As we await Hillary’s “Alt Right speech,” and speculate about what exactly she’s going to say, the general consensus is that she’s a mad woman, and not in a good way.
What could she be thinking in bringing our ostracized movement into the limelight? Isn’t our connection to Trump a stretch? And even if there are some “elective affinities” between Breitbart, Trump, and us, isn’t Hillary just encouraging normal people to google Alt Right and maybe . . . heaven forbid . . . agree with us?
The far smarter course, it would seem, would be to ignore the very idea that an alternative to the mainstream exists.
And perhaps Hillary is off her meds. . .
But let’s assume that she’s not, and that her speech is a brilliant example of Machiavellian calculation. Being a Machiavellian myself, here’s my best guess at her chain of reasoning.
1. The GOP is the White Man’s party, whether it likes it or not. Ninety percent of its votes come from White people. Even the non-racial components of the coalition reek of Whiteness: the Religious Right, country-club WASPs, corporate managers, libertarians, self-described “patriots”—the list goes on.
2. Because the GOP is so White, it will struggle to win elections as demographics change. Mitt Romney won a whopping 59 percent of the White vote. Trump’s electoral promise is that he could do even better, by brining in previously non-voting White people. But a Trump victory in 2016 is precarious, to say the least; 2020 and beyond might simply be impossible.
3. Hillary envisions a long-term Democratic majority, even a kind of one-party government. (California is an image of what this could look like.) To achieve this goal, she wants to pick off large swaths of the GOP coalition: establishment Republicans, SWiPL types, concerned Soccer Moms, et al. (Remember, she’s already put many neocons onto her foreign-policy team.)
4. Hillary seeks to equate the GOP with Trump—and not just Trump but an obscene inner-core of Trumpeanism, the Alt Right.
In other words, Hillary is trying to push the GOP into permanent minority status by empowering the Alt Right—and, believe me, she will be empowering us today. The Alt Right is, in a way, what people wrongly accuse the GOP of being: a nationalist party for White people. Hillary’s Alt Right speech will try to force the GOP to become what it is.
At Milo’s party last month, I made an outlandish self-fulfilling prophecy: “We’ve taken over the Right.” The fact is, the mass media—and now none less than Hillary Clinton—want us to take over the Right.
In fact, they are going to help us do it, if only we would let them.
