The European Intellectual Origins of the Alt-Right

Abstract

This article places the intellectual inspirations behind the white nationalism of the Alt-Right in a Transatlantic context. It does so by first focusing on the late 1960s and the rise of New Right Movements throughout Europe that sprang up as a response to the New Left, which involved a hatred of liberal internationalism and multiculturalism, a thorough critique of global capitalism, and, in one way or another, promoted an identitarian form of race-based politics. The pivotal New Right figure here is Alain de Benoist whose key ideas this paper will summarize. The paper then shows how Benoist's thought made its way into United States by the 1990s. I will conclude by unpacking a strange argument that it was in fact cultural Marxists, and specifically European émigré thinkers fleeing the Nazis, who provided a model for how the alt-Right could pursue a cultural revolution that would overthrow liberal understandings of race and identity

The Alt-Right’s continuation of the ‘cultural war’ in Euro-American societies

“…Metapolitics is increasingly a concern for the radical right on both sides of the Atlantic. It might be a metapolitical truism to suggest that without the ND we would not have witnessed the emergence of the Alt-Right (Steinmetz-Jackson, 2019: 255–66). ‘A growing number of rightwing intellectuals, from Richard Spencer in the United States to Aleksandr Dugin in Russia, have acknowledged the significant influence the so-called French Nouvelle Droite has played in influencing their thinking about collective identities and cultural hegemony’, insisted one writer in his study on the European intellectual origins of the Alt-Right (Steinmetz-Jackson, 2019: 257).…”

“…It might be a metapolitical truism to suggest that without the ND we would not have witnessed the emergence of the Alt-Right (Steinmetz-Jackson, 2019: 255–66). ‘A growing number of rightwing intellectuals, from Richard Spencer in the United States to Aleksandr Dugin in Russia, have acknowledged the significant influence the so-called French Nouvelle Droite has played in influencing their thinking about collective identities and cultural hegemony’, insisted one writer in his study on the European intellectual origins of the Alt-Right (Steinmetz-Jackson, 2019: 257). In short, the Alt-Right’s metapolitical orientation and focus on white Europeans as the primordial source of belonging was presaged by de Benoist’s fixation on the defense of the ‘homeland’ of Indo-European civilization as far back as 1966 (de Benoist, 2016).…”

“…Greg Johnson, one of the leading Alt-Right thinkers, has proclaimed his indebtedness to the ND: ‘We do not have any thinkers of the caliber of Alain de Benoist, Guillaume Faye, and many others. We are deeply indebted to the decades of work they have done’ (Steinmetz-Jackson, 2019: 258).…”

“…Ignoring the ND’s rejection of administrative equality, multiculturalism, and immigration, as well as its desire to create ethnically homogeneous societies, Telos editor Paul Piccone falsely claimed that the ND was advancing 95 percent of the New Left’s ideals (Piccone, 1993–4: 3–22). Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins claims that the ND’s influence extended beyond dissident sectors of the New Left to a pan-European New Right, Spencer’s Alt-Right, and Traditionalists such as Steve Bannon (former White House Chief Strategist and Senior Counselor to President Trump), and Dugin (Steinmetz-Jackson, 2019: 257).…”

“…Daniel Steinmetz-Jackson underscores the transnational metapolitical impact of the ND and their framing of worldwide ethnopluralism as a non-racist or anti-racist response to capitalist and state homogenization: ‘We are not racist, so the argument goes, but want to preserve our French cultural values. It is the same type of argument Richard Spencer and Greg Johnson make when marching to defend the white race against immigrants and the homogenizing liberal values they say threaten it’ (Steinmetz-Jackson, 2019: 259).…”