“Trump”—What Does the Name Signify? or, Protofascism and the Alt-Right

Abstract

This article examines the rise of the alt-right and Donald Trump’s successful campaign for president of the United States in the context of three overlapping contradictions: that of subversion in postmodern culture and politics, that between the democratic and commercial logics of the media, and that of the failure of the Left in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. The article looks at the rise of “Trumpism” and the new brand of white nationalist and misogynistic culture of the so-called alt-right in its historical context to show how it is consistent with but also distinguished from previous right-wing ideologies. More generally, the three contradictions presented here are proposed as explanations for understanding the mainstreaming of the alt-right in contemporary politics and culture.

The discourse of the US alt-right online – a case study of the Traditionalist Worker Party blog

“…This was frequent in the TWP blog, which often described its prototypical members as: heterosexual + white + male (see Section 5.4). This clustering coincides with a number of the socio-demographics ascribed to the US 'alt-right', whose members reject mainstream conservatism and neoliberalism and who seek to dismantle the perceived Republic and Democratic establishment in the US (Flisfeder, 2018). Across these prototypical identity traits, in-group's victimhood once again ran strongly in the corpus, as evidenced by the collocates of the salient word 'white': guilt, genocide and advocates (see Examples 10 and 11).…”

Memes, Misinformation, and Political Meaning

“…Perhaps partly because of this communal aspect, memes have proven to be effective vehicles for misinformation and disinformation. Numerous studies have shown how both state and nonstate actors have weaponized memes to spread hate, propaganda, and false information about political opponents (see, e.g., Bogarts and Fielitz 2018;Flisfeder 2018). Particularly well-known examples include those spread by the Russian-sponsored Internet Research Agency and the Reddit message board, r/The_Donald, which helped generate and "test" not only numerous memes favorable to Donald Trump, but also bolstered influential conspiracy theories like Pizzagate (Donovan 2019).…”

Political Memes and Fake News Discourses on Instagram

“…Yet, memes have also been lately weaponized, hijacked, and exploited by hate groups, state-run trolls, and extremists to support their political agenda. Numerous studies examined this aspect of memes' use mostly by alt-right trolls and groups (Bay, 2018;Bogerts & Fielitz, 2018;Dematagoda, 2017;Flisfeder, 2018;Hannan, 2018;Harmer & Lumsden, 2019;Heikkilä, 2017;Woolley & Guilbeault, 2017). For instance, Russian trolls actively used memes to target young people, mostly showing Western leaders as fascists, while Ukrainian soldiers were presented as Nazis with fake photoshopped images (Aro, 2016, p. 125).…”