Donald Trump, Steve Bannon and the alt-right conspiracy myth

           

Donald Trump, she alleged, has given a platform to a ragbag of racists and sexists – their influence reflected in the power enjoyed by Trump’s new campaign chief Steve Bannon. Bannon is the man behind Breitbart, the online newszine that asked its readers “Would You Rather Your Child Had Feminism or Cancer?” His ex-wife once accused him of making disparaging remarks about Jews, which is bad publicity for a presidential campaign that has already been accused of anti-Semitism. So is the GOP ticket a Trojan horse for neo-fascism?

Not really. Probably not. Time will tell. The fact is that it’s very hard in the moment to judge precisely what’s driving a presidential campaign or what it represents – you need a good decade of distance and sober reflection before the historians can do that. For now, we should acknowledge that the alt-right is a small but significant force and that it has found its candidate. It is largely found online, probably overwhelmingly male, obsessed with culture rather than economics (it’s hard to discern a view on, say, taxation), hugely critical of the Republican establishment and reactionary. And it likes Donald Trump, who has occasionally retweeted its activists and pushes policy on immigration and Islam that is straight from the alt-right playbook. The hiring of Bannon thus makes it tempting to read into Trump an ideological framework that, actually, isn’t there.

Proof is the fact that Bannon’s appointment coincides not with Trump becoming more Trumpy but, in fact, becoming less Trumpy. Last week he appeared to u-turn slightly on immigration, indicating that some illegal immigrants will not be forced to leave the country under his administration. This is bigger than it sounds. Trump’s whole candidacy was defined by his support for a wall. The wall probably stays. The rhetoric about Mexico paying for it is gone, however. And lots of Mexicans will, maybe, remain in America even if it goes up. This is almost no different from boilerplate Republican policy.