Michael Morris

THE violent ideological collision in Charlottesville, US, last month may have confirmed the progressive public’s worst fears about a resurgence of neo-fascist white supremacism emboldened by Donald Trump’s presidency.

It was, on the face of it, a clash about history; Charlottesville, a university town in Virginia, became the focus of controversy over plans to remove the statue of Confederate hero, General Robert E Lee, a symbol of Southern virtues for the Right, but, for the Left, an unwanted token of a repellent history.

For Philippe-Joseph Salazar, Charlottesville – in a broader sense – is less about America’s contested history than its contested future and the emergence of a new ideology vigorously challenging the assumptions and orthodoxies of the “identity politics” of race, gender or religious affinity, of political correctness and curbs on free speech and the inevitability or virtue of multi-culturalism.

The Casablanca-born distinguished professor of rhetoric at UCT and a former director in rhetoric and democracy at Jacques Derrida’s foundation, Collège international de philosophie, in Paris, has been immersing himself in material generated by the altright “nebulous” – as he calls it, borrowing from the astronomical concept of a cosmic cluster or cloud to describe a complex array of political thinking – and is writing a book about it.

The mostly male, mostly white alt-right is, he believes, a global phenomenon and an ideological elaboration that is being sorely misappreciated.

Salazar earned acclaim in 2015 for his book Paroles armèes, an analysis of the Islamic State’s propaganda and strategies of influence, which won him the French literary prize Prix Bristol des Lumieres, and international attention for his dispassionate assessment of the IS phenomenon. It was published in English by Yale University Press in the US earlier this year as Words Are Weapons, Inside ISIS’s Rhetoric of Terror.

Rhetorical study, he has argued, rests on a “considered, respectful appraisal” – rather than outraged moral judgment – which, as he said of the self-declared caliphate – or Islamic authority – of IS, “allows me to see things others don’t see…”

Bringing the same dispassionate technique of studying the reasoning, oratory and argumentation of a resurgent global conservatism – instead of merely dismissing it as morally suspect, bigoted, or backward – reveals the alt-right movement as more complex and potentially more effective as a political agent in the world than detractors might imagine.

Yet, he argues, most observers of recent events in America are stuck on the fascistic imagery, such as marchers with flaming torches, and the too-obvious association with Nazism. “The risk lies in working from old premises. Many people find it difficult to acknowledge an ideology formation run by young,