Who are the alt-right, exactly? (An open letter)

[AdrienIer]

Don't conflate what you'd want to be true :

So the current Alt-Right is basically an invention of the media who failed to smear moderate conservatives. Slobbering morons.

with what is actually true. The truth doesn't necessarily fit with your worldview. This :

They originally state that it was coined by a Neo-Nazi then go on to say it means "not mainstream conservative."

is true if you put some limit as to what "not mainstream" means. Some horrible person invented the term, then some slightly less horrible people used it to brand themselves and a few others. Then they tried to build up a coalition of non-mainstream right wingers under that flag. Many people on the left tried to warn everyone that it was dangerous, and so did some "centrists" but the right didn't listen and became mostly united behind Trump and the alt right. Because Trump is the leader of the alt right (or at least someone very close to the alt right who is pushing some of their agenda), people on the left use ardent Trump supporters and alt right people as synonyms, which is not entirely accurate. In truth it's more that the republican party base has shifted so far to the right that even those that do not share the alt right ideology or methods are willing to accept their new alt right overlords.

 

[Ryika]

Because Trump is the leader of the alt right (or at least someone very close to the alt right who is pushing some of their agenda)

Don't conflate what you'd want to be true

 

[Gori the Grey]

Some horrible person invented the term, then some slightly less horrible people used it to brand themselves and a few others. Then they tried to build up a coalition of non-mainstream right wingers under that flag.

Anyone who would like can take this as a precis of the continuation of the larger taxonomy I was beginning to sketch, with just this one additional point of emphasis for the nonce: the "non-mainstream right wingers" who have been willing to be drawn under the flag are driven by the same anxieties about the steady erosion of white privilege as drive the horrible person and the slightly less horrible people.

 

[Kyriakos]

I am not sure if there actually is an alt-right by now. Eg Alex Jones was one of the main 'alt-right' figures before Trump was elected. He then became a pro-religion, pro-church, pro-police state, pro-army proponent, so that is just regular right; nothing alt there.
Even abstinence from war ( ) seems to not be a main line with these people anymore, so, yes, regular right, business as usual, just with a tinge of orange.

Another issue is that the regular right is the dem party as well, with the part of it not being right now labeled as Berniebros.

The US just has two Right parties, is all.

 

[innonimatu]

I don't believe feminism holds the copyright.

I got the impression that was the point of the thread.

Here's from the Southern Poverty Law Center's treatment:

I've bolded the last line to show that I am too right.

Any idiot can make up a term. It still requires dissemination, and that requires mass media. Things don't just "go viral".

 

[Perfection]

Spoiler :

Moderator Action: Please spoil absolutely ginormous images! - Vincour
Please read the forum rules: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422889

 

[Kyriakos]

That keyboard probably has seen better days..

 

[JollyRoger]

I agree that MRAs are not alt-Right. I don't think they possess any realistic alternative to the right hand.

 

[OldBoomer]

is true if you put some limit as to what "not mainstream" means. Some horrible person invented the term, then some slightly less horrible people used it to brand themselves and a few others. Then they tried to build up a coalition of non-mainstream right wingers under that flag.

I understand that American college kids may consider someone like Milo Yiannopoulos (a non-mainstream gay Jewish-Conservative who is despised by Neo-Nazis) to be only "slightly less horrible" than an actual Neo-Nazi, so much so that they burn down their own campuses, smash out windows, and beat each other in the head with bike locks when he comes to speak at their campus, however that's really beside the point.

Many people on the left tried to warn everyone that it was dangerous, and so did some "centrists" but the right didn't listen and became mostly united behind Trump and the alt right. Because Trump is the leader of the alt right (or at least someone very close to the alt right who is pushing some of their agenda), people on the left use ardent Trump supporters and alt right people as synonyms, which is not entirely accurate. In truth it's more that the republican party base has shifted so far to the right that even those that do not share the alt right ideology or methods are willing to accept their new alt right overlords.

Warn people it's dangerous? The Alt-Right is basically a left wing Frankenstein creation. If these slobbering morons in the media would have just kept their mouths shut there would be no Alt-Right. These dumb asses mainstreamed the entire movement. Then what did you expect to happen when the mainstream left follows-up by labeling everyone from conservative leaning independent to Neo-Nazi as Alt-Right?

 

[metatron]

It is in fact primarily white people raised in at least nominally Christian households understanding themselves as an aggrieved minority, or minority-to-be. They are nostalgic for a time when Christian whites were unselfconsciously advantaged within American society. That advantage took the form of 1) significant numerical advantage, 2) the availability of manufacturing jobs the salaries from which could sustain a middle-class lifestyle and 3) domination of the culture at large by at least the trappings of Christianity. (Their own self-definition will not directly acknowledge this fact.)

This doesn't interact well with that neat little list of mine. Virtually none of those people fit that bill. Most of them don't even support Trump, which seems to be strongly relevant to other portions of your argument.
Heck, some of the people i outright conceded to be part of the alt-right, don't fit this.
As a result you are in obvious disagreement with Lexi.
And then your take offers little to explain someone like Mike Enoch.

But he coined the term, for goodness sake!

Does SPLC provide sources? Because that's a contested matter. Check wikipedia.
Not that it makes much difference either way. Spencer made the term "big" and i suppose that's what you'd, quite justifiably, care about.

 

[Lexicus]

This doesn't interact well with that neat little list of mine. Virtually none of those people fit that bill. Most of them don't even support Trump, which seems to be strongly relevant to other portions of your argument.
Heck, some of the people i outright conceded to be part of the alt-right, don't fit this.
As a result you are in obvious disagreement with Lexi.
And then your take offers little to explain someone like Mike Enoch.

Look, I already told you on page one, if you are looking for a grand unified theory of the alt-right, you are doomed to disappointment. It's a tendency, more than a coherent group that can be sharply defined.

 

[metatron]

Look, I already told you on page one, if you are looking for a grand unified theory of the alt-right, you are doomed to disappointment. It's a tendency, more than a coherent group that can be sharply defined.

I appreciate that. Never mind that being true for many political group terms that are allready commonly accepted.
But, you know, you should have some agreement among each other. And there should be some criteria or something that has the least predictive quality.

I'm not looking for "sharply" here, rather "at all". So far i have to say i'm quite disappointed.
Like, what you and Gori have written is not just not neatly overlapping, not just not close, it's outright contradictory, and arguably rather severely so. And so far there's the two of you. God know's what happens when you're three.
That's a problem.

 

[Manfred Belheim]

I got the impression that was the point of the thread.

The point of the thread about defining the alt-right is something something feminism copyright??

 

[Lexicus]

Like, what you and Gori have written is not just not neatly overlapping, not just not close, it's outright contradictory, and arguably rather severely so. And so far there's the two of you. God know's what happens when you're three.
That's a problem.

Well, I can certainly give some specific objections to Gori's definition. As he himself as said, though, it was a stab and he needs more time to do a proper job.

A recent poll asked Republicans with whom they see themselves as more aligned: Trump or Republicans in Congress. 58% said Trump, 38% said Congress. That 58% is the alt-right. I know that's a purely external characterization, but it can give some sense of the scope: 60% of half the nation.

I don't agree that this is true. The real alt-right is much smaller, and far more radical in its views than the average Trump supporter. Trump winning the nomination and the Presidency, however, has certainly lowered the barrier, as it were, between the alt-right and the mainstream right. The overtly fascistic, racist, misogynist, and so on views in the alt-right have become far more mainstream as a result of Trump's capture of the Republican Party.

Now I'll continue with the next installment, refreshing my screen occasionally so that I'm not adding material to a post that no one is reading any more.

So, American society has over the past thirty or so years been changing--demographically, economically, religiously--in ways that are felt to be (and are) stripping whites of various degrees of advantage they had historically enjoyed. They are naturally made anxious about this, and that anxiety has given rise to the alt-right.

Thirty years ago a white guy could earn a solid middle-class income by working at a manufacturing job. Thirty years ago, the notion that homosexual sinners would be allowed to get married was unthinkable. Thirty years ago, we hadn't had two buildings in New York plane-bombed by terrorists operating in the name of Islam.

All of these developments, threatening to or disadvantageous to the fortunes of white Christians, are linked to globalism. Manufacturing jobs are going to foreign countries; terrorists are coming from foreign countries to blow us up in the name of a non-Christian religion; and immigrants are coming from Mexico and South America to take our jobs. And the secular humanism that makes possible gay marriage is an import from decadent Europe.

The alt-right is a nostalgic, nativist reaction that dreams of resisting or reversing these globalist developments.

It exists on a scale defined by how overtly the adherents are willing to acknowledge the racial dimension of the anxieties.

At the mildest end of the scale, there is no acknowledgment: America has lost manufacturing jobs, and we should do what we can (rip up NAFTA) to boost the number of jobs in that sector in America so hard-working Americans can make a good life for themselves. Who could argue with that.

A bit further down the scale, a small measure of overt anti-globalism, only vaguely directed toward any particular foreigners, enters in: our politicians have signed trade deals with other countries, such as China and Mexico, that are disadvantageous to America, and we need to reverse that.

Yes, again, this is more a description of the mainstream of the Republican Party than of the alt-right proper. The alt-right proper is more accurately understood as a "trolling," chan-aesthetic-embracing tendency within the neoreactionary movement (the other tendency is the 'academic' tendency, the archetype of which is The Bell Curve by Charles Murray and the current poster child of which is Richard Spencer.

Neoreactionaries essentially reject all the values of the Enlightenment entirely. They don't believe in basic human equality, they are scientific racists and misogynists. They reject democracy, and there are various anti-democratic tendencies within it which range from the Richard Spencer-type wannabe Nazis to the Peter Thiel "democracy and freedom are incompatible; countries should be run like joint-stock companies" authoritarians. New Atheism provided a crucial influence on the alt-right and is where it gets its simplistic-positivist epistemological orientation as well as its general argumentative style (though I would not consider New Atheist figures like Dawkins and Harris to be part of the alt-right, they represent moreso the tendencies within bourgeois liberalism - eugenics, scientific racism, and so on - that historically gave rise to the intellectual underpinnings of 20th-century fascism and National Socialism).

 

[Gori the Grey]

This doesn't interact well with that neat little list of mine. Virtually none of those people fit that bill. Most of them don't even support Trump, which seems to be strongly relevant to other portions of your argument.
Heck, some of the people i outright conceded to be part of the alt-right, don't fit this.
As a result you are in obvious disagreement with Lexi.
And then your take offers little to explain someone like Mike Enoch.

Does SPLC provide sources? Because that's a contested matter. Check wikipedia.
Not that it makes much difference either way. Spencer made the term "big" and i suppose that's what you'd, quite justifiably, care about.

Ok, so now you force me to leave my truncated sociological analysis and prematurely jump ahead to the linguistic phase of the analysis.

And at that, I have to jump to the second stage of the linguistic analysis and say that when the phrase that one adopts to describe oneself is essentially a version of "not-X," the application of that phrase will almost inevitably widen to an internally incoherent group, defined only by their opposition to X, in this case, establishment Republicanism. Whoever was responsible for coining the term* wasn't thinking that far ahead when he did so. I've already told you I'm not going to look at your list of cases; I have little doubt there are many differences among them.

I'll square my seeming differences with Lex once my unified field theory of the alt right is entirely laid out. Boy, did I step in this one.

*and I don't care about the specific individual; my only point was that the term served as the movement's self description long before it was used disparagingly by the left and the mainstream media/

 

[metatron]

*and I don't care about the specific individual; my only point was that the term served as the movement's self description long before it was used disparagingly by the left and the mainstream media/

You said that before, and i forgot to quote that.
Because that's a problem too.
Because the group of persons called "alt-right" by outsiders is bigger than the people who identify as such.
Probably by an order of magnitude or more.

 

[Manfred Belheim]

The overtly fascistic, racist, misogynist, and so on...

Not really related to anything at all, but I remember starting a thread in recent months basically about how the word "misogynistic" really annoys me, and it should* be "misogynist". This is literally the first time in years I've seen someone use "misogynist" in this sense, so hurrah! But then in the same sentence you said "fascistic" when "fascist" would have done! Gah!

* when I say should I of course mean... well go and find the thread...

 

[Lexicus]

Fascistic just seemed to flow better in the sentence. *shrugs*

Anyway, @metatron, you should read this: https://ia800403.us.archive.org/25/items/the-silicon-ideology/the-silicon-ideology.pdf

This is my tentative answer of who the alt-right is. I'll quote the most immediately relevant passage:

Thus, here is a perhaps more comprehensⅳe list of the backbone of neo-reactionary values:

1. Transhumanism and faith in the power of technology as a means towards other ends.

2. An authoritarian form of government. In more “moderate” or “reasonable” forms, this takes the form of running the country as a joint-stock corporation (this, for example, is [Mencius] Moldbug’s position), which is well within the norm of neoliberal thought. This, however, blends into calling for monarchy and aristocracy in more “extreme” variants (if we can classify them as “moderate” and “extreme”), with the ruler usually in either case being either a tech CEO (with several proposals being floated to make Eric Schmidt or Elon Musk or Peter Thiel “CEO of America”) or a super-intelligent machinic mind. The neo-reactionaries hope to be the aristocrats, or, sometimes, monarchs of their own in a patchwork of principalities somewhat reminiscent of the Holy Roman Empire.

3. The belief in a “Cathedral”, similar to the role ideology plays in Leftist theory, but one that pushes progressⅳe ends (feminism, multiculturalism, democracy, equality)– and a hostility towards this “Cathedral”

4. White (or, less frequently, East Asian, or, still less frequently, South Asian) nationalism, accompanied by scientific racism, eugenics, social Darwinism, degeneration theory, biological determinism, and a belief that ethnic uniformity increases social capital. Very frequently accompanied with anti-Semitism and the anti-Semitic canards of the early 20th century. Almost always accompanied with Islamophobia.

5. Faith in the Austrian School of Economics, or, less frequently, its more ’respectable’, less obⅵously astrological, cousin the Chicago School

6. Extreme misogyny based in evolutionary psychology, the actⅳe promotion of rape– stemming from this belief in traditional gender roles, extreme homophobia and transphobia

7. Cultural touchstones in war-based ⅵdeo games and tabletop games (such as the Imperium in Warhammer 40,000) along with “The Matrⅸ” (a moⅵe, ironically, written and directed by two ans women partially about gender theory–one, in any case, that the NRx-ers have unfortunately clinged on to in bad readings)

8. Among the less academic, an obsession with ****oldry and the use of mass harassment tactics (death threats, rape threats, DDoS, doxⅺng, swatting, misinformation campaigns &c) to silence enemies

There are two poles within neo-reaction, the “academic” pole, exemplified in LessWrong and the blogs of the main theorists of the movement (Unqualified Reservations, More 9 Right, Outside In), and the “alt-right” pole, exemplified in ***** (especially the /pol/ board), *****, My Posting Career, and The Right Stuff. The two poles meet on Reddit, Twitter, and Tumblr, among other sites. In addition, neo-reactionary ideas are quite common in Silicon Valley, though often without explicit allegiance to its theory, as can be seen in the statements of Peter Thiel and Balaji Srinⅳasan, among others.

Emphasis mine, and I also added [Mencius] near the top. Mencius Moldbug is the pseudonym of Curtis Yarvin, among the most important neo-reactionary thinkers. I've run into his writing before in my internet travels. Indeed, I was previously familiar with much of what's discussed in this piece but I didn't know the full story or how to synthesize the information into a coherent narrative or theory. As you can probably see, it has already informed my response to Gori.

 

[Manfred Belheim]

Points 1 and 6 are interesting.

1 - because it suddenly injects Transhumanism into the mix!! Where the hell did that one come from?! That's a bit out of left field isn't it?

6 - because "extreme misogyny and the active promotion of rape" is a stance I've seen literally nobody espouse, ever. So if you really consider that to be a fundamental backbone of the alt-right (or neo-reactionaries, whatever that means) then you're saying that essentially no people qualify. Either that or you're claiming that the people already identified as alt-right in this thread actively promote rape, which is a ludicrous and blatantly false claim.

 

[Yeekim]

I always assumed that "alt-right" refers to anyone outside "mainstream" right-wing and as such, is anything but one single, coherent group by definition...