You could ask some of the same questions about the alt-right, the loosely assembled far-right movement that exists largely online, and that overlaps with both the Trump campaign and with the politics of Zero Hedge. Richard Spencer, the white nationalist who came up with the term “alt-right,” described the movement in December as “an ideology around identity, European identity.” But the alt-right has often seemed more diffuse than that, more of a catch-all for the least presentable elements of the online right: white nationalists, neo-reactionaries, the male-victimhood clique of GamerGate. Late last year,
BuzzFeed proclaimed that the movement, with a boost from the Trump campaign, “has hit it big,” and ever since anxious alarms have been issuing from the conservative mainstream. The
Times columnist Ross Douthat worked to distinguish the reactionary tradition from the open racism of the alt-right.
National Review denounced the “racism and moral rot” that characterized the movement.
Commentary described the alt-right as a gathering force, and warned of a “coming conservative dark age.”
And yet, as an ideology, it can be hard to take the alt-right seriously. When Spencer named the movement, he was the managing editor of
Taki’s Magazine, whose founder and namesake, Taki Theodoracopulos, is a monarchist man-about-Gstaad and the society columnist for the London
Spectator. Its own propagandists often say they are joking. The right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, of Breitbart, himself a leading fellow-traveller, claimed that some “young rebels” are drawn to the alt-right not for deeply political reasons but “because it promises fun, transgression, and a challenge to social norms.” The alt-right exists mostly online, and so it is shrouded in pseudonyms.
