Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
Progressive in a different way
Self-righteous, myopic perceptions muddle mainstream estimations of the scale and vigour of the alt-right, UCT philosopher Philippe-Joseph Salazar tells
bright people from good colleges. We always assume, and have been for many decades, that if you are young, intelligent, articulate and forwardlooking, you are progressive.
“What you have in the alt-right is ‘progressive’ in a different way”, a movement seeking not a return to the past, but a way into the future by reforming the status quo.
“Merely using stultified semantics to quantify them only advances their cause because it diverts attention from the real work they are doing, which is reading and writing a lot, and using oratory, to develop an alternative argument.”
Salazar said what was emerging from his study was a complex “repurposing” of ideas in the broader alt-right “cloud”, often borrowed from Europe, and even from the Left itself.
In the case of Charlottesville, for instance, the issue for the alt-right was not nostalgia or reverencing history, but – in a notable borrowing from the Gay Pride movement – “a matter of pride”.
“I found a reflective article which underlined this point, saying that wanting to keep the statues was not about memorialising history, or about memory – very much a theme of the Left – but about looking to the future, and seeing monuments as opportunities to rally pride.
“They say that for 30 years, whites in America have been plagued by a catechism of victimhood, and rallying with pride around a statue is one way of reversing that.”
Salazar was intrigued to hear the Charlottesville chant “You will not replace us!” by one of the Rightist protesters – a phrase that drew on the work of Europeanist French philosopher, Renaud Camus, whose book The Great Replacement, warns of the permanent cultural mutation of France through immigration.
There was also evidence of America’s alt-right borrowing from France’s neo-fascist philosopher Alain de Benoist.
Significantly, though, while there was a measure of nostalgia among European fascists “for a time when fascism was part of politics”, there was no such nostalgia in the US, “and so the Right is far more forward-looking in that respect”. To them, “the past is a hindrance”.
There was a strong strand of “green” thinking in the alt-right, and a veneration of the idea of spurning corporatism, globalism and Big Money, and going back to the land.
Equally, while the alt-right laid unabashed claim to notions of white “superiority” – “saying ‘everyone wants to be like us, everyone copies us, we invented the world’ and so on” – many within the alt-right disclaimed associations with white supremacy, insisting they had no interest in dominating anyone else.
Salazar observed: “This is language the Left has found it difficult to fit into categories.”
These things were bound up with no small measure of paradox, too – strikingly evident in the personality of alt-right poster boy, Milo Yiannopoulos, a savvy, witty, articulate and often devastatingly snappy debater and writer who was also gay and Jewish and boasted of his black lovers.
It was plain Yiannopoulos could not be typecast as a neo-Nazi.
Indeed, Salazar argues, more thoughtful conservatives are quite content with the idea of the rightwing fringe being called “clowns”.
“Traditionally, clowns in the circus diverted attention from the danger when the lions entered. I saw all this being enacted, and I thought the Left was being quite silly about it, because they think they have a grasp of what is happening, and they don’t.”
Salazar highlighted leading conservative Stephen Bannon’s warning that “as long as the mainstream carries on with identity politics (emphasising politically correct formulas of, for instance, black pain and white privilege) ‘we win’.
“And the fact is that identity politics is very 1990s, and those who cling to it are failing to see the new ideological formation taking place, while often identity politics is merely reduced to slogans, which is not an argument.”
He added: “The lack of accuracy from the Left and the mainstream media in naming what alt-right in its various nuances is, is a great danger to them, and reminds me of how IS was constantly referred to as ‘barbarians’ and ‘madmen’. The semantics are loose, and it means people are not seeing the reality of these various movements, and how different they are from one another.”
What was emerging in the altright was “actually the formation of the new ideology, and, so long as what Trump quite smartly called ‘the alt-left’ keeps using old clichés, old frames of thinking, old references, they will not see the wood for the trees, and the alt-right is very aware of that”.
Salazar added: “It’s a worldwide thing, and because South Africa is in the global world, we had better pay attention.”
In his estimation the emergence of a forceful alt-right in South Africa was a possibility, but a remote one.
“I think victimhood has become so much a part of the catechism of white youth – that they are responsible for everything, they are to blame and so on – that I don’t think they will be able to get over it soon. And conservatism in South Africa is not very literate, either.
“But it was the same in the US, and it reached a breaking point. That point could be reached in South Africa too, where young, articulate, university-trained whites decide they have had it, and it might flip over – which is why people should be thinking about it.”
The real challenge in South Africa remained “reconciliation”.
“The meaning of reconciliation in theology is summed up in the Greek word, metanoia, which means ‘change of mind’; you change your mind from bad to good and rejoin the community.
That’s the lesson of Desmond Tutu and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission – truth, but also reconciliation, which is the pivot. “It should be the mainstay of our politics, but I don’t think the government is using it enough.”