You can’t depend on much with the Trump White House, but one thing abideth: whatever has happened by the time you lay your head down to sleep in Australia, will have changed, changed utterly upon waking. There was never any doubt that Donald Trump’s second statement on the Charlottesville neo-Nazi march and lethal car attack, condemning racism and white supremacist hate groups, would not stand. Trump sounded uneasy and tentative saying it; the word “racism” seemed unnatural coming out of his mouth. His father had attended KKK rallies in Queens and Brooklyn before WW II, when the KKK was as focused on Catholics and Jews (in the north) as it was on black people; Trump’s everyday attitude appears to be functional chauvinism: get the Jews in to do the money, the blacks for heavy lifting, and have the gays decorate the hotel rooms. Most likely, he was persuaded, cajoled, yelled at to do it, by his daughter/adviser Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, both conventional New York social liberals (and Kushner is Jewish). His new chief-of-staff John Kelly might also have had a hand in it. The statement was met with some relief from the Republicans, and grudging acknowledgement (it deserved no more) from sections of middle America.

Less than a day later, this brief outbreak of the most minimal decency was rescinded with a new press conference from Trump, rambling, deranged and aggressive as any, saying there was violence on both sides, and “good people on both sides”, and apparently all but characterising the neo-Nazi attacks on the opposition protest as self-defence.

Pure Trump in phrasing and style, but the content is another matter. This notion of “faults on both sides, good people on both sides” is pure Steve Bannon, Breitbart, and white ethno-nationalism. Distinguishing itself from neo-Nazism, it is still determined to maintain a “solidarity of the last instance”, with the most vile expressions of its ideology, and will turn to defend them, rather than ally with multicultural liberalism.

This gives yet more evidence of how the White House is running: that an addled, out-of-depth President is being fought over by two dominant factions, with current policy being a product of who gets his ear last, and manages to rile him up in the right way. Bannon would have more to work with than the Ivanka/mainstream fashion: Trump, watching TV talking heads of all channels having a go at him — including right-wing ones such as FOX News and Glenn Beck’s The Blaze — would have been easily riled to show everyone that he couldn’t be dictated to by “political correctness”.

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The “good people on both sides” line is especially telling, because it recalls an earlier moment on the right — in 1985, when President Ronald Reagan, on a state visit to West Germany, gave a speech at a military cemetery in Bitburg, where members of the Waffen SS were buried along with Wehrmacht soldiers. The visit was part of Cold War politics; chancellor Helmut Kohl was building electoral support among “conservative” Germans, and Reagan wanted to build support so that a new range of missiles could be rolled out on German soil.

 The visit was bad enough; the remarks there and before it were appalling, with Reagan describing the Wehrmacht soldiers there as “victims, just as surely as the victims in the concentration camp”. The words were written for Reagan by Patrick Buchanan, his communications director, and a man labelled a “paleo-conservative”, who is essentially an intellectual godfather to the alt-right. Buchanan, from a right-wing Catholic family, followers of the isolationist, anti-Semitic Father Charles Coughlin, a lynchpin of American quasi-fascism in the 1930s and 1940s, has spent decades advocating an ethno-nationalist understanding of what the United States is. It’s an anti-liberal reading of the nation’s founding, which argues that the notion that the Declaration of Independence and the constitution — documents of abstract rights — function as a founding root for the country is poppycock. Buchanan (and other such conservatives) have some agreement with left critics of such documents, who argue that they were drafted to defend the rights of white, property- (including slave-property) owning men — and excluding rights that didn’t fit that mould.

For Buchanan and other paleo-conservatives, such documents functioned to a degree as propaganda against the British — a particular cause dressing its interests up as a fight for universal justice. Such paleos have always sought to argue that the United States should know itself as an Anglo-Celtic Christian society, later joined in (formal) full citizenship by emancipated black people, who had themselves been Christianised. On that basis, it is argued, the notion that the US is an expanding polity of rights, open to all, should be resisted. For Buchanan, such conception of what a nation is amounts to a form of “national suicide”.

Throughout his last three of four books, Buchanan has argued a modified form of this approach, a culture-war truce. Multicultural liberalism has won substantial territory, real and metaphorical, he argues; it is powered by rising new industries. What is needed is a mutual recognition of difference, and a politics based on that fact, rather than a spurious search for unity. For a time, Buchanan had a slot on Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC show, and that was about the best talking-head TV evah.

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Buchanan’s paleo-conservative version of the US polity is what lies at the root of alt-right/white supremacist politics, and one reason why the US right is fracturing so utterly. These are not the Tea Party right, waving their pocket copies of the constitution and denouncing “King” Obama for “trashing” the constitution by using some executive wiggle room to save millions of families with children from deportation. When they put their hands to their hearts on July 4, they are not honouring the free speech, separation of church and state. They are heirs of the groups in the 1780s who never wanted a Bill of Rights at all, or even the constitution in its given form. Manifest destiny for them is the spread of white European Christianity across the ocean, and then the frontier, and then the world.

Christianity, not Judeo-Christianity. On the right, Jew-hatred/anti-Semitism is surging back at an extraordinary, but not unexpected rate. The notion that an eastern particularist religion lies at the root of the European religion that defines the white order is intolerable to them; hatred of Muslims is a recent and far less passionate addition. Right-wing anti-Semitism is an obsessive and autonomous thing, because it regrows in the mind of each hard-right conservative who hankers for a pure social order in which there is no contradiction between polity, society and ethnicity — modern non-Israeli Jews being the living embodiment of this. From the hard-right it spreads to the neurotic right: note how The Spectator Australia and The Sunday Times have recently published (and then retracted) anti-Semitic writers. Note how Mark Latham has linked with the Canadian site The Rebel, whose founder Gavin McInnes spouts the usual obsessive anti-Semitic crap. Those drawn to the political right because they are ethno-nationalist, rather than pro-capitalist liberals, won’t be able to help themselves; the more multicultural society becomes the more identity-based their politics will be  (witness the degeneration of the IPA, for example).  

The important thing to recognise, in understanding the US, and the West in general, is how deep the roots of these attitudes dig into the soil. They are not aberrations; they have a tradition they call on. We recognise that not to legitimise, but to understand how the appeal might spread. There’s no real sign that Trump is thinking strategically about this; in this instance he serves as symptom and example, and object-lesson in what one is up against.