I still don’t really understand the alt-right. But in order to fight it, we need to.

Urbanjodi
Urbanjodi
Aug 22, 2017 · 5 min read

The rise of nationalism is not just an American issue, it is a global one and we would be foolish to not be looking at how this system is growing. I feel like there is still so much more, and something very key, missing from my understanding. Interested in others thoughts.

What is becoming increasingly confirmed to me is that outrage online or on the streets must be very carefully entered into if at all. We need other sites of intervention that really deal with the issue on individual levels as much as institutional levels, and not merely perform our politics in ways that risk adding fuel to the nationalist/alt-right argument that their liberty and culture is under threat.

“The alt-right has been able to successfully brand itself as an edgy and fun and ironic movement that takes pleasure in needling both liberals and conservatives, and it’s tongue-in-cheek and rebellious as opposed to just being motivated by [the] genocidal hatred that you would see from people like William Pierce.” — Hawley

This article is mostly about male American Nazis. Let me concede upfront the problem is not only about them. Just look up Wife with a Purpose on YouTube for one of many examples. Observe how she appeals to logic over emotion, and culture over race as her key tactics. She doesn’t deny oppression or histories of colonialism, slavery etc, but uses her ability to concede those wrongs to further entice a rational man to support her calls.

According to political scientist George Hawley, the profile of the average alt-right subscriber is a white male millennial, atheist and secular, anti-feminist.

This is my generation and people younger than me. I spent a large part of Sunday, on the news of what had happened in Charlotsville, reading opinions as they were formed and shared, and reading about morality and righteousness (Haidt) and prejudice (Allport). I’m not an expert, but some ideas stood out and resonated.

Reading “what I saw from the inside” type stories about the KKK there are common themes of finding a sense of belonging, purpose and power (feeling like you induce fear). These themes seem more important than dogmatic subscription to notions of white superiority. Cult like, I guess, in what value is offered through group memberships — the dogma, though totally scary and born of historic and contemporary systems of raced-based power, oppression and the manipulation of scientific, political and every other institution to support such, is almost secondary to actual membership.

The alt-right is not the KKK though. It’s a more generalized alternative to conservativism. It has been described as rebranding of conservative family (read: anti-feminist) values for the secular male who rejected the religious aspects of traditional republican values. Membership is (largely) online with meme-lol-trolls — and so I question the extent to which the power of belonging is a more primary drive (over real belief in the dogma).

Moves to take memes to the street, to protect symbols, is a step towards tighter membership (“we are not atomised individuals” says the one fascist in this Vice video), as well as shifting/normalising the Nazi dogma.

The Overton Window: expanding the spectrum in one direction or another shifts radical positions closer to acceptable.

But how do we arrive at protest action for such immoral causes?

Allport talks about the connection between frustration and prejudice. In an individualistic society, frustration is either due to an internal (“intropruntive”) cause, or an external one. Gone are the days of telling stories of “tragedy” where bad things happen to otherwise good people, just because — with no one to blame. We live in a society of protagonist and antagonist.

Could these men be both frustrated, and “extropunitive” (there a) has to be someone to blame and b) this aggression and blame faces outward, not inward)? Their frustration not due to some personal accountability or haphazard chance, no — they are a victim. Political change, narrative changes, about the role and place of the black life, is seen as a direct affront, change as necessarily being about loss, and the white man is the ultimate loser in this narrow view. Raised in a time where their masculinity would have been a key measure of how parents viewed them, these men may have been called things like “sissies” or “gay” in childhood experiences of victimization and so their fragility as privileged people triggers a hyper-masculine response.

According to Allport, the sources of frustration that lead to prejudice tend to be derived from self-esteem issues and could be sexual, economic, status related or related to guilt. (I’m going with sexual cos: tiki torches, shields and khaki. It’s like the biggest Reddit/4chan nerds came out from behind their screens armed with whatever they wore to the last war-themed LARP they went to? Jokes aside, I wouldn’t be the first to write about the overlaps between the “alt-right” and “pickup artist culture” in America…)

A lack of self-insight and emotional maturity requires that this generalized anxiety be targeted outward.

#WhitePrivilege

Generating a symbolic competitor (“‘Jews’ will not ‘replace’ us”) and organizing to exclude them, generates a feeling of security and superiority that masks anxiety with privilege — unlocking a sense of differential status in otherwise totally average, mediocre or even thwarted lives.

Because these men can’t cope with their own insecurities, they decide that the acts of immigrants, black people and Jews are morally wrong, and that they are righteous in comparison. In order to support this ego-boosting moral superiority, they post-hoc construct ideas of how these groups have “harmed” them and are innately inferior. Thus they remain “rational” in their hatred and victimhood, while establishing that sense of differential status and belonging.

Organizers of the “alt-right” movement are not creating so many 20–35yr old white men with such deep levels of repressed internal conflict nor are they creating the historic systems of white privilege, they’re just tapping into the nexus of both:

Both, then, need to be understood to be overcome.

Further reading: I studied the alt right so you don’t have to; So you want to fight white supremacy

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Urbanjodi

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Urbanjodi

Archive of thoughts. Imperfect, incomplete and not assumed to be my final position. My actions speak louder than my words. Learn more: https://jodi.city

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