The Alt Right after Charlottesville
There’s an episode in the Simpsons where Homer, inspired by Thomas Edison, becomes an inventor. His first invention is a shotgun for applying make-up, apparently with the intent of capturing the “business-woman-on-the-go” market. You work the device by loading the barrels with cosmetics, pointing the gun at your face and pulling the trigger. Marge tries some gentle criticism of the device by saying the most obvious thing, which is “I don’t think women are going to like being shot in the face, Homer”. That quote kept occurring to me throughout the week as I thought about Charlottesville and the reaction to it, with Richard Spencer in place of Homer Simpson. There’s a basic problem you haven’t addressed – people aren’t going to want to be Nazis, Richard.
For emerging movements, the quintessential modern political dilemma is whether they can they switch out of talking about their issue within a bubble of people already agree with them, to making inroads among a wider audience. The first step is realising that what you’re in is a bubble; the next is imagining the most reasonable uninformed person to whom your arguments might appeal, and tailoring your approach to them.
The Alt Right has proven bad at stage two, it makes you wonder if they’re past stage one, or are capable of getting past it. The story so far is that after Trump’s election the new American hard right appeared to have substantial political and cultural momentum behind it. Then came the Heilgate video, bringing that to a shuddering halt by showing a dedication to ideas that did not and never would have any place in an influential political movement in 21st Century America. The reaction caused them to shrink, regroup, and re-emerge – only for Charlottesville to repeat the cycle again.
Why should anyone care whether a bunch of fascists trip themselves up in public by displaying what it is they actually believe? The first answer is that it’s just interesting – few people posited the reemergence of the hard right as a key player in American politics five years ago, so it’s fascinating to see where it goes from here, if anywhere.
The second reason is the Alt Right is the most visible right wing political phenomenon on the planet, and thus its fate is bound to more traditional and less alarming strands of conservatism whether either group likes it or not. The Alt Right might be the group that contains actual Nazis but the shorthand of “Nazi” is regularly thrown at anyone trying to achieve any political goal that could be perceived as right wing, or even merely not left wing. The power of those slinging the slur is strengthened by the presence of actual Nazis they can point to. Events in Charlottesville mean it just got harder to (for instance) talk about free speech (hate speech!), argue against bombing Syria (appeasement!), or introduce reasonable limitations on immigration (emigres!) from the right. It has also increased the reluctance of people to stand up for those issues, because no-one will want to have a link drawn between themselves and the marchers at Charlottesville, even if such a connection requires a leap of the imagination. One need only look at the speed with which Confederate statues are coming down across America to understand the scale of the failure the march represents.
The final reason is that there’s a tremendous amount of energy bottled up inside the young men of Alt Right, and how that is released should be of concern to everyone. This is the second shot at stepping out into the mainstream has ended in failure, and plenty of people see that as worth celebrating. But the energy hasn’t dissipated and won’t until it achieves some kind of true political outlet. The best outcome would be for that energy to be assimilated into the existing political landscape in a less terrifying form. It can’t currently be accommodated on either the new or old left (because of minority identity politics) or the mainstream right. It’s not going to go away of it’s own accord. Locking up its most visible representatives and closing down key organisations is not going to kill the trends that created it. The worst outcome is the one we’re currently experiencing, that all that energy doesn’t find a political resolution, allowing the pressure to build until more explosions happen. Instead of the sharpest edges of the movement being blunted as it is accommodated within the mainstream, what you get instead is a continuous string of Charlottesvilles.
Might things have been different this month? Imagine you could wind the clock back and give the organisers of Unite the Right better chance to prepare for Charlottesville. What might they have done? Demand that those attending the rally display no Nazi or Nazi-ish characteristics in any sense, either in speech, action or dress. No chanting “jews will not replace us”, no “roman salutes”, no carrying homemade shields with Nordic runes painted on the front. Decide which are the people or groups that are carrying too much baggage to be useful and ask them not to attend, or disinvite them.
Maybe, feeling ambitious they could take it a further level. One of the ways movements succeed is by displaying and leveraging social value. People look at who is at your march and see not just political points that can agree with but people that in some sense people that you want to be or be part of. So maybe what you do is encourage fellow travellers to go to the gym, develop at least one hobby outside of politics, do some non-political work in your chosen community as a group.
I don’t see any of that happening, do you?
The transgression is a significant part of what attracts young people to the Right. Lots of people get into this because want to be able to talk about “the JQ”, tell people who disagree with that they’re fags, talk about sending you on a helicopter ride. They last thing on earth they’re interested in going in joining the school board, or cleaning up a local park like some kind of fucking communist. Even if you succeeded in getting people to restrain the worst aspects of their behaviour, dress like normies and only express their views in their mildest and most palatable form – groups already exist to facilitate that outside the extreme right. Why not just go and become a Proud Boy? For the Alt Right all this sounds both too much of a leap and aesthetically wrong. For a shitlord, toning it down and committing to something exposes a soft underbelly of sincerity, leaving you with the potential to be hurt emotionally, or embarassed. Personal exposure is antithetical to the troll mentality. So where does that leave us?
A person or group on the political fringe is always at their most powerful when they are saying things that seem transparently true to a wide swath of the public but which they never hear from regular politicians. They appear at their worst when they speak publicly in the riddles of their subculture about niche topics or concerns that no-one outside their world thinks, talks about or understands. When Jared Taylor says to young white people “you are not the villains of history”, that is if nothing else a clear and direct message that speaks to something tangible. When Richard Spencer gets side-tracked talking about who is and isn’t white he sounds like a phrenologist coming at you to measure your skull. The inability to tailor a message by emphasising what is sounds reasonable and discarding what is crazy and repulsive is proving to be an insurmountable difficulty. Charlottesville makes it two calamities in a row that prove it. It may not matter whether there’s a third, if they have already have negotiated their way down a political dead end and into eternal transgression, and irrelevance. In time that might turn out to be a problem for everyone.
