Is Alt-Right the New Black?

In her 2017 book Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right Angela Nagle argues that the strictures of left-wing internet culture would generate a counter-cultural response. This worry is now going mainstream, as evidenced by James Pogue’s essay Free Radicals, arguing the New Right is the new cool movement for young and hip intellectuals. Emily Jane Fox and Joe Hagan echo this view that the right is becoming cool, writing that “Conservative Guys are Going to Get all the Girls.” In a more analytic vein, N.S. Lyons argues that 
“The youth of today, bombarded 24/7 as they are with an official ideological Message that is suffocatingly all-pervasive and repeated with a rhythm as subtle as a jack-hammer, and finding themselves lost with an unfulfilled human yearning for normality and truth in a society saturated with thermobaric levels of gaslighting, just might do the natural thing and rebel. And if they do, they’re likely to rebel in the only direction they now can: by becoming more traditionalist and conservative.” 

There is no doubt that many young people are pushing back against the zealous piety of left-wing institutions and normalization. My students are curious and exuberant, and they want to hear dissident opinions. This doesn’t mean they become conservatives. But it does mean that they are more open to traditionally liberal and even conservative views that have, for them, a counter-cultural patina of being cool. Lyons writes: 

For at least a century, the Left has held a firm monopoly on “transgressive chic,” profitably waging a countercultural guerilla war against society’s hegemonic status quo. For the Right to capture some of the Left’s youthful energy and rebellious cachet would represent a tectonic cultural and political shift. We shouldn’t be shocked if it happens.

Few things are more natural for young people than to push back against the strictures and norms of their day, even if only to stand out a little from the crowd and assert their independence. A counterculture forms as a reaction against an official or dominant culture—and today, it is the woke neoliberal Left that occupies this position in America’s cultural, educational, technological, corporate, and bureaucratic power centers. In this culture, celebration of ritualized, old forms of transgression is not only permitted, but practically mandatory. Dissent against state-sponsored transgression, however, is now transgressive. All of what was once revolutionary is now a new orthodoxy, with conformity enforced by censorship, scientistic obscurantism, and eager witch-hunters (early-middle-aged, zealously dour, tight-lipped frown, NPR tote bag, rainbow “Coexist” bumper sticker, pronouns in email signature—we all know the uniform).