Introduction
The Rise of the Alt-Right
We hear much about the rise of the ‘Alt-Right’ in recent times. It is said to be behind the ascent of President Donald Trump in the US and of the ‘far right’, ‘nationalist’ and ‘populist’ politicians of Europe, and it is also said to be behind the British BREXIT referendum vote to leave the European Union.
The ‘Right’ part of the Alt-Right label refers to standard conservative positions on income inequality, wealth distribution, trade unions, environmental protection, state regulation and social issues such as abortion. The ‘Alt’ part of the ‘Alt-Right’ label, however, signifies a number of their key policy themes which dissent from the neo-liberal, capitalist globalisation politics of the mainstream Right and which chime with a growing, popular anti-establishment mood.
The Alt-Right supports:
Economic nationalism (tariffs on cheap imports, other trade protectionist measures, revitalisation of domestic manufacturing, etc.);
Foreign policy isolationism and military non-intervention, and the redirection of foreign aid funding to domestic needs, and
Immigration restriction and border control.
The Alt-Right rejects:
the off-shoring of jobs to low wage countries and the import of cheap immigrant labour;
job-destroying and sovereignty-sapping ‘free trade’ agreements;
aggressive foreign policy and unnecessary, costly and counter-productive wars;
the corrupting effect of political donations from corporate globalists;
the ideology of multiculturalism which insists that ethnic ‘Diversity’ is an unsullied good enriching white communities, and
the stifling effect of multicultural ‘political correctness’ on free speech for fear of trespassing on the identity sensitivities of population sub-groups such as blacks, Hispanics, refugees and Muslims.
With the dissident parts of its platform, the Alt-Right is stealing a march on not just establishment political parties but on the radical left as well by attracting its once natural support base, the domestic (and still largely white) working class.
The Alt-Left
The traditional Left once shared much of the dissident policy framework of the Alt-Right. The Left led the ‘Occupy’ anti-globalisation protests, mobilised against neo-conservative wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, carried the trade union flag against capitalist ‘free trade’ deals, opposed the corporate purchase of politicians, fought against censorship and defended the fundamental right of free speech.
The contemporary Left, however, has departed from many of these traditional Left policies to focus, with increasing obsession, on ‘identity politics’. With traditional class politics under siege from a sustained assault by market-fundamentalist neo-liberalism, the Left (whether hard, soft, liberal or centrist) has increasingly retreated to a politics which views almost every political issue through ‘identity’, i.e. through the prisms of skin colour, ethnicity, chromosomal structure, gender identification and ever-tinier slivers of the ever-expanding LGBTQI spectrum. The Alt-Right deride the Left’s strategic reorientation to identity politics as ‘Cultural-Marxism’ but the term is a reasonably accurate depiction of the Left’s turn from Marxist class and economic struggle to cultural sensitivity and speech-policing.
In opposition to this new direction of the Left, an Alt-Left rejects the colonisation of left-wing politics by identity politics and the wholesale repositioning of socialist politics from the political to the personal, from class to culture, from materialism to subjectivity, from Marxism to multiculturalism, from the proletariat to the declassed lumpenproletariat and marginalised underclass. The Alt-Left rejects the ‘identitarian’ left’s elevation of ‘Diversity’ (the core cultural-ideological element of capitalist globalisation) to almost cult-like status.
A major factor behind the contemporary Left’s adoption of identity politics has ironically been the Left’s past cultural successes. Social movements once drew their energy from a strong labour movement and a politics centred around questions of class, wealth and economic power and they achieved significant advances in the rights of women, gays and other minorities. With the Left now struggling for influence on the economic front, however, the social battle front of the culture wars has become increasingly more important to the identitarian Left and is being increasingly pursued through stand-alone single issue campaigns. This has narrowed the scope for further social gains as the Left gets drawn into battle with ever smaller cultural dragons: micro-aggressions, cultural appropriation, Trigger Warnings, Safe Spaces, gendered bathrooms and all the other manifestations of the politics of identity. This new focus of the Left doesn’t add up to a bold, sweeping and popular anti-establishment political vision.
The aggressively defensive stance of the identitarian left over its new political high ground inures it to challenge by dissidents from the Old Left. The weapon of choice for the identitarian Left is simplistic and often vitriolic deployment of such discussion-killers as ‘racist!’, ‘xenophobe!’ and ‘Islamophobe!’, coupled with strident ad hominem assaults on the tribunes of contraband opinion (Trump, Le Pen, Wilders, Farage, Brexiteers, etc.). Such vitriolic verbal denunciations may offer emotionally consoling therapy for a progressive Left bewildered and angry about it growing alienation from its old working class social (‘we are right, the people aren’t’) but all it does is wrap another layer of protective bubble-wrap around its politically shrinking, insular world.
Liberal and left wing progressives have largely ceased to engage with the fundamental economic and cultural concerns of the working class, or to recognise that ‘Diversity’ is not all that it’s cracked up to be i.e. it is possible to have non-racist objections to mass immigration such as the consequent environmental stress, unsustainable population growth, transport and other infrastructure strains, welfare budget burden, increased crime, Islamic terrorism, etc. The Alt-Right, however, connects with many crucial working class concerns, making right-wing populism the default political order.
An Alt-Right political victory, however, threatens more business-friendly, corporate-tax-cutting, deregulating, fossil fuel expanding and environment-trashing policies which will degrade the living standards of the working class that the Left once oriented to. If the Left reflects on how far its contemporary identity politics obsessions have drifted from the concerns of ordinary people, it may yet regain some political relevance.
What the Alt-Left is Not
The Alt-Left is not leftish social democrats such as Jeremy Corbyn (the British Labour Party leader) whose pro-immigration stance is untroubled by the negative economic and social effects of open-borders immigration on the British working class.
Neither is the Alt-Left the former Democrat presidential aspirant, Bernie Sanders, who, initially refused to buy into the centrality of identity politics to the modern Left and who persisted in talking in class terms of rich and poor, instead of identity terms of African-Americans, Hispanics, Native-Americans, Asian-Americans, LGBTQI Americans, etc. For all his Old Leftist, New Deal virtues, Sanders quickly became an open-borders conformist. In the 2016 Democrat presidential nomination race, Sanders initially said that ‘of course’ immigrant labour drives down wages and ‘makes everybody in America’ worse off by ‘doing away with the concept of a nation state’, adding that ‘what right-wing people in this country would love is an open-border policy’ (‘that’s a Koch brothers proposal’, he had said, dismissively, in 2015). Sanders soon realised that an open-borders immigration policy is exactly what the migrant-reliant US Democrat Party wants, too, for its new voting base and for its big corporate donors.
Key Alt-Left Policy Themes
Key Alt-Left policy themes which distinguish it from the contemporary, identitarian Left are:
Opposition to global capitalism’s desire for ‘free movement’ of people in an open-borders world i.e. the Alt-Left is immigration-restrictionist.
Opposition specifically to Muslim immigration for its many imported social problems.
Opposition to ‘politically correct’ restrictions on free speech.
Support for national economic and democratic sovereignty - in the interests of the national working class, including support for:
BREXIT (and any other defections from the European Union), and
The dissident elements (such as immigration-restrictionism and economic nationalism) of populists such as TRUMP