Moreover, other forces are ransacking the castle, too - namely, technology, globalization, and financialization. To many on the radicalized right, social progress is a zero-sum game in which minority groups and women have been winning at the expense of the previous kings of the castle. And in this far-right movement, there is instead a backlash to those same changes and those same symbols - to a black president, to a woman candidate, but also to the idea that diversity and inclusiveness and the other major social movements of the 20th century even represent progress at all, rather than its inverse. This still-young century’s most potent political movements have been about reckoning with the rapid progress of the last one in the Obama surge, there was contained the hopeful notion that the changes had been good, that they were not an end in themselves but merely the beginning of something even greater and brighter still to come. This didn’t happen out of nowhere the new reactionary spiderweb is just as much of a referendum on our world as the Obama coalition was. The amazing thing is, in November, for the first time in American electoral history, the counterculture won everything.
One formed in the spirit of opposition to everything the existing Establishment stood for: globalist, technocratic liberal elitism. But at no point during the campaign, even, could you have mistaken the unruly energy on the right for anything so organized as a party or as purposeful as a protest movement. Reactionary energy helped deliver all three branches of government to a Republican Party in the grips of an alt-right-curious anti-PC bomb-thrower the faithful called their “god-emperor” (or at least helped him along with last year’s affirmative action for white people, a.k.a. Not to mention the White House.īut to approach the big messy tent of the new retrograde right - the international brigade of nativist-nationalists, tech-savvy anti-globalists, the porn-loving gender traditionalists - as primarily a political movement is to wildly underestimate its scope. Along the way, the coalition swept up “men’s rights” advocates and anti-Semites and cruel angry teenagers and conspiracy theorists and a few fiendishly clever far-right websites and harassing hashtags and even a U.S. All share with Spencer’s white-ethno-nativism the ideals of isolationism, protectionism, and nationalism: a closed nation-state. The alt-right - or the new right, if you prefer to sound more like Tom Wolfe than Kurt Cobain, or the radical right, to properly acknowledge its break from mainstream conservatism - is a coalition comprised of movements like neo-reaction, certain strands of libertarianism, tech triumphalism, and even the extreme-populist wing of the Republican Party.
Right wing media alternative reality falls apart full#
For much of last year, the term was often used as shorthand for “racists, but … young?” Which is helpful, as far as it goes, but the full reality is much more complicated. Richard Spencer, the most press-hungry of that group, takes credit for it.
Here in America, in trying to describe our brand of the reactionary wave currently tsunami-ing the entire developed world, we’ve leaned on the term alt-right, which had been coined by white supremacists. It was yet another message-board in-joke - freighted with political meaning - suddenly in the news.īut weirdness, perhaps, is what happens when a movement grows very quickly and without any strong ideological direction - from a disciplined party, from traditional institutions like churches and chambers of Congress, from anything more organized than the insurrectionist internet. In other words, an innocent dairy beverage as old as time had been conscripted as a Donald Trump surrogate on the internet. The next month, neo-Nazis who organized on the message board 4chan crashed the show, where they started chugging from milk jugs - because northern Europeans digest milk well, or because milk is … white.
In January, the actor Shia LaBeouf mounted an art installation designed to protest the president. The details are postmodern, absurdist, and ominous - not unlike the forces that brought them about.
When did the right wing get so bizarre? Consider: For a brief and confusing moment earlier this year, milk somehow became a charged symbol of both white supremacy and support for Donald Trump. To understand this new right, it helps to see it not as a fringe movement, but a powerful counterculture.
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