News media have continued their 24/7 attacks on Donald Trump without pausing for breath, even as the election campaign ended and the presidential transition began.
Their constant indiscriminate fire makes the purveyors of news and punditry like the boy who cried wolf. To the public, it’s now just irritating background noise from the ranks of the losing party’s supporters. But this means that, like those who heard the boy cry wolf, people are not alert when something genuinely troubling comes along. The avalanche of stories about general “disarray” at Trump Tower should not, however, obscure a genuine problem relating to the appointment of Stephen Bannon, former Breitbart chairman, as Trump’s chief strategist.
The Left flings charges of anti-Semitism and racism at pretty much anyone they dislike. Bannon has been one of their targets, the evidence adduced being some of Breitbart’s content and allegations made during a heated child custody battle. But the Anti-Defamation League acknowledges there is no definitive example of Bannon ever saying anything anti-Semitic, and his Jewish former employees at Breitbart have strenuously defended him from the charge.
It is grating for someone to have to repudiate charges they claim are untrue. It’s a political maxim that if you’re explaining, you’re losing. So politicians tend not to want to do it. They’d rather brush allegations aside as unworthy of comment. But this would not be a proper response from Team Trump and Bannon in this case.
Bannon said he wanted to make Breitbart News “the platform for the alt-right,” and the alt-right is undeniably streaked with strands of racism and anti-Semitism. The name sounds like “alternative right,” suggesting merely a conservative option to Bushism or the neoconservatism of the last decade. Many well-meaning people who reject globalism, free trade, liberalized immigration, or Bush-era foreign policy might be attracted to both the idea and the label.
But “alt-right” is a clever marketing term intended to rebrand white nationalism. Assuming Bannon means it when he describes himself as “an economic nationalist” and not a racist or white nationalist, what is the proper response to the fact that the movement includes enthusiastic subscribers to views that all decent people reject? Racism is not something to co-opt, sanitize or attempt to marry to conservative ideals, with which it is incompatible.
The movement’s flagship journal, Radix, for example, includes discussions of the virtues of abortion as a eugenic tool for culling minority populations; there are pseudo-scientific discourses on biological excuses for racial inequality; criticism of white women who miscegenate; mockery of those who adopt children not of their race.
The alt-right’s presence in social media magnified its role in electing Trump. So did Hillary Clinton, who strangely spoke at length about the alt-right on the campaign trail. And some pundits absurdly suggest 61 million people were inspired by racism to choose Trump. The many small cities and counties that voted for President Obama once or even twice but then helped flip five key blue states to the Republican nominee did not do so out of racial animus.
But there are racist supporters of Trump, and now that he is to be president it’s more important than ever that he prevent the idea that racism is a majority idea from growing and that racists have won. He must distance himself from their vile propaganda.
Bannon made himself the nexus between Trump and the alt-right when he voluntarily labeled himself as such. He now will have immense power in the White House, and his embrace of the alt-right will be a genuine problem, not merely a symptom of leftish hysteria, until he and his boss repudiate the ugly ideology that is seen to cling to them.
Trump is not known to apologize or change his mind under pressure. He seems to delight in never doing so. But the president-elect’s chief strategist owes it to his boss to repudiate racism in a plain, unvarnished and plausible public statement on that subject. Comments in passing, and denials upon questioning, will not be enough to make this subject go away. If this shadow of doubt about the new administration is not dispelled, the Trump presidency will be damaged and made less effective. It is nine weeks until Trump is sworn in as the 45th president. We hope he will do so with this issue behind him rather than with it looming over the West Front of the Capitol.
