Last night on the Chris Hayes show, Rubio SuperPAC advisor Rick Wilson lost it and felt the need to attack the alt-right. Almost immediately afterwards, Jonah Goldberg and many others began attacking the alt-right on Twitter. In short, the establishment now feels threatened by the alt-right.
Interestingly, for a while, there has been a short memo about the alt-right floating about among “Conservatism Inc” warning people of the alt-right. I’ve read parts of this memo and surprisingly its description of the alt-right is not inaccurate, just too succinct. Here I’ll give a more detailed explanation of the alt-right.
The alt-right was first coined by Richard Spencer, as an intellectual alternative to the dry “Conservatism Inc” that then passed for right-wing thought. Since then, the term has really taken on a life all its own. As others have noted, the alt-right really isn’t a political movement per se but rather a zeitgeist. The big-tent alt-right includes identitarians and archeofuturists, race realists and HBD bloggers, European New Right (ENR), edgelords, neo-reaction (NRx) and reaction (Rx), trad Christians, neo-pagans, white nationalists, PUAs, etc. (Note, these groups are not mutually exclusive. For example, an alt-righter might consider himself an identitarian and race realist.)
One thing commenters have correctly noted is how young the alt-right is. While there is no objective way to determine the average age of the alt-right, I would place it in the early 20s. (Compare this with the average age of a National Review reader, which is about 65.) And this youth movement is different from, say, the “College Republicans” of the 1980s. These young alt-righters did not grow up reading National Review (a good thing). They grew up with /pol/, Reddit, Twitter and other social media, and were later introduced to sites like Radix Journal, AmRen, VDare, Occidental Observer, Heartiste, MPC, and The Right Stuff.
How large is the alt right? Really impossible to tell, but some estimates have placed it around 4 million people (mostly in the USA and Europe) and growing rapidly.
While the alt-right is a large tent that disagrees on some issues, one issue that really unites the alt-right is immigration. The alt-right is fed up with Third World immigration into the West and wishes to see most of these immigrants / migrants / refugees / invaders repatriated back to their ancestral lands.
The alt-righters usually are not free-market ideologues. They believe the health of the nation should supersede free-market globalism, which often leads to a deracinated cosmpolitanism. It’s why many on the alt-right are skeptical of free trade.
Philosophically, the alt-right might be called a rejection of universalism, itself a left-wing idea and product of the Enlightenment. Nonetheless, the alt-right does not reject all Enlightenment ideas, especially science. (And those trads who say they do are probably liars.) The alt-right might be thought of as archeofuturist which attempts to combine ancient relativistic and manly virtues with the findings of modern science, including those in human biodiversity.
Michael Brendan Dougherty recently called the alt-right “race obsessed”. A better phrase might be: race realists. Most alt-righters actually take Darwinism seriously. (If you are at a loss of what “taking Darwinism seriously” means, you might want to read this book.) Young alt-righters are comfortable with modern science which shows that human biodiversity is a facet of life. The fact that so many today in Conservatism Inc. want either to ignore or deny human biodiversity, shows how untethered from reality modern conservatism has become. It is living in a politically correct fantasy land.
Someone recently emailed a list of “popular college majors” of alt-right people. I have no idea how someone could determine this, but here’s the list: computer programming, mathematics, genetics, evolutionary psychology, evolutionary biology, economics, classical languages, Germanic studies (think Tolkien & Wagner), and philosophy.
The younger alt-right is quite technologically savvy and has made many hashtags go viral: #Cuckservative, #WhiteGenocide, #MerkelMussWeg, #NRORevolt, #ISaluteWhitePeople, #WhiteGirlsAreMagic, #BoycottStarWarsVII, etc.
The most successful alt-right meme to infect the general public by far is the cuckservative meme (roundup here), which I’m happy to say I played a part in. Other memes created by the alt-right: white genocide, ((( ))), the current year, dindus, and many more.
Some critics have asserted that the alt-right is anti-Christian. This is not true. What the alt-right is against is mainstream Christianity today where you have “Christian leaders” supporting the Third World immigration invasion of the West and telling white people that they should adopt non-whites instead of procreating and white babies. Much of modern Western Christianity has become suicidal and the alt-right is correct to mock and criticize it. But in terms of religion, the alt-right is quite diverse. Some are atheists and agnostics. Some are neo-pagans. And many subscribe to an “uncucked form of Christianity” that is not antagonistic toward Western Civilization.
Trump. Many mainstream journalists seem obsessed with the fact that many in the alt-right support Donald Trump. Yes, many (but not all) do. Nonetheless, the alt-right would still exist without Trump. And many in the alt-right are not even American and are more interested in leaders like Orbán, Le Pen or Putin.
Many journalists have labelled the alt-right anti-semitic, which is more a smear than an actual description. There is actually diversity among the alt-right on the “Jewish question” (JQ). Some like Jared Taylor do not discuss it. Others like Kevin MacDonald do. There is little dispute that Jews have disproportionally been involved in starting left-wing movements of the last 150 years: Marxism, Cultural Marxism, Freudianism, Boasian Anthropology, etc. Also, many Jews support Israel building a wall, deporting Africans and refusing Syrians while simultaneously supporting mass immigration for the West. Most in the alt-right would probably agree that a free and open society should not have a problem discussing this. Some younger Jews sympathetic to the alt-right I’ve talked to see more comfortable with these ideas being discussed, so there might be a generational divide on this.
Whatever happens, one thing is clear: The alt-right does not seem to be going anywhere. In fact, it seems to be growing very rapidly.
Updates:
Interestingly, we’re also witnessing the rise of an alt-left, which in many ways compliments the alt-right.
Occam's Razor 