What is the Alternative Right? Part One
by Greg Johnson
https://www.counter-currents.com/201...-1/#more-86560
http://whitenationalist.org/forum/sh...8769#post18769
http://whitenationalist.org/forum/sh...8769#post18769
3,536 words
Part 1 of 4
Author’s Note: This is the opening essay of a forthcoming anthology called The Alternative Right.
The Alternative Right does not have an essence, but it does have a story, a story that begins and ends with Richard Spencer. The story has four chapters.
First the term “Alternative Right” was coined in 2008. Then the Alternative Right webzine was launched on March 1, 2010 and ran until December 25, 2013. When it was first coined, the Alternative Right simply referred to an alternative to the American conservative mainstream. When it became the name of a publication, it functioned as a broad umbrella term encompassing such schools of thought as paleoconservatism, libertarianism, race-realism, the European New Right, Southern Nationalism, and White Nationalism. By the time the Alternative Right webzine was shut down, however, the term Alt Right had taken on a life of its own. It was not just the name of a webzine, but a generic term for Right-wing alternatives to the conservative mainstream.
The second chapter is the emergence in 2015 of a vital, youth-oriented, largely online Right-wing movement. This movement encompassed a wide range of opinions from White Nationalism and outright neo-Nazism to populism and American civic nationalism. Thus this movement quite naturally gravitated to the broad generic term Alt Right. The new Alt Right threw itself behind Donald Trump’s run for the presidency soon after he entered the race in 2015 and became increasingly well-known as Trump’s most ferocious defenders in online battles, to the point that Hillary Clinton actually gave a speech attacking the Alt Right on August 25, 2016.
The third chapter is the Alt Right “brand war” of the fall of 2016. The Alt Right “brand” had become so popular that it was being widely adopted by Trumpian civic nationalists, who rejected the racism of White Nationalists. White Nationalists began to worry that their brand was being coopted and started to push back against the civic nationalists. The brand war ended on November 21, 2016 at a National Policy Institute conference with the incident known as Hailgate, in which Richard Spencer uttered the words “Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!” and raised his whiskey glass in a toast, to which some people in the audience responded with Hitler salutes. When video of this went public, civic nationalists quickly abandoned the Alt Right brand, and the “Alt Lite” was born.
The fourth chapter is the story of the centralization and decline of the Alt Right, largely under the control of Richard Spencer. This period was characterized by polarization and purges, as well as the attempt to transform the Alt Right from an online to a real-world movement, which culminated at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia on August 11–12, 2017. Both trends led the Alt Right to shrink considerably. Some abandoned the brand. Others abandoned the entire movement. The remnant has retreated back to its strongholds on the internet. As of this writing, there is no fifth chapter, and the Alt Right’s future, if any, remains to be seen. Like cancer, there may be no stage five.
1. The Invention of a Brand
The Alternative Right brand first emerged in the fuzzy space where the paleoconservative movement overlaps with White Nationalism. The term “paleoconservatism” was coined by Paul Gottfried, an American Jewish political theorist and commentator. Paleoconservatism defined itself as a genuinely conservative opposition to the heresy of neoconservatism.
The paleoconservative movement was a safe space for the discussion and advocacy of everything that neoconservatism sought to abolish from the conservative movement: Christianity, tradition, America’s white identity, an America-first foreign policy, immigration restriction, opposition to globalization and free trade, the defense of traditional/biological sexual roles and institutions, and even—although mostly behind closed doors—biological race differences and the Jewish question.
Aside from Gottfried, the leading paleocons included Samuel Francis, who openly associated with White Nationalists; Joseph Sobran, who was purged from National Review for anti-Semitism and who also openly associated with White Nationalists; and Patrick Buchanan, who stayed closer to the political mainstream but was eventually purged from MSNBC for “racism” because his book Suicide of a Superpower defended the idea of the United States as a normatively white society.
William H. Regnery II (b. 1941) is a crucial figure in the rise of the Alt Right because of his work in creating institutional spaces in which paleoconservatives and White Nationalists could exchange ideas. Lazy journalists repeatedly refer to Regnery as a “publishing heir.” In fact, his money came from his grandfather William H. Regnery’s textile business. The conservative Regnery Publishing house was founded by Henry Regnery, the son of William H. Regnery and the uncle of William H. Regnery II. (In 1993, the Regnery family sold Regnery Publishing to Phillips Publishing International.)
In 1999–2001, William H. Regnery II played a key role in founding the Charles Martel Society, which publishes the quarterly journal The Occidental Quarterly, currently edited by Kevin MacDonald. In 2004–2005, Regnery spearheaded the foundation of the National Policy Institute, which was originally conceived as a vehicle for Sam Francis, who died in February of 2005. NPI was run by Louis R. Andrews until 2011, when Richard Spencer took over. Both the Charles Martel Society and the National Policy Institute are White Nationalist in orientation. The Occidental Quarterly is also openly anti-Semitic.
But at the same time Regnery was involved with CMS and NPI, he was also working with Jewish paleocon Paul Gottfried to create two academic Rightist groups that were friendly to Jews. First, there was the Academy of Philosophy and Letters,[1] of which Richard Spencer was reportedly a member.[2] But Regnery and Gottfried broke with the Academy of Philosophy and Letters over the issue of race, creating the H. L. Mencken Club, which Gottfried runs to this day.[3] The Mencken Club, like the Charles Martel Society and NPI, is a meeting ground for paleoconservatives and White Nationalists, although it is also friendly to Jews.
Richard Spencer began as a paleoconservative, entered Regnery’s sphere of influence, and emerged a White Nationalist. In 2007, Spencer dropped out of Duke University, where he was pursuing a Ph.D. in modern European intellectual history. From March to December of 2007, Spencer was an assistant editor at The American Conservative, a paleoconservative magazine founded in 2002 by Scott McConnell, Patrick Buchanan, and Taki Theodoracopulos in opposition to the neocon-instigated Iraq War. By the time Spencer arrived, however, Buchanan and Taki had departed. After being fired from The American Conservative, Spencer went to work for Taki, editing his online magazine Taki’s Top Drawer, later Taki’s Magazine, from January of 2008 to December of 2009. Taki thought his magazine was stagnant under Spencer’s editorship, so they parted ways. With money raised through Regnery’s network, Richard Spencer launched a new webzine, Alternative Right (alternativeright.com) on March 1, 2010.
The phrase “alternative right” first appeared at Taki’s Magazine under Spencer’s editorship. On December 1, 2008, Spencer published Paul Gottfried’s “The Decline and Rise of the Alternative Right,” originally given as an address at that year’s H. L. Mencken Club conference in November. Spencer claims credit for the title and thus the phrase “alternative right,” while Gottfried claims that they co-created it.[4] The Alternative Right in decline is, of course, the paleoconservative movement. The Alternative Right on the rise is the more youthful post-paleo movement crystallizing at the Mencken Club and allied forums. The Alternative Right webzine was to be their flagship.
The Alternative Right webzine had an attractive design and got off to a strong start. I particularly respected Spencer’s decision to publish Steve McNallen and Jack Donovan, important writers who were anathema to Christians and paleocons. But after about six months, the site seemed to lose energy. Days would go by without new material, which is the key to building regular traffic, and matters were not helped by the site layout. Instead of simply putting new material at the top of a blog roll, the site had a host of departments, so one had to click six or eight links to discover that there was no new material. After doing this for a couple of weeks, readers would stop coming, waiting to hear about new material by email or on social media. By the beginning of 2012, Spencer had lost interest in editing the webzine. On May 3, 2012, he stepped down and handed the editorship to Andy Nowicki and Colin Liddell.
However, in 2013, Spencer was embarrassed by negative press coverage of one of Liddell’s articles and realized that he would always be linked to Alternative Right, even though he no longer had control of its contents. On Christmas day of 2013, Spencer shut Alternative Right down without consulting or warning Nowicki and Liddell. The domain address was repointed to Spencer’s new webzine, Radix Journal, which would never become a household name. Then, after another strong start, Radix too slumped into a low-energy site.
Nearly four years of articles and comments at Alternative Right—the collective contributions of hundreds of people—simply vanished from the web. Nowicki and Liddell salvaged what they could and carried on with the Alternative Right brand at blogspot.com, although their site had few readers and little influence. In 2018, embarrassed by the decline of the Alt Right brand, they changed the name to Affirmative Right.
Spencer’s greatest mistake in shutting down Alternative Right was not his high-handed manner, which caused a good deal of bitterness, but the fact that he pulled the plug after its name had become a generic term. Just as the brand “Xerox” became a term for photocopying in general, the brand “Hoover” became a verb for vacuuming in general, Sony’s “Walkman” became a generic term for portable cassette players, and “iPod” became a generic term for portable mp3 players, the Alt Right had become a generic term for a whole range of radical alternatives to mainstream conservatism. Imagine Xerox rebranding with a weird sounding Latinate name like Effingo once it had become synonymous with its entire industry.
The beauty of the Alt Right brand is that it signaled dissidence from the mainstream Right, without committing oneself to such stigmatized ideas as White Nationalism and National Socialism. As I put it in an article hailing Alternative Right to my readers at TOQ Online:
by Greg Johnson
https://www.counter-currents.com/201...-1/#more-86560
http://whitenationalist.org/forum/sh...8769#post18769
http://whitenationalist.org/forum/sh...8769#post18769
3,536 words
Part 1 of 4
Author’s Note: This is the opening essay of a forthcoming anthology called The Alternative Right.
The Alternative Right does not have an essence, but it does have a story, a story that begins and ends with Richard Spencer. The story has four chapters.
First the term “Alternative Right” was coined in 2008. Then the Alternative Right webzine was launched on March 1, 2010 and ran until December 25, 2013. When it was first coined, the Alternative Right simply referred to an alternative to the American conservative mainstream. When it became the name of a publication, it functioned as a broad umbrella term encompassing such schools of thought as paleoconservatism, libertarianism, race-realism, the European New Right, Southern Nationalism, and White Nationalism. By the time the Alternative Right webzine was shut down, however, the term Alt Right had taken on a life of its own. It was not just the name of a webzine, but a generic term for Right-wing alternatives to the conservative mainstream.
The second chapter is the emergence in 2015 of a vital, youth-oriented, largely online Right-wing movement. This movement encompassed a wide range of opinions from White Nationalism and outright neo-Nazism to populism and American civic nationalism. Thus this movement quite naturally gravitated to the broad generic term Alt Right. The new Alt Right threw itself behind Donald Trump’s run for the presidency soon after he entered the race in 2015 and became increasingly well-known as Trump’s most ferocious defenders in online battles, to the point that Hillary Clinton actually gave a speech attacking the Alt Right on August 25, 2016.
The third chapter is the Alt Right “brand war” of the fall of 2016. The Alt Right “brand” had become so popular that it was being widely adopted by Trumpian civic nationalists, who rejected the racism of White Nationalists. White Nationalists began to worry that their brand was being coopted and started to push back against the civic nationalists. The brand war ended on November 21, 2016 at a National Policy Institute conference with the incident known as Hailgate, in which Richard Spencer uttered the words “Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!” and raised his whiskey glass in a toast, to which some people in the audience responded with Hitler salutes. When video of this went public, civic nationalists quickly abandoned the Alt Right brand, and the “Alt Lite” was born.
The fourth chapter is the story of the centralization and decline of the Alt Right, largely under the control of Richard Spencer. This period was characterized by polarization and purges, as well as the attempt to transform the Alt Right from an online to a real-world movement, which culminated at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia on August 11–12, 2017. Both trends led the Alt Right to shrink considerably. Some abandoned the brand. Others abandoned the entire movement. The remnant has retreated back to its strongholds on the internet. As of this writing, there is no fifth chapter, and the Alt Right’s future, if any, remains to be seen. Like cancer, there may be no stage five.
1. The Invention of a Brand
The Alternative Right brand first emerged in the fuzzy space where the paleoconservative movement overlaps with White Nationalism. The term “paleoconservatism” was coined by Paul Gottfried, an American Jewish political theorist and commentator. Paleoconservatism defined itself as a genuinely conservative opposition to the heresy of neoconservatism.
The paleoconservative movement was a safe space for the discussion and advocacy of everything that neoconservatism sought to abolish from the conservative movement: Christianity, tradition, America’s white identity, an America-first foreign policy, immigration restriction, opposition to globalization and free trade, the defense of traditional/biological sexual roles and institutions, and even—although mostly behind closed doors—biological race differences and the Jewish question.
Aside from Gottfried, the leading paleocons included Samuel Francis, who openly associated with White Nationalists; Joseph Sobran, who was purged from National Review for anti-Semitism and who also openly associated with White Nationalists; and Patrick Buchanan, who stayed closer to the political mainstream but was eventually purged from MSNBC for “racism” because his book Suicide of a Superpower defended the idea of the United States as a normatively white society.
William H. Regnery II (b. 1941) is a crucial figure in the rise of the Alt Right because of his work in creating institutional spaces in which paleoconservatives and White Nationalists could exchange ideas. Lazy journalists repeatedly refer to Regnery as a “publishing heir.” In fact, his money came from his grandfather William H. Regnery’s textile business. The conservative Regnery Publishing house was founded by Henry Regnery, the son of William H. Regnery and the uncle of William H. Regnery II. (In 1993, the Regnery family sold Regnery Publishing to Phillips Publishing International.)
In 1999–2001, William H. Regnery II played a key role in founding the Charles Martel Society, which publishes the quarterly journal The Occidental Quarterly, currently edited by Kevin MacDonald. In 2004–2005, Regnery spearheaded the foundation of the National Policy Institute, which was originally conceived as a vehicle for Sam Francis, who died in February of 2005. NPI was run by Louis R. Andrews until 2011, when Richard Spencer took over. Both the Charles Martel Society and the National Policy Institute are White Nationalist in orientation. The Occidental Quarterly is also openly anti-Semitic.
But at the same time Regnery was involved with CMS and NPI, he was also working with Jewish paleocon Paul Gottfried to create two academic Rightist groups that were friendly to Jews. First, there was the Academy of Philosophy and Letters,[1] of which Richard Spencer was reportedly a member.[2] But Regnery and Gottfried broke with the Academy of Philosophy and Letters over the issue of race, creating the H. L. Mencken Club, which Gottfried runs to this day.[3] The Mencken Club, like the Charles Martel Society and NPI, is a meeting ground for paleoconservatives and White Nationalists, although it is also friendly to Jews.
Richard Spencer began as a paleoconservative, entered Regnery’s sphere of influence, and emerged a White Nationalist. In 2007, Spencer dropped out of Duke University, where he was pursuing a Ph.D. in modern European intellectual history. From March to December of 2007, Spencer was an assistant editor at The American Conservative, a paleoconservative magazine founded in 2002 by Scott McConnell, Patrick Buchanan, and Taki Theodoracopulos in opposition to the neocon-instigated Iraq War. By the time Spencer arrived, however, Buchanan and Taki had departed. After being fired from The American Conservative, Spencer went to work for Taki, editing his online magazine Taki’s Top Drawer, later Taki’s Magazine, from January of 2008 to December of 2009. Taki thought his magazine was stagnant under Spencer’s editorship, so they parted ways. With money raised through Regnery’s network, Richard Spencer launched a new webzine, Alternative Right (alternativeright.com) on March 1, 2010.
The phrase “alternative right” first appeared at Taki’s Magazine under Spencer’s editorship. On December 1, 2008, Spencer published Paul Gottfried’s “The Decline and Rise of the Alternative Right,” originally given as an address at that year’s H. L. Mencken Club conference in November. Spencer claims credit for the title and thus the phrase “alternative right,” while Gottfried claims that they co-created it.[4] The Alternative Right in decline is, of course, the paleoconservative movement. The Alternative Right on the rise is the more youthful post-paleo movement crystallizing at the Mencken Club and allied forums. The Alternative Right webzine was to be their flagship.
The Alternative Right webzine had an attractive design and got off to a strong start. I particularly respected Spencer’s decision to publish Steve McNallen and Jack Donovan, important writers who were anathema to Christians and paleocons. But after about six months, the site seemed to lose energy. Days would go by without new material, which is the key to building regular traffic, and matters were not helped by the site layout. Instead of simply putting new material at the top of a blog roll, the site had a host of departments, so one had to click six or eight links to discover that there was no new material. After doing this for a couple of weeks, readers would stop coming, waiting to hear about new material by email or on social media. By the beginning of 2012, Spencer had lost interest in editing the webzine. On May 3, 2012, he stepped down and handed the editorship to Andy Nowicki and Colin Liddell.
However, in 2013, Spencer was embarrassed by negative press coverage of one of Liddell’s articles and realized that he would always be linked to Alternative Right, even though he no longer had control of its contents. On Christmas day of 2013, Spencer shut Alternative Right down without consulting or warning Nowicki and Liddell. The domain address was repointed to Spencer’s new webzine, Radix Journal, which would never become a household name. Then, after another strong start, Radix too slumped into a low-energy site.
Nearly four years of articles and comments at Alternative Right—the collective contributions of hundreds of people—simply vanished from the web. Nowicki and Liddell salvaged what they could and carried on with the Alternative Right brand at blogspot.com, although their site had few readers and little influence. In 2018, embarrassed by the decline of the Alt Right brand, they changed the name to Affirmative Right.
Spencer’s greatest mistake in shutting down Alternative Right was not his high-handed manner, which caused a good deal of bitterness, but the fact that he pulled the plug after its name had become a generic term. Just as the brand “Xerox” became a term for photocopying in general, the brand “Hoover” became a verb for vacuuming in general, Sony’s “Walkman” became a generic term for portable cassette players, and “iPod” became a generic term for portable mp3 players, the Alt Right had become a generic term for a whole range of radical alternatives to mainstream conservatism. Imagine Xerox rebranding with a weird sounding Latinate name like Effingo once it had become synonymous with its entire industry.
The beauty of the Alt Right brand is that it signaled dissidence from the mainstream Right, without committing oneself to such stigmatized ideas as White Nationalism and National Socialism. As I put it in an article hailing Alternative Right to my readers at TOQ Online:
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