Posted on August 23, 2016

The ‘Race Realist’ Theory of How Trump Can Win, Explained

David Weigel, Washington Post, August 22, 2016

In the days since he added Breitbart News chief executive Stephen K. Bannon to his campaign, Donald Trump has made a considered pitch to black voters, and held a meeting with around two dozen Latino leaders from politics, business and faith where he reportedly hinted that his immigration policy could be tapered.

None of that has rattled Trump’s fans on the “alternative right,” or among “race realists.” In a speech at American Renaissance’s annual conference this year, VDare editor Peter Brimelow said outright that the movement could not simply trust Trump on anything but the construction of a border wall–“he does love to build things.”

In this wing of the conservative movement, Trump is seen as a frustrating messenger who is nonetheless more aware of the problems facing civilization than anyone else in politics. At VDare, a clearinghouse for immigration restrictionists, the news is not what happened in a meeting, but that the media keeps missing Trump’s passionate attacks on crime caused by undocumented immigrants.

The alt-right, in other words, is constantly focusing on the trees and not the forest. And their theory of how 2016 can be won, or how the Republican Party could save itself, is that a supermajority of white voters can be moved by the Democrats’ support of mass legalization of immigrants and greater Syrian refugee acceptance.

“The single biggest issue of the 21st century is whether the First World has the will to resist being inundated by the Third World,” said Steve Sailer, an influential writer for VDare and Taki’s Magazine. “If we do preserve our borders, the Third World will figure out how to control its own fertility like everybody else has. If we don’t, though, we’ll become Rio with worse weather and scenery. But [German Chancellor Angela] Merkel’s [mistake] last year of letting in a million Muslim mob shows how badly the ideology of borderlessness has warped the judgment of the ruling class.”

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{snip} The alt-right has always sought allies and ideas from the European far-right, and its rise in the wake of that crisis has been welcomed. In “We Didn’t Start the Movement,” a parody video filmed for American Renaissance’s annual conference, images of French National Front leader Marine Le Pen follow images of far-right protests and Islamist militant-linked terrorist attacks.

The right’s success in Europe underscores what the alt-right believes to be true here: There is a clear path to success if Republicans are willing to become a party of national interests, against multiculturalism. By contrast, if the party thinks it can win on the margins, it will lose white voters as they stay home or fail to see a distinction with Democrats. In “How Trump Could Pull it Off,” American Renaissance’s Jared Taylor laid it out with charts from a new study of white Americans.

“Whites still cast more than two-thirds of the votes in national elections,” Taylor wrote. “They could theoretically choose the president even if every non-white voted against them. Donald Trump will win if he turns out whites in unprecedented numbers and persuades them to vote for him. His best chance is to keep hammering at his signature issues: build a wall, throw out illegals, get rid of birthright citizenship, keep out Muslims. All this strongly appeals to white ‘racial resentment’ and gives a sense of ‘political efficacy,’ thus solving the two problems that almost certainly account for part of the drop in white voter turnout. Mr. Trump could set new turnout records in the general election, just as he did in the primaries.”

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