In many ways, since the
inauguration of Joe Biden to the office of President of the United States
(POTUS) on January 20th 2021, it may indeed seem as if the groups
that vocally labelled themselves as ‘Alt-Right’ (Alternative Right) may have
retreated somewhat.[1]
Despite this, the January 6th ‘Storming of the Capitol’ illustrated
the potential impact of such groups, even if on this occasion they were unable
to manifest any potential to take and hold power; gaining access to the
Capitol, filming their misdemeanours, then retreating with a cocksure pride and
a feeling that they had done something to enact change. It must be stated that
those who constituted the mob should not be simply identified as a single
unified group, be it Alt-Right, Alt-Lite, Nationalists, Identitarians, Libertarians, and so on. Indeed, the only unifying factor that can be deduced is that they were
supportive of two notions: (a) that Donald Trump had indeed won the 2020
election, with this win being ‘stolen’ from him, and (b) that forcible access
to the Capitol building was required. Aside from this, it would be a disserve
to our critical faculties to ‘lump them all in together’, so to speak.
Nonetheless, one of the noticeable features of the mob that underscore and aid
such a claim – that indeed the crowd cannot be simply lumped together – were
the flags hoisted by its members. Amidst the sea of ‘Trump 2020’ or ‘Stop the Steal’
banners were a number of insignia and standards of the Far Right, Alt-Right and
Alt-Lite.
By this point, there is
a plethora of conceptualisations for these terms. As far as the term
‘Alt-Right’ is concerned, researchers emphasise different elements of its many
qualities in conceptualisation. For instance, the noted scholar of right-wing
and extremist populist parties, Cas Mudde, contends with the ‘Southern
Poverty Law Centre’ that the ‘Alt-Right’ is: “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”.[2]
In this regard, the
Alt-Right can be defined by Mudde as occupying some of the space he categorises
as ‘far right’, as a combination of both ‘radical’ and ‘extreme’ tendencies. In
Mudde’s framework, the ‘radical right’ is defined as: “ideologies that believe
that inequalities between people are natural and positive and that accept the
essence of democracy but oppose fundamental elements of liberal democracy”.[3] This is distinguishable
from the ‘extreme right’, identified as: “Ideologies that believe that
inequalities between people are natural and positive and that reject the
essence of democracy”.[4] This is significant, as
what we see is that Mudde separates his dual categories on the basis of their
attitude to democracy broadly. The Alt-Right may be considered as ‘far
right’ because of internal variations in regards to democratic attitudes, where
some Alt-Right groups promote a notion of illiberal democracy and others
simple non-democracy in regards to their identitarianism. This being
said, other scholars, naturally, centre their focus on different criteria to
that of Mudde in order to pin down how the Alt-Right may be understood. George
Hawley, for instance, emphasises the movement’s internal dialectic with a
particular mode of white nationalism and identitarian thought as an umbrella
movement, where the alt-right label does not commit the individual to any
particular political philosophy.[5]
Equally, other
definitions emphasise the strictly active qualities of the Alt-Right
Phenomenon; the way in which it manifests and acts in the political world . The
greatest example of this, I think, rests with the work of Angela Nagle.
Although Angela Nagle’s work has been thought to cause some stir[6], it is my contention that
Nagle’s conceptualisation of the Alt-Right uniquely keeps it coupled with the
intrinsically distinct phenomenon that makes it what it politically is – the
way it acts. In her ‘Kill All Normies’, Nagle states that the Alt-Right signifier,
in its strictest definition, became an inclusive retroactive hailing of
political position in online circles, absorbing the then newest wave of online
white Identitarian nationalist movements and subcultures.[7] Here, we see Nagle return
definition to the phenomenon’s crystallisation in our contemporary political
milieu – its crypto-ontology – the fact that the movement itself (a) generated
from the digital public arena, and, saliently, (b) is reflexively
self-conscious of that ontological condition to the point at which it is
insisted as being an integral quality, part of the eidos, of the
phenomenon itself.
Although outside the
scope of what I would like to discuss here, its interesting that at the moments
when the Alt-Right have engaged with ontological shifts – attempting to manifest
on a non-digital, material, plane – such as the 2017 Charlottesville ‘Unite The
Right’ Rally, or indeed the January 6th storming of the Capitol,
such a shift becomes the chief factor towards the movement’s collapse and
debilitation in the moment; falling short of the potential to have conjured a
genuine political rupture or event [Ereignis]. The inability for the
Alt-Right to coordinate itself outside of its crypto-habitat, to synchronise
itself with a material ontology, has, so far, thus proved to function as a
modality of trip switch or fuse. Thus, to ignore such a quality in
conceptualisation of the movement is to ignore something wholly integral to its
functioning.
Nonetheless, Nagle’s
work never veers particularly far from the Alt-Right as a predominantly online
political movement, as a questionable cultural, or sub-cultural,
counter-hegemonic movement. This is a theme that continually recurs. For
instance, in a 2019 paper, Viveca Greene highlights the essential connection
between the alt-right, its digital ontological condition, and its cultural
connection to far-right satire, parody and irony, totally decoupling the
popular narrative assumption that these actions work only in favour of progressive
causes.[8] The same can be said for
the Alt-Right’s connection to cultural masculinity, being innately bonded to
the Alt-Right’s online culture. Although perhaps more closely related to the
‘Meninism’ and anti-feminism oft associated with ‘Alt-Lite’ groups such as The
Proud Boys, some contend that its digital ontology lends agency to the
movement, allowing it to have become a chief actor in a growing culture of
violent sexism and extremism.[9]
This brings us neatly
to the ‘Alt-Lite’, which is distinct from the Alt-Right and yet somehow
subsumed by it, conflated in popular narrative at very least. How are we to
distinguish ‘Alt-Lite’ from ‘Alt-Right’? Indeed, the two are distinguishable by
the prism through which they view what they agree are the key contemporary
issues. This is most coherently laid out in ‘The International Alt-Right’
by Patrik Hermansson, David Lawrence, Joe Mulhall, and Simon Murdoch. Here they
state:
“While both reject left/liberal
democratic hegemony, and the rights, freedoms and/or affiliated movements
associated with it and both concerned with the same set of issues – the left,
globalisation, gender, the West, equality, and so on – they view these issues
through fundamentally different lenses. While both are deeply critical of the
conception of equality derived from the liberal consensus, the core concern of
the alt-right is the threat it supposedly poses to the existence of white
people, and so they advocate for the protection of their ‘race’, usually
through the creation of white ethnostates. As such, race forms the basis of its
worldview…In contrast, the alt-lite perceives the liberal consensus as a threat
to traditional Western culture and so is in favour of a Western chauvinist
nationalism…The alt-lite bemoans notions such as ‘white guilt’ or ‘white
privilege’, while the alt-right frequently talks of pan-European civilisation and venerates
classical western culture.”[10]
Thus, following this,
we can see that, although similar or related, the alt-lite and alt-right are
distinct entities in contemporary politics. Hence, movements like Jared
Taylor’s American Renaissance Group and the Boogaloo Boys, although wholly
distinguishable in relation to their praxis, can both be considered Alt-Right
because of the dominant racial themes their politics engage with. Nonetheless,
although perhaps as equally aggressive in their postulate LARPing as the
Boogaloo Boys, The Proud Boys should be considered Alt-Lite, fundamentally
employing a distinctive lens to the Alt-Right, even if they do indeed display
surface similarities. Therefore, although they frequently appear together, at
rallies and events, but this distinction between them is to be ignored at one’s
own interpretive peril.
As Hawley states, “There
is no Alt-Right pope with the ability to declare what is or is not an Alt-Right
position”, and as such, conceptualising the Alt-Right will always be a
hermeneutic attempt at conceptual phenomenology, endeavouring to interpret and
re-interpret an umbrella movement in a constant condition of flux, without
gospel, unity, or common manifesto.[11] In this regard, the
Alt-Right should be considered as no more than an assemblage that, perhaps,
could be in contention for classification as a Deleuzian Body without Organs,
as “crisscrossed with axes and thresholds, with latitudes and longitudes and
geodesic lines, traversed by gradients marking the transitions and the
becomings, the destinations of the subject developing along these particular
vectors…Nothing but bands of intensity, thresholds, and gradients”.[12]
So, in regards to all
of this, how should the Alt-Right be understood? What should at least a rough
conceptualisation look like? Following this discussion, a conceptualisation of
the Alt-Right can only be thought of as comprehensive, even if to the slightest
degree, if it allows for: (1) distinction from the Alt-Lite, (2) an emphasis on
the racial and self-described counter-hegemonic lens through which the
Alt-Right views contemporary politico-cultural dialogue, (3) an account of its
internet-based or digital political ontology, and (4) an appreciation of its
conceptual complexity as an assemblage. With this criterion in mind therefore,
the broad conceptualisation offered by Hermansson (et.al.) hits closest to the
bullseye. Here, Hermansson (et.al.) claim that the ‘Alternative Right’ is:
“[A] set of groups and individuals,
operating primarily online though with offline outlets, whose core belief is
that ‘white identity’ is under attack from pro-multicultural and liberal elites
as so called ‘social justice warriors’ (SJWs) who allegedly use ‘political
correctness’ to undermine western civilisation and the rights of white males.
Put simply, the ‘Alternative Right’ is a far right, anti-globalist grouping
that offers a radical ‘alternative’ to traditional/establishment conservatism.
The eclectic and disparate nature of its constituent parts makes for large
areas of disagreement yet, together, they are united around a core set of
beliefs”.[13]
This definition,
alongside their distinguishing from the Alt-Lite, gets to the nub of what we
can consider to be the conceptual phenomenon of the Alt-Right, broadly. Equally, this permits space for enough conceptual ambiguity to allow for future groups to
fall into such a categorisation, and for those for whom the shoe currently fits
to splinter away from it, forming part of an already existing or as yet unseen
phenomena.
[1] The term ‘Alt-Right’ was coined by
the President and Director of the White Supremacist ‘National Policy
Institute’, Richard Spencer; although it can be argued that the term was
inspired by the thought of the paleoconservative scholar Paul Gottfried. See:
George Hawley (2017) Making Sense of The Alt-Right. New York: Columbia
University Press, p. 51. As for a discussion of the extent to which the
Alt-Right were in retreat, see: Jack Thompson and George Hawley (2021) ‘Does
the Alt-Right still matter? An examination of Alt-Right influence between 2016
and 2018’, Nations and Nationalism, 27(4), pp. 1165-1180.
[2] Cas Mudde (2019) The Far Right
Today. Cambridge: Polity Press, p. 191.
[3] Ibid, p. 193.
[4] Ibid, p. 192.
[5] George Hawley (2019) The
Alt-Right: What Everyone Needs to Know. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
pp. 7 – 11.
[6] For instance: Dustin Guastella
(2020, May 25th) ‘We Need a Class War, Not a Culture War’, jacobinmag.com.
Available at: https://jacobinmag.com/2020/05/we-need-a-class-war-not-a-cultural-war.
[7] Angela Nagle (2017) Kill All
Normies: Online culture wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right.
London: Zero Books, p. 11.
[8] Viveca S. Greene (2019)
‘“Deplorable” Satire: Alt-Right Memes, White Genocide Tweets, and Redpilling
Normies’, Studies in American Humor, 5(1): 31-69.
[9] Samantha Kutner (2020) Swiping
Right: The Allure of Hyper Masculinity and Cryptofascism for Men Who Join the
Proud Boys. Research Paper. The Hague: International Centre for Counter
Terrorism.
[10] Patrik Hermansson, David Lawrence,
Joe Mulhall and Simon Murdoch (2020) The International Alt-Right: Fascism
for the 21st Century?. Abingdon: Routledge, p. 2.
[11] George Hawley (2017) Making
Sense of The Alt-Right. New York: Columbia University Press, p. 140.
[12] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (2004)
Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Helen R. Lane, Mark Seem and
Robert Hurley (Trans.), London: Continuum, p. 21.
[13] Patrik Hermansson, David Lawrence, Joe Mulhall and Simon Murdoch (2020) The International Alt-Right: Fascism for the 21st Century?. Abingdon: Routledge, p. 2.
Image: Unite The Right Rally, 2017, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Charlottesville_%22Unite_the_Right%22_Rally_(35780274914).jpg