Richard Spencer in Washington, November 18, 2016. Linda Davidson | The Washington Post | Getty Images

The ultranationalist case for single-payer health care

Some of the arguments that the Trumpists and alt-rightists offer for single-payer are the standard concerns about the plight of sick and suffering Americans that wouldn't feel out of place in a Bernie Sanders speech — like Cernovich's insistence that "we owe it to all Americans to do right by them, and to help them out." Other arguments are offered more in sorrow than in anger. Derbyshire, for example, laments the fact that Americans are unwilling to accept a true free market in health care — but argues that single-payer makes more sense than the current hodgepodge of insurance subsidies and regulations and tax breaks. "Citizens of modern states will accept no other kind of health care but the socialized or mostly socialized kind," he said on a 2012 episode of his podcast, Radio Derb. "This being the case, however regrettably, the most efficient option is to make the socialization as rational as possible." Single-payer, he concludes, would involve "less socialism, and more private choice," than "what we now have." (Derbyshire doesn't really explain why socializing insurance is less socialist than not socializing insurance.) But the main argument offered by Trumpists is about their movement. Donald Trump famously promised in May 2016 to turn the Republican Party into a "workers' party." The implication was clear: Republican elites before him like Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney prioritized deregulation for businesses and tax cuts for the rich, and offered little or nothing for working-class people, specifically working-class white people. Instead, the party relied on social issues like abortion and immigration to earn their votes. F.H. Buckley, the George Mason University law professor who led Scholars & Writers for Trump, even approvingly cites the leftist writer Thomas Frank's What's the Matter With Kansas? on this point. "Frank asked how it was that the poor folks of his home state voted for a Republican Party that cared so little for their economic interests," Buckley wrote in the New York Post. "Become the jobs and the health-care president, and you [Trump] will have answered Frank's question." "Steve Bannon has said the Republicans will become a party of 'economic nationalism,'" Buckley continued. "No one has bothered to define this, but here's one thing it must mean: We're going to treat Americans better than non-Americans. We're going to see that Americans have jobs, medical care and an enviable safety net." Of course, the Trumpists are big fans of using racialized, not explicitly economic appeals on issues like immigration and crime to win votes. But whereas they see mainstream Republicans like Paul Ryan or Jeb Bush making those appeals as a smokescreen for unpopular economic policies, they want to pair the appeals with an nationalist economic agenda that is actually popular with these voters. "Unlike Paul Ryan and Rich Lowry, who masturbated to Atlas Shrugged in their college dorms and have no loyalty to their race, Donald Trump is a nationalist," Richard Spencer writes. "We can't ignore the politics of this. If Trumpcare passes, leftists can credibly claim that Trump has betrayed his populist vision. They will recycle the hoary script about nationalism and 'scapegoating' immigrants as a means of pushing through a draconian agenda. And they'll have a point!" Single-payer, Spencer insists, would "serve our constituency" (read: white people), give the right an answer to the appeal of social democrats like Bernie Sanders, and encourage the growth of the alt-right movement: "So many writers, activists, and content creators on our side shy away from becoming more involved, not just out of fear of social punishment, but out of fear of being fired and losing their health insurance." Moreover, as soon as health care becomes a public issue, an alt-right government could use that power to promote a more vigorous, healthy white race on a number of dimensions. "When single-payer healthcare is implemented, issues like food safety, nutrition, and obesity become matters of public concern," Spencer writes. "It will draw more attention to the alternative we are presenting to America's current lowest-common-denominator society." Of course, single-payer would overwhelmingly benefit a lot of nonwhite Americans as well. But programs like Social Security and Medicare do too, and their universal nature and the fact that they're tied to work have led them to be less racialized and stigmatized than cash welfare or Medicaid. Single-payer's universality is appealing because it helps the white working class without making them enroll in means-tested programs traditionally associated with black and Latino beneficiaries.

This is a key strategy of the far right in Europe