
Via Vox Day, I came across this WaPo column by Jason Willick titled “The alt-right is an attack on Western values. Liberals shouldn’t surrender so easily.” Willick writes:
The speech — a call to arms for a Western civilization ostensibly menaced by decadence and bloat from within and hostile powers from without — was received across the center-left as a thinly veiled apologia for white nationalism. “Trump did everything but cite Pepe the Frog,” tweeted the Atlantic’s Peter Beinart. “Trump’s speech in Poland sounded like an alt-right manifesto,” read a Vox headline. According the New Republic’s Jeet Heer, Trump’s “alt-right speech” “redefined the West in nativist terms.”
Thus, the intelligentsia is now flirting with an intellectually indefensible linguistic coup: Characterizing any appeal to the coherence or distinctiveness of Western civilization as evidence of white nationalist sympathies. Such a shift, if accepted, would so expand the scope of the term “alt-right” that it would lose its meaning. Its genuinely ugly ideas would continue to fester, but we would lose the rhetorical tools to identify and repudiate them as distinct from legitimate admiration for the Western tradition. To use a favorite term of the resistance, the alt-right would become normalized…
[B]y identifying Western civilization itself with white nationalism, the center-left is unwittingly empowering its enemies and imperiling its values…
Vox nails it when he writes:
[T]he white Left is gradually beginning to realize that they have made a fatal blunder in declaring the white Christian West their enemy, as there is no place for them in the various tribes of the global South and East…
This is why I keep pointing out that the Alt-Right is inevitable. You can play all the word games you like. You can cherry-pick whatever historical documents you like. You can invent whatever contorted and ahistorical definitions you like. You can quote at length from the red-letter edition of the True Sayings of Judeo-Christ. But in the end, so long as you continue to deny that a nation is a group of people related by blood, language, and tradition, and deny that the West is a civilization constructed by, of, and for European Christians, you will end up precisely where the Left is, because a first step into falsehood is always followed by a second, and a third, as your perspective increasingly comes into conflict with observable events.
