“Alt-Left” is Murky Bullshit, Means Nothing

Robert Hallock
Aug 26, 2017 · 8 min read

Humans have been arguing about their worldviews since they could scratch the shape of a buffalo into the rocks of a cave. If we skip forward a couple years, Man also created a field of study that describes how we argue those views: rhetoric. Rhetoric is what gives politicians their powers of persuasion, and knowing its techniques is a bit like seeing the code of the Matrix. These days, however, advanced rhetoric is often replaced by a soundbite-ready tactic that does not have a fancy Greek name — it’s just called name-calling.

Name-calling is a petty attempt to reduce one or more topics to a short and disparaging label; anyone who’s seen toddlers argue intuitively understands the goal, but the adult version often attacks ideas rather than people. That’s an important difference, because the latter is far more dangerous to the integrity of public discussion and the fluid function of Democracy.

Adults employ name-calling to anchor feelings of disgust to political movements. The rhetorician hopes that their audience will be persuaded against learning more about that movement. Some in the audience may even become hostile to the slandered movement, and that is a great victory for the rhetorician indeed.

More deviously, the speaker often exploits the ambiguous nature of name-calling to lump many disparate ideas into the same reductive category. Like a grim emotional Bingo, the boundaries of the category constantly shift by design, absorbing and ejecting whatever the rhetorician finds convenient in their quest to persuade listeners. You.

From zero to hero: the term “Alt-left” experienced a 100-fold jump in popularity on Google on August 13, 2017, reflecting an overnight prominence of the term in the wake of the Charlottesville, VA protests.

This is the Matrix code surging through “Alt-left,” a nasty bit of name-calling rocketing into the public consciousness virtually overnight on August 13th to attack Progressives who stood against the Neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, VA that left three dead.

The Intent of “Alt-left”

By now, many Americans are probably familiar with the “Alt-right,” a Far-Right breed of US Conservatism. The Alt-right has a clear origin story: it was named by proponent Stephen Spencer, and their platform is one that rejects typical Republican dogma in favor of White Nationalism as a central doctrine.

White Nationalists claim that the “European culture” of white heterosexual people is being threatened by minorities gaining increasingly equal rights, privileges, and protections under US law. Rather than defending the equality demanded by the US Constitution, White Nationalists propose to re-segregate the United States with new legislation that robs minority American citizens of fair and impartial treatment through the elevation of whites to a superior legal standing.

The Alt-right has attempted to gain a toehold in mainstream politics through sympathizing from the US President, but protests in Boston and elsewhere have demonstrated that the American majority is thankfully averse to the Alt-right’s point of view.

Richard Spencer, Alt-right activist and father of the name “Alt-right.” (AP Photo/David J. Phillip, File)

The widespread and visceral repugnance to the Alt-right platform is the emotional plinth on which the “Alt-left” label is designed to stand. Its users hope you will be thoughtlessly persuaded to disregard, or to oppose, the ideas and people that get dumped into the “Alt-left” bucket.

So, if such a concerted effort is being made to create this label and draw unsavory parallels with Neo-Nazis, just who does it apply to? And while we’re at it, what are the ideas of the Alt-left? Who are the members? What are the leaders? What do they stand for? Those who would pejoratively utter or print “Alt-left” hope Americans won’t notice or care.

But since you seem curious, I’ll tell you the answers: “Alt-left” is bullshit. That’s it. It’s that simple. The “Alt-left” label is used by factions within the American Right and Left to belittle wildly different people and ideas. “Alt-left” casts a net so wide, and so contradictory, that it means nothing at all. It is only a formless bogeyman that summons thoughts of Neo-Nazis marching in the street. But the American political center is understandably very uncomfortable with those Neo-Nazis, and “elections are won in the middle,” as they say. And now the real purpose is clear: “Alt-left” is a very powerful tool to persuade the one group of people who can truly swing a national election — like the Congressional ones in 2018.

Attacks From the Left

Within the Liberal wing of American politics, there is an ongoing schism between the Centrist Democrat worldview that currently leads the Democratic party, and a surging Social Democrat worldview, which has been empowered by the poor results of Democrats in recent national elections.

Without relitigating the specifics of those elections, the Social Democrat faction (“Progressive Wing”) of the Democratic party have some ground to stand on: The Centrist-lead Democratic party has lost scores of Governorships, Senate seats, and House seats all over America; America has been viciously Gerrymandered on their watch; millions of Americans have been robbed of the right to vote; the party leaders rejected living wages, and told Americans they don’t deserve affordable healthcare. In strategy, messaging, and results, the failures have been tremendous.

Despite these galling losses, power concedes nothing without demand. There remain influential Democratic pols, such as Joy Ann Reid and Joan Walsh, that are virulently opposed to many of the specific policy positions being put forth by the Progressive Wing. These pundits frequently and maliciously deploy the “Alt-left” name-calling to silence critics that are attacking Centrist Democrat candidates and their policies for being a suspect or losing hand. According to Centrist Democrats like Reid and Walsh, however, these attacks are merely racism or sexism masquerading as policy critique, making the Progressive Wing a close cousin to the Alt-right.

Joy Ann Reid using “Alt-left” as a slur to diminish Progressive Wing Liberals grilling Democrat Kamala Harris for her record and financial ties.

Others, like Vanity Fair’s James Wolcott, regularly gloss over women and people of color in the Progressive Wing to paint the entire apparatus as a white “dude-bro” organization. In Wolcott’s reckoning, the Progressive wing is not actually interested in vital topics like lessening economic inequality, better access to education, or Medicare for All. He reductively alleges that the Progressive platform is only a disguise for “disillusionment with Obama’s presidency, loathing of Hillary Clinton, [and] disgust with ‘identity politics.’”

Centrist Democrats like Wolcott, Walsh, and Reid collectively give the Leftist interpretation of “Alt-left” as a monster that threatens to ruin the Democratic party with toxic masculinity and racism, and it permits them the fantastical thinking that Hillary Clinton’s doomed presidential bid was the result of a pincer attack between foaming radical groups who secretly have a lot in common. But Mark Pitcavage of the Anti-Defamation League might’ve been closer to the truth as he spoke to The New York Times: “[Alt-left] had been made up to create a false equivalence between the far right and ‘anything vaguely left-seeming that they didn’t like.’”

Attacks From the Right

Within the Conservative wing of American politics, all Liberals are frequently portrayed as a threat to “traditional American values.” Policies like marriage equality, consumer protection regulation, Medicare for All, Constitutional Disestablishment, education finance reform, natural resource preservation, and equal protection for transgender citizens (to name a few) are all positioned as Liberal plots to destroy this One Nation Under God.

This view is relentlessly parroted throughout an extensive network of hyper-partisan blogs, TV news networks, and propaganda bots foreign and domestic. This effort has reached such an acuity that even the word “Liberal” is used as invective, uttered as though its targets should somehow be ashamed of their desire for a more open and accepting world.

This expansively angry worldview gives the “Alt-left” name-calling a new scope when wielded by a Conservative American. It’s not just Social Democrats ruining the Democratic party from within, it’s anyone left of Center that’s ruining America itself.

According to the Conservative blogosphere, the “Alt-left” has quite a diverse and influential membership:

  • Black Lives Matter: Often portrayed as a violent, racist band of “black supremacists” that commit acts of domestic terrorism against innocent everyday white people.
  • AntiFa: Often portrayed as “militant Liberals” that mobilize to punch hard-working cops, suppress noble Conservative free speech, and damage precious public property.
  • George Soros: Often portrayed as a scheming, rich mastermind that bankrolls Liberal terrorism and the “Jewish conspiracy.”
  • Social Justice Warriors (SJWs): Often portrayed as fanatical and scolding etiquette police that try to silence traditional and immutable thinking about sex, genders, and attraction.
  • Radical Islamic Terrorists: Deeply conservative religious fundamentalists that are, somehow, “Left wing” in the mythos of some influential Conservative pundits.
  • Counter-Protesters: Paid agitators that are just there to silence free speech and ruin innocent monuments to figures that never wanted to do bad things like own people as property.
  • The Deep State: The disgruntled “shadow government” that’s plotting to overthrow Trump, who has never done anything Unconstitutional or illegal.
  • Barack Obama: Because “history.”
  • Also: religiously conservative Sharia Law proponents, the United Nations, the media, anti-Israel critics, teachers, Globalists, the deeply conservative KKK and many more.

Phew.

Looking beyond the sprawling, convoluted, and often contradictory definition of “Alt-left” offered by the American Right, the air remains heavy with the stench of “Alt-left is anything Liberal I don’t like.” Reaching across the aisle, everybody!

But the pièce de résistance of “Alt-left’s” rhetorical emptiness comes to us from the Right, as some Conservative adherents even say that Hillary Clinton herself is a leader of the Alt-left movement. Indeed, the very same “Alt-left” name-calling is being used to both defend and attack Centrist Democrats like Hillary Clinton from the opposite ends of the American political spectrum.

One of the many widely-available Right Wing memes that bizarrely cast Centrist Democrat Hillary Clinton as a member of the “Alt-left,” with an exhaustive supporting cast.

With such deeply irreconcilable discrepancies sprinkled throughout the “Alt-left” tale, we should hold suspect the motivations of rhetoricians who would wield it as a slur — or utter it at all. At best, such people purport to know more than they do, but it’s more probable that their agenda is a calculatedly slanderous one designed to ultimately influence an election. Regardless of where a name-calling spin doctor sits on that spectrum, the unnuanced shrewdness wounds only America in the end.

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Robert Hallock

Written by

Midwestern roots, Canadian branches, Texan leaves.

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