Steve Bannon on April 20th, 2017.
From AP/REX/Shutterstock.
Its all Steve Bannons fault. Three months into the Trump presidency, many in the Movement Formerly Known as the Alt-Right are in full rebellion against the term, and, ironically, many believe their acknowledged leader, currently President Donald Trumps chief strategist, gave it currency in the first place.
Trumps election, and Bannons ascendance, seemed likely to make the term a badge of pride, and a blow against political correctness. But thats far from what happened. In my reporting on the right over the months of Trumps presidency, almost nothing could make my sources more infuriated than affixing them with the alt-right label. I just think we have to be very careful about this kind of thing, [to] the extent that people want to describe that racism and anti-Semitism and all that kind of stuff, said Jeffrey Lord, CNN commentator and Trump surrogate. I mean, theres just not room for that kind of stuff in the conservative movement, period. Not under any circumstances, ever.
The alt-right label had been in use for years, partly to describe a vivid, largely online subculture of trolls who reveled in their racialist ugliness, often claiming it was an antidote to the reign of political correctness, which they saw as ruining the country. Populist nationalism joined hands with white supremacism and immature 4Chan trolls, borrowing its language from the latter and a deliberate, ironically blasphemous embrace of the former. Whether it was a belief system, a fully formed ideology, or a form of rhetoric, a way of poking at the nostrums and sacred cows of liberalism, was left deliberately murky.
Last summer, in an interview Bannon gave to Mother Jones during the Republican National Convention, Bannon allowed the movement to be pinned down. He called Breitbart the platform for the alt-right. The phrase multiplied exponentially after he became Trumps campaign chairman, catapulting the movement into the mainstream. Used to fighting a guerrilla war, now the alt-right was in the openand defending the ugliness became a lot harder.
Several people I spoke to thought that Bannons comment was not meant to be taken seriously. I think he was being his provocateur self there, said Lord, who himself scrambled from the label, and said that Bannon had approached him once about writing for the site. I think he probably saw it as an anti-Establishment group, which it decidedly is, and theres lots of us who think being anti-Establishment has considerable merit. But just because they might share a strand of a belief here doesnt make it an endorsement.
Milo Yiannopoulos, as a Breitbart columnist, was the most recognizable face of the alt-rights ugliness-as-provocation, though he never fully embraced the term. Now hes become a poster child for its struggles, after remarks emerged suggesting he condoned pedophilia (Yiannopoulous apologized for the tone of his comments, reiterated that he abhors sexual abuse, and subsequently resigned from the site). Yiannopoulos gives the Bannon interview similar weight in the history of the movement, though characteristically, he blames the media for what transpired. What I think he meant by that, was alt-right defined broadly, as the movement that propelled Trump to power, and that Breitbart was one of the places that they come to read news that is not completely opposed to their point of view, Yiannopoulos said. Calling it the platform for the alt-right, and defining the alt-right as white supremacy, is a journalistic trick, designed to pretend that what Bannon was saying was, if youre a white supremacist, come to Breitbart for your news.
Milo Yiannopoulos at the Republican National Convention in July 2016.
Photograph by Justin Bishop.
Before his exile from Breitbart, Yiannopoulos had identified himself as a fellow traveler of the movement, implying an overlap on some issues, and a rejection on others. When I spoke to him, however, he had scrambled even further away. Now the term alt-right has come to mean something else, and therefore, thats what it means now, he said. Whereas I may have considered myself previously a fellow traveler on some issues with the alt-right, the alt-right as the word is used today . . . I have nothing to do with it, and no fondness for it, and no interest in being associated with it.
If a lawmaker campaigns in poetry and governs in prose, the alt-right, whatever it is these days, is trying to pivot from campaigning in bathroom graffiti to governing in the foreign language of diplomatic tact and deliberate restraint. A movement that spent years on the attack now has to learn to defend.
The term alt-right, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, was created in 2008 by Richard Spencer to describe a strain of white nationalism that rejected every mainstream conservative view and pushed to preserve Western civilization from, in his words, a left-right dialectic...
It was Yiannopoulos, along with fellow Breitbart writer Allum Bokhari, who tried to stitch together a bigger tent for the movement. In their essay, An Establishment Conservatives Guide to the Alt-Right, the self-proclaimed Jewish gay and a mixed-race Breitbart reporter laid out the four groups they believed made up the amorphous blob of a movement fueling Trumps rise: identity politics-loathing intellectuals, migrant-wary natural conservatives, the twentysomething-year-old-white-man meme team, and, of course, the militaristic, white-supremacist 1488ers. While Yiannopoulos and Bakhari attempted to push the 1488ers away from the rest of the group and patted the memelords on the head, they still placed them under the same tent as the normal populist-nationalists. There are a myriad of agreements between its supporters over what they should build, they wrote, but virtual unity over what they should destroy.
But no one sees the alt-right as four groups; they see it as one group. To my mind, alt-right always carries with it self-conscious racialist politics, said David Frum, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush and a harsh critic of Trump and the Republican Partys racialist embrace. I would not use it to describe people who oafishly, and often without self-awareness, engage in racial dog-whistling. Id say that what the alt-right people do is take the unconscious and make it conscious.
Ever since last summer, almost everyone in the movement has been trying, and mostly failing, to get out from under the tent. Of all the trolls profiled by Politico in January, only Spencer would wear the label. Yiannopoulos, who had yet to fall, had pushed himself away from the term, but it did little good. The press did such a good job at defining it as white supremacy, that the only people who embrace it are the white supremacists, he said.
In a way, the problem of the Movement Formerly Known as the Alt-Right in the Trump era is precisely the same as Donald Trumps problem: words matter. A Hawaii district judge halted Trumps revised travel ban for its religious animus, specifically citing Trumps previous provocative statements during the campaign. Stephen Miller, a former Breitbart columnist turned White House aide, embarrassed the Trump administration with a few problematic TV appearances and disappeared from the airwaves when his comments were used by the Hawaii judge. Even Breitbart itself began to go mainstream, disclosing its investors and masthead to the Senate Press Gallery when they were denied credentials, and passively letting its radical, burn it all down writers leave.
Yiannopolous, of course, sees a bright future for his brand of conservative culture, whatever its called. I think the next 30 years in culture is going to be defined by a colossal pushback in political correctness, which was part of what this movement was about. Libertarianism and punk is coming back now in the form of Make America Great Again hats and conservative comedians and personalities. Thats not going anywhere. But the particular, specific word alt-right, the medias ruined it as a useful term to describe whats happening.
Frum, for his part, doesnt blame Bannon; he blames Trump, the tentpole of the alt-rights big tent. He attracted people who just liked bullying. He attracted people whose primary interest was seeing womens place in society reduced. He attracted people who were nihilistic and hungry for destruction. And he attracted a very small numberthere arent so many of theseof people who are self-consciously racialist. And that last group is what Richard Spencer called the alt-right.
Conservatives of many stripes are rushing to get out of the tent. But getting out is a lot harder than getting in.
Is this an endearing moment of Donald squeezing Erics cheeks, or Donald checking to see if his thoroughbred sons teeth are healthy?
Tiffany, Donald, and Donald junior at Donalds 50th birthday party.
Young Eric attends the U.S. Open in 1991, making one of the few public appearances without shellacked hair.
A 10-year-old Eric is not as camera-ready as his mother Ivana. Hell get there one day.
Don Jr., 38, and Barron, 10, share an inter-generational fist-bump at the Republican National Convention.
Eric and Don Jr., for once not wearing slicked-back hair, pay their respects to their dear father.
Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. at the Old Post Office, now a Trump hotel, Washington, D.C., July 2014.
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Is this an endearing moment of Donald squeezing Erics cheeks, or Donald checking to see if his thoroughbred sons teeth are healthy?
by Ron Galella/WireImage.
Tiffany, Donald, and Donald junior at Donalds 50th birthday party.
BY RON GALELLA/WIREIMAGE.
Young Eric attends the U.S. Open in 1991, making one of the few public appearances without shellacked hair.
by Ron Galella/WireImage.
A 10-year-old Eric is not as camera-ready as his mother Ivana. Hell get there one day.
by Ron Galella/WireImage.
As Ivanka practices looking gorgeous at her fathers 50th birthday, a 12-year-old Eric appears displeased at his choice of tie.
by Richard Corkery/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images.
Eric and Donald at a basketball game in East Rutherford, New Jersey, in 2007.
BY JAMES DEVANEY/WIREIMAGE.
Don junior in Briarcliff Manor, New York, 2014.
BY BOBBY BANK/WIREIMAGE.
A 23-year-old Eric attempts to smile. Hell get there one day.
by M. Von Holden/WireImage.
Donald disapproved of Don Jr. proposing to model Vanessa Haydon using an engagement ring provided by a New Jersey jeweler who wanted publicity. You have a name thats hot as a pistol, said Trump, a man who put said name on everything from steaks to playing cards.
by Dave Allocca/StarPix/REX/Shutterstock.
It is unknown whether Eric Trump eventually killed this animal for sport.
by Paul Zimmerman/Getty Images.
Don Jr., and baby Barron at the unveiling of their fathers star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Barron is either throwing his fists in the air in celebration of his fathers accomplishments, or is waving for help.
by Hubert Boesl/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images.
We presume that this is Don Jr. impersonating his sister Ivanka at the Eric Trump Golf Tournament in 2014.
by Bobby Bank/WireImage.
A 9-year-old Barron already has his fathers eyes and princely smirk.
by Debra L Rothenberg/FilmMagic.
At a campaign event in Las Vegas, December 2015.
FROM VISIONS OF AMERICA/UIG/GETTY IMAGES.
Don Jr., 38, and Barron, 10, share an inter-generational fist-bump at the Republican National Convention.
By Carlo Allegri/REUTERS.
Eric and Don Jr., for once not wearing slicked-back hair, pay their respects to their dear father.
by Mark Wilson/Getty Images.
Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. at the Old Post Office, now a Trump hotel, Washington, D.C., July 2014.
BY PAUL MORIGI/WIREIMAGE.
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The Movement Formerly Known as the Alt-Right Tries to Evolve - Vanity Fair