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I recall the term being thrown around in survey of niche articles in right wing publications circa 2014-2015 to refer to a concept vaguely like "Right Wing but Irreligious," a conservatism that did not center evangelical Christianity, with a listed cluster of guys I had never heard of who argued different versions with the similar theme of right wing but leaving lame-o evangelicals behind. This included both Richard Spencer types who wanted to refocus conservatism around the white race (or hatred of the Blacks), and Rand-ian objectivists. I was never under the impression this was much of a movement, just an intellectual argument that was somewhere in the vague fever swamps that lay to the right of The American Conservative to which I subscribed at the time. Guys like Rod Dreher and Daniel Larison would mention the concept, and associated figured and publications, as a line item. My impression was that the concept was largely aesthetic, about appropriating a disrespectful anti-authoritarian, "alt," hipster aesthetics rather than lame wal-mart corporatism, punk rock not christian rock, etc.
It wasn't until the Clinton campaign elevated that discourse that I started to have any real familiarity with it, and what it refers to. I don't know to what extent we can trace any real influence the "alt right before it was cool" had on the broader alt-right movement of today.
I recall attending a conference on "agile" corporate structures at a business school, and in the typical form of these lectures by professors I half remember exactly one line and little else. He talked about how as a young college student in Europe in the 70s, he was involved in campus marxism, and the goal for everyone at the time was to be a "number" who got arrested or infamous for some act of protest: the Munich Six, the Birmingham Nine, etc. And he talked about how at the time, he could tell the difference between like nine kinds of communist, and could clock someone within seconds of meeting based on small aesthetic cues or minor vocabulary choices. He could tell a Marxist from a Leninist from a Stalinist from a Maoist from a Trotskyite from an anarchist from a third-world-ist etc. But for the rest of the world these differences were unimportant: those are all communists.
In the same way, those on the Right can tell the difference between fourteen kinds of right-winger, and the natural tendency is to giggle at normies who confuse Richard Spencer with Curtis Yarvin, or think either of them have anything in common with Mitt Romney. But for normies their coding isn't that strong. So the "rise of the alt right" has less to do with whether anyone in particular has so many followers, but more to do with alt right rising as a blanket classification for every right winger in skinny jeans.
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