Alt-right

The alt-right (abbreviated from alternative right), is a far-right, white nationalist movement. A largely online phenomenon, the alt-right originated in the United States during the late 2000s before increasing in popularity and establishing a presence in other countries during the mid-2010s. The term is ill-defined and has been used in different ways by academics, journalists, media commentators, and alt-right members themselves.

In 2010, the American white nationalist Richard B. Spencer launched The Alternative Right webzine. His "alternative right" was influenced by earlier forms of American white nationalism, as well as paleoconservatism, the Dark Enlightenment, and the Nouvelle Droite. His term was shortened to "alt-right" and popularized by far-right participants of /pol/, the politics board of the web forum 4chan. It came to be associated with other white nationalist websites and groups, including Andrew Anglin's Daily Stormer, Brad Griffin's Occidental Dissent, and Matthew Heimbach's Traditionalist Worker Party. Following the 2014 Gamergate controversy, the alt-right made increasing use of trolling and online harassment to raise its profile. It attracted broader attention in 2015, particularly through coverage on Steve Bannon's Breitbart News, due to alt-right support for Donald Trump's presidential campaign. Upon being elected, Trump disavowed the movement. Attempting to transform itself from an online-based movement to a physical one, Spencer and other alt-right figures organized the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, which led to violent clashes with counter-demonstrators and resulted in one death when an alt-right member drove his car through the crowd of counter-demonstrators. The fallout from the rally resulted in a decline of the alt-right. The activities of alt-right movement have been described as largely merging into the far right as of 2020-2021.

The alt-right movement espouses the pseudoscientific idea of biological racism and promotes a form of identity politics in favor of European Americans and white people internationally. Anti-egalitarian in nature, it rejects the liberal democratic basis of U.S. governance, and opposes both the conservative and liberal wings of the country's political mainstream. Many of its members seek to replace the U.S. with a white separatist ethnostate. Some alt-rightists seek to make white nationalism socially respectable, while others (known as the "1488" scene) adopt openly white supremacist and neo-Nazi stances to shock and provoke. Some alt-rightists are antisemitic, promoting a conspiracy theory that there is a Jewish plot to bring about white genocide, although other alt-rightists view most Jews as members of the white race. The alt-right is anti-feminist and intersects with the online manosphere. Most adherents to the alt-right are also Islamophobic. The movement distinguished itself from earlier forms of white nationalism through its largely online presence and its heavy use of irony and humor, particularly through the promotion of memes like Pepe the Frog. Individuals who are aligned with many of the alt-right's ideas without espousing its white nationalism have been termed "alt-lite".

The alt-right's membership is overwhelmingly white and male, attracted to the movement by deteriorating living standards and prospects, anxieties about the social role of white masculinity, and anger at left-wing and non-white forms of identity politics such as feminism and Black Lives Matter. Alt-right material has contributed to the radicalization of men responsible for various murders and terrorist attacks in the U.S. since 2014. Critics charge that the term "alt-right" is merely a rebranding of white supremacism.

Definitions and terminology

The term "alt-right" is an abbreviation of "alternative right". A distinct far-right movement arising in the 2010s, it drew on older far-right ideas while also displaying novelties. Efforts to define the alt-right have been complicated by the contradictory ways in which self-described "alt-rightists" have defined the movement, and by the tendency among some of its political opponents to apply the term "alt-right" liberally to a broad range of right-wing groups and viewpoints.

As the alt-right rose to wider awareness around 2016, media sources struggled to understand it; some commentators applied the term as a catch-all for anyone they deemed far-right. The scholars Patrik Hermansson, David Lawrence, Joe Mulhall, and Simon Murdoch noted that in the "press and broadcast media", the term had been "used to describe everything from hardcore Nazis and Holocaust deniers, through to mainstream Republicans in the US, and right-wing populists in Europe". As the term "alt-right" was devised by a group of white nationalists themselves, as a form of self-description, some journalists avoided it. George Hawley, a political scientist specializing in the U.S. far-right, disagreed with this approach, noting that using terms like "white supremacist" in place of "alt-right" conceals the way that the alt-right differed from other far-right movements.

Definitions

Hermansson et al defined the alt-right as "a far right, anti-globalist grouping" that operated "primarily online though with offline outlets". They noted that its "core belief is that 'white identity' is under attack from pro-multicultural and liberal elites, and so-called 'social justice warriors' (SJWs), who allegedly use 'political correctness' to undermine Western civilisation and the rights of white males". The anti-fascist researcher Matthew N. Lyons defined the alt-right as "a loosely organized far-right movement that shares a contempt for both liberal multiculturalism and mainstream conservatism; a belief that some people are inherently superior to others; a strong Internet presence and embrace of specific elements of online culture; and a self-presentation as being new, hip, and irreverent".

The Encyclopædia Britannica defined the alt-right as "a loose association of relatively young white nationalists, extreme libertarians, and neo-Nazis" who were "mostly active online". The Southern Poverty Law Center defined the alt-right as "a set of far-right ideologies, groups and individuals whose core belief is that 'white identity' is under attack by multicultural forces using 'political correctness' and 'social justice' to undermine white people and 'their' civilization". The Anti-Defamation League states that "alt-right" is a "vague term actually encompass[ing] a range of people on the extreme right who reject mainstream conservatism in favor of forms of conservatism that embrace implicit or explicit racism or white supremacy".

In the Columbia Journalism Review, the journalist Chava Gourarie labelled it a "rag-tag coalition" operating as a "diffuse online subculture" that had "an inclination for vicious online trolling, with some roots in fringe-right ideologies". In The New York Times, journalists Aishvarya Kavi and Alan Feuer defined the alt-right as "a loosely affiliated collection of racists, misogynists and Islamophobes that rose to prominence around the time of Mr. Trump's first campaign." BBC journalist Mike Wendling termed it "an incredibly loose set of ideologies held together by what they oppose: feminism, Islam, the Black Lives Matter movement, political correctness, a fuzzy idea they call 'globalism,' and establishment politics of both the left and the right".

History

Influences

The alt-right had various ideological forebears. The idea of white supremacy had been dominant across U.S. political discourse throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. After World War II, it was increasingly repudiated and relegated to the far-right of the country's political spectrum. Far-right groups retaining such ideas—such as George Lincoln Rockwell's American Nazi Party and William Luther Pierce's National Alliance—remained marginal. By the 1990s, white supremacism was largely confined to neo-Nazi and Ku Klux Klan (KKK) groups, although its ideologues wanted to return it to the mainstream. That decade, several white supremacists reformulated their ideas as white nationalism, through which they presented themselves not as seeking to dominate non-white racial groups but rather as lobbying for the interests of European Americans in a similar way to how civil rights groups lobbied for the rights of African Americans and Hispanic Americans. Although white nationalists often distanced themselves from white supremacism, white supremacist sentiment remained prevalent in white nationalist writings.

American white nationalists believed that the United States had been created as a nation explicitly for white people of European descent and that it should remain that way. Many called for the formation of an explicitly white ethnostate. Seeking to distance themselves from the violent, skinhead image of neo-Nazi and KKK groups, several white nationalist ideologues—namely Jared Taylor, Peter Brimelow, and Kevin B. MacDonald—sought to cultivate an image of respectability and intellectualism through which to promote their views. Hawley later termed their ideology "highbrow white nationalism", and noted its particular influence on the alt-right. Taylor, for instance, became a revered figure in alt-right circles.