The alt-right movement, relatively minuscule but outsized in the media coverage it has received before and since Donald Trump’s election, is the latest iteration of America’s dalliance with identity politics. So writes WEEKLY STANDARD senior editor Christopher Caldwell in the New York Times. Here’s an excerpt:
Mr. Tait, who hopes to start an alt-right movement in England, said: “What you’re seeing now is young people who have never been affiliated to any kind of politics, ever. They don’t remember what it was like before the war or in the 1960s or even in the 1980s. Their motivation isn’t a sense of loss.” That is what is “alt” about the alt-right. These people are not nostalgic. They may not even be conservatives. For them, multiculturalism is not an affront to traditional notions of society, as it would have been in the Reagan era. It is society. The Vanderbilt University political scientist Carol Swain was among the first to describe the contours of this worldview. In her 2002 book, “The New White Nationalism in America,” she noted that young people were quick to identify double standards, and that they sometimes did so in the name of legitimate policy concerns. “I knew that identity would come next,” she recalled. “It had to come. All they had to do was copy what they were hearing. The multiculturalist arguments you hear on every campus — those work for whites, too.” Mr. Spencer, asked in an interview how he would respond to the accusation that his group was practicing identity politics in the manner of blacks and Hispanics, replied: “I’d say: ‘Yuh. You’re right.’ ”
Be sure to read the whole piece here.
