Anomic Plague and the Alt Right

I remember the evening last fall spent in conversation with one history professor and several student friends. The professor, a very centrist liberal, was proposing the standard liberal explanation for the alt right: racism pure and simple, an argument that’s been summoned into service on so many occasions of late that it’s as if there could be no other cause of injustice and hatred, as if all would be well if only there were a racially fair distribution of the societal pie. The poison pie.

The students took exception to the racial argument. They were close enough in circumstances and age to know that some of those attracted to the alt right were not particularly racist or at least not primarily motivated by racial resentment and hatred. They were instead suffering from anomie, disorienting loneliness, a condition common enough in modern society but made worse by their generation’s absorption in social media. If those young people encountered some voice that spoke to them directly and boldly, that seemed to care in some sense about who and what they “essentially” are, that could win their allegiance. This portrayal of an anomic youth that finds adherence to any cause infinitely preferable to bleak isolation struck a responsive chord with everyone present.

Erik Lynch who was part of that conversation confirms and adds these thoughts: “Yes, I think this is an accurate representation of our conversation. The only point of clarification I would make is that, while anomie is what draws people to the alt right—not racism—racism, antisemitism, sexism, etc., almost invariably develop as they become enmeshed in these communities. The anomic youth are not typically drawn to the cause like Klansman, 3%-ers, and other white supremacist and fascist groups. They are drawn to a cause, to some community. At present the radical right is the only political position effectively offering them fraternity and belonging. The anomic youth desire “some voice that speaks to them directly and boldly.” Whose voice it is and what it is saying are quite secondary to being addressed. The anomic youth find people who would care about them and bring them into the fold. If the price is the exclusion of minorities or Jews or women, so be it. But these were never primary incentives of their political alignment, which is what sets the alt right apart from other wignat, fascist, or reactionary groups.

This understanding is an invigorating one, because those lost to the alt right are not irredeemable. The online alt right, centered around /pol/ on 4chan, was at its peak in 2015-2016 during the headiest days of the European Migrant Crisis and the French terror attacks, but it fell off considerably after the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville in 2017. I have many personal friends who, in varying degrees, bought into the alt right in this period, all for reasons of anomie, and all of whom have since renounced their association with those beliefs, having found genuine fellowship in more positive communities. The alt right offers a way out of alienation, but it comes with the terrible price of social ostracism, which serves to push initiates further into the only community that will give them the time of day. From the perspective of the alt right fellow traveler, the caricaturistic tales of capricious “Social Justice Warriors” bearing down to oppress and destroy the straight white men in whose company he finds himself would not appear at all exaggerated.

In recognizing that anomie, not racism, is the starting point for the descent into the alt right, we see that we can offer a positive alternative to the alt right by creating and sustaining communities of solidarity, genuine friendship and fraternity, communities of the Left that (in a most unleftist way) are embracing and inclusive, not sectarian and puritanical. We need to draw people in. Huge masses of people are begging to be addressed, to be recognized, but at the moment only the alt right is making a serious effort to do this. Though it is like asking a fish not to swim, the Left needs to renounce its sectarianism and its exacting tests of purity and to live up to its own ideals of solidarity. Fraternité is just as important as Liberté and Égalité, and this is a whole one-third of our Revolutionary heritage that we have surrendered to the Right. We know our positions to be superior, rationally and morally, to those of the Right and the Center. We know that there is a huge segment of the population crying out to be heard. We have a duty to set aside our preening sense of superiority over the anomic masses and to draw them in. Many, if not most, would heed our call.

Signed,
Andrew (Weeks) and Erik (Lynch)