Thomas J. Main > Quotes

“Such, then, was the political analysis that the proto-Alt-Rightist paleoconservatives bequeathed to the early twenty-first century. Liberal democracy, they argued, is totalitarian, despotic, illiberal, and in reality undemocratic. Hard regimes on the model of fascist Italy, the Soviet Union, and Nazi Germany are alternatives worth considering, they said. Political ideas are mere tools of elite domination, with the sole exception of far-right ideas, which are pure science and mere realism. Racial and ethnic differences trump human rights and the rule of law. Politics is no more than an unending power struggle in which values count for nothing and victory for everything.”
― Thomas J. Main, The Rise of the Alt-Right

“A key conclusion is that the imaginary constructions to which the Alt-Right professes loyalty—the “historic American nation,” the “Real America,” a “white ethnostate on the North American continent,” a “Federal American Republic”—have no more relation to the actually existing United States than did the “American Soviet system” dreamed of by the Stalinists. If we think of the old CPUSA as anti-American in the sense that it radically rejected American political philosophy and declared loyalty to a utopian ideal rather than to the United States, then the Alt-Right is at least as anti-American as the Communists ever were.”
― Thomas J. Main, The Rise of the Alt-Right

“Alt-Right ideology involves a root-and-branch rejection of all the central propositions of American political philosophy and of liberal democracy in general. Rights, political equality, the rule of law, electoral democracy, and constitutionalism are all discarded, sometimes with certain caveats, often with disgust. The Alt-Right is not merely a more right-wing and politically incorrect version of conventional American conservatism; rather, it is a radical and intemperate break with the country’s entire political tradition and order.”
― Thomas J. Main, The Rise of the Alt-Right