“Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate – How the Alt-Right is Warping the American Imagination,” by Alexandra Minna Stern, 2020
This is an analysis of the modern U.S. alt-right in its variations. It does not focus on hard-core Nazis, Klan or street-fighters, which many in the alt-right have tried to distance themselves from, as well as the religious right which seem not to be in her definition of alt-right. It ignores class, economics and anti-communism, which is typical of academic liberals. It details the various cultural strategies and divisions within the alt-right, trying to create a broad picture of the continuum between what she calls ‘alt-light’, alt-right, white nationalism and white supremacy.
Because of this Stern can reasonably say that characterizing everyone as a ‘fascist’ is inaccurate, much like the ignoramuses on the right who call everyone to their left a ‘communist.’ She studied these fearful reactionaries and anti-Covid mask snowflakes so we don’t have to. But as her sub-head reads, she seems not to understand that the alt-right is merely another historical iteration in a long, long ‘American’ tradition. The American imagination has always been warped.
As pointed out in the essay below, The Real Red Pill,” red-pilling is an alt-right cliché stolen from a leftist film. To them it means seeing the true reality of white identity and gender roles. She thinks the ultimate goal for the alt-right is a 90% white ethnostate, harking back to ‘year zero’, 1965, when 90% of the U.S. population was ostensibly ‘white.’ 1965 is the year the Hart-Celler immigration act passed, allowing increased migration from non-European areas.
Stern, like so many liberals, maintains the idea in her language that there are multiple races, not one human race. This is an idea also promoted by the alt-right as part of their view of biological essentialism – natural talents built genetically into each ‘race.’ As part of this the alt-right is reviving discredited 1970s ‘scientific’ racists like Hernstein, Shockley and Jensen, who claimed different ‘races’ had different IQs. Of course intelligence has nine aspects, not one, not to mention the fact that IQ tests are deeply flawed. The alt-right is also obsessed with eugenics, much as U.S. racists in the early 1900s were, including Theodore Roosevelt. They were prominent until the advent of the Nazis. This kind of racism justifies capitalist class stratification, which is its prime role, unbeknownst to either Stern or the alt-right.
Stern discusses the Proud Boys, who she first portrays as a bunch of mild-mannered anti-feminists open to all ethnicities. But they blocked with Patriot Prayer and came to Charlottesville, along with being indicted in New York. She dwells on Identity Europa, which is based on upscale frat boys who want to mainstream white identity politics. They are well-dressed and ‘in shape’ yuppie white nationalists. In her discussion she covers websites like the the Daily Stormer, Counter-Currents, American Renaissance and VDARE and others, along with less well-known racist groups.
Stern claims that the basic difference between Republicans and Democrats in 2016 was over skin color and ethnicity, ignoring any economic issue. Stern never mentions the existence of capitalism hovering over all of this, like a professorial goldfish that can’t see the water or its own bowl.
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| Well-Dressed All Male Alt-Right Racists |
As a feminist Stern spends a lot of time on various right-wing women on the internet who yearn for many, many white babies to support the ‘white race’ and being supportive handmaids of ‘their man.’ As Stern puts it, they “check their gender equality at the door.” They promote home-schooling and will probably be unable to work outside the home because of the baby flood. According to Stern, much of the alt-right came out of the 1990s internet manosphere of men’s rights activism and trolls, which denigrated women and feared transsexuals. She estimates that 90% of alt-right activity happens on the internet in sites like 4chan, 8chan/8kun, Gab and Bitchute, which tells you how abstract it is so far.
FISSURES
Like the left, the right also has divisions. Most alt-right groups are all male or nearly so. So there are splits in the alt-right between misogynists who hate women, love male solidarity and even verge on homosexuality and those who understand that the white Cascadian ethnostate or even national white people need breeders, so they caution against putting women down too much. Similar splits exist over the few homosexuals and Jews in the U.S. alt-right, who are largely castigated by most.
Some white identitarians want versions of white supremacy -– Jews to Israel, Mexicans back to Mexico, Asians and Africans to return ‘home,’ etc. What they will do with indigenous Americans is murky - maybe 'allow' them to go to Canada. Others advocate ‘separate but equal’ – a white ethnostate in the northwest area of the U.S. in Idaho, Washington and Oregon. It would be 90% white, with controls for ‘character’ and sexual orientation, allowing a few honorary ‘non-white’ people in. Even some ‘white’ people would not be qualified in this new Confederacy. Although she does not mention it, the only way this would be accomplished is ethnic cleansing. This conception includes a black belt nation in parts of the south and Aztlan in the southwest, as part of an ‘ethnostate’ skin color balkanization of the whole U.S. Sort of like 'Partition' in India and Pakistan.
However the main split on the right is between the hard-right killers – Nazi, Klan, Atomwaffen, Rise Above Movement, etc. – and the alt-right figures trying to mainline their ideas without Klan hoods or swastikas. According to Stern, Charlottesville set the whole movement back, as well as reducing the role of Richard Spencer, who invited the many factions to ‘unite the right.’
INTELECTUAL ROOTS
Stern’s principal interest is teasing out the intellectual roots of alt-right concepts. One key issue is political time, which the alt-right sees as circular and cyclic, not linear as do liberals or a sort of spiral/zigzag determined by class struggle and dialectics, as do Marxists. While most refrain from a return to deep ecology primitivism, they desire an ‘archeo-future’ similar to the science-fiction story Dune, which combines feudal social relations with magical high technology. Of course, they have no clue over the connection between high-tech labor and an advanced social structure. In that sense they are against modernism without an economic analysis. Like Trump, they want to jam open the “Overton window” of narrow political possibilities, and accelerate every reactionary policy and law they can in the time they have.
The pressure of a supposed disappearing ‘white’ majority in the U.S. by 2050 makes them sweat, hysterically claiming this demographic shift means ‘white genocide.’ So linear time is not on their side. In a way they want a simple world of clear sexual roles and geographic skin color sorting, absent any consideration of economics – the opposite of the increasingly complex world they face. They are irrationally fearful of leftists, as their multiple panics over ‘antifa’ attest. Their bet on vast rural areas is also against the trends of modern capitalism, which concentrates people in urban areas and mechanizes agriculture.
Stern points out that many of the higher-end ideas of the alt-right in the U.S. come from elite ultra-right French intellectuals and even borrowings from European Marxists – like the Gramscian, Frankfurt and Badiouist concepts of cultural struggle, wars of position and hegemony. The right calls this metapolitics. Alt-right metapolitics avoids the concept of class, as do liberals and black nationalists. Yet the groups inspired by rightist European theories look down on the working-class ‘knuckle-draggers’ in their own movement. At some point it might become a replay of the German black shirts and brown shirts… another fissure to keep an eye on.
(The ultra-right is much weaker than they think and, due to support in high places, prone to violent adventurism. Be prepared!)
Other prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box upper left: “No Fascist USA,” “Fighting Fascism”(Zetkin); “The Ultra-Right,” “It Can’t Happen Here”(Lewis); “Anti-Fascism, Sports, Sobriety,” “The Coming Storm,” “A Fascist Edge,” “Clandestine Occupations,” “Charlottesville, Virginia,” “The Real Red Pill.”
And I bought it at May Day Books!
Red Frog
October 20,
2020
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