If you’re ever looking for a hearty chuckle, the Nation never fails to deliver. It fashions itself as a “progressive” magazine—if your notion of progress is reviving Marxist nostrums of yesteryear.
There’s nothing much funny about white supremacists. But reading along as a left-wing Nation correspondent hangs out with white supremacists and realizes she shares some political beliefs with them? Well, this should be entertaining.
Writer Donna Minkowitz describes a secret meeting organized by alt-right figure Richard Spencer that she crashed in mid-November at an organic winery in Maryland. Upon arrival, Minkowitz writes that she was surprised to find that the discussion centered not only on the usual brown-shirt Jew-hating you might expect from neo-Nazis, but also on what she says is a “new emphasis on economic issues” that she found “seductive.”
Why seductive? Because the white supremacists’ views on economic issues sound a lot like, well, like views espoused by the Nation and Democratic party progressives. In what could pass for Bernie Sanders campaign literature, she quotes Spencer saying “I support national health care” and railing against “the trillions spent in insane wars.” Minkowitz also quotes Spencer blasting the GOP tax plan as “stupid . . . Reaganite nostalgia” and supporting a universal basic income. Another speaker decried that everything is seemingly becoming “corporatized and capitalized.” Wait—is this a white supremacist conference or a New York Times editorial board meeting?
She quotes another speaker exclaiming that “2018 is going to be the year of leftists joining the white-nationalist movement!”
It’s apparently easy to work up an appetite railing against minorities, Jews, and capitalism: Minkowitz reports that the conference featured “an omelet station for a luxurious brunch of liquored fruit salad and scrambled eggs with house-smoked salmon and delicious vegetables.” (We’ll leave it to others to judge if this constitutes normalizing white supremacists.)
While clearly bashing their abhorrent views on race, Minkowitz also seems sympathetic to the new white supremacist focus on income inequality: “The main reason they talked about it is because it’s there. Even middle- and upper-middle-class white folks face rising rents, falling wages, and increasingly inadequate and shoddy health insurance. Even they are dealing with ever rising work hours and the consuming need to increase income to fill the gaps.”
All this leaves The Scrapbook wondering: With white supremacists developing a left-wing political agenda, why have Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi been so slow to disavow them?
