Are you one of the alt-Right?

[Legion Troll]

Oh, yeah, there are trading cards.​

There is, lurking in Reddit and 4chan threads and in community blogs and forums, a movement of right-wingers who openly argue that democracy is a joke.

That it's weak, it's corrupt, and it caters to the whims of a fickle electorate rather than the needs of the citizenry.

That Congress and the president must be replaced with a CEO-like figure to run the country as it truly should be, without the confused input of the masses.

For some in the movement, Donald Trump is that figure. For the hardcore, even the most authoritarian-styled presidential candidate in decades isn't good enough.

Welcome to the alt-right.

The label blends together straight-up white supremacists, nationalists who think conservatives have sold out to globalization, and nativists who fear immigration will spur civil disarray. But at its core are the ideas of a movement known as neoreaction, and neoreaction (NRx for short) is a rejection of democracy.

Thus, within the world of neoreaction, Trump's seemingly authoritarian impulses are a feature, not a bug. The only real problem is he may not go far enough.

They're striking fear into the hearts of the mainstream rightists.

"They are the vehicles by which anti-liberal and dehumanizing sentiments become legitimized in conservative circles," Washington Free Beacon editor Matthew Continetti explained.

In an essay for the Federalist called "You Can’t Whitewash the Alt-Right’s Bigotry," Cathy Young assails the movement as, "a mix of old bigotries and new identity and victimhood politics adapted for the straight white male."

The alt-right is often dismissed as white supremacist Trump supporters with Twitter accounts, and they are certainly that.

But spend some time reading the movement's central texts, as I did, and you'll find it's more than a simple rebranding of the white nationalist movement. It's the product of the intersection of a longstanding, long-marginalized part of the conservative movement.

While mainstream libertarians are outspoken about democracy's deficiencies, they rarely propose an alternative. The neoreactionaries do: some kind of nondemocratic system with rule-driven succession.

Libertarians also tend to be big fans of modernity, and despite its affinities to the tech world, neoreaction really, really is not. Neoreactionaries believe that for a long time — maybe since the Revolution — things have been going to shit.



http://www.vox.com/2016/4/18/11434098/alt-right-explained

 

[Auster]

I got ecitedafied when I heard you say alt-right. It was decent enough reading, and there simply isnt enough academic thinking to reach out to youth

 

[Legion Troll]

If you look at the numbers, the Whig theory of history — with some faults and starts, everything's getting better — appears to be basically right.

Extreme poverty is at historic lows, hunger and infant mortality are plummeting, life expectancy is going up, war is on the decline, education is more available, homicide rates are down, etc.

But what if those numbers are all lies produced by biased sources in academia and propagated by tools in the media? What then?

The neoreactionaries are a distinctly '00s and '10s phenomenon, but they draw on the racialist and traditionalist arguments of a much older movement: paleoconservatism.

The term "paleoconservatism" is a retronym coined in the 1980s to characterize a brand of conservatism that was by then going extinct, a brand exemplified by Robert Taft, the Ohio senator and legendary isolationist who lost the 1952 Republican nomination to Dwight Eisenhower, and by Pat Buchanan in his 1992, 1996, and 2000 presidential runs.

Paleocons agree with mainstream conservatism on social issues — they tend to be stridently anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ rights, pro-school prayer, and disproportionately traditionalist Catholic.

Paleocons are largely isolationist, warning America against foreign entanglements and dismissing neocon attempts at democracy promotion as hubristic and doomed to failure.

They tend to be heavily critical of Israel. They're also more fervently nationalist than mainstream Republicans.

That translates into a very negative view of immigration, both due to its perceived economic harm to Americans and because of the "damage" it does to American culture, and into more support for tariffs and trade protection.

But since Buchanan, the movement hasn't had a loud national voice. After 9/11, paleocon isolationism became anathema among conservative politicians.

There are a number of reasons the paleocons lost ground, but a big one was that the movement had a huge racism problem. In particular, skepticism of foreign entanglements and of the alliance with Israel specifically would occasionally bleed into overt anti-Semitism.



http://www.vox.com/2016/4/18/11434098/alt-right-explained

 

[tsuke]

o/ alt - right member here.

 

[Legion Troll]

A writer with the pen name Mencius Moldbug (née Curtis Yarvin) started a blog called Unqualified Reservations. He proceeded to write essays that would inspire a whole movement of online political writers.

The neoreactionaries drew inspiration from earlier paleoconservatives like Pat Buchanan and Joseph Sobran but with a tech-y twist.

Moldbug, for one, is a programmer currently working on a startup he cofounded called Urbit.

And the core contention of Moldbug and the other NRx thinkers is one that's been common in technolibertarian circles for a long time: Democracy is a failure.

"Democracy is — as most writers before the 19th century agreed — an ineffective and destructive system of government," Moldbug writes. Moldbug doesn't actually like the term "democracy." He prefers "demotism," or rule of the people, a label under which he sweeps modern-day developed democracies like the US or Western Europe.


http://www.vox.com/2016/4/18/11434098/alt-right-explained