Where the Alt-Right Really Comes From

“As Ross Douthat says, you may have hated the religious Right but wait until you see the post-religious Right.”

The Alt-Right has been in the public eye for several years now. This loose grouping of far-right ideologues and their followers has captured the public imagination with its public stunts, its divisive and ugly rhetoric, and its descent into violence. Despite their claims to the contrary, we can recognize them and their narrative as a rebirth of white supremacy for the digital age. This is crucial, as the Alt-Right’s growth came along with technology; it gave the movement itself a means of communication, while simultaneously contributing to the social conditions of increased individualism and isolation that provided fertile ground for people to become receptive to their messaging.

Our technology today is perfectly suited to our hyper-individualism, tailored as it increasingly is to our every whim and individual taste. This growth in choice stemming from a reduction in boundaries, a reduction both good and bad, has gone along with a reduction in meaning, something people are desperately searching for. The lack of a core sense of meaning makes us vulnerable to those selling an apocalyptically redemptive bill of goods. This is what the identity politics, of which the Alt-Right is the far-right manifestation, offers. It places us all at risk, and it risks shattering our societies into pieces.

In an essay for First Things entitled “The Anti-Christian Alt-Right,” Matthew Rose lays out the intellectual roots of Alt-Right thought. He traces an intellectual lineage from Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West, to the works of Julius Evola, the Italian traditionalist mystic, to more modern thinkers like Alain de Benoist. These writers provide the basis for the Alt-Right’s canon. An earlier writer who provided the intellectual foundation for the far-right from the nineteenth century to today was the minor French nobleman Arthur de Gobineau, who promulgated the racialist theory of decline with which Arthur Herman begins his book The Idea of Decline in Western History. Gobineau took a vitalist view of race, which held that each racial group had a unique animating spirit that drove them in different ways. Of course, given this was the nineteenth century, the white race was held to be superior and to have a stronger animating spirit.