Currently the subject of a major Twitter storm, Nick Pell’s article for The Irish Times’ website “The Alt-right: everything you need to know” omitted the main thing you need to know about the alt right – that its central concern is race.
Richard Spencer, a movement leader named in the article, who popularised the term Alt-right, couldn’t be clearer or more explicit about his goal, which is to create a white racial consciousness in America. Some of the more ambitious aims discussed exhaustively in Alt-right circles include the creation of a white ethno-state in America and later a pan-national white European consciousness, uniting North America, Russia and Europe in a bloc or Empire.
Spencer is in the strict dictionary definition of the term, a racist. He claims “race is something between a breed and an actual species” and believes non-white Americans should leave in a “peaceful ethnic cleansing”. He believes the Alt-right will infiltrate mainstream American culture and politics, starting with deporting undocumented immigrants under Trump. Spencer’s Alt-right takes influence from the French New Right who were often called “Gramscians of the Right” applying the theories of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, arguing that political goals would best be achieved through changing the culture and media from which formal politics would follow. And so far, it seems to be working.
The strictest definition of the Alt-right includes other overtly racial thinkers like Jared Taylor who calls himself a “race realist”, Steve Sailer who writes about “human biodiversity” – a pretty transparent euphemism – and Nick Land who explores the idea of the “Dark Enlightenment”. All of these are to varying degrees preoccupied with racial IQ, the Bell Curve, Western civilisational decline due to increased racial impurity, cultural decadence, cultural Marxism and Islamification…
While Alt-right leaders like Spencer are deadly serious and irony-free, it would be absurd to suggest that there has suddenly been a mass explosion of popular and sincerely-held white separatism in the US – a fevered liberal fantasy now mockingly associated with the expression “literally Hitler”. There are many in the Pepe-meme-sharing, Alt-right online world who probably aren’t that political but like the transgression and subcultural subversiveness.
No matter how familiar you are with the Alt-right, and I’ve watched them closely for many years, “explaining” the Alt-right’ to a general audience will always make you sound like an overwhelmed grandparent trying to figure out how to work the internet, in part because of their slippery use of irony. Stylistically the Alt-right is like the music subcultures of past decades, with its hip elitism that rolls its eyes at normies who don’t understand its conventions and argot – even though they are of course designed to be opaque to outsiders so as to resist easy interpretation.
