On NRO today, Ian Tuttle examines how and why Donald Trump has attracted the support of so many white racists. One thing that stands out to me as important in this article is that contemporary white racism is no longer – as I think it really was, say, twenty years ago – merely an incohate collection of instincts and attitudes. It has learned to think and speak in a new pseudo-intellectual vocabulary – one that is markedly different from the old pseudo-intellectual vocabulary that gave mental structure to white racism sixty years ago.

Gone is the claim of purely biological difference, which was the very lifeblood of white racism from the American founding to the Civil Rights era. Today the claim is not to a superior nature but to a superior second nature – a superior culture that is, allegedly, so deeply ingrained that it actually changes biology, creating racial differences where none existed prior to human action. The superiority of culture over nature established by advanced or “post” modernity now extends even to racism, formerly the most atavistic pro-natural form of thought.

Our liberation from ancient superstitions into a real knowledge of nature has led, among other things (many of them good), to a deep dissatisfaction with the limits of nature. Locke, perhaps the key leader of the liberation from superstition, emphasized the need to accept those limits. But we have not. “Culture,” which (when divorced from God) seems infinitely malleable and responsive to our desires, was proposed as as a substitute source of ultimate meaning – leading us straight back into the loving arms of superstition.

Allan Bloom once joked that his critics, who embodied so unambiguously the rejection of reason that he had diagnosed in Closing of the American Mind, could have been sent by central casting for a Hollywood adaptation of the book. So could the pseudo-intellectuals of the “Alt Right.” It is becoming increasingly clear that Bloom was not in the least hyperbolic when he warned that America was playing with the same matches Germany had been playing with in the 1920s.

The conclusion of Tuttle’s article struck me particularly as one Bloom – or Martin Luther King – would appreciate:

They also seem to think that liberal democracy itself was an abstraction tyrannically imposed on an unwilling populace. It wasn’t. It was a slowly and painfully forged response to centuries of challenges. The Western, liberal-democratic order is wracked with problems, of course; but it always has been. The question is, Has it been more fruitful, more liberating, more constructive in promoting the common good than have the various orders that came before it? And if so, is there a compelling reason for throwing it over in favor of the ancient belief that some men are, indeed, born with saddles on their backs, and a favored few born booted and spurred, entitled to ride them?

This is the question the Alt-Right poses. As it happens, it’s an old question, and one to which our forebears gave powerful answers. But every generation has to relearn them. The larger the Alt-Right grows, the clearer it is that ours hasn’t.