Pessimism and the Alt-Right: knowledge, power, race and time (original) (raw)
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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.
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.
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.
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.
Propaganda and the Nihilism of the Alt-Right
Radical Philosophy Review, 2020
The alt-right is an online subculture marked by its devotion to the execution of a racist, misogynistic, and xenophobic politics through trolling, pranking, meme-making, and mass murder. It is this devotion to far-right politics through the discordant conjunction of humor and suicidal violence this article seeks to explain by situating the movement for the first time within its constitutive online relationships. This article adds to the existing literature by viewing the online relationships of the alt-right through the genealogy of propaganda. Through situating the alt-right alongside the genealogy of propaganda, the article offers new insights into the social isolation, increasingly extreme social and political positions, nihilism, and violence that have emerged within the alt-right. The article concludes by applying the lessons of the alt-right for online organizing across the political spectrum and argues that a class-based politics of the left is an important part of countering the rise of the alt-right.
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.
‘The fire rises’: identity, the alt-right and intersectionality
Journal of Political Ideologies, 2018
This article examines the ideology of the 'alt-right, ' specifically in its relation to the importance of identity. Placing the alt-right within the context of the rising importance of identity within American society, the article discusses the alt-right as overlapping in significant ways with the identitarian elements within the American Left. Investigating the manner in which national/racial identity plays a central role in altright thinking and using the notion of 'category-based epistemology' for guidance, this article argues that the alt-right-rather than a quirk of the 2016 electoral cycle-is likely to increase in its importance as a 'rightist' form of intersectionality. Who you are elucidates who you hate. As identity becomes more central in political confrontations, the importance (and danger) of in-group/out-group dynamics increases. In various parts of the Western world-be it in the nationalist rhetoric of Donald Trump's presidential campaign and its supporters, the nationalist rhetoric of many 'Brexit' supporters within the United Kingdom, or the electoral fortunes of the Freedom Party in Austria's 2016 presidential election-the saliency of national identity (at times with an ethnic/racial undercurrent) has increased in recent years. But unlike much of the nationalist rhetoric of earlier periods (particularly between 1922 and 1945), this current form of nationalist identity is separatist rather than imperial. In the American context, the 'alt-right' best represents this identity-focused movement on the Right. This movement is less an outlier, however, when seen in the context of the broader identity focus in the West: in effect, the ideational structure of movements like the alt-right becomes much clearer once one sees it in comparison with the importance of identity for the progressive Left, exemplified by the notion of intersectionality. This article will present the alt-right as engaged with identity politics in the United States as it has developed in recent decades. In particular, this article places the alt-right as a continuation of identitarianism that saw its initial growth in progressive politics. The discussion will be in three parts. The first section examines the similarities and overlaps between the alt-right and what can be called the 'intersectional Left, ' presenting them as two subtypes of 'category-based epistemology. ' The second section explicates the role of identity within the alt-right, especially as it differs from some earlier political forms of racial/national