{"id":1566,"date":"2016-09-18T16:50:10","date_gmt":"2016-09-18T20:50:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/?p=1566"},"modified":"2016-09-18T16:50:45","modified_gmt":"2016-09-18T20:50:45","slug":"1566","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2016\/09\/1566.html","title":{"rendered":"The Alt-LEFT"},"content":{"rendered":"

Whether there really is a sinister \u201calt-right,\u201d as Hillary Clinton has insisted<\/a>, is questionable.<\/p>\n

What is not questionable, though, is that there is an alt-left. <\/em>This election cycle has made this clear.<\/p>\n

And the home of the alt-left is the Republican Party.<\/p>\n

The alt-left is, in some ways, <\/em>domestically, a more moderate form of left-wing progressivism. In other ways, however, in foreign policy, with its military adventurism, it is actually a more robust species of this ideology.<\/p>\n

Of course, those on the alt-left don\u2019t ever self-identify in these terms. On the contrary, they describe themselves as \u201cconservative.\u201d Nevertheless, these \u201cconservatives\u201d are nothing of the kind. They are neo<\/em>conservatives.<\/p>\n

And this is but another way of saying that they are adherents of the alt-left.<\/p>\n

More than one argument will bear this out.<\/p>\n

First, from at least the time of Edmund Burke, \u201cthe patron saint\u201d of modern conservatism, conservatives had distinguished themselves from radicals not just by way of the sorts of policies for which they advocate, but as well by the philosophical principles underlying those policies. Whether they were the proponents of the French Revolution, Marxism, Social Justice, or any other token of progressivism, leftists, being utopian<\/em>, have tended to indulge in universal and absolute metaphysical and moral abstractions\u2014like Reason, the Rights of Man, and Democracy\u2014that conservatives have resolutely disavowed.<\/p>\n

Conservatives, on the other hand, have opted for tradition, local, culturally-specific, time-honed tradition, as their starting point for political and moral reflection.<\/p>\n

Now, as should be obvious to anyone who has been paying attention to American politics for more than a few minutes, to say nothing of decades, those in the alt-left\u2014neoconservatives\u2014share in common with their leftist radical counterparts from other times and places their embrace of these rationalist fictions.<\/p>\n

The alt-left endorses \u201chuman rights,\u201d and insofar as the latter are supposed to be \u201cself-evident\u201d propositions around which a whole society can be organized, it also endorses the Reason <\/em>of the philosophes <\/em>who advocated on behalf of the French Revolution.<\/p>\n

Yet the alt-left also prizes Democracy as the prototype of the ideal universal civilization.<\/p>\n

These concepts the alt-left weaves together in a uniquely American expression, what it champions as \u201cAmerican Exceptionalism,\u201d the creed or doctrine that America is humanity\u2019s \u201clast, best hope<\/a>\u201d and that it is the only country in all of human history to have been erected upon an idea. <\/em><\/p>\n

Classical conservatism, in glaring contrast, has no creeds, for it is not an ideology but, rather, an antidote or response to ideology.<\/p>\n

Second, some of those on the alt-left, including and especially some of its most notable representatives, unabashedly concede that they had spent their formative years on the left. More tellingly, they admit that they never abandoned it!<\/p>\n

Irving Kristol, the late father of renowned Anti-Trumpist Bill Kristol, is perhaps the most revealing example of this. He accepted the distinction of being \u201cthe godfather\u201d of neoconservatism while insisting that the latter had nothing to do with traditional conservatism or any other rightist movement.<\/p>\n

Unlike traditional conservatives, neoconservatives embrace \u201cthe welfare state,\u201d i.e. \u201csocial security, unemployment insurance, some form of national health insurance, some kind of family assistance plan, etc.\u201d, and it will not hesitate \u201cto interfere with the market for overriding social purposes [.]\u201d<\/p>\n

Kristol underscores the point that neoconservatives don\u2019t want to \u201cdestroy the welfare state, but\u2026rather reconstruct it along more economical and humane lines.\u201d<\/p>\n

Neoconservatives are enthusiastic proponents of American Exceptionalism. Kristol insists that the United States is \u201ca creedal nation\u201d with a \u201c\u2018civilizing mission\u2019\u201d to promote \u201cAmerican values\u201d throughout the world. Given its status as a \u201cgreat power\u201d and its \u201cideological\u201d nature, America, Kristol informs us, does indeed have a responsibility, \u201cin those places and at those times where conditions permit\u201d it \u201cto flourish,\u201d to \u201c\u2018make the world safe for democracy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nathan Glazer is another neoconservative who goes so far as to suggest that neocons are essentially socialists. <\/em>\u201cIt\u2019s very hard for us [neocons and socialists] to define what it is that divides us, in any centrally principled way.\u201d<\/p>\n

The original neoconservatives were leftists for whom the rest of the left in the 1960\u2019s and \u201870\u2019s drifted too far leftward. This, though, most certainly doesn\u2019t mean that the neocons moved rightward. They did not. The alt-left clung to both the abstract rationalistic philosophical underpinnings of its globalist, progressivist vision and the kinds of domestic and foreign policy prescriptions typical of that vision. As Glazer says, while in some instances there may be disagreement over \u201cthe details or the scope of health insurance plans,\u201d \u201cthe level of taxation that should be imposed upon corporations,\u201d or \u201chow much should be going into social security,\u201d there doesn\u2019t appear to be any \u201cprinciples that separate us.\u201d<\/p>\n

Those white-hot frustrations of grass-roots conservative and Republican voters who have turned to Trump in record numbers have been building for years. They stem from the fact that while these voters believed that they were throwing their support behind a conservative or right-leaning party, they were in reality supporting the alt-left, a movement that differs, when <\/em>it differs,<\/em> from the hard social Democrat left only in degree, never in kind.<\/p>\n

That there is an alt-left that millions have been led to confuse with conservatism also explains how and why it is that there is a NeverTrump movement, a movement comprised exclusively of those who for decades tirelessly advanced the GOP and \u201cthe conservative movement.\u201d The alt-left recognizes that it shares more in common with Hillary Clinton and her party than it shares with Trump: mass Third World immigration, globalist trade policies, the promotion of multinational corporations, and militaristic crusades for exporting Democracy to the four corners of the Earth have proven to be things on which the alt-left and the mainstream left have never stopped agreeing upon.<\/p>\n

More on the alt-left will be said in the near future. The point of this article was to establish that there is indeed an alt-left that is far more powerful and influential than any alleged alt-right.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Whether there really is a sinister \u201calt-right,\u201d as Hillary Clinton has insisted, is questionable. What is not questionable, though, is that there is an alt-left. This election cycle has made this clear. And the home of the alt-left is the Republican Party. 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