3 min read
It was Philip Larkin, of all people, who once described the United States as two coasts separated by "vast deserts of bigotry" - not that the scabrous poet had ever bothered to visit and find out for himself.
Much has been written and said in the past week about metropolitan journalists espousing much the same wrinkled-nostril view of America and therefore failing to prepare the republic, and themselves, for the rise of a genital-grabbing demagogue to national prominence.
Liberal insularity and condescension towards "flyover country" and the white working class have given us the dreaded reality of President-elect Donald Trump.
Yet this argument, I think, misses a trick. Against all expectations, New York and Los Angeles have unleashed the false prophets upon the vast deserts. The bigots now come from the coasts.
Mr Trump has just hired, as his incoming White House strategist, his former campaign manager Steve Bannon, a man who in the 20th century might have been another object of the hatred and derision by the mob he incites and leads.
But this is the 21st century, when an erstwhile Goldman Sachs banker and financier of Seinfeld can call himself a "Leninist" and somehow act as the pied piper for an increasingly noisy subset of suit-and-tie white supremacists known euphemistically as the "alt-right".
What is this insurgent movement now slithering its way into the Oval Office?
Having presented itself as a winking, playful variation on the theme of old-fashioned nativism - Oswald Mosley reimagined by Russell Brand, a racist-but-not-really p----take of the easily offended PC and safe space campus brigades - the alt-right are, in reality, fascists with a fondness for Photoshop.
Their main propaganda outlet, as Mr Bannon has proudly noted, is Breitbart Media, of which he is still the chairman, albeit on an extended leave of absence.
In this moral universe, the Confederate flag is not a racist standard of slavery but a proud symbol of Southern heritage; contraception can turn women into lunatic hags (Mr Bannon has elsewhere favourably compared Ann Coulter and other feminine ornaments of the extreme right to "a bunch of dykes"); a neo-conservative editor can be denounced as a "renegade Jew"; an award-winning historian of the Soviet Union somehow constitutes a quadruple threat to the man in the street by being a "Polish, Jewish, American elitist".
Mr Bannon's minions traffic in Holocaust jokes, false crime statistics rooted in demography, and the danger of refugees who are said to bring nothing with them beyond Sharia law and gang-rape. Their favoured pastime, if my own Twitter account is any guide, is to render Jewish journalists in concentration camp garb or in Nazi ovens, or to place Jewish names between double parentheses - orthographic yellow stars delineating the new-old enemy.
It scarcely matters that the alt-right believe they have finally found an anti-establishment, swamp-draining godhead in the figure of a Manhattan real estate baron who pays no taxes, decorates his home as Liberace might and listens to his Orthodox Jewish son-in-law for political advice.
One would be seriously remiss to dismiss them as a frivolous internet phenomenon - in it for the clicks and "lulzs", as one of the alt-right's clown princes puts it. Their intellectual architect, a man cited approvingly by Breitbart, is a PhD dropout called Richard Spencer, who assures us that he is not kidding when he says blacks and Hispanics are less intelligent than whites and should therefore leave the United States along with Muslims, Jews and Asians.
Mr Spencer admires Vladimir Putin and Aleksandr Dugin, the Russian philosopher of "Eurasianism", a blood-and-soil theory of civilisational superiority, who has called for the genocide of Ukrainians and the Kremlin's further annexation of Europe.
Mr Spencer insists his domestic project is to be more of an entente cordiale between and among the races, less a violent Anschluss. Minorities will simply leave the United States of their own accord, with a little gentle persuasion.
"It's like presenting to an African that this hasn't worked out," he told the liberal magazine Mother Jones in late October. "We haven't made each other happier. We are going to have to take part in this paradigmatic shift together."
Mr Trump is meant to be the accelerant-in-chief of this paradigmatic shift, which is why his staffing choices are now being cheered by neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan.
Former KKK imperial grand wizard David Duke, in praising the Bannon appointment, has said Mr Trump's consigliere is "basically creating the ideological aspects of where we're going".
More conventional conservatives, meanwhile, instruct us not to get too excited by the prospect of a white nationalist in the White House. According to Newt Gingrich, one of Mr Trump's most faithful surrogates on the hustings, Mr Bannon cannot be counted an antisemite. Why? Because he has worked in Hollywood.
I do not have to tell British Jews what forces are unleashed when men such as these rise to power, or come close enough to it. The inevitable has already begun. Since election day, swastikas have been popping up on buildings in the tri-state area and reports of racist abuse levelled against blacks, Latinos and Muslims have increased.
I make no long-term predictions for my country other than to note something I never thought I would do in my lifetime.
The cranks, creeps and losers once consigned to the virtual sewers or backwoods have now emerged with a new-found determination and purpose.
America, they believe, is theirs.
