The alt-right: reactionary rehabilitation for white masculinity: US alt-right extremism is a logical consequence of mainstream neo-conservatism

After the 2016 presidential election, as the US media scrambled for ways to understand the sources of Trump's support, there was a dramatic proliferation on news sites of profiles of figures from the alt-right such as Milo Yiannopolous and Richard Spencer-many of them alarmingly deferential in tone. Almost immediately, however, there was an understandable backlash from liberal commentators and activists, urging journalists to stop using the euphemistic 'alt-right' moniker and to instead refer to the loosely-defined digital subculture to which the label was attached as 'neo-Nazi'.

As someone who spends the best part of my days reading and collecting data from alt-right hubs for my research, it was hard not to notice the instant impact of this strategy. Figures who had previously embraced the alt-right label as a way to distinguish themselves from traditional Republicans quickly began to discard the term. But I am not certain that forcing well-known commentators with a large established platform of anti-progressive resentment to hastily rebrand themselves is the solution to the problems represented by the alt-right as an ideological communication network. The media was right to focus on alt-right networks as a way of understanding the wellsprings of Trump support, but to brand the whole field as neo-Nazi, or to narrow the critical field of vision to the network's deliberately outrageous Nazi acolytes, is to risk losing sight of its roots in socially acceptable discourse.

There is at present a lively and important debate on how to defy the 'normalisation' of the alt-right, but it is important here to tackle not simply the way it is branded but also the ideological and material underpinnings of this process. It is a relatively useless tactic to point out that the alt-right's way of positioning the world is in fact the work of a delusional fringe. It would be more helpful, instead, to pinpoint the accountability of mainstream post-9/11 neo-conservatism in laying the groundwork that would go on to underpin and encourage the burgeoning alt-right digital scene.

This article will make the case that the alt-right is both inspired and defined by a discourse of anxiety about traditional white masculinity, which is seen as being artificially but powerfully 'degenerated', with catastrophic consequences for the nation. It also argues that this discourse is dominant in much of the political and cultural mainstream.

The alt-right is not really a social or political movement in the traditional sense: it is, rather, a network of smallish digital social hubs whose ideological position can be understood as the natural conclusion of neo-conservative logics surrounding liberalism, manhood and national security. While branches of this network may take different forms and styles, they can all be broadly characterised as firmly supporting the counter-cultural rehabilitation of the white male individual through a hostile rejection of liberal-left discourse. The material discussed in this article - entirely produced and distributed online-represents an attempt to discursively reconstruct an idealised model of white masculinity, based on nostalgia for a time that has never existed, and defined largely on the basis of the absence of modern, 'degenerate' influences. The collection of digital groups and forums gathered under the alt-right label may role-play as sites of political activism and advocacy for white Americans, but their rhetoric is very different from traditional political discourse in that it is based on fantasising: and their fundamentally reactionary fantasy is of the reversal, or undoing, of modernity. In these circles, modernity is conceived of as a corrupting ideological force constructed by the nation-state's internal enemies, which have severely damaged the superior lifestyles of the past. That such language is fantastical should not, however, undermine its potential as a threat. Indeed, as shown by the power of Trump's slogan 'Make America Great Again', it can have global consequences.

When self-proclaimed alt-right spokesmen such as Jared Swift claim that 'we've pushed the Overton window...