New Haters, Same Old Backlash
Maybe now when I tell you that we're not in a post-racial society, you'll pay attention, OK?
The latest evidence includes an intriguing debate over how to identify the loosely organized but increasingly prominent alt-right movement.
Should we call them by their chosen label, "alt-right," which is short for "alternative right?" Or should we address them as I prefer by such traditional labels as "white nationalists" or simply "white supremacists?"
It's a tricky question because the alt-right is a Twitter-age hashtag movement like the tea party, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, "NotMyPresident" protesters and whatever other new movement may be percolating into a flash mob.
The question gained new prominence after President-elect Donald Trump chose Steve Bannon to be his chief strategist. Among other achievements, Bannon is former chairman of Breitbart Media, which he described last summer in a Mother Jones interview as "the platform for the alt-right."
Does that mean a guy who proudly helped to provide a "platform" for anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, ethno-nationalistic pranksters and provocateurs will now have a White House office and the president's ear?
Bannon's defenders argue that Breitbart is not a white nationalist site and that Bannon is not a racist, anti-Semite or other kind of hater. Joel Pollak, senior editor at large for Breitbart News Network, memorably attributed such charges to sore losers on the left, "still in tantrum mode" after losing the recent presidential election.
No question that Trump owes Bannon, as Trump likes to say, "big league." Trump's campaign seemed dead on its feet until Bannon took charge. Yet imagine for a moment if President Barack Obama gave a White House post to his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and you'll have some idea what the fuss over Bannon and the al-right is about.
In America's long tradition of political pendulum swings, the rise of the alt-right or something very much like it was downright predictable. The end of slavery and the beginning of citizenship for all African-Americans brought the rise of the Ku Klux Klan.
The passage of federal civil rights and voting rights legislation in the mid-1960s brought the rise of "white backlash," the presidential candidacy of George Wallace and the beginnings of today's racial polarized political parties.
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