@Trajan @Sagat
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/02/opinion/sunday/what-the-alt-right-really-means.html?_r=0
What the Alt-Right Really Means
By CHRISTOPHER CALDWELLDEC. 2, 2016
An attendee at a Trump campaign event in New Hampshire in September. Damon Winter/The New York Times
Not even those most depressed about Donald J. Trump’s election and what it might portend could have envisioned the scene that took place just before Thanksgiving in a meeting room a few blocks from the White House. The white nationalist Richard B. Spencer was rallying about 200 kindred spirits.
“We are not meant to live in shame and weakness and disgrace,” he said. “We were not meant to beg for moral validation from some of the most despicable creatures to ever populate the planet.” When Mr. Spencer shouted, “Hail, Trump! Hail, our people! Hail, victory!” a scattered half-dozen men stood and raised their arms in Nazi salutes.
Mr. Spencer, however you describe him, calls himself a part of the “alt-right” — a new term for an informal and ill-defined collection of internet-based radicals. As such, he poses a complication for the incoming president. Stephen K. Bannon, the executive chairman of Breitbart News, whom Mr. Trump has picked as his chief White House strategist,
told an interviewer in July that he considered Breitbart a “platform for the alt-right.”
Perhaps we should not make too much of this. Mr. Bannon may have meant something quite different by the term. Last summer “alt-right,” though it carried overtones of extremism, was not an outright synonym for ideologies like Mr. Spencer’s. But in late August, Hillary Clinton devoted a speech to the alt-right, calling it simply a new label for an old kind of white supremacy that Mr. Trump was shamelessly exploiting.
Groups such as Mr. Spencer’s, which had indeed rallied behind Mr. Trump, were delighted with the attention. Mr. Spencer called the days after the Clinton speech “maybe the greatest week we ever had.” While he does not consider either Mr. Trump or Mr. Bannon alt-right, Mr. Spencer has expressed hope that the press’s describing them as such will help his own group grow.
The alt-right is not a large movement, but the prominence that it is enjoying in the early days of the Trump era may tell us something about the way the country is changing. At least since the end of the Cold War, and certainly since the election of a black president in 2008, America’s shifting identity — political, cultural and racial — has given rise to many questions about who we are as a nation. But one kind of answer was off the table: the suggestion that America’s multicultural present might, in any way, be a comedown from its past had become a taboo. This year a candidate broke it. He promised to “make America great again.” And he won the presidency.
Mr. Trump’s success is bound to embolden other dissenters. This could mean a political climate in which reservations about such multiculturalist policies as affirmative action are voiced more strenuously. It could mean a rise in racial conflict and a platform for alarming movements like Mr. Spencer’s. More likely, it is going to bring a hard-to-interpret mix of those things.
Mr. Spencer, 38, directs the National Policy Institute, which sponsored the Washington meeting. Despite its name, the institute has little to say about policy, although it has called for a 50-year moratorium on immigration. What it mostly does is seek to unite people around the proposition that, as Mr. Spencer put it, “Race is real, race matters, and race is the foundation of identity.”
There are many such groups, varying along a spectrum of couth and intellect. Mr. Spencer, who dropped out of a doctoral program at Duke and worked, briefly, as an editor for The American Conservative, has his own online review, Radix Journal. The eloquent Yale-educated author Jared Taylor, who hosts the American Renaissance website and magazine, was at the conference, too. Kevin MacDonald, a retired psychology professor whose trilogy on Jewish influence is a touchstone for the movement, also came. There were cheers from the crowd at the mention of Andrew Anglin, who runs a neo-Nazi website called The Daily Stormer, but he was not there. Neither was Greg Johnson, whose online review Counter-Currents translates right-wing writings from various European languages. Some of these groups sprouted on the internet. Others have been around since before it existed.
There is no obvious catchall word for them. The word “racist” has been stretched to cover an attitude toward biology, a disposition to hate, and a varying set of policy preferences, from stop-and-frisk policing to repatriating illegal immigrants. While everyone in this set of groups is racist in at least one of these senses, many are not racist in others. Not many of the attendees at the Washington gathering favored the term “white supremacist.” The word implies a claim to superiority — something few insisted on. “White nationalist” is closer to the mark; most people in this part of the alt-right think whites either ought to have a nation or constitute one already. But they feel that almost all words tend to misdescribe or stigmatize them.
Almost all of them are gung-ho for Mr. Trump. That is a surprise. “I’ve been watching these people for 17 years,” said Heidi Beirich, who follows extremist movements for the Southern Poverty Law Center. “It’s the first time I’ve seen them come out for a candidate.”
Mr. Trump disavowed the alt-righters once the excesses of Mr. Spencer’s conference went viral. But as a candidate, Mr. Trump called the government corrupt, assailed the Republican establishment, flouted almost every rule of political etiquette, racial and otherwise, and did so in a way that made the alt-righters trust his instincts. And whether or not he exploited them as shamelessly as Mrs. Clinton alleged, he did little to put the public at ease on the matter — retweeting posts from someone called @WhiteGenocideTM and dawdling before disavowing the endorsement of the former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke.
“I don’t think that Trump is a rabid white nationalist,” the alt-right blogger Millennial Woes said at a speech in Seattle days after the election. “I think that he just wants to restore America to what he knew as a young man, as a child. And I think he probably does know at some level that the way to do it is to get more white people here and fewer brown people.”
Mr. Spencer speaks of Mr. Trump’s campaign as a “body without a head” and considers many of his policies “half-baked.” But for him, that is not the point. “Donald Trump is the first step towards identity politics for European-Americans in the United States,” he said.
There is no good evidence that Mr. Trump or Mr. Bannon think in terms like these. Not even the former Breitbart editor at large Ben Shapiro, who has become an energetic critic of Mr. Bannon and his agenda, says that Mr. Bannon is himself a racist or an anti-Semite. Mr. Shapiro considers fears that Mr. Bannon will bring white nationalism to the White House “overstated, at the very least.”
To be sure, Mr. Bannon holds right-wing views. He believes that a “global Tea Party movement” is underway, one that would fight crony capitalism and defend Western culture against radical Islam. In a 2014 speech he showed an interest in linking up American activists with certain European populist movements, including opponents of both the European Union and same-sex marriage. But while he recognized that some groups, such as France’s National Front, had “baggage, both ethnically and racially,” he expressed confidence that their intolerance “will all be worked through with time.”
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