Paul Gottfried has read Antifa's wunderkind Mark Bray and finds that there's no there there, just slogans

Proving once again that PhD's aren't what they used to be. Maybe it's time to draft them. 

The Myth Making of Antifa Intellectuals:

Despite its obvious incompatibility with the dominant political culture, the alt-right seems to have rallied philosophically deeper thinkers than the slogan-chanting adolescents who swarm around [Mark] Bray. ...

Bray’s Left has nothing in common with the Left that existed in interwar Europe. His field and passion are gender studies and “fighting racism.” These were hardly the major interests of anarchists and Marxists in the 1930s. Back then the Left was serious about a socio-economic revolution and showed no noticeable interest in identity politics or LGBT self-expression. It may even be a bit of a stretch to relate antifa activism to the protests in the 1960s that I personally witnessed. The demonstrators at that time opposed a prolonged war in Vietnam into which they might be personally dragged; others protested segregation, which really existed in some parts of the country. What similarly deep cause is driving Bray and his allies? I can’t seem to find one other than seizing power or simply letting off steam.

An alt-right taxonomy one year after Charlottesville, and its prospects for survival

Provided by Paul Gottfried, with useful links, in Paul Gottfried: Charlottesville After A Year—As An Outsider, I Think The Alt-Right Far From Finished, from which this excerpt:

Growing racial tensions, reckless immigration and a further weakening of already-weakened social bonds could all help the Alt-Right expand its following.

Part of the Alt Right’s eventual success may come from its anti-traditionalism. The Alt-Right is mostly (but not entirely) anti-Christian and advances a Nietzschean or neo-pagan perspective. It is thereby in sync with the growing secularism of millennials.  

And the Alt-Right doesn’t wear itself out trying to defend the traditional bourgeois family. It appears to be made up largely of young, unattached bloggers. Most of those Alt-Right publicists I read focus on racial conflict or the struggle between civilizations; and they push these themes far more frankly and with less careerist backtracking than the well-paid propagandists of Conservatism, Inc. They also cite telling statistics about racial and gender differences; and they pride themselves on their openness to science as well as on their sometimes vaguely defined “radical traditionalism.”

The Alt-Right belongs to a post-conservative Right. 

This is another way of saying the future success of the alt-right depends on the continued splintering of the American experience occasioned by its enthusiasm for secular ideologies.

Hence the way to defeat the alt-right, if that is what the left really wants, is to reject multiculturalism and participate in unifying the country instead of working toward its demise. And that implies supporting the radical correction of America's immigration laws symbolized and actualized by Donald Trump's wall.

But, of course, that would make too much sense, as little sense as reproducing oneself the old-fashioned way, by marrying and having children.

Idealism, of whatever stripe, is poison, but our thirst for it, unfortunately, is the well nigh inescapable bastard patrimony of our Christian past. 

Or that the charm and venom, which they drunk,

Their blood with secret filth infected hath,

Being diffused through the senseless trunk

That, through the great contagion, direful deadly stunk.

-- Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Canto II, iv.