A group of alt-right members march on Tom McCall Waterfront Park to join the Patriot Prayer Rally in Portland. (Photo by Diego Diaz/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images).
The transatlantic white nationalist movement, or alt-Right, has been the subject of frenzied attention over the past few years. Its rise has been widely linked to the election, in 2016, of Donald Trump, a political outsider who has repeatedly, if erratically, signalled sympathy for the extreme Right.
As candidate and President, Trump has gratuitously insulted minorities, retweeted extremist Twitter accounts, and displayed, at best, a morally ambivalent attitude towards violent white nationalists. All this, coupled with growing populism in Europe and signs of increasing political violence, has led some parts of the media to claim that America is entering its Fascist moment.
It has also raised questions about the extent to which the alt-Right feeds off the wider conservative movement, and whether the latter enables and normalises the former. This is the argument of the latest addition to the alt-Right canon, Alexandra Minna Stern’s Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate.
Stern’s work explores the pedigree of alt-Right ideas, showing their origins in a mixture of reactionary, green and even Hindu thought. Whereas progressives look to a future in which their beliefs and goals have triumphed, reactionary intellectuals reject the narrative of linear progress and instead favour a cyclical pattern of conflagration followed by revival. French radical Right author Guillaume Faye’s Archeofuturism, for instance, reaches back into the mists of ancestral time and forward into the high-tech future.
Hence the optimism of Faye and other alt-Right intellectuals about the role of genetic and reproductive technologies in rehabilitating whiteness. This cyclical conception of time, according to Stern, was partly inspired by Hinduism, via French-Greek Nazi intellectual and Hindu convert Savitri Devi, who in turn influenced post-war French New Right intellectuals such as Réné Guénon and Alain de Benoist.
Then there are the multifaceted green influences. Before reading this book I had no idea that bioregionalism, the idea of an arcadian land separated from modernity in which the inhabitants coexist in harmony with nature, resonated with the separatist dream of a whites-only ethnostate. The pristine zone beloved of deep ecologists is usually imagined as my neck of the woods: the Pacific Northwest, including northern California and British Columbia.
This area, especially in the 1970s, was among the most racially homogeneous in North America, and ecologist Ernest Callenbach’s bestselling 1975 novel Ecotopia describes a utopian society set here; a throwaway aspect of which was the “few dark-skinned faces” evident in Ecotopian San Francisco and the existence of separate city-states for African-Americans and Chinese. From a different angle, American eugenicist Madison Grant in 1916 compared the “Passing of the Great Race” of North European whites with the extinction of the Redwoods and other native species.
Given the fact that barely six in 10 Americans are non-Hispanic whites, a segment of the alt-Right has already written off their country, preferring a racial breakup of the union and vesting their hopes in white separatism. The various proposed ‘whitopias’ in North America tend to focus on the most homogeneous contiguous territories, such as ‘Ozarkia’ in Arkansas and Missouri, ‘Cascadia’ in the Pacific Northwest, ‘New Albion’ in Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire, or ‘Gulflandia’ along the somewhat less homogeneous Gulf Coast.
Yet Stern’s book comes unstuck, as many similar works do, when it tries to link white nationalism to mainstream conservatism, and to hype up the threat. This is a wider problem with academic and journalistic assessments of a phenomenon many see in morally absolute, binary terms. The typical formula is to cite extreme Right approval of a racist Trump tweet or statement, yet Trump is hardly an ideologue with a steady compass. He lashes out indiscriminately at opponents, and yes, makes racist generalisations about entire groups such as undocumented immigrants, Mexicans, Haitians or Muslims.
But support for Trump is not confined to white Americans, and, as the book acknowledges, no more than 6% of Americans share white supremacist beliefs. In Washington Post/Kaiser 2018 survey data cited by the book, when white Americans are asked directly about their support for the “alt-right or white nationalist movement”, the number who answer in the affirmative is just 2%, compared with the 6.4% of African-Americans and 5.4% of Hispanics who identify as white nationalists!
Sometimes these academic critiques of the alt-Right and the wider conservative movement say as much about the mindset of the contemporary cultural Left as anything. Stern, for example, insinuates that those who criticise feminists or sympathise with Trump are of a piece with white separatists; conservative pundits, such as Fox News’s Tucker Carlson or Laura Ingraham, who have expressed concern about the pace of ethnocultural change, apparently “parrot… Alt-right rhetoric”. Liberal-rationalists such as Jordan Peterson and Claire Lehmann, editor of Quillette, are thrown into the amorphous Right-wing miasma supposedly spreading alt-Right memes.
Many people see the Trump administration’s admittedly ham-fisted and poorly-planned attempt to get control of the very real crisis of Central American migration as evidence of white nationalist thinking, with migrant detention a harbinger of concentration camps and ethnic cleansing. In fact, the crisis has been largely caused by liberal court rulings that created loopholes attracting poor Central Americans to the border. Many are unaccompanied children because the migrants know that US law prohibits their deportation. Family separation was mandated by the 1997 Flores Agreement (and its 2015 reinterpretation by a California court) preventing minors from being detained for more than 20 days. It presumed the US would rather turn a blind eye to an influx of family migrants (few of whom are fleeing war, but most of whom will never be deported) than separate children from parents to allow more claimants to be heard and, therefore, deported.
Trump deserves to be criticised for not securing a bipartisan waiver of the Flores Agreement before the surge, and failing to work with Democrats in Congress ahead of time to get the money to detain families humanely. His nasty, dehumanising words must be condemned, especially as these poor migrants are only doing what any rational person would in their situation. On top of this he has botched relations with Mexico, whose cooperation he needs to stem the flow. But he is not responsible for the border problem and didn’t invent child separation.
It is very tempting to lump in the extreme members of the nationalist Right, the danger of which was most recently illustrated by the El Paso shooting, with more broader conservatives or even classical liberals, since even quite distantly related ideologies share some concerns, goals and beliefs. It is a temptation especially associated with Left-modernism, a totalising “us-them” worldview in which those who criticise the progressive agenda on race and immigration are accused of marching us down the road toward the ethnostate. Progressives probably wouldn’t appreciate a conservative arguing that higher taxes are a slippery slope toward Communism – and rightfully so, precisely because the slippery slope charge cannot be refuted. If you tar a person with the alt-Right brush, you needn’t detain yourself with facts or arguments.
There is a broader problem with ‘scholar-activism’ in the study of nationalism and populism, an interpretive pick’n’mix approach over systematic empirical generalisation. As a consequence, purported links between the alt-Right and mainstream conservatism are asserted through anecdote or painted by the broad brush of guilt-by-association, rather than being substantiated through big data analytics or survey evidence. This activism has itself played a role in today’s white backlash. By weaponising the ‘racism’ charge and using political correctness to shut down the possibility of sensible discussion and compromise over the pace of ethnocultural change, academia and the media have opened up space for both the alt-Right and wider populist movement to emerge.
Eric Kaufmann’s Whiteshift: Immigration, Populism and the Future of White Majorities is out now in paperback. (Penguin/Abrams, 2019).
Eric Kaufmann is Professor of Politics at the University of Buckingham and author of Taboo: How Making Race Sacred Led to a Cultural Revolution (Forum Press, 4 July).
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Subscribe“We’ve already accepted that coercive public-health measures may be imposed for the common good.” No “we” have not. That inaccurate assumption is more dangerous than the work of the utilitarian technocrats.
I think ‘we’ have, if by ‘we’ Mary means society as a whole. Many of us (myself included) resist the new medical coercion, but the reality is we’re a minority.
There is a direct parallel with the ‘social credit’ system in China – the CCP have very successfully been nudging the Chinese population into being ‘better’ people (or at least one definition of ‘better’). And a couple of points arise from this.
The first is that I have come across multiple accounts of Chinese people across ages and sexes, who say, unprompted, that the system has made them, individually, a better person. It absolutely gives me the heebie-jeebies – this is Clockwork Orange territory, but what am I, what are we, to make of that?
The second point is, since the CCP are already social engineering a version of this, it is clear to me that they will directly head for the biotechnological interventions once they become available. I suspect there will be plenty in the West who will resist this though.
To be fair, we have just had two years of the mantra “we follow the science” which isn’t too far a stretch from “in science we trust”. Science is the new priest class, they understand God better than the common folk, we should do as they say. What could go wrong?
Yes there will be resistance, but only outside of the ruling elites who are already on-board. Such resistance also exists in China.
“ Such resistance also exists in China.”
I’d love to read an article about that. China efficiently censors information reaching the West and I haven’t found any articles about how Chinese people resist the CCP, or even if they want to.
Those who are unhappy are allowed additional educational opportunities. We don’t hear much from those who fail reeducation.
The ruling elites won’t, of course, be taking it.
Making the rest of the pack, sheep, is a great way to become top wolf.
Perhaps the prevailing culture plays a part in how willing people may accept collectivism. Western cultures in general are much more directed toward self-actualization independent of the group. Polling anything generally results in thirds in Western cultures. Whether any drugs might be useful in changing us is fine, except the third that will never allow that.
Every society has had some form of moral education, to reward the good and punish the bad. How could it be otherwise ?
I see little reason to single out China in this, unless because it’s large and foreign. Radical social experimentation is no longer coming from the Red East, it’s coming from the Blue West
I’m not singling out China in the sense of good and bad – I’m singling out China because of scale. China simultaneously fascinates me and terrifies me as it’s power and reach grows – especially the way technology is being used by the central government to maintain hooks into all aspects of both corporate and personal life.
China shows all the signs of following a curve similar to first Japan, then S. Korea, and the other Confucian countries – different of course but sharing many characteristics, economically, culturally, and demographically (including the precipitous drop in birth rates as prosperity rises). But China is multiple times the size. That in itself is going to create effects never previously seen. But from the effects already known, there is every reason to be extremely wary, for someone like me who, for all it’s flaws, buys into the Western package, and wants to see it win out over the Chinese political model. Before deflation set in in Japan, stock market capitalisation there briefly reached levels rivalling the US around the early 1990s – and that is a nation a fraction the size of the US.
You are correct that radical social experimentation is happening at scale in the West – but at least until the pandemic, I never had the impression that this was state-driven, rather, the state, being composed of the same type of people who occupy the corporate world, followed the ad-hoc lead set by commerce and technology. In China though, I look at the ‘one child’ policy, which undoubtedly created the largest societal generations in history without a sibling, and that to me is the epitome of systemic, large scale, state-driven social experimentation. I now look at the ‘social credit’ system, and that looks to me to be social policy exactly in the same vein.
These love drugs are dangerous, as I told my doctor when he examined my torn shoulder tendons….a Viagra filled ruck sack is far to heavy for someone of my age…
What on earth was someone your age, carrying a rucksack full of Viagra for?
And there will be unforeseen consequences which, with a little bit of effort, are perfectly foreseeable. If only mankind could see the wider horizons rather than get carried away at poking at parts of the puzzle of life.
Well, being circular here, but it is clearly going to become possible, sooner or later, to *impose* on humanity, the behaviour that it stops poking at parts of the puzzle of life – by of course, poking at parts of the puzzle of life.
It then becomes a race: if people of like mind to you get there first, then they will be able to ensure locking humanity into *this* moment – humanity can statically remain what it is now (or some tweaked version of your preference) forever thereafter.
1990: “you must wear a motorcycle helmet so we won’t have to pay to put your brains back into your skull”
2030: “you must take your soma so we won’t have to pay to clean up your antisocial behavior”
As we’ve found with a great many things recently, the philosophical line between these cases is shorter than we think.
In our brave new world, we now have the soma from Huxley’s Brave New World.
Every day we stray further from God’s light.
Oh Lawks! The first thought that occurred to me was ‘Soma’, as I see it did to others here. But another cultural reference that comes to mind is the film Serenity.
In it, a drug was introduced into the atmosphere of a new-settled planet, intending to create a populace that was calm and peaceful. They became so to the extent that all will, effort and striving was absent, even the desire to have children was gone. Eventually, they all just lay down and died where they were. Peacefully.
Apart from a tiny fraction who had the opposite reactions, becoming insanely vicious, violent psychopaths. C/f hamsters.
The subtext being, all of our “…will, effort and striving…” is a product of our biological inheritance, and very specifically, our genetic programming as manifest at this moment in time.
Absent that programming, “…will, effort and striving…” will be absent too, as will attendant nebulous human concepts like happiness, desire, kindness, cruelty, empathy and so on.
This has of course implications for both us and for the machine intelligence we create.
It will (eventually, but in truth soon enough) become possible to tweak, edit, or even completely remove (or at least suppress) that genetic programming. At which point, what remains is no longer human in any real sense, but no less valid as a sentient entity than us.
Also, machine intelligence created sans a genetic history will be very alien indeed because it will not share any of our presumptions, and it’s behaviour will not be predictable – because assuming we create adaptive entities, something would fill the vacuum. We will also no doubt create entities which shares all or part of our genetic inheritance (“wet-ware” type AI), and I don’t believe there will be any possible way to distinguish us from our creations at that point.
A report from a whistleblower came out of Google saying they appear to have created a sentient robot. It was on Fox News last night.
Not buying that – we are probably around a decade away from creating a semblance of sentience simulation that can fool adult humans. And yes, I do think it will be as quick as that. But my point is, there is only one direction that can go, until we get to the point where no human can tell machine intelligence running on a computer apart from human responses. At which point you are relying solely on machine intelligence telling you what are and aren’t human responses – which is not going to be at all comfortable.
These people are diabolical.
Let everyone do/take whatever they want provided it doesn’t affect anyone else.
Only if it’s detrimental to others should it be restricted or controlled.
MDMA causes impotence.
Hundreds of thousands of years of evolution have rendered us insecure and agressive – I’m more concerned by that very real problem.
Sounds like the plot to Jacob’s Ladder.
Wasn’t MDMA used for this purpose some decades ago? Wonder how that went.
MDMA was developed as an anti depressant, I thought Acid was supposed to be the mind altering drug of choice of government brain washing?!?
Quite well, as it is being used in a limited and responsible way. Also, its informal use in nightclubs etc has often been credited with the ending of football hooliganism in the UK.