Andre Reszitnyk writes for Truth-Out:
Trump is the organic expression of a sinister faction of right-wing thinkers that have up until now been restricted to the dark corners of the internet: the neo-Nazis, white supremacists, extreme religious traditionalists, anti-Semites, anarcho-capitalists and hardcore libertarians that together make up what white nationalist Richard Spencer describes as the “alt-right.” This host of regressive political communities also includes the so-called Men’s Rights Movement, the group responsible for instigating the Gamergate cyber attacks upon women in the video game industry. Jared Taylor, the head of the white nationalist New Century Foundation and one of the chief “intellectuals” of the self-described alt-right, has said that the president-elect, “instinctively, clumsily stumbled upon some of the policies that we’ve been promoting for a long time.” These are the people for whom Trump was not a protest candidate but instead a champion, the first high-profile figure to openly espouse their extreme cause. This movement embodies a violent identity politics for straight white men that rejects the very principle that all people on Earth deserve equal protection and dignity.
The white supremacists and other right-wing activists who describe themselves as the alt-right are united less by coherent shared policy positions and more by a number of strong feelings — mostly angry, hateful feelings directed toward the media, government institutions, universities and the so-called culture of political correctness. Members of this group describe the efforts of left-leaning academics, politicians, media outlets and celebrities to call out racism, sexism and homophobia when they see it as tyrannical developments that have stripped white men of their “rightful” power. Claiming that feminist, anti-racist and anti-homophobic political movements represent a turn away from universalism, and that efforts to criticize offensive speech amount to censorship, this group rejects both mainstream Democrat and Republican parties. Some members of the alt-right have hijacked the language of feminism in order to describe their movement as an intersectionalism of the right, which blends a wide spectrum of prejudices. The self-described alt-right gives a home to all who reject the idea that the government should provide for its citizens and that all people are equal. Trump’s vocal supporters — KKK leader David Duke, anti-Semitic media chairman Steve Bannon, anti-feminist and Islamophobic journalist Milo Yiannopoulos, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, white supremacist website The Daily Stormer, and an army of anonymous internet trolls posting racist Trump memes on 4chan and 8chan — comprise a veritable “who’s who” of the alt-right.
In order to identify the hub around which the varied spokes of this movement turn, it is necessary to examine one of the more intellectually “rigorous” factions of the movement: neoreaction. The principle voices of neoreaction are Curtis Yarvin, who goes by the pen name Mencius Moldbug, along with former University of Warwick professor and Deleuzian philosopher Nick Land. The central theme of neoreactionary doctrine, which is predominantly expressed via long, torturously written blog posts, is hardline opposition to what they call “the Cathedral,” the imagined alliance of institutional politics, academia, mass media and culture. The three major subsections of Breitbart News — the alt-right’s chief internet gateway — “Big Hollywood,” “Big Government” and “Big Journalism,” clearly echo these neoreactionary pillars.
What neoreactionaries find so abhorrent about “the Cathedral” is its promotion of things that we generally take for granted as the preconditions for political activism: namely, a belief in natural equality, human rights, social justice, egalitarianism and democracy. Land urges his followers to “stagger back in imagination before 2008 … remain in reverse until the Great Society/Civil Rights era … that is before backing out of the calamitous 20th century.” He calls for the creation of a “Dark Enlightenment,” which embraces the technologies and scientific achievements of the past 200 years, but rejects the progressive, universalist mode of politics that emerged after the French Revolution.
The neoreactionary movement is not just trying to slow down or partially reverse the advances made over the past decades by women, people of color and the LGBT community. Rather, it seeks to install a society in which equality as such is regarded as evil. While the left battled those who were unwilling to include everyone in the universal human community, a cabal of misanthropes was rejecting the very notion of a global humanity. Many of us underestimated the strength of the fringe, which sought to divide the world back into tribes.
