Evan McLaren’s major objection to White Nationalism is the professional social pricing that comes along with supporting racialism. This is a valid criticism. It raises another question though: to what extent have racialists, through their alignment with the conservative Right, been penalized due to our opposition to the broader progressive economic agenda?
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Interesting. I never thought of that. Could some sort of racial politics be constructed together with leftist economics? And what might that mean? Might be a worthwhile consideration.
Certainly. FDR’s New Deal coalition of Northern workers and Southern segregationists comes to mind. Alabama has a long tradition of populism, progressivism (the Grange in the 1870s, Reuben Kolb vs. the Bourbon Democrats in the 1890s, Braxton Bragg Comer in the 1900s, George Wallace in the 1960s) and hostility to entrenched corporate power.
Huh. When my social science professors were lamenting the latent racism of the New Deal I thought they were just being multiculturalist whiners. Perhaps I ought to have payed better attention.
The Old Left (1920s/1930s) was focused on class issues and relegated race reform to the public policy backburner. FDR kept the NAACP at arm’s length. The South was the backbone of the Democratic Party at the time. Truman was the first Democratic president to embrace civil rights.
Later, in the aftermath of WW2 (during the second Red Scare), conservatives identified class based appeals with treason and sympathy with communism. That’s why the Left gave up its crusade against industrial capitalism in favor of race based agitation. Meanwhile, the Right under Eisenhower embraced anti-racism to further its anti-communist agenda in the Third World.