Thursday, April 6, 2017

Why The Alt-Right Loves Single-Payer Health Care

 By Dylan Matthews

When Mike Cernovich, one of the most prominent alt-right internet trolls supporting Donald Trump, was interviewed on 60 Minutes, he used the platform to spread conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton's health and to allege that she is involved with pedophilic sex trafficking operations. But he also declared his belief in single-payer health care.

"I believe in some form of universal basic income," he told CBS’s Scott Pelley, citing concerns about technological unemployment. "I’m pro-single-payer health care. Is that right-wing or is that left-wing anymore? Well, if you have a lot of people, a large swath of the company, or country, are suffering, then I think that we owe it to all Americans to do right by them and to help them out."

This might seem like a bizarre position for a far-right conspiracy theorist to take. Single-payer health care, after all, entails nationalizing most or all of the health insurance industry and having the government set prices for doctors’ services. Conservatives in America have spent the better part of the past century arguing that the idea is socialistic, would lead to long waits for lifesaving treatment, and would give the government power over the life and death of its citizens.

But Cernovich is less a traditional conservative than he is a Trumpist — and Trumpism in its purest, alt-right variety cares more about white working-class identity politics than traditional conservatism. More and more, Trump fans are seeing single-payer as part of that.

Alt-rightists and other Trump-loyal conservatives — Richard Spencer, VDARE writer and ex–National Review staffer John Derbyshire, Newsmax CEO and Trump friend Christopher Ruddy, and onetime Donald Trump Jr. speechwriter and Scholars & Writers for Trump head F.H. Buckley — all endorsed various models of single-payer in recent months and years.

Even elites in the alt-right mold who once deplored single-payer are changing their tune. Pat Buchanan, the paleoconservative three-time presidential candidate whose white identity politics and fiercely anti-trade and anti-immigration stances helped inspire the modern alt-right, had free market views on health care in the 1990s and condemned Obamacare as a scheme to kill Grandma in 2009. This week, he told me in an email he has “not taken any position on single-payer, and [has] pretty much stayed out of the Obamacare repeal-and-replace debate.”

Curtis Yarvin, a Silicon Valley programmer whose writings under the pen name Mencius Moldbug helped launch the neoreactionary branch of the alt-right, told me he welcomes the movement’s trend toward single-payer, viewing it as a “sincere effort to think realistically in the present tense rather than in abstract ideology.”

Read the rest here.

17 comments:

  1. Bob, Mike is not alt-right. He even...disavows...such a description (perhaps using other language). Are you taking talking points from CBS now? Fake news.

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    Replies
    1. so what? plenty of republicans don't like the term neocon but they are still warlike tools all the same.

      Delete
    2. Shimsohn,

      The last defense for every scoundrel is now to charge "Fake news." The story is accurate and goes well beyond what Cernovich considers himself. And yes it is only "other language" that he uses since he calls himself "new right" and an "American nationalist."

      You are a disgrace for charging fake news to this post.

      Delete
  2. This actually sounds like Tom Woods making fun of Krugman mocking Republicans for implicitly saying, "We're only against welfare for 'THOSE PEOPLE'" and it turns out Krugman was right.

    NATIONAL-ist SOCIALISM, anyone? Genetically based ethno-socialism anyone?

    I am again vindicated for repeatedly pointing out that no non-Austrian has the slightest understanding of voluntary exchange, honest pricing and economic calculation. We're doomed.

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  3. It is nice of the Alt-Righties to differentiate themselves so much from us good guys. Here's Vox Day being touchy-feely yesterday:

    No one actually gives a damn about Syrian children, except that they not be permitted to reside in the West. It's unfortunate that the God-Emperor appears - appears - be falling increasingly under the sway of the Washington wormtongues whispering about being presidential in his ears.

    Perhaps the God-Emperor needs to get out of the White House and start listening to the American people again rather than his observably unreliable intelligence agencies.

    It's really rather remarkable how "the international situation" operates as a "hey shiny" distraction for politicians. People have been getting brutalized and slaughtered in the Middle East for 6,000 years. If humanity is really fortunate, they'll be getting brutalized and slaughtered there 6,000 years from now. To believe that it is any concern of yours, much less that you can do anything about it, is the height of folly.


    http://voxday.blogspot.com/2017/04/neoconning-god-emperor.html

    Yes, Neoconning the GOD EMPEROR.

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  4. Alt-Right or else

    Americans will all be Alt-Right soon, and immigrants like this are why. They have to go back.

    The pre-1965 demographics are the absolute minimum required. If you, or your parents, or your grandparents, arrived in the USA after 1965, you have to go back. No one gives a damn if you were born American in Mumbai. Or Topeka.

    You're not American. The United States of America is not your country and you damn well know it. Now, go home before the golden goose finally expires and you end up as just another skull stacked in a pyramid along the border.

    No hard feelings, you understand. It's nothing personal.

    http://voxday.blogspot.com/2017/04/you-will-all-be-alt-right-soon.html

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Vox Day is an anti-free market enemy of liberty. He should be given the same respect as any other statist animal, which is none whatsoever.

      Delete
    2. @Matthew

      Vox Day like many of the alt-right are keyboard warriors who don't have to backbone to carry out their little violent fantasies and want the blue and badge wearing thugs to do it for them. They're like that obnoxious short kid everyone has encountered in High School, likes to run his mouth but because that kid is friends with the biggest (and sometimes easiest manipulated) kid, nobody delivers the punch he's been asking for. For the alt-right that big kid they're searching for is the government goon

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    3. I remember Vox Day from WND 20 years ago.

      What a POS.

      Delete
  5. Socialized medicine can now be criticized as some rayciss alt-right policy. Totally deplorable.

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  6. Decades of conservative and libertarian messaging have failed miserably, if someone who is ideologically uncomitted, but predisposed to some libertarian ideas, like Mike Cernovich, sees socialized medicine as the right answer. It's time to try something else.

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    Replies
    1. failed miserably!?!? dude they have never ever been tried

      Delete
    2. Heath, dude, are you deaf? Apollo Slater said the MESSAGING has failed. He is right. This is a true fact.

      "[B]efore some audiences not even the possession of the exactest knowledge will make it easy for what we say to produce conviction. For argument based on knowledge implies instruction, and there are people one cannot instruct."
      - Rhetoric, Aristotle

      As Vox Day, the Supreme Dark Lord of the Evil Legion of Evil says, far more pithily, Most People Are Idiots. That's not a judgement. Intelligence is not the measure of the man. It's just an observation.

      Libertarianism of the sort everyone here thinks they believe and is possible, is as Utopian as communism.

      First, most people are indeed incapable of discussing ideas on a dialectic level. They resort to rhetoric, or emotional arguments. This is not a left-only phenomenon.

      Every single commenter here, save myself of course, has responded using rhetorical arguments. You are not capable of responding dialectically. Because Aristotle. And because MPAI. Even you.

      Delete
  7. Another example on how the alt-right is just right wing socialism.

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  8. Apollo Slater also engages in dialectic.

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  9. The reason for that is there is no substantial difference between the extreme left and the extreme right.

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