"NO ENEMIES TO THE RIGHT" IS NOT A NEW PHENOMENON

nomoremister.blogspot.com

7 - 9 minutes

David French doesn't like the young men he refers to as "The Lost Boys of the American Right":

    It keeps happening. Since the ascendance of Donald Trump, with depressing regularity, right-wing men have been outed for using the most vile rhetoric. In private chats and sometimes in full view of the public on social media, they’ll engage in blatantly racist, sexist and homophobic speech, flirt with fascist imagery and then often disavow their words and actions the instant they’re caught.

Examples?

    ... last month, the Ron DeSantis campaign parted ways with a young speechwriter named Nate Hochman who reportedly inserted a Nazi sonnenrad symbol into a pro-DeSantis video online....

    In June the right-wing publication Breitbart published group chats and private messages from Pedro Gonzalez, a popular online influencer and DeSantis supporter, which included comments like “Whites are the only hope nonwhites have of living civilized lives” and “The only tactical consideration of Jews is screening them for movements” ...

    This month HuffPost reported that Richard Hanania, an influential anti-woke writer, published a series of pseudonymous posts at racist publications in the late 2000s and early 2010s. In a Substack post he rejected his old comments, but close observers of his contemporary work were hardly surprised by the revelations. Just this past May, for example, he posted in a thread on crime that America needs “more policing, incarceration, and surveillance of Black people.”

Here's more on the writings Hanania has now disavowed:

    ... between 2008 and 2012, he posted pseudonymously on several white-supremacist and misogynistic websites, including VDare and Richard Spencer’s Alternative Right. Hanania inveighed against miscegenation, called for the sterilization of Black people with a “low IQ,” and claimed that women “didn’t evolve to be the decision makers in society.” 

French has an explanation for all this:

    To understand the cultural dynamic, I want to introduce you to an obscure online concept, no enemies to the right. A tiny fringe adopts this mind-set as a conscious ethos, but for a much larger group, it is simply their cultural reality. In their minds, the left is so evil — and represents such an existential threat — that any accommodation of it (or any criticism of the right) undermines the forces of light in their great battle against the forces of darkness. Attack the left in the most searing terms, and you’ll enjoy the thunderous applause of your peers. Criticize the new right, and you can experience a vicious backlash. The result is a relentless pull to the extremes.

I don't think this is wrong exactly, but I don't agree that "no enemies on" (or "to") "the right" is "an obscure online concept." The phrase has been used for decades to describe the beliefs of both uncompromising extremists and somewhat more moderate ideologues who cynically want to leverage the energy of extremism. In a 1994 Washington Post op-ed, Michael Lind used the phrase in the latter sense, chastising mainstream Republicans for tolerating Pat Robertson, who sounded a lot like Pedro Gonzalez:

    Since the end of the Reagan administration ... American conservatives have been quietly rehabilitating views confined for a generation to the fringe.

    Consider the conspiracy theories of Pat Robertson, the white man's answer to Louis Farrakhan. In his 1991 book "The New World Order," Robertson argues that a secret cabal of international bankers, Freemasons and occultists has been responsible for the French and Russian Revolutions and the creation of the Federal Reserve. While Robertson is careful to stress his support for the state of Israel, he sees Jewish bankers behind all sorts of conspiracies: "It is reported that in Frankfurt, Jews for the first time were admitted to the order of Freemasons. If indeed members of the Rothschild family or their close associates were polluted by the occultism of Weishaupt's Illuminated Freemasonry, we may have discovered the link between the occult and the world of high finance."

    ... Robertson repeatedly claims that Jewish bankers on Wall Street, seeking to create a mystical "new world order," backed the Bolsheviks.... According to the leader of the Christian Coalition, international high finance stood behind not only Lenin but John Wilkes Booth. Says Robertson, "it is my belief that John Wilkes Booth, the man who assassinated Lincoln, was in the employ of the European bankers."

    ... not one of today's timid conservative intellectuals has dared to mock Robertson.... William F. Buckley, Jr., who drove Birch leader Robert Welch from the ranks of the respectable right, has repeatedly defended Robertson, even though the latter's claim that a "tightly knit cabal" of Satan-worshipping occultists is secretly running the United States through the Council on Foreign Relations makes Bircher conspiracy theories look tame. Other mainstream conservatives such as William Bennett and Midge Decter are doing their best to change the subject from Robertson's bizarre views by accusing critics of the religious right (many of them Jews) of anti-Christian or anti-religious bias. 

Lind also cited Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's book The Bell Curve as a work of bigotry the mainstream right shouldn't have tolerated, along with Phillipe Rushton's Race, Evolution, and Behavior, whose main thesis was summarized in what Lind called "a rave review" in National Review: "Orientals are more intelligent, have larger brains for their body size, have smaller genitalia, have less sex drive, are less fecund, work harder, and are more readily socialized than Caucasians; and Caucasians on average bear the same relationship to blacks...."

Lind wrote:

    The stakes in this "no enemies on the right" game are high. If Republicans make gains in Congress in the coming mid-term elections, and win the White House back in 1996, the GOP strategy of welcoming the formerly excluded far right will appear to be vindicated. The moderate conservative majority in the GOP will learn that their party has not been harmed, and may even be helped, by welcoming antisemitic conspiracy theorists, pseudo-scientific racists and nativists back into the fold. For the short-sighted opportunism of the conservatives, all of America may eventually pay a heavy price.

Tolerance of this kind of extremism wasn't necessarily a winning strategy in the mid-1990s, but it wasn't a losing strategy either. The GOP mainstream agreed that some extremists (e.g., Rushton) should stay at the margins. Herrnstein and Murray's book was vilified, but Murray's career survives to this day. And Robertson, whose voters the GOP needed, was tolerated as long as the secular world never noticed his most bigoted pronouncements. But since then, Fox News, online culture, and successful campaigns by Donald Trump and other bigots have made sequestering hate speech seem less necessary.

To David French, the phrase "no enemies to the right" refers to a worldview so seductive that it turns people into bigots who might otherwise never have a hateful thought, the way the rhythms of 1950s rock and roll were said to drive otherwise innocent youths to frenzies of backseat heavy petting. In reality, the mainstream right has accommodated and frequently encouraged hateful thinking for decades. The only difference now is that the Internet never forgets, so it's harder to keep the hate talk in its place, where it's useful but not noticeable. But the success of Donald Trump suggests that the mainstream can tolerate quite a bit of this speech. Rejecting it on principle is, of course, apparently not an option for the right.