Why did America fall for the alt-Right?
Racism has become respectable again, and even New Zealand is not immune, as writer David Neiwert explains to Philip Matthews.
Black lives to the Left of me, white lives to the Right. Who can keep up with US politics any more? A year ago, hundreds of white supremacists and their fellow travellers – men with Confederate flags, swastikas, guns and tiki torches – marched in the sleepy college town of Charlottesville, Virginia. They chanted ‘‘You will not replace us!’’ and ‘‘White lives matter!’’. But the weekend become truly notorious for the murder of an anti-racist protester by a white supremacist who drove his car into a crowd.
This is America. But was Charlottesville the start of something, or was it the end? A lot can happen in 12 months, and when US news site Politico collected opinions on the first anniversary of Charlottesville, it found that some pundits thought the shock of the murder, and US President Donald Trump’s ambivalent responses, had pushed the movement back underground.
So are we talking about the rise and fall of the so-called alt-Right? Factor in the firing of former Trump adviser and farRight strategist Steve Bannon from the White House and, earlier in 2017, the public disgrace of high-profile agitator Milo Yiannopoulos, and you could form the impression that the threat has passed and the movement is in decline.
US journalist David Neiwert has a very direct response to that idea.
‘‘I think that’s bollocks,’’ he says cheerfully by phone from Seattle. ‘‘The movement is very much alive, and anyone who thinks it’s washed up doesn’t know what they’re talking about.’’
Yes, the tide did go out a little after Charlottesville. And the anniversary saw a laughably small crowd of the alt-Right marching in Washington, DC – just ‘‘a pathetic rabble of two dozen racists’’, according to USA Today, dwarfed by much larger crowds of anti-racism protesters. But across the country in Portland, Oregon, several hundred supporters of the relatively new far-Right group the Proud Boys massed for a demonstration.
The Proud Boys are racists remade for a hipster age. They favour black polo shirts with yellow trim, in a nod to British skinhead fashion of the 1970s and ’80s, and were organised by Vice magazine cofounder Gavin McInnes, who claimed they back ‘‘Western chauvinism’’, not overt racism, although the difference is subtle. They also epitomise one of the ways in which racism has become fashionable again, through transgressive online culture and a dark sense of humour. In this world, memes and GIFs are as important as flags and bumper stickers. Neiwert has followed the developments. He began tracking far-Right groups in the late 1970s, after the Aryan Nations formed in Idaho. That was more old-fashioned racism: overtly anti-Semitic within a ‘‘Christian identity’’ framework.
Neiwert’s book Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump, published in 2017, shows how these scattered groups in remote parts of the US led, somehow, to the White House.
There were militias and armed standoffs in places like Montana before farRight fringe thinking gained a new mainstream prominence about a decade ago. A few things happened: a black man became president, the ‘‘Tea Party’’ movement became a legitimate face of the far-Right, and social media in general and YouTube in particular gave every crank a platform.
The leading crank is Alex Jones, peddler of the internet’s most bizarre and dangerous conspiracy theories. The good news is that Jones has recently been taken off YouTube, denying him much of his reach, after families of children and teachers killed in the Sandy Hook school shooting filed defamation lawsuits – Jones’s gibberish included claims that the massacre was ‘‘completely fake’’ and performed by actors.
Other tech companies have followed suit. Facebook suspended Jones’s account. The Proud Boys were booted off Twitter.
In response, Trump said it is ‘‘very dangerous’’ when social media companies regulate content.
All of which shows the obvious power of bypassing traditional gatekeepers of truth and speaking directly to gullible minds. Fake news and internet conspiracies set the scene for the alt-Right, or, as historian Timothy Snyder puts it in Neiwert’s book: ‘‘Accepting untruth is a precondition of tyranny.’’
What about us?
Surely rational, tolerant New Zealand is a world away from this madness. But we also seem to be on the alt-Right radar, as the recent visit of Canadian activists Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux showed. Neiwert followed that story with interest.
It was impossible to move without bumping into a strong opinion about whether the Canadian pair should be allowed to speak in Auckland. Some New Zealanders were naive enough to take their reasonable-seeming line ‘‘It’s OK to be white’’ at face value.
Neiwert explains that this is an old rhetorical trick. ‘‘We don’t hate other people, we just want to defend white people. That’s what they say.’’
But Molyneux’s racism became more overt in front of supporters in Sydney, where he delivered a long criticism of Aboriginal culture, ‘‘the lowest rung of civilisation’’.
Then they appeared in Auckland. Or didn’t, as it turned out. Protests and opposition led to the venue cancelling the appearance at the last minute.
Neiwert thinks New Zealand did the right thing.
‘‘It would be tempting to ignore people like Molyneux and Southern and deny them oxygen, but they have a knack for going out and creating their own oxygen. It’s good for communities to stand up and make clear one way or another that you won’t stand for this kind of hatemongering, and you don’t approve of people using hateful speech against vulnerable minorities.’’
Which brings us to the vexed issue of free speech. After Massey University cancelled a Don Brash speech, it was strange to see a free speech protester at the university wielding the Gadsden flag, which has become synonymous with farRight militias and Tea Party activists. It features a rattlesnake and the threat ‘‘Don’t tread on me’’.
‘‘Everybody’s all for free speech, but free speech that is about removing other people’s rights isn’t the kind of speech that anybody should want to platform,’’ Neiwert says. ‘‘Tolerance and intolerance are like matter and antimatter. If you have a community that is built on principles of tolerance and then introduce intolerant voices and permit them to have full rein, it actually destroys those principles.’’
This is close to what philosopher Karl Popper called the paradox of tolerance. He wrote that, ‘‘If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them’’.
Coincidentally, Popper wrote that sentence in Christchurch, as an exile from Nazi-occupied Europe.
The big noise on the Right these days is Jordan Peterson, author of the bestselling 12 Rules of Life, who is expected to tour New Zealand in early 2019. Peterson is not an overt white nationalist, but a critic of multiculturalism and feminism. Neiwert likens him to ‘‘a gateway drug’’ who ‘‘spreads ideas that are congenial to and undergird parts of the alt-Right and white nationalism generally’’. He might also be the most famous thinker in the world right now, again thanks to YouTube.
There are slippery definitions. Even Trump is not a would-be fascist, but a populist – ‘‘a reflexive, instinctual racist’’ rather than an ideologue. His views are based on gut feeling ‘‘and whatever he pulls out of his butt’’, as Neiwert puts it.
But in a sense, the leader doesn’t matter. What matters is that a large number of Americans – possibly as many as 11 million, according to a University of Virginia study – share alt-Right beliefs.
‘‘Trump could disappear tomorrow and this movement would be with us for a very long time,’’ Niewert concludes.
David Neiwert appears in the Word Christchurch festival at The Piano on August 30.