I was amused to read today that in the course of railing against protesters in Washington, DC, Stephen Miller made a repeated point of calling them old and white. Not simply because the base of the Republican party is old and white. But also because he so perfectly illustrates a point I made years ago, in The Reactionary Mind, about how the right so often mimics the left:

Conservatives often are the left’s best students. Sometimes, their studies are self-conscious and strategic, as they look to the left for ways to bend new vernaculars, or new media, to their suddenly delegitimated aims….At other times, the education of the conservative is unknowing, happening, as it were, behind his back. By resisting and thus engaging with the progressive argument day after day, he comes to be influenced, often in spite of himself, by the very movement he opposes. Setting out to bend a vernacular to his will, he finds his will bent by the vernacular.

I have a hunch that Miller’s invective against old white people is an instance of the second kind of education, the one that happens behind the conservative’s back, without his realizing it.