White nationalists clash with counter-demonstrators before the start of a speech by Richard Spencer. Credit: Scott Olson / Getty
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Last week, I wrote about the oddity of Teen Vogue’s advocacy of communism. Publishing a hagiographical interview with somebody who claimed to be “literally a communist” and tweeting repeatedly about the necessary destruction of capitalism were stances, I suggested, which seemed at odds with the potential longevity of a luxury lifestyle magazine.
Since then, various members of the Left and far-Left have urged on me a consideration of which they think I am blind. They allege that people like me are taking the new far-Left far too literally, and that when certain of them say that they are “literally” communists, there is, in fact, something else going on. They are not actually planning to institute full-scale communism in the foreseeable future. Rather, they say they are doing one of a number of things, from merely striking a stance, to aiming to wound, to merely flirting with darkness.
Well, I’ve heard this interesting line of argument before and it is worth dwelling on. For it can be heard online from figures on – or supportive of – the alt-right.
As it happens, I do think that the term alt-right has some serious definitional problems. It is unclear, for example, how many people it consists of in the real world and what differentiates those who are real and part of it – and not just the online trolls – from simple, ugly, old-school white supremacism.
From early on in the evolution of the term, one explanation of the alt-right was to say, when its online legions were joking about aspects of the Holocaust, that it was just playing around with the dark stuff. Of course, the defence went, these people didn’t actually want to institute a second Holocaust and didn’t necessarily think that the last one was a good thing. Here was simply a new generation who had grown up long after these terrible events and who were using their own edgy humour and ways to wound and were doubtless making some mistakes along the way. At least this was the claim.
I don’t know that many people are writing about the complicated area of politics that this all opens up, but perhaps we should be. Because I don’t think that all such statements can be put down to pure historical ignorance. Take the Twitter account from Goldsmiths University (the LBGTQ Twitter account) which last month received widespread condemnation for a thread on Gulags.
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