My answer on Quora. There were another two nice answers after mine.
If you consider the Breitbart wing of the Alt Right to be the Alt Right then yes, the Breitbart Alt Right is the Republican Party, or at least the Trump campaign. Keep in mind though that the Breitbart wing is on the far moderate end of the Alt Right and as you start getting away from that wing, you start getting into some very nasty stuff.
The Breitbart wing is the Trump campaign. The Trump campaign is the Breitbart people. But really Breitbart is not a whole lot different from World Net Daily (especially) and Free Republic. Really there is almost no difference between WND and Breitbart. The Republican Party has been going nuts for some time now.
But as far as the real ugly stuff to the right of WND and Breitbart, I do not think that this thinking has taken over Trump’s campaign much less the Party.
No. The Republicans this year have been taken over by various people angry at loss of the middle class, job loss to overseas, and people in the Dem party caring only about immigrants and the “disadvantaged.” Which is largely not middle America.
They KNOW Trump is nuts. They are too angry to care.
This is a superb answer that explains the Trump phenomenon excellently. I could not have summed it up better. This really is what is going on. Exactly.
The Alt-Right component of the GOP has certainly been given its head during this cycle. It’s what has propelled Trump into his current status as nominee. As the years have gone by and moderates have trickled out of the party, the remaining Alt-Right membership has gotten more prominent by default. The party leadership is obviously of two minds about it. On one hand, they’re grateful at this point for votes, any votes, because the old stalwarts of the evangelical right have been less reliable of late. But the Alt-Righters are an embarrassment and give moderates and swing voters even more reasons to run away.
The Alt-Right has also gained more prominence due to the decline of party influence in Congress, which at one time could exert downward pressure on members who were too far outside the mainstream. No longer. Trump isn’t an outlier in the party anymore; he’s just the logical extension of the warfare within the GOP that’s been whittling away moderates for many years. The Alt-Righters have always been there; it’s just that now they’re about all that’s left of the Republican energy. There are plenty of GOP’ers who aren’t in the Alt-Right camp, but they’re being sidelined so as to give The Donald a clear run. It’s anybody guess what they’ll do from here.
Another absolutely fantastic answer. The part about the evangelicals not being as reliable anymore is great. The evangelicals were not really with Trump. That’s a misconception. They were with Cruz and Rubio. Also the rural US was not with Trump either. That is another huge misconception – that it’s rural hicks like TRASH talks about that are the Trump base. The rural areas went for Rubio and Cruz. It is mostly exurbs in the Northeast and Rust Belt that gave Trump his votes. He also won the big cities in the same region. He carried entire states in the Rust Belt. That’s where Trump’s real power is coming from.
Trump has pretty much traded in the evangelicals for this new Alt-Right type base. The Republican Party obviously created this whole Trump phenomenon with their decades of dog-whistling. But these people are arrogant and they thought that they could just dog-whistle away and get votes and never really have to pay the piper or cash in the chips at the end. The used the Religious Right in the same way. These elites just wanted their votes. They never intended to actually put in this Christian Dominionist clerical rule that the Christo-fash want. They thought they could just cynically use these people and run on their issues without ever having to implement any of these Christian Right projects because the people who run the party never supported the hard Christian Right projects. They are just rich men who mostly want their daughters, wives or sisters to be able to access abortion.
They used the anti-illegal immigrant crowd in the same way. These elites ranted and raved about illegal immigration, but they never intended to do anything about it.
At this point, the Trump genie is out of control. They created this monster by their arrogance and cynicism and now they have no idea what to do with it.
