The media are determined to botch the use of the term “alt-right” just as the bungled the term “neo-conservative.”
Though the two schools are diametrically opposed philosophically, the parallel comes from the fact that when both terms became trendy, the media began applying them in broad and absurd ways that only reveal their own ignorance.
Ever since President Trump’s election, the media have focused on the rise of the so-called alt-right, a lose collection of fringe figures that rejected establishment conservatism in favor of a populism that ranged from attacks on PC culture to uglier expressions of racism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, and white supremacy.
For many in the media, after Trump won and the movement received more attention, it just came to be used as a synonym for “very conservative.”
On Thursday, the absurdly broad application of “alt-right” reached new heights when an Economist headline referred to Ben Shapiro as “the alt-right sage.”
This is, of course, completely ridiculous. Shapiro is a proponent of traditional conservatism — smaller government, lower taxes, gun rights, stricter adherence to the constitution, protection of the unborn, and so on. As an Orthodox Jew, he has also been subject to a significant amount of anti-Semitic venom from the alt-right for his criticisms of Trump. In fact, a report from the Anti-Defamation League that focused on anti-Semitic Twitter attacks on Jewish journalists in 2016, particularly by the alt-right, found that Shapiro — by far — was the leading victim of such harassment.
When I saw the headline, it immediately reminded me of the abuse of the term “neo-conservative,” especially during the Bush era.
Neo-conservatives referred to a more specific group on the right — former Democrats who recoiled from the leftward drift of the party in the 1960s and 1970s. They were alienated by the campus radicalism, supported a more adversarial posture toward the Soviet Union, and started to see government programs and mismanagement as leading causes of urban decay. After Sept. 11, they became influential because the administration embraced their interventionist foreign policy and beliefs in democracy promotion. Because neo-conservatives were leading proponents of the Iraq War and that was the dominant debate of the Bush era, the term “neo-con” was slapped on everybody who supported the war, had a hawkish foreign policy, or who was just considered really conservative. In some corners, the term “neo-con” became used as an anti-Semitic smear of Jewish conservatives.
The term was so widely used that even national security adviser John Bolton is often described as a “neo-conservative” to this day because he has a hawkish foreign policy. However, anybody who understood anything about Bolton or conservatism would know that he actually volunteered for Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign while still in high school, and that he was not a supporter of democracy promotion, but instead always argues in terms of national interest. There is nothing “neo” in his conservatism.
Having spent the last two decades misapplying the term “neo-conservative,” it seems as if the media is going down the same road with “alt-right.”
UPDATE: The Economist has subsequently changed the headline of the piece, which now refers to Shapiro as a “radical conservative.” The following editor’s note was added to the article, “Editor’s note: This article has been changed. A previous version mistakenly described Mr Shapiro as an “alt-right sage” and “a pop idol of the alt right”. In fact, he has been strongly critical of the alt-right movement. We apologise.”
Here is a screencap of the original headline.
