re: #182 HappyWarrior

I wish I could understand it better too. I see the alt right’s existence as a rejection of the values that were taught to my generation in school. We read Disry of Anne Frank, Night, Richard Wright’s Black Boy, excerpts from Frederick Douglass’s autobiography, etc and I think what these guys feel is they’re being picked on for being white. It’s complete shit since we do celebrate Washington, Lincoln, the Roosevelts, and others.

From the lofty intellectual side of the Right, we had Harold Bloom, arguing for a mostly European and American “canon” of literature en.wikipedia.org, and Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, which argued against post-modernism and relativism and for a more traditional (i.e., European Christian) mode of ethics and morals.

Interestingly, the two Blooms are not related.

There were a whole series of similar books that were published from the 1970s to the 1990s, all from intellectuals decrying moral relativism, pop culture, and most notably, the introduction of “non-canon” works in high school and university, such as novels by women (who were not named Austen or Brontë), and minorities, and 20th century novels that were more racy than the usual traditional fare. The arguments were essentially the same as the two Blooms — that all this “extraneous” learning detracted from the study of the core aspects of (white) Western Civilization. The subtext was Western Civ was inherently superior to all others, so fuck those others.

We had to read one of those books (maybe it was William Bennett’s) when I was a high school teacher as part of our faculty summer reading assignment. I remember getting so angry at times that I wanted to hurl the book into the nearest trash bin.