A Quote by Chip Berlet
Part of the coalition is intellectuals who have an idea of racial nationalism, which is very popular in right-wing populist movements in Europe. The alt-right believes in racially separate nation-states.
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Trump displays many of the traits of a proto-fascist, and he is also part of a wave of right-wing nationalist movements that is sweeping the West. He can also be positioned in the long, American right-wing tradition of fearing 'the Other,' whether they are Catholics or Jews or, now, Muslims.
In Europe the right wing is bogged down in Nationalism in most cases and still fighting so called Reds.
The term 'alt-left' sprang up long after the term 'alt-right,' which was coined in 2010 by white supremacist Richard Spencer, and defined by the Associated Press just after the 2016 election as a movement based on a mix of white nationalism and hard-edged populism.
Left-wing movements have tended to be unisex, and asexual in their imagery. Right-wing movements, however puritanical and repressive the realities they usher in, have an erotic surface. Certainly Nazism is "sexier" than communism.
Western intellectuals, and also Third World intellectuals, were attracted to the Bolshevik counter-revolution because Leninism is, after all, a doctrine which says that the radical intelligentsia have a right to take state power and to run their countries by force, and that is an idea which is rather appealing to intellectuals.
People are less certain of their national identities or their place in the world. It starts looking different and disorienting. And there is no doubt that that has produced populist movements both from the left and from the right in many countries in Europe.
At the heart of the problem is the fact that the United States is a racially divided nation where extreme racial inequalities continue to persist.
The alt-right believes that Western culture is currently imperiled and that the elites on both sides of the political divide are not doing enough to protect it. In that analysis, I think they're right.
Take, for example, there is a right-wing populist uprising. It's very common, even on the left, to just ridicule them, but that's not the right reaction. If you look at those people and listen to them on talk radio, these are people with real grievances.
I don't think the alt-right would call me alt-right. They call me alt-lite, usually. I just consider myself a nationalist or a traditionalist.
The alt-right didn't emerge from nowhere. There's a cultural foundation that existed beforehand that was almost like the petri dish and the growing medium for the alt-right.
The progressives have a challenge. Part of it is that you now have a lot of progressives who feel that 50 million, 60 million people voted to endorse the toxic parts of Donald Trump, that suddenly we now are in a country, you know, surrounded by people who, you know, are proud to be, you know, a part of this alt-right thing and they think it was an alt-right takeover.
If you listen to the talk shows, which are rabid right-wing, and very interesting, an important fact about the United States, they reach a huge audience. And they're very uniform. So right wing, I don't think you can even find an analog in your, but they reach a mass audience, and their view is that the corporations are liberal. Their appeal to the population is, "the country is run by liberals, they own the corporations, they run the government, they own the media, and they don't care about us ordinary people."
Extremists and populist movements are exploiting people's fear of those who are not like us. We can see the consequences in the form of terrorism and racially motivated violence.
Trump is much, much worse than people understand. In his ideal world, you would have an alliance between Trump, Putin, Marine Le Pen, maybe a right winger might knock off Merkel in Germany, and you'd have this sort of, essentially, a nationalist populist alliance that can only be made sense of when seen as a right-wing, white nationalism against the world. Because, who do they want to fight? They want to fight Asia and China, they want to fight Latin America and Mexico.
Here is the difference, nationalism has a certain connotation in Europe, which is not necessarily positive, but I think in Asia, nationalism is seen very much as a sort of natural corollary to economic progress, almost like you're independent, you progress, you are prosperous and nationalism comes with all of that.
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