It’s hard to grapple with where the conservative movement is today without understanding Breitbart.com. The publication has long had a huge audience, but its larger influence became clear last week after Donald Trump appointed Breitbart’s longtime chair, Steve Bannon, to be his campaign’s CEO.
Breitbart is now the in-house publication of the Republican nominee for president in all but name. What it publishes explains a great deal of Trump’s appeal — and is helping to define what “Trumpism” means.
So what is Breitbart’s oeuvre? Well, it’s the kind of site that has an entire category of articles called “black crime.” It once reported a photo of an old Adidas shirt as evidence that Islamist terrorists are sneaking across the Mexican border. It has referred to conservative writer Bill Kristol as a “renegade Jew.” This is the norm, not the exception: One of Breitbart’s key distinguishing features today is lurid, fearmongering coverage of minority groups, particularly African Americans and Muslims.
On one level, the significance of a publication like Breitbart taking over the GOP is obvious: The Trump campaign is, to an unprecedented degree, openly catering to racists and xenophobes.
But the real story here is a great deal more subtle. Breitbart’s ascendancy isn’t an accident. It’s a microcosm of the broader story of conservative institutions. The story of Breitbart is the story of the traditional conservative movement being defeated by a force, a kind of white populist nationalism, that it had previously depended on.
Understanding Breitbart, then, isn’t just important for understanding Trump and his presidential campaign; it also helps us understand the rot eating away at the foundations of American conservatism.......
.....In addition to his live-hard lifestyle, he differed from normal conservatives in another respect: He never really cared that much about policy. While other conservative writers defined themselves by issues like fighting abortion or the Iraq War or battling health care reform, Breitbart saw the important battles as taking place outside of Washington.
“It's like when people are like, 'What do you think we should do on health care?' I don't ****ing have a clue. It's too complicated for me,” he told Slate’s Christopher Beam in 2010. "I'm trying to shift the focus of conservative movement from the narrow — the policy — to a much higher elevation, granting them a greater perspective."
Breitbart saw the enemy as something that he called “cultural Marxism” (importantly distinct from the actual approach to cultural studies inspired by Marx).
Breitbart believed that in the mid-20th century, a series of European intellectuals immigrated to America and developed a plot to destroy it. According to Breitbart, these intellectuals — mostly Frankfurt School thinkers like Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer — saw America’s “Judeo-Christian heritage” as the key peg underpinning American capitalism.
“In the 1940s, the left came in and said, ‘America is not susceptible to the argument that its economic system, capitalism, is wrong,’” Breitbart said in a 2011 lecture. “These social engineering ingrates — ingrates! — who came from the University of Frankfurt ... they were the ones that devised that America’s capitalism could not survive an assault on its checks and balances, and that was its Judeo-Christianity.”
Breitbart believed, very firmly, that today’s left was executing on this plot — that the mainstream media, the academy, and Hollywood were all leftist-dominated institutions working to transform American society to lay the groundwork for a Marxist revolution. Their weapons, he says, are “political correctness [and] multiculturalism.” Breitbart’s mission was to fight back, to liberate culture from leftist political correctness......
.....All journalists make mistakes, even egregious ones, from time to time. But Breitbart’s errors were repeated and endemic. They were the logical result of its core editorial commitment to journalism as more of a culture war than the reporting of facts. The goal, for Breitbart, wasn’t accuracy first; it was victory over cultural Marxism......
.....This appeal came from a disconnect between the Republican elite and its voters. Republican leaders were more motivated by conservative dogma on the economy and foreign policy. They thought cultural grievances about issues like immigration were sideshows, and they appealed to those sentiments while really pushing on the issues that mattered to them.
Breitbart was consciously founded on the idea that those leaders were wrong, that Republican voters really cared about the culture war, and that conservative ideology was the discardable bit. The site’s growing influence on the right proved its vision right, making it impossible for the conservative mainstream to purge it even if they wanted to.
The mainstream conservative movement has mostly been in denial on this point.....
