WHO NEEDS THE ALT-RIGHT WHEN THERE'S ORDINARY AMERICAN RACISM?

The Washington Post reports that the alt-right may have passed its peak.

Eight months after a white-nationalist rally in Charlottesville ended in the death of a counterprotester, the loose collection of disaffected young white men known as the alt-right is in disarray.

The problems have been mounting: lawsuits and arrests, fundraising difficulties, tepid recruitment, widespread infighting, fierce counterprotests, and banishment from social media platforms. Taken together, they’ve exhausted even some of the staunchest members.

One of the movement’s biggest groups, the Traditionalist Worker Party, dissolved in March. Andrew Anglin, founder of the Daily Stormer, the largest alt-right website, has gone into hiding, chased by a harassment lawsuit. And Richard Spencer, the alt-right’s most public figure, canceled a college speaking tour and was abandoned by his attorney last month.

I read this story shortly after I read Jamil Smith's "Where Can We Be Black?," which was just published in Rolling Stone:

African Americans are often made to feel as though we are uninvited guests in our own country. We are excluded from environments great and small, at times by force.... This exclusion is the very root of racial discrimination, and of the social penalties that whiteness exacts upon blackness....

After missing his bus last Thursday, Brennan Walker, a 14-year-old student in Rochester Hills, Michigan, tried to walk to school. His mother had taken his phone away, and soon, Walker was lost. He ended up doing what most Americans would think is safe to do: knock on a neighbor's door and ask for help and directions. But that same act cost Renisha McBride and Jonathan Ferrell their lives – and it almost cost Walker his. He told local reporters that after a white woman in the house behaved as if she thought Walker was trying to break in, a white man, Jeffrey Ziegler, came downstairs with a gun. Walker took off running. He only heard the gunshot that meant to take his life before escaping, later hiding and crying.

... By now, many of us have seen the viral video shot by [Starbucks] customer Melissa DePino, showing ... Philadelphia police officers confronting and arresting ... two black men, Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson, who had been waiting peacefully.... There was no reason to charge the men with anything but "waiting while black" ...

These are just two recent incidents. Similar incidents happen every week. Occasionally there are consequences -- Ziegler is now charged with felony assault and the Starbucks manager has lost her job. More often, there are no ultimate consequences for the people who do these things.

So why do American racists need the alt-right? Membership in the alt-right means marginalization -- but there's plenty of opportunity to be racist in America without joining a racist movement. And many Americans don't insist on a white ethno-state -- they just want the racial pecking order regularly reinforced. So they're satisfied with ordinary American racism.

Just as mid-century American workers contended themselves with a somewhat generous social safety net while rejecting out-and-out socialism, twenty-first-century heartland whites are rejecting racist movements because there's considerable opportunity to be racist in America without them.