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National Review founder William F. Buckley Jr. and editor Rich Lowry gave the alt-right a platform and elevated ideas central to the movement.

Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by U.S. Department of Defense via Wikimedia Commons, Gage Skidmore/Flickr CC.

Early in November, just a few days before the election, a gathering of white nationalists, heterodox academics, libertarians, and other misfits of the right convened in Baltimore. The H.L. Mencken Club was meeting for its ninth annual conferencea two-day affair featuring lectures, debates, and conversations about the future of American conservatism. Novembers conference came amid surging interest in the alt-right, which owes its very name to the club. In 2008, a speech from the inaugural conference by its president, Paul Gottfried, was republished under the title The Decline and Rise of the Alternative Right in Richard Spencers Takis Magazine, the earliest prominent usage of the phrase. At Novembers conference, Gottfried echoed that 2008 call for the marshaling of an independent and authentic right.

National Review can no more disown the alt-right than it can disown its own legacy.

That right has been marshaled. The alt-right has become a political and cultural phenomenon without recent precedentthe rise of Donald Trump has brought with it newly empowered figures promoting fashionably packaged racism and anti-immigrant animus. As the alt-right has grown, though, mainstream conservatives have loudly shot down suggestions that its rise has anything to do with them. They are anti-Semites, they are racists, they are sexists, they hate the Constitution, they hate free markets, they hate pluralism, they despise everything we believe in, American Conservative Union executive director Dan Schneider told Conservative Political Action Conference attendees last month. They are not an extension of conservatism.

Mainstream conservative outlets have denounced the movement as well, none more loudly than National Review, the flagship publication of the American right. Last April, National Reviews Ian Tuttle condemned Breitbart writers for downplaying the racism of the movements intellectual leaders, including Spencer and Jared Taylor, founder of the white supremacist publication American Renaissance. These men have not simply been accused of racism, he wrote. They are racist, by definition. Taylors race realism, for example, co-opts evolutionary biology in the hopes of demonstrating that the races have become sufficiently differentiated over the millennia to the point that the races are fundamentallythat is, biologicallydifferent. Spencer, who promotes White identity and White racial consciousness, is beholden to similar scientific findings.

Tuttles characterization of Spencers and Taylors beliefs is entirely accurate. At the same time, it would apply equally to the views of three speakers of note at Novembers Mencken conference: Robert Weissberg, John Derbyshire, and Peter Brimelow. All were onetime contributors to National Review. Despite the magazines disavowal of the alt-right, the platform it provided for these writers and its elevationthroughout its historyof ideas that have become central to the movement tie National Review to the alt-rights intellectual origins. In truth, National Review can no more disown the alt-right than it can disown its own legacy.

During a debate on the final night of last years Mencken conference, Robert Weissberg offered thoughts on the problems plaguing the city of Detroit and its black population. I actually attended a conference on Detroit, he proclaimed, which had a distinguished panel that talked about the problems for about two hours, and guess what never came up?

Brain size! someone called out. The room erupted in laughter.

Close, Weissberg giggled. What brave soul, he said eventually, would insist that economic progress is impossible in a culture that prizes criminality and sloth?

His comment was a blunt reiteration of ideas he explored as an on-and-off contributor to National Reviews Phi Beta Cons blog from 2010 to 2012. The indisputable evidence is that genetically determined IQ matters greatly, but since many liberals abhor this politically incorrect conclusion, they insist that the entire issue is controversial, he wrote in one 2012 post. Weissberg was booted from the publication that year, though, when it emerged that he had delivered a talk at Jared Taylors American Renaissance conference.

John Derbyshire, a longtime Review contributor, had been canned just days earlier for a post hed written at Takis titled The Talk: Non-Black Version. The piece , a reference to the talk black parents often give their kids about how to navigate situations that could subject them to racism and police brutality, detailed advice hed given his children about black people, including recommendations to avoid concentrations of blacks not all known to you personally and avoid being the Good Samaritan to blacks in apparent distress.

Anyone who has read Derb in our pages knows hes a deeply literate, funny, and incisive writer, Review editor Rich Lowry wrote affectionately in a post announcing Derbyshires firing. Derb has long danced around the line on these issues, but this column is so outlandish it constitutes a kind of letter of resignation.

Lowrys characterization of Derbyshires prior line-dancing struck some commentators as odd given that Derbyshires bigotry had been pointed out long before his ousterperhaps most cogently by John Derbyshire. I am a homophobe, though a mild and tolerant one, and a racist, though an even more mild and tolerant one, he told a blogger in 2003.

The third prominent National Review alumni and Mencken Club speaker there that day last fall, Peter Brimelow, was a former editor at the magazine who had been canned in 1997. That was a key year for the publication, one which also saw the demotion of National Review editor-in-chief John OSullivan. Brimelow and others have concluded, reasonably, that the shake-up was the culmination of a gradual retreat from a stance on immigration both men shared, which, in Brimelows case, has since veered into more open racism. VDare, founded by Brimelow in 1999, regularly publishes articles on the purported biological inferiorities of minorities and is one of the most well-known online bastions of xenophobia. Diversity per se, its mission statement reads, is not strength, but a vulnerability.

As with Derbyshire, Brimelows racist commentary was a regular feature well before his ouster. His 1995 book Alien Nation argued that black crime could be easily explained because certain ethnic cultures are more crime-prone than others, warned against an incoming tide of weird alien migrants with dubious habits, and said that visitors to the waiting rooms of the Immigration and Naturalization Service should expect to soon find themselves in an underworld that is not just teeming but also almost entirely colored.

In addition to these three, Paul Gottfried, leader of the Mencken Club, was himself ousted as a National Review contributor in the 1980s. But he believes that racism was not, ultimately, the cause of any of the firings. They didnt throw anybody out because they were racist, Gottfried told me. It was the capture of the conservative movement by business and political interests supportive of immigration and multiculturalism, among other things, he alleges, that led to a series of purges of proto-alt-right figures such as himself. These were akin, Gottfried posited, to National Review founder and conservative icon William F. Buckleys renunciation of the conspiratorial John Birch Society in the 1960s.

If Gottfried is right, the purges seem to have been incomplete. Victor Davis Hanson, a current writer for National Review and a frequent critic of multiculturalism, for instance, published a National Review piece about race and crime a year after Derbyshires firing that loudly echoed his offending column without similar repercussions, right down to the paternal recommendation to avoid black people. Jason Richwine, a researcher who left the Heritage Foundation after the discovery of his doctoral dissertation, in which hed argued the low average IQ of Hispanics is effectively permanent, currently writes for National Review on, among other issues, Hispanic immigration. Charles Murray, whose 1994 book The Bell Curve promoted the idea of inherent racial differences in intelligence to wide controversy, wrote a defense of Richwine for National Review in 2013 and was a contributor as recently as last year.

As often noted in alt-right circles, National Reviews early years were characterized by explicit racism. American Renaissance resurfaced this history in the wake of Derbyshires firing in 2012 when it republished a 2000 essay by James Lubinskas lamenting National Reviews gradual abandonment of the interests of whites as a group. From that essay:

Lubinskas went on to cite numerous passages detailing National Reviews erstwhile support for white supremacy: an article arguing the hopelessness of integration given IQ differences between whites and blacks and the threat of attempted molestation of white girls by Negro boys or girls. An article condemning the forced integration of Little Rock, Arkansas Central High School. An article by conservative philosopher Russell Kirk defending apartheid in South Africa on the grounds that granting the black majority the right to vote would bring anarchy and the collapse of civilization.

These essays and others, spanning decades, mirrored the views of National Review founder William F. Buckley, who famously defended the right of whites to deny black Americans the vote and maintain white supremacy in a 1957 Review editorial titled Why the South Must Prevail. The White community is so entitled, he wrote, because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.

Buckleys views on immigration, echoed through his magazine, also prefigured the alt-right. Though Buckley took pains to distance himself from the open white nationalism motivating some immigration restrictionists, he did back curbing immigration specifically to fight multiculturalism. Buckley also expressed skepticism of the relative acculturability of nonwhites. The Ellis Island cultists resist plain-spoken reasoning, Buckley wrote in 1997. If pockets of immigrants are resisting the assimilation that over generations has been the solvent of American citizenship, then energies should go to accosting multiculturalism, rather than encouraging its increase.

Buckley, like the alt-right, was particularly perturbed by Muslim immigrants and saw ominous signs of Muslim upheaval in Europe. Western Europe has a Muslim problem, he wrote in a 2007 column. Muslim migrants, he opined, had particularly become a threat to the British way of life commensurate with a continental army threatening invasion or Nazi bombers darkening the sky.

National Review planted its flag firmly in favor of culture-based restrictionism in 1992, with a 14,000-word cover essay on immigration written by none other than Peter Brimelow. The essay is an attack on nonwhite immigration that, in its fixation on Americas shifting ethnic balance and the reality of ethnic and cultural differences, hints at white nationalism. Americans are now being urged to abandon the bonds of a common ethnicity and instead to trust entirely to ideology to hold together their state (polity), Brimelow wrote. This is an extraordinary experiment, like suddenly replacing all the blood in a patients body.

Brimelow would expand upon his views in a 1995 episode of Buckleys show Firing Line that saw him speak in favor of the debate position Resolved: That All Immigration Should Be Drastically Reduced. Over the course of the debate, Buckley endorsed the idea, proposed by Brimelow in his National Review essay and in Alien Nation, of pausing legal immigration. This past November, Richard Spencer himself endorsed a 50-year immigration pause..

Just a few short years after the Brimelow cover, the magazine started closing itself to rhetoric and argumentation on immigration that aligned it too closely with openly bigoted restrictionists. That move began with Brimelows firing and editor-in-chief John OSullivans demotion in 1997. National Review went on to adopt a stance described by Ramesh Ponnuru in a 2001 essay as restrictionism that can succeed. Even in that piece, however, Ponnuru praised Brimelow for bravely and wittily challenging pro-immigration consensus and the taboos that sustained it and criticized Brimelows rhetoric largely for its impracticality.

The magazines shift away from Brimelows brand of restrictionism was itself practically rather than morally motivated. Buckley, in a 2000 letter to Jared Taylor that Brimelow would later publish at VDare, said so himself:

Raspail here is Jean Raspail, French author of The Camp of the Saints, a racist 1973 novel about the invasion of the West by murderous and sexually violent Third World migrants. The book has been praised widely for years by white supremacists, including American Renaissances Jared Taylor. Trump adviser Steve Bannon has also praised the novel repeatedly and Iowa Rep. Steve King recommended the book in a recent interview. In a 2004 National Review column on African migrants to Europe, Buckley would laud Saints as a great novel.

Clearly, Buckley and others at the magazine retained sympathies for Brimelows position on immigration that were deemed too embarrassing or too futile to continue to espouse as openly as they once had. Nevertheless, Brimelow, having been designated a liability, would found VDare in 1999 as an outcast, to continue promoting the line he advanced in his National Review essay. John OSullivan, demoted but still employed by National Review, would serve on the sites board of directors. OSullivans position at VDare was revealed in 2012 in the wake of Derbyshires firing. OSullivan responded with a post in which he called white nationalism silly and claimed he had resigned from VDare in 2007. OSullivan was nevertheless listed as a member of the board in VDares nonprofit filings as late as 2010the year the site gave more than $34,000 to Richard Spencer for the launch of the flagship publication Alternative Right.

Let it not be said that National Review has not tried to consider the origins of the alt-right, which nowfed by the rhetoric and proposals of the new presidentseeks to do real harm to the immigrants and minorities it hates. In a piece published last year, David French went as far as to identify a specific culprit for the alt-rights rise. Who built modern white identity politics? he asked. White supremacists did, but along the way the Left has handed them the bricks and mortar to construct their edifice of hate. Among the bricks that French alleged the left has handed to the alt-right are the writings of Ta-Nehisi Coates and the activism of Black Lives Matter. All my life Ive been part of a conservative movement that has been struggling mightily to move the culture past the politics of race, he wrote, and into a politics of universal human dignity, with each of us created in the image of God. Predictably, French declined to examine how National Reviews long record of publishing writers invested in race science, which continues to this day with Murray and Richwine, squares with the conservative movements putative promotion of universal human dignity.

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I am going to defend National Review here. More...

For years, National Review has advanced the ideas of Robert Weissberg, John Derbyshire, Peter Brimelow, its founder William Buckley, and others for whom universal human dignity was a debatable proposition. Its writers now cast about, looking in vain for the source of a movement they say deeply troubles them. We can cough politely and look away, National Reviews Jay Nordlinger said of the alt-right in February. Or stare it square in the face. If and when National Review does the latterand if and when the conservative movement itself decides to do sothe face they will find staring back at them will be quite familiar.

Laura Wagner contributed reporting for this piece.

More here:
How National Review Helped Build the Alt-Right - Slate Magazine

"My dear Mr Douthat," said the Internet one day. "Have you heard that the alt-right has laid claim to Jane Austen?"

I replied that I had not.

"But they have," returned she; "for The Chronicle of Higher Education and The New York Times have told me all about it."

I made no answer.

"Do you want to know how they have taken possession of her?" cried the Internet impatiently.

" You want to tell me, and I have no objection to hearing it."

That was invitation enough.

"Why my dear, you must know, it seems that certain young men of dubious character, not content with seizing The Matrix and Taylor Swift and Pepe The Frog for their own, have taken to citing Austen's novels in support of their racist and gender-essentialist beliefs; indeed one of the most celebrated of these bounders even quoted her words in some sort of anti-feminist diatribe."

"What is his name?"

"Milo Yiannopoulos."

"Is he married or single?"

"Oh! Single, my dear, to be sure! A single man of large fortune; with many admirers and speaking engagements!"

Now the Internet is a creature of mean understanding, too much information and uncertain temper. But the experience of 20 years online has enabled me to understand something of her character.

And in this case she has fastened on something genuinely interesting, a truth increasingly fretted over: Many aspects of culture, high and low, that once seemed securely in liberalism's possession appear to be vulnerable to appropriation by the alt-right.

Before the Bennets, Dashwoods and Woodhouses, it was the ancient Greeks and Romans.

Firebrand Milo Yiannopoulos, a former journalist at right-wing news site Breitbart who is a flamboyant poster boy of the alt-right movement, took a dig at "ugly" feminists by revising the famous first line of Pride And Prejudice on his controversial speaking tour. PHOTO: AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE

In November, a classicist named Donna Zuckerberg fired off an anguished piece about the alt-right's affection for her discipline and urged her fellow classicists to watch for lurking reactionary sentiments among would-be students of the ancient world.

The "Austen and the alt-right" discussion has been a touch less apocalyptic, perhaps because Austen herself is less directly political than Plato or Plutarch.

Instead it mostly has a self-reassuring air, in which Austen's academic admirers promise one another that no true Jane-ite could ever be anything except "rational, compassionate, liberal-minded".

Austen would not be my first example of how the past can threaten liberalism (the Greeks do offer rather clearer case studies), but she is not a terrible one either.

Only a certain kind of racist idiot would read her novels as a brief for white supremacy.

This is an idea with a powerful hold on the liberal mind - that great literature and art inoculate against illiberalism, that high culture properly interpreted offers a natural rebuke to all that is cruel, hierarchical and unwoke.

The idea that if US Vice-President Mike Pence really listened to Hamilton he would stand up to Mr Donald Trump... that former US president Barack Obama's humanistic reading list was somehow in deep tension with his drone strikes... that had his predecessor George W. Bush only discovered his talent for painting earlier he might not have invaded Iraq... these are conceits that can be rebutted (with Wagner or Celine or Nazis-at-the-symphony references) but always seem to rise again.

In part they endure because contemporary liberalism has substituted aestheticism for religion, dreaming of a universal empathy sealed through reading rather than revelation.

But they are also powerful because the last few generations have produced very few major artists or movements that are not liberal or left-wing.

The defeat and moral disgrace of fascism, the eclipse of traditional religion, the philistinism of American conservatism and the narrowing of post-1989 political debates have all helped forge a political monoculture in the arts and the academy, making the link between literature and liberalism seem natural, inevitable, permanent. But it isn't.

Even our age has a Naipaul, a Houellebecq, and meanwhile the whole deep human past is still there, and every age before ours is littered with aesthetic and philosophic visions that in no way conform to contemporary left-of-centre pieties.

So from the point of view of liberalism's present cultural position, its belief in aesthetic-political unity, the past can be a very dangerous place indeed. (Something that the campus-left understands quite well; hence its zeal to abolish canons and police certain forms of memory.)

And when a movement like the alt-right tries to appropriate that past for crankish, racist purposes, it's understandable that people would be jolted - not by the intellectual power of that appropriation, but simply by the reminder that there is nothing natural or inevitable about the way we think about aesthetics and politics today.

Austen would not be my first example of how the past can threaten liberalism (the Greeks do offer rather clearer case studies), but she is not a terrible one either.

Only a certain kind of racist idiot would read her novels as a brief for white supremacy.

But amid all the academic arguments about whether she was a Tory or a crypto-radical, much of her popular appeal clearly rests on the contrast between her social world and ours - the sense that hers was more romantic and more civilised, and that in becoming more liberal and egalitarian we have maybe also sunk a bit towards barbarism.

This feeling, common to many Jane-ites of my acquaintance, is a reactionary frisson, not a real step away from liberalism. Nor is the overt misogyny and racism of alt-right Austenites likely to woo many normal Austen readers down that particular rabbit hole.

Unless some day illiberalism comes as a Darcy rather than a Wickham.

NYTIMES

Read more here:
Pride And Prejudice as a tool for the alt-right - The Straits Times

Wikipedia

Some members of alt-right movement are hoisting up Jane Austen as an icon hoping to equate their vision of white nationalism with a beloved literary icon.

By comparing their movement not to the nightmare Germany of Hitler and Goebbels, but instead to the cozy England of Austen a much-beloved author with a centuries-long fandom and an unebbing academic following the alt-right normalizes itself in the eyes of ordinary people, writes Nicole M. Wright, an assistant professor of English at the University of Colorado, in a March 12 Chronicle of Higher Education article.

Wright noticed the trend after right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos referenced the famous first line of Pride and Prejudice, turning it into a dig at ugly feminists.

As a Victorian novelist might have put it, it is a truth universally acknowledged that an ugly woman is far more likely to be a feminist than a hot one, Yiannopoulos wrote.

Some alt-right writers use Austen as shorthand for defiance of the sexual revolution, according to Wright.

Andrew Anglin, the publisher of the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer website, evoked Austen while praising Taylor Swift and criticizing Miley Cyrus. Anglin dubbed Taylor Swift an Aryan goddess.

Its incredible really that shes surrounded by these filthy, perverted Jews, and yet she remains capable of exuding 1950s purity, femininity, and innocence, said Anglin. She is the anti-Miley. While Miley is out having gang-bangs with colored gentlemen, she is at home with her cat reading Jane Austen.

Reporting on the phenomenon, a New York Times writer observed, Austens work has been cited before in political debates.

In this case, some alt-right admirers who want to associate their ideology with a household name celebrate Austens novels as depicting a lost white world.

Email Sam Kestenbaum at kestenbaum@forward.com and follow him on Twitter at @skestenbaum

Continue reading here:
Jane Austen 'Alt-Right' Icon? The Forward - Forward

The "alt-right" - a movement of internet-savvy, far-right nationalists in the United States - likes to provoke. Its members gather online, exchanging extremist views on blogging platforms and message boards, sharing racist memes and trolling their ideological opponents on social media.

The latest alt-right controversy follows the group's apparent appropriation of the works of one of England's best loved novelists - Jane Austen.

Educated racists

Why the sudden neo-Nazi interest in literary classics, you might ask. It could have something to do with the fact that, in a bid to distinguish themselves from their white supremacist "skinhead" cousins, alt-righters likes to profess intellectual superiority.

"Skinheads, by and large, are low-information, low-IQ thugs driven by the thrill of violence and tribal hatred," Milo Yiannopoulos, former editor for alt-right platform Breitbart News, wrote in 2016. "The alternative right are a much smarter group of people - which perhaps suggests why the Left hates them so much. They're dangerously bright."

Milo Yiannopoulos described alt-right members as "dangerously bright"

The far-right's recently acquired taste for Austen was brought to light by Nicole M. Wright, an assistant professor of English at the University of Colorado. Her curiosity was piqued after hearing Yanniopoulos referencethe 18th-century author. When she then "ventured into the mire" of alt-right online hangouts, she found that Yiannopoulos was not alone in linking Austen's English idyll to a white supremacist utopia.

"To my surprise, invocations of Austen popped up in many alt-right online venues," Wright wrote in an article for The Chronicle of Higher Education. "I found that there are several variations of alt-right Jane Austen: 1) symbol of sexual purity; 2) standard-bearer of a vanished white traditional culture; and 3) exception that proves the rule of female inferiority."

One blogger wrote of the return to an "Austen-like" world with "traditional marriage la P&P [Pride and Prejudice]" being imposed in an "ethnostate."

Reading between the lines?

Devoney Looser, a professor of English at Arizona State University, believes it is possible to "misread" Austen's novels as being supportive of "traditional values"when it comes to politics and marriage.

"I suppose you could imagine her fiction as offering a form of escapism to a fantastical, supposedly uncomplicated past, when men were men, women were women, and everyone stayed in his own social class," Looser told DW.

"The reason I think that is a misreading of her fiction is that it completely ignores the ways in which she's a social critic who uses irony to expose the abuses by those in power."

Keira Knightley in the 2005 film adaptation of "Pride and Prejudice"

Members of the alt-right understand the importance of marketing. Why scare away potential sympathizers by quoting known Nazi ideologues, when they can point to the whitewashed, class-bound world of Austen's novels and say: See how things were in the good old days?

As Wright points out, with this kind of approach the alt-right can "normalize itself in the eyes of ordinary people."

Jane Austen's politics

Of course, how Austen herself intended her texts to be read is another question.

"Conservatives and progressives have been fighting over how to read Austen's fiction for a century and a half," saidLooser, who has been researching Austen's connection to politics for her upcoming book, "The Making of Jane Austen."

"Suffragettes were marching through the streets of London in support of women's rights, carrying a Jane Austen banner, and at the same time elite men in private clubs were arguing that her genius was in her describing a limited world that celebrated women's confinement to the domestic sphere. That's quite a political contrast."

Looser addsthat the earliest reference she has found to a "directly political fight over Austen" took place in 1872. "Members of the British parliament invoked Austen's name on opposite sides of the question of expanding women's right to vote," she explained.

"A conservative MP suggested Austen would never have wanted any such thing, because she was firmly on the side of traditional gender roles, but a liberal MP said surely Austen would be on the side of their era's learned women who sought to expand the franchise."

Austen was invoked by both sides of the women's suffrage debate

As Looser explains, there is also a "robust debate" surrounding Austen's fiction and its treatment of colonialism and slavery. "There I see more evidence of her as a liberal critic of those practices and institutions, not as a conservative apologist for them," she added.

Classics out of context

Of course, Austen is not the first author to be posthumously dragged into modern debates on race and gender. Classic works of literatureare regularly re-examined through a contemporary political lens, decades or even centuries after the era in which they werewritten.

Looser also points out that Austen wrote "fiction, not treatises."

"Even if this means the implications of her fiction are more politically slippery, I'm grateful for that," she added. "It's far more interesting to read fiction that provokes us to think about how and why we might think and feel, rather than telling us what we must think and feel."

"One mistake a few people make is in reading Austen's brilliant 'It is a truth universally acknowledged' line as a moral dictum," saidLooser. "It's not. It's a trenchant piece of social commentary and social criticism, when read in the context of the novel as a whole."

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White pride and prejudice: Why the alt-right has adopted Jane Austen - Deutsche Welle

Various journalists have helped form a narrative of sorts about the identity of this shadowy, boisterous alt-right movement. The alt-right is childish and vicious, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing other than the message-board histrionics of aggrieved young men in their parents basement.

From what I can see, this narrative does apply to a degree. Where various alt-right voices have articulated ethnocentrism, outright racism, misogyny, decadence, and a kind of juvenile hatred, among other vile stances, we should offer condemnation in no uncertain terms.

I do wonder, however, if the media has missed at least one true thing regarding the alt-right. The movement (if we can call it that) may often prove inchoate and even inarticulate, but behind the memes and coded language, there seems to be a massed sentiment. It is this: men feel left behind.

America is divided today on this matter and its import. Many folks, particularly those of a more progressive bent, see men as whining over lost cultural capital. Once, men had it good; now theyre forced to compete in an even playing field, and theyre falling on their faces. Sorry for the stacked deck, guyshow does it feel, losers?

Others see men struggling, observe them falling precipitously behind in earning college degrees and other achievements such as earnings for unmarrieds, watch them leaving their wives and children then violently lashing out, and begin to wonder if men need something besides elaborate gender theory or a dismissive long-form hot-take. Maybe men, particularly young men, need help.

This second group does not wish to cut men a blank check for their ill behavior. Actually, this groupa diverse and motley crew of religious groups, libertarians, and people who care about the future of civilizationwishes to hold men to a high standard. In other words, this is the group that most wants to hold men to account, that most takes their failings seriously. It is the group that dismisses mens concerns with gentle remonstrance, that accommodates men by dumbing things down for them, that unwittingly ends up doing them terrific harm.

Because it is not friendly to them, many men do not like postmodern society. They have been taught they have no innate call to leadership of home and church, and accordingly have lost the script for their lives. They have been encouraged to step back from being a breadwinner, and do not know what they are supposed to do with their lives.

They have been told that they talk too loudly and spread their legs too wide, and thus do not fit in with a feminized society. They may be the product of a divorced home, and may have grown up without an engaged father, so possess both pent-up rage and a disappearing instinct. They did nothing to choose their biological manliness, but are instructed to attend sensitivity training by virtue of it. They recognizerightlythat politically correct culture constrains free thought and free speech, and so they opt out from it.

But here is where the common narrative of the alt-right and related groups makes a major mistake. Men are disappearing, but they are not vanishing. They are moving out of the mainstream, and into the shadows.

Many men do not want this. Many men do not want to fall back. Many men want a challenge. They want to work. It is not in their nature to sit back; men on average have 1,000 percent more testosterone than women. Men know they are not superheroes, but they watch superhero movies because they wish in the quietness of their own lives to be a hero to someone, even just one wife and a few children. Men have a glory hunger that is unique and in many cases undeniable. For the right cause, men are not only willing to sacrifice, and even die, for the right cause they are glad to die.

But such discussion is not the lingua franca of our day. Young men have these desires coursing through their blood, but very few outlets in normal American life help them to understand such hard-wired drives. Those voices who do offer such a view face tremendous pushback and retributive hostility.

As a result, many younger men today do not know how to voice their instincts. This is at least partly why so many have adopted ironic signifiers for their frustrated ambitions and impolitic viewsfrogs, memes, and catchwords like fail. What young men cannot say in plain speech they say through an ironic graphic.

It is easy, and right, to identify where aspects of the alt-right are plainly misogynistic. But tying an entire people group to its worst excesses allows for the full-scale dismissal of a diverse array of concerns and experiences. This has happened with Donald Trumps voters, for example; according to many journalists, theyre all either racist or angry about the loss of the halcyon days. The media executes the same lazy move with the angry young men of the alt-right: theyre idiotic little boys. We have nothing to hear from them, nothing to learn, nothing to consider.

This is a foolish instinct. But it is not only that: it is a dangerous one. It leaves you susceptible to groundswells that sweep over a culture seemingly without warningthe Tea Party, Brexit, Trump. Many folks on the progressive side assume that because they have won the college campus and now dominate the urban centers of power that the cultural game is over.

But what looks like a fortress-grade progressive order is really an unstable element, as we have seen several times over. The ideological insurgency will never have Ivy League degrees to award, coveted Beltway bylines to dole out, or global-power conference invites to issue. But the insurgency is finding its audience, and the audience is destabilizing and even remaking the public-square, and all without central coordination or control of leading cultural institutions.

You thought Bane was a movie character; turns out hes a political avatar.

I do not write this analysis as one who supports these developments generally or the alt-right specifically. As with every shadow venture of young and aimless men, they trouble me deeply. Where young men lurk in corners and whisper in the dark, we should always be concerned, whether its in your leafy suburban neighborhood or on a deep-web message-board.

We can debate the extent to which the perceptions of angry young men are reality. What we cannot debateif we care about them, that isis that many men are angry, flailing, and dangerously volatile today.

We will not find an easy solution to this troubled situation. The public square is roiled and shows no signs of calming down soon. True, restoring the family will greatly aid in the nurture and care of young men. Sure, strengthening the economy and putting men to work will help. Yes, tabling the speech codes and thought codes of the secular academy will bring some men back to the table.

But men need a deeper solution than this. They need something more than a message-board movement to join. They need a call to maturity, to repentance, to greatness, to leadership, to courage, to self-sacrifice on behalf of women and children. They need a hero: not a political performance-artist, but a true hero, a savior who, unlike a fallen culture, leaves no repentant manor womanbehind.

Owen Strachan is the author of The Colson Way: Loving Your Neighbor and Living with Faith in a Hostile World (Thomas Nelson). He is a professor at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.

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The Alt-Right Is What Happens When Society Marginalizes Men - The Federalist