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    On the Origins of Alt-Right in America

    The orgins of the alt-right in America lie in paleoconservatism. It was begin by paleoconservative Paul Gottfried. It was a reactionary movement against the rise of neoconservatism. It dissolved in conflict between libertarians and traditionalists. And it was in name alone absconded by rejection of paleoconservatives, Richard Spencer. The left and the media followed Spencer for there was great affinity there. Gottfried abandoned the name.

    Salon suggests Paul Gottfried, "a retired Jewish political historian,” was a founder of the Alt-Right

    Looking at the early history of the movement, long before the social-media trolls got involved, one can more clearly see that one of the principles that got the alt-right started was an intense dislike of former president George W. Bush — and his foreign policy in particular. Indeed, criticizing and debunking the neoconservatives who dominated the Bush administration has been [Paul] Gottfried’s lifelong project.

    Although he rejects the alt-right label today, Gottfried affixed it to himself in the summer of 2008 when he teamed up with a 30-year-old editor named Richard Spencer to create a conference for right-wingers who regarded Dubya as a warmongering liberal who had betrayed conservatism and surrendered to leftist political correctness.

    Gottfried delivered a speech that November to the first meeting of his H.L. Mencken Club titled “The Decline and Rise of the Alternative Right.” It focused on the conflict that occurred in the 1970s and ’80s when many hawkish Democrats had migrated to the Republican Party and began dominating its institutions. The neoconservatives, as they were eventually called, had made a mess of the GOP and America as a whole, Gottfried argued, but their right-wing opponents (he had earlier coined the term “paleoconservatives” in 1986 to describe them) were continually unable to do anything about it because they were so ideologically divided.

    According to his address, Gottfried intended to do something to promote collaboration and unity against the common enemy. The alt-right was that something....

    “Richard, I think, has gone on out on a limb to create a more extreme, racialist right,” Gottfried, 75, told Salon in a telephone interview last month. His preferred stance then (and now) was more about “anti-anti-racism” and opposing leftist political correctness, he said.

    Another factor in their disaffection was an address that Spencer gave at the Mencken Club’s 2011 meeting, in which he heaped praise upon Madison Grant, an early 20th-century conservationist who was also an advocate of the bogus racial science known as eugenics.

    Spencer’s speech was not well-received by the crowd....

    What follows are excerpts from Paul Gottfried's speech The Decline and Rise of the Alternative Right.

    ...Paleoconservatives did an enormous service in the 1980s when they kept the neoconservatives from swallowing up entire the intellectual and political Right. They had performed something roughly analogous to what the Christians in Asturias and Old Castile had done in the eighth and ninth centuries, when they had whittled away at Muslim control of the Iberian Peninsula. But unlike the rulers of Castile and Aragon, the paleos never succeeded in getting the needed resources to win back lost ground. Unlike the medieval Spanish monarchs, they also didn’t have the space of several centuries in which to realize their goals.

    ...what is now called paleoconservatism did not grow out of resistance to the Reformation or French Revolution. It is the product of recent historical circumstances, and it assumed its current form about thirty years ago as a diffuse reaction to the neoconservative ascendancy. It was never unified philosophically, and its division between libertarians and traditionalists was only one of the many lines of demarcation separating those who began to call themselves “paleos” about 25 years ago....

    ...More recently we have been confronted by another problem on the right, namely groups that give little evidence of being what they claim to be. As far as I can tell, there is nothing intrinsically rightwing about denying the claims of family and society on the putatively autonomous individual. And the dream of living outside of the state in a society of self-actualizing individuals, opening themselves up to being physically displaced by the entire Third World, if its population chooses to settle on this continent, is not a rightist alternative to anything. It is a failed leftist utopia. It is one thing to deplore the modern welfare state as a vehicle of grotesque social change or for its violations of the U.S. Constitution. It is another matter to believe that all authority structures can be reduced to insurance companies formed to protect the property and lives of anarcho-capitalists. Such a belief goes counter to everything we know about human Nature, and even such an embattled anti-welfare- statist as H.L. Mencken never hoped to destroy all government. He loathed egalitarian democracy but not the traditional social and political authorities in which communal life had developed and which conforms to our intertwined social needs.

    A couple years ago Paul Gottfried declared Don’t call me the ‘godfather’ of those alt-right neo-Nazis. I’m Jewish in reaction to an uninformed hatchet job by a leftist moralizer.

    Robert Fulford’s comments about my political influence (March 10) were illustrated with a picture of an unidentified “man” giving a Nazi salute at a recent event of which I know nothing and headlined “How the alt-right’s godfather transformed our world (not in a good way).” Fulford writes that I once “nourished thoughts that seemed at best eccentric but now form everyday conversation online.” I am, he says, “a major source” of the alt-right’s “ideas and attitudes.”

    These revelations about me omit the fact that I am a Jew, whose cousins were killed by the Nazis. Thus any suggestion that I might be associated with what is depicted as a neo-Nazi movement is especially offensive. This association, moreover, has nothing to do with reality.

    ...Here we get to the heart of the problem: Fulford should familiarize himself with what Hawley calls the Old Right position that I’ve defended. This includes opposition to promiscuous foreign interventionism, the National Security State, social engineering, non-traditional mass immigration, and more. Yet these are all policies that Republicans like Mitt Romney, John Kasich, the Bush family and other representatives of this “traditionally right-wing” party accept.
    Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. ― Gustav Mahler

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