Making Sense of the Alt-Right by George Hawley

Author:George Hawley
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Columbia University Press

Some conservatives complained about [Trump’s CPAC] speech on Twitter, but there’s nothing the movement’s writers and intellectuals can do. Trump proved he doesn’t need them, while they obviously need him very badly in order to get their agenda passed. All those years conservatives spent amassing political power and creating an alternative media universe paid off, they won—except in the process their entire apparatus was taken over by an unpredictable orange reality TV show star. And the kicker is it turns out the rank and file on the right actually like him a lot better than anyone the GOP has given them.50

The changing media landscape creates other problems for conservatism. While the conservative purging mechanism still appears to be relatively strong—there are recent examples of individuals that were fired or shut out of certain publications after their deviation from the conservative party line, especially for crossing a line on racial issues51—the proliferation of new right-wing publications on the Internet means that such people can still reach an audience with relative ease. So while the Internet is a new avenue for spreading the conservative message, it is an avenue that other voices can take advantage of as well. The Internet has no gate and thus no gatekeepers. The old sources of conservative thought no longer have a monopoly on the means of right-wing communication, and it is now easier than ever for interested readers and listeners to access dissident views.

The third challenge to purging has to do with the Alt-Right’s own stance toward the conservative movement. Over the last sixty years, most of the right-wing groups and individuals purged from the conservative movement, and by extension from public discourse, wanted to be part of the organized conservative movement. The John Birch Society did not reject the basic premises of conservatism; it was purged because it was embarrassing. David Duke ran as a generic Republican who happened to be openly racist. Pat Buchanan was certainly critical of the organized conservative movement, but he did not reject conservatism as such. Many of the writers who were cast aside by the mainstream conservative publications would probably have been happy to continue to write for such venues had they been allowed to do so.

Unfortunately for the conservative movement, the Alt-Right is of a different opinion. The Alt-Right is not interested in a seat at the conservative table. Many white racist movements in the United States could be described as simply more racist versions of conservatism; the Alt-Right, on the other hand, rejects most of the basic principles of the conservative movement. Beyond the conservative movement’s self-declared devotion to color-blind politics, the Alt-Right also rejects the religious right, is skeptical of global capitalism, and has zero interest in early conservative classic texts. The Alt-Right genuinely and openly wants to see the conservative movement destroyed; thus being denied ink and pixels from Commentary is no threat of any kind.

To some extent, asking conservatives to “purge” the Alt-Right is akin to asking the United Methodist Church to purge the homophobic Westboro Baptist Church from American life.

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