OVER THE SIX MONTHS OF THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION, the confidence of the alt-right has been growing by the day. “We’re winning” was the buoyant slogan in alt-right gatherings and chat rooms, and the movement’s leaders regularly said that they believed their ideas would soon become second nature in the culture of American politics—in much the same way that the once-marginal cultural radicalism of the early sixties had moved into the mainstream. In recent months I was starting to worry they might be right.
But I believe now that Charlottesville marks the end of a significant phase of the alt-right. Their seemingly rapid growth was fueled—or at least bulked up—by an online culture of shared hatred for the cultural left. This collective reflex acquired an ironic, countercultural edge among a growing corps of transgressive shitposters and anti-PC trolls—and was duly amplified by a media infatuation with everything subcultural and extremely-online.
This was no shambolic gathering of weedy LARPers or neckbeards with silly grins and Pepe signs but a uniformed procession of politically serious white nationalists.
But how many of these racist trolls are committed to the real-life violence and potential state repression that the movement’s goals will now summon forth? The standard online shtick for politically serious members of the alt-right has been to flirt with Nazism but then to laugh at anyone who took these gestures at face value. But in the wake of James Alex Fields’ alleged terrorist assault in Charlottesville, which claimed the life of antifa protestor Heather Heyer, ironic dodges are foreclosed to the alt-right. In addition to Fields’ usage of a car as a deadly weapon—a tactic borrowed, ironically enough, from ISIS sympathizers in Europe—the show of fascist strength in Charlottesville made it abundantly clear that the most vocal and committed leaders of the movement are not basement-dwelling geeks but heavily armed militiamen. This was no shambolic gathering of weedy LARPers or neckbeards with silly grins and Pepe signs but a uniformed procession of politically serious white nationalists prepared for violence and employing deadly serious chants of “blood and soil” and “you will not replace us.”
When Trump was elected, the term “alt-right” was granted a broad, and for its adherents, a usefully vague, ambit in our media culture. At the time, Milo Yiannopoulos was the best-known celebrity of a new, youthful Trumpian trollish right-wing sensibility. Writing for Breitbart, a web publication that Steve Bannon called a “platform for the alt-right” Yiannopoulos wrote about the alt-right in relatively sympathetic terms. To Milo’s chagrin, however, the favor was never returned. Many alt-right enthusiasts rejoiced in characteristically homophobic language when his career fell apart.
Meanwhile, in the full heat of the campus wars over free speech, after Gamergate and other massive online culture-war mobilizations, it was the “alt-lite”—figures such as Milo, Mike Cernovich, and Paul Joseph Watson—who had the large online audiences. They warned about the threat of Islam and mass immigration, railed against feminism, egalitarianism, political correctness, and so on. But as the momentum built up behind them for more and more edgy transgressions, it became clear that they didn’t have much in the way of ideas or solutions. On his Dangerous Faggot tour, Milo whipped up students into a kind of hysterical frenzy with large groups of male students in MAGA hats shouting “Build the wall!” Such clearly authoritarian outbursts of xenophobia pushed the boundaries of cruelty and dehumanization directed at refugees and migrants into a clear fascist register of expression. But if western civilization really was in a state of freefall and the Muslim savage really was at the gates, as the Milo crowds insisted, surely something stronger than a bit of do-what-you-want “cultural libertarianism” would have to be summoned in order to address such threats. And so those who did profess to have solutions and transformative ideas—the alt-right proper— filled the vacuum.
The alt-right itself presents a clear danger to our democracy even if it is diminished by the events at Charlottesville—but as it now seems poised to recede in national politics, there are other dangers we might be too distracted to notice. This fraught new moment of political reckoning will assuredly bring new hazards with it—and after taking stock of the mud-slinging and rushed hyperbolic takes online in Charlottesville’s aftermath, it seems some of these hazards are likely to grow into serious long-term threats. The almost cartoonish villainy of the far right will enable the center to consolidate its power—and that could, perversely enough, produce another wave of purification and witch-hunting of the kind that a newly vibrant and increasingly popular Anglophone left was starting to finally overcome. We may see, for example, a resurgent American centrist and neocon embark on a cynical guilt-by-association bid to use alt-right rhetoric against leftist opponents of Syrian “regime change,” because the alt-right also argued against U.S. intervention in Syria. Similarly, leftists who opposed Hillary Clinton or have stressed the role of “economic anxieties” of downwardly mobile whites in the rise of the Trumpian right may start catching flak for excusing and thus enabling Nazis. Indeed, if any of the great historians of the Nazi period wrote their books today, they’d be denounced for larding their accounts with such interpretive context, as they all did, because context has now been reclassified as blame-shifting.
