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The steelman is that the “alt-right” were basically conservatives who were very loudly anti-immigration and anti-pc in ways that the establishment Republican Party was not (e.g. I remember people on /r/TheMotte itself lamenting that no party would ever reduce immigration).
It is clear that being loud and proud that “we don’t care if the left calls us bigots, stopping immigration and keeping trans advocates away from our kids is super important” is now very prevalent at the national stage in a way that it wasn’t in 2015, and that Trump demonstrated a clear departure from historical norms. Whether you want to call that “the rise of the alt right” or not is a narrative question more than a factual one.
Yes I agree with this basic definition.
I was a member of different online groups that either directly named themselves 'alt-right' or something adjacent, so I do believe the 'alt-right' was some kind of community.
People I talked to in person had the following background : former libertarian, former communist, pagan, religious in some really quirky denomination, atheist, former or current alcoholic/drug addict, rich, poor, middle-class, college students, divorcees...
I would say one of the biggest commonalities was that they wanted to be able to joke about certain things, say the n-word, and have fun with people they have stuff in common with.
I would explain the emergence of the alt-right with the following coincidences:
-as the internet expanded to everybody and their grandma, the government (the feds, the glowies) and their media arm took notice. There was gamergate, and the young men who only wanted some gamer time start getting targeted as if they were guests on a late-night show. Jokes, innocuous comments, banal opinions start getting removed, accounts get banned, anti-harassment, anti-humor TOS established...
The last safe space for juvenile white fun is under siege. From edgy users to thought criminals, an entire ecosystem of anti-corporate, anti-government memes blooms.
-video media became ubiquitous. While FBI crime statistics may not convince somebody, the repeated exposure to the audiovisual facts of a white boy beaten up in a school bus in a hundred variations is sufficient to help even the most sheltered individual question the plot of the average Hollywood movie.
-between terrorist attacks and huge waves of immigrants from Africa in Western Europe, in the US anti-police riots, drug and homelessness epidemics, obscure far-right writers appeared as prophets, with for example the Camp of the Saints coming back as a best-seller.
While this massive energy was converted into the physical form of Trump and the victory of 2016, it ultimately did not deliver a phantasmagoric 4th Reich. Those who perhaps wanted to overturn the 2020 elections inadvertently forgot their guns at home when they toured the Capitol.
Now, the hardest of white supremists are probably rethinking their ambitions, hoping perhaps for a slice of territory post-civil war. The content creators that persist have mostly evaporated into grifters, as the serious ones have been so thoroughly deplatformed that they faded into obscurity, or were simply jailed or sued to bankruptcy, or perhaps they just moved on, with no practical path to political action.
Both sides have learned a lot from this. The government/media hydra have refined their control over basic infrastructure. Right-wingers are learning to go underground, to play the game and take any small win before going all-in, and perhaps we will see more Gaza-style tactics in the future, who knows.
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