The purpose and meaning of the alt-right movement
20.12.2016
When I first started using the term alt-right in the midsummer of 2008, the term was negative in its conception. It was an attempt to get away from the mainstream conservatives, from George W. Bush and from neoconservatives. It was starting a new beginning. At that time, I did not know quite what that was going to be.
As the years have gone on, the alt-right had come to me as identity politics. If I could sum it up in one word, it really would be identity. Before we were asking questions like what foreign policy should we have or what economic policy should we have we must ask fundamental questions – "who are we?"
If you look at the mainstream conservatives – where they are coming from?
They talk about themselves and the conception of the United States as a fundamentally liberal order. Mainstream conservatives defined themselves in many ways in terms of professor Dugin’s Fourth Political Theory – they define themselves as hyper-liberals. They are saying that they must be hyper-liberal to protect the world from fascism, communism and other illiberal threats. Therefore, mainstream conservatism in its essence really was a global religion.
To continue in this framework, I think that the alt-right is a kind of Fourth Political Theory. We definitively have roots and things like the European New Rights like Alain de Benois and we can have a movement that is powerful, that has headlines, that drives liberals crazy, but we don’t quite know, where we are going to be in the future.
What is great about the alt-right? Two things.
1)The consciousness that we are the new beginning, that we are the starting over. The whole 20th century conservatism is failed and thrown out of the window.
2) We have this route in our identity. We’re not going to start from a place of global liberalism, or the cold war. We’re going to start from a place of European identity.
I think the journey for the alt right for the next decades is going to be fascinating. We are going to have a lot of common ground with similar movements in Russia and Europe, or elsewhere.
