I can’t get through this campaign season without talking
about the alt-right. I heard last week that many people don’t know what the
alt-right refers to or means. Anecdotal testing among family and colleagues
showed that this was the case; most people understood that it stands for
“alternative right,” but were unclear what that means ideologically.
Thanksgiving weekend being a time for travel, I had ample time to consume these
podcasts in search of some answers: Point
of Inquiry, Trumpcast,
The
Ben Shapiro Show, On The Media, and
the BBC’s World Have Your
Say.
What exactly is the alt-right and what does it represent?
Like everything else in the media landscape, the definition is slippery and
amorphous. In a speech, Hillary Clinton summarized the Wall Street Journal’s
definition: “a
loose but organized movement, mostly online, that rejects mainstream
conservatism, promotes nationalism and views immigration and multiculturalism
as threats to white identity.”
Andrew
Marantz of the New Yorker breaks this down further, pointing to four groups
of people who are lumped under the term:
1.
White nationalists are the most prominent group.
They receive the most media coverage and include figures such as Richard
Spencer (the BBC podcast featured an interview with him). The core of their
beliefs is to protect white power and white culture in America.
2.
“Pure Trolls.” Marantz uses this term to refer
to nihilistic, chaos-causing individuals online. They don’t necessarily have an
agenda except to bully and intimidate.
3.
Anti-feminists. Born out of the Gamergate
movement, these people ridicule expressions of femininity that do not fit
stereotypical notions. Marantz notes a fear of emasculation.
4.
Conspiracy theorists. These individuals promote
conspiracy theories that undermine legitimate facts and spread paranoia.
These groups are not natural bedfellows, but fervent support
of Donald Trump brought them together as an additional base behind the
President-elect. Thus, alternative right literally means the other group of
people who have coalesced behind Trump. The idea of the alt-right as separate
and different is integral to its identity. For these people, the establishment
right is corrupt, clueless and “cucked.” They espouse a different lens through
which to view politics and the world.
The alt-right’s fixation on sex and sexual power is striking
Followers say that those who do not share their views are “cuckolded” or
“cucked” for short; the hashtag #Cuckservative, refers to a traditional
conservative. According to Buzzfeed,
the use of “cuckold” stems from a genre of submissive porn and “it casts its
targets as impotent defenders of white people in America.” Point
of Inquiry notes that “cucked” connotes sexual humiliation, emasculation
and castration. This article in the New
Republic adds that the term “pushes psycho-sexual hot buttons.”
It continues:
Racism and sexism have always been connected, with one of
the prime justifications for racial hierarchy being the supposed need to
protect white women from black men and also, more implicitly, to keep black
women sexually submissive to white men. A cuckservative thus conjures up one of
the supreme nightmares of the white supremacist imagination, the fear that
white men will assume a submissive role (or position) in the sexual hierarchy.
Along with its discourse, the linguistic imagery of the
alt-right is rooted in violence against notions of race, gender, individual agency,
and sexual consent. Kevin Drum in Mother
Jones refers to this “toxic resentment of women” as powering the alt-right.
All of a sudden, Trump’s comments about Mexican “rapists” take
on another level of damaging significance. Was
that choice of words a coincidence? I wish I could say yes.
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