Donald Trump and JD Vance: Decoding a double dose of right-wing racism

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Donald Trump and JD Vance: Decoding a double dose of right-wing racism
Old-fashioned "paleoconservative" racism and neocon-flavored pseudoscience, united at last on the 2024 GOP ticket

By Paul Rosenberg
Contributing Writer
Published August 18, 2024 6:00AM (EDT)


(Salon) The Republican ticket of Donald Trump and JD Vance is currently being subjected to well-deserved ridicule, but even if their venture ends in defeat, powerful antidemocratic forces behind them — such as Peter Thiel and Elon Musk — aren’t going anywhere, and Trump’s base won't suddenly melt into nothing. Despite what looks to be their failure (so far) to score with racist and misogynist attacks on Kamala Harris, it’s worth taking a closer look at how two distinct streams of conservative racism have come together this year.

Two recent books I have covered for Salon shed light on these distinct forms. First was David Austin Walsh’s “Taking America Back: The Conservative Movement and the Far Right,” (author interview here), which explains that the “mainstream” conservative movement never rid itself of its fascist element and the "paleoconservatives" who have re-emerged in the Trump era. The second book is Annalee Newitz's “Stories Are Weapons” (interview here), which features a chapter about how neoconservatives (ideological rivals of the paleocons) tried to make racism great again with “The Bell Curve,” a 1994 book whose style of racist pseudoscience has flourished in Silicon Valley, including among JD Vance’s most significant backers.

I reached out to Walsh and Newitz in an effort to expand our understanding of the present moment, what brought us here and what may lie ahead. What they told me was both simple and complex. Here’s the simple part: The paleocons can be understood as old-fashioned, antisemitic white nationalists, representing a form of instinctive racist conservatism that resents and resists all change. The neocons' first intellectual leaders, on the other hand, were Jewish, and their "model minority" assimilation into the conservative movement typified the adaptive dynamic of a more pragmatic conservatism that accepts change and seeks to master it. Among other things, this involves intellectualizing racism in evolving ways — new bottles, same old whine. Yet at root, both forms boil down to denying the humanity of Black people, Native Americans and Muslims, along with a long list of racial, ethnic and religious "others." The differences are largely about how best to do this.

....(snip)....

JD Vance fits the neocon model on multiple counts. First and most obviously, his Silicon Valley backers not only embrace the eugenic arguments advanced in “The Bell Curve,” but center those arguments ideologically. This connection, bringing Silicon Valley wealth and social media influence into the picture, is clearly a dominant consideration. Newitz offered several intertwined thoughts on the subject:

While researching my book, I found that techniques the military had used for psyops had become common in culture wars. ... Before that time, psyops had been reserved for use against foreign adversaries, but now they were being used by Americans on other Americans. Psychological war became culture war. And we're still seeing the results of that, with industry moguls taking up the cause in the present day. [Elon] Musk and [Peter] Thiel are doing essentially what rich industrialists such as Henry Ford did, when he bought a Michigan newspaper and used it to publish Nazi propaganda during the 1920s. ...

I think the ruling class always wants to justify its power with a mystical or pseudo-scientific story that suggests they are truly the chosen ones and that they deserve to rule. Of course the barons of Silicon Valley are drawn to myths about their superior intelligence because they work in an industry that values smarts and rewards brilliant inventors. The "Bell Curve" myth is also a story about meritocracy — it suggests that white people control the majority of our nation's wealth because they deserve it, due to their mental prowess. It has nothing to do with luck or inherited wealth or an unequal playing field.

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https://www.salon.com/2024/08/18/donald-and-jd-vance-decoding-a-double-dose-of-right-wing/