‘The fire rises’: identity, the alt-right and intersectionality (original) (raw)
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International Research Journal of Social sciences and Humanities, Vol.:02, Issue:02,July-Dec,2023PP:82-95, 2023
The elements of white supremacy and white nationalism are deeply embedded in the American society since the end of American civil war. White nationalism and the Alt-right movement fundamentally revolve around the identity politics and considered race as the lens to view all political issues. This paper attempts to find out the historical evolution of the white nationalism and Alt-right, their core beliefs, views and motivations, discussing the proponents and ideologue and criticism on the ideology. The findings revealed that both white nationalism and Alt-Right movement have risen and fallen over the course of history but the online social media platforms and meme culture provided a new dimension and brought them back to the mainstream political and societal discussions.
Social Policy Review 31, 2019
A series of journalistic books and articles exploring the Alt-Right provide detailed empirical data critical to understanding the underpinning social networks of the Alt-Right. However, intensive media focus on young, working-class-usually American-white supremacists sharing extremist material over the internet masks incidences of closely related racist, conspiracist, misogynist, and 'anti-elitist' ideology in wider, often middle-class mainstream media, politics, and social policy discourse. This article problematises these narratives. Drawing partly on the work of Mary Douglas and Antonio Gramsci, we contribute to ongoing national and international 'Alt-Right' debates with an interdisciplinary, political-anthropological model of 'mainstremeist' belief and action. This approach highlights the links between 'fringe' and 'centre' into an entangled social network seeking to deploy social policy as a tool of misogynist, patriarchal, racist, and classist retrenchment.
In Want of a Sovereign: Metapolitics and the Populist Formation of the Alt Right (Introduction)
In Want of a Sovereign: Metapolitics and the Populist Formation of the Alt Right, 2023
The thesis examines the politico-rhetorical dynamics around the 2016 US presidential election through the lens of the Alt-Right, not as a movement but as a signifier in broader political struggles to shape the political space of representation. It employs Ernesto Laclau’s post- foundationalist theory of populism to challenge the conventional perspectives that the Alt- Right was an extension of a radical right-wing movement or ideology. Instead, it demonstrates how the signifier rose to prominence due to its political and rhetorical utility for both its supporters and opponents, and how it eventually led to a political formation expanding beyond the far-right milieu in which the term 'Alt-Right' originally was coined. The study revolves around two questions: How was the Alt-Right symbolically formed in 2016, and how can it inform our understanding of the present conditions of populism? It analyzes the elements that eventually were articulated as Alt-Right, including a far-right milieu of writers with a long-term ”metapolitical” propaganda strategy, online subcultures known for irony, trolling, and provocative humor, and the ”Gamergate” controversy, eventually articulated as a right-wing backlash against progressivism. Quantitative data analysis of the term’s usage on Twitter/X provides an outline of the signifier's career on Twitter. The outline informs the study of the articulation process whereby different elements came to be associated with an emerging Alt-Right political identity. The study analyzes the pivotal moments in the process and emphasizes the significance of Hillary Clinton’s Alt-Right speech in August, 2016. The thesis argues that the formation of the Alt-Right as a political identity challenges the conventional view of populism as proposed by Laclau. In 2016, ‘Alt-Right’ became a counter- hegemonic empty signifier not primarily through counter-hegemonic processes but rather due to the discursive efforts of the hegemonic political axis. The conclusion discusses how this inversion aligns with post-politics, premised as a prevailing logic of articulation and political legitimization, and how this form of legitimization in and around 2016 inadvertently sustained the very far-right movements depicted as its ultimate threat. The concluding discussion offers a theoretical discussion of how and in what way it may continue to do so. In so doing, the thesis indicates present socio-historic conditions for the emergence of populism, understood in the sense explained in the dissertation: as a political situation characterized by a chasm between political alternatives generative of a counter-hegemonic identity.
Obscure Subjects: Myth and Metapolitics on the alt-Right
Critical Theory Network
In this essay, I situate the neo-fascist movements, specifically the alt-Right in an historical context that examines both the conditions that capitalism reaches wherein it begins to produce fascism. I also provide an account of the internal development and deployment of the alt-Right compared to prior fascist movements of the twentieth century. The historical period in which fascism first arose, the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, provides an important point of reference for understanding the external societal conditions as well as the internal function of fascism. In The Birth of Fascist Ideology Zeev Sternhell notes two defining characteristics of what led to the fascism of the 1920's and 1930's in France and Italy: Firstly, there was a steady cultural revolution aimed at overthrowing liberalism in response to the failure of Marxist approaches to revolution which emphasized an economic revolution to the modes of production. Secondly, and this is perhaps a distinctive feature of every fascist movement, these political movements of the early 20 th century turned against Enlightenment metaphysics of materialism and science, replacing the reason of Marxist revolutionary thought and action with an emphasis on mobilizing followers around a romanticized myth. Sternhell argues that the myth that began early 20 th century fascism was the event of the violent general strike as theorized by the reactionary socialist syndicalist Georges Sorel (1847 – 1922). This myth would eventually be modified to adhere to nationalist and biological racism with the rise of the Nazi's, but the important functionalist point is that fascism requires the deployment of a myth to organize its followers.
A journey through the Alt-Right
die Taz, 2017
The following article was published as three episodes’ series for the German newspaper die Taz on 17-18-19 February 2017 (see attachment). It was also part of a lecture delivered at “die Börse Zentrum” in Wuppertal, Germany, on November 24, 2017.
Encyclopedia of Critical Whiteness Studies in Education, 2020
This encyclopedia entry on the U.S. Alt-Right, short for alternative right, describes a constellation of right-wing forces loosely united by a critique of traditional conservatism animated by political commitments to white nationalism or ultranationalism, authoritarianism and rejection of democracy, gender traditionalism, hatred of the left and liberalism, and antisemitism. It explores this amorphous term, one that encompasses a spectrum of far-right actors that includes white nationalists, “race realists,” neo-Nazis, far-right academics, esoteric antimodernists, and the misogynist “manosphere.” It addresses the political division between alt-right – who openly embrace white nationalism, fascism, or Nazism – and the “alt-lite,” who advocate civic rather than white nationalism and welcome participation by Jews, gays, and people of color. Yet defending both wings are united by a commitment to human inequality, understood as an inherent and inescapable fact of life that manifests between races, nations, culture, sexes, and sexualities. In almost all cases, straight white men are situated at the apex of this civilizational hierarchy. The entry describes the movement's origins, political and intellectual composition, key actors, specific racial discourse, relationship to president Trump, and impact on U.S. political culture more generally.
Cultural Politics, 2018
This article examines rise of the alt-Right and Donald Trump’s successful campaign for President of the United States in the context of three overlapping contradictions: that of subversion in postmodern culture and politics, that between the democratic and commercial logics of the media, and the failure of the Left in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Referring to these three contradictions, this article looks at the rise of “Trumpism” and the new brand of White nationalist and misogynistic culture of the so-called alt-Right in its historical context to show how it is consistent but also distinguished from previous Right wing ideologies. More generally, the three contradictions presented here are proposed as explanations for understanding the mainstreaming of the alt-Right in contemporary politics and culture.
Discourses of Resilience in the US Alt-Right
Resilience, 2019
The New Right movements known as the American Alt-Right regularly appeal to resilience and resistance. In this research we examine whether and how they include resilience thinking in their discourses. We analyse Alt-Right discourses on indigeneity, frequently enunciated as the survival of race, on social norms, with a focus on gender, as well as on power and democracy to uncover the role played by resilience thinking. It is found that an illiberal 'reactionary resilience' is clearly manifest and linked to 1930s as well as newer ideas of identity, nature and politics. It plays an unlikely and important role in coagulating Alt-Right ideas of identity, survival and struggle in particular. Further, resilience as an assumption linked to nature as well as an operational concept, plays key roles in framing the publicly acceptable face of Alt-Right arguments and as a strategic and personal ethos in resisting social and political change.
What's So Alternative About 'The Alt-Right'?
2017
This dissertation responds to the public and academic debate concerning how to conceptualise the Alt-Right within the broader context of far-right movements -both historical and contemporary. Adopting a holistic and interdisciplinary approach to the study of the phenomenon, this research draws upon various political, sociological and cultural theories. A critical analysis of the Alt-Right’s substance and modus operandi through primary and secondary resources is contextualised within these various theoretical frames: establishing a conceptual framework of the Alt-Right as a ‘new social movement of oppositional subcultures’. The style and tactics of the movement are then analysed in the context of other far-right movements. These two preliminary conclusions are then synthesised, generating the thesis that the separation of the Alt-Right from other far-right groups constitutes a valid and necessary distinction.