Alt-right

The alt-right was a loose online movement, active in the United States from roughly 2010 to 2018, that organised politics around racial identity. Mainstream conservatives rejected it, and the rejection was not tactical. The movement’s founding premise — that a nation is a biological rather than a civic and cultural inheritance — contradicts the conservative tradition it claimed to be replacing.

Understanding the alt-right matters for conservatives because the movement was a rival, not a wing. It recruited by telling young men that conservatism had failed, and its collapse after the Charlottesville rally of August 2017 came from the same source as its brief growth: it had no institutions, no doctrine of restraint, and no account of the common good.

Key Takeaways

• The alt-right defined the political community by race, in direct opposition to the conservative account of nationhood as law, language, faith, and inherited custom.
• Richard Spencer put the phrase into circulation in 2008, and the movement grew through anonymous message boards rather than parties, churches, or publications.
• The Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville on 11–12 August 2017, in which Heather Heyer was killed, destroyed the movement’s public standing.
• American conservative institutions, including National Review and the editorial line established by William F. Buckley Jr., had already ruled out racial politics decades earlier.
• Critics on the left argue that the boundary conservatives draw here is porous, and that mainstream rhetoric on immigration supplied the movement’s recruiting ground.

History And Context

The term entered circulation in November 2008, when Richard Spencer used “alternative right” as the title of a talk by the paleoconservative philosopher Paul Gottfried at the H. L. Mencken Club, and then as the name of a website he launched in 2010. Spencer founded the National Policy Institute journal Radix in 2012. The intellectual sources he cited — Julius Evola, Francis Parker Yockey, the French Nouvelle Droite of Alain de Benoist — sit outside Anglo-American conservatism entirely.

Growth came through anonymous internet forums rather than organisations: 4chan’s politics board, sections of Reddit, and Twitter accounts using cartoon avatars. The 2014 Gamergate controversy supplied a recruiting pool of young men already organised around grievance towards media institutions. The 2016 presidential campaign gave the movement visibility it had not earned by numbers, and Hillary Clinton’s speech in Reno on 25 August 2016 naming the alt-right raised its profile further.

Two events ended it. On 19 November 2016, Spencer closed a Washington conference by shouting “Hail Trump” while members of his audience returned Nazi salutes; the footage circulated within hours. Then on 11–12 August 2017, the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, brought marchers with torches through the University of Virginia campus chanting racial and antisemitic slogans; the following day a participant drove a car into counter-protesters, killing Heather Heyer and injuring nineteen. Deplatforming, civil litigation, and the Sines v. Kessler verdict of November 2021, which awarded more than twenty-six million dollars against organisers, dismantled what remained.⁴

The conservative boundary predated all of this. William F. Buckley Jr. removed the John Birch Society from respectable conservatism through National Review in 1962 and 1965, and expelled the antisemitic and racialist writers around Willis Carto from the movement’s institutions. The magazine’s opposition to the alt-right in 2016, including its symposium against the candidate the movement favoured, followed that established practice.

The Conservative Position

Conservatives reject racial nationalism on grounds internal to their own tradition. Edmund Burke described the nation as a partnership between the dead, the living, and the yet unborn — a partnership in an inheritance of law, religion, manners, and language.¹ None of these is transmitted biologically. A person adopts them, and the possibility of adoption is what allows immigration to be assimilative rather than fatal.

The second objection concerns the moral status of the person. Conservative political thought in the West rests on the claim that persons possess a dignity antecedent to the state, sourced in the Christian and natural-law traditions. Racial collectivism denies exactly this, subordinating the individual to a category he did not choose and cannot leave. Russell Kirk’s account of conservatism as the defence of a moral order grounded in transcendent norms leaves no space for a politics organised around ancestry.²

The third objection is practical. The alt-right was revolutionary in method: it sought rupture, treated existing institutions as illegitimate, and cultivated transgression as a recruiting device. Michael Oakeshott’s description of conservatism as a disposition to prefer the familiar to the unknown and the tried to the untried describes the opposite temperament.³ A movement that wants to tear down the constitutional order is not conservative regardless of the direction it faces.

Differing Positions

Left-wing critics argue that the conservative disavowal is late and incomplete. They point to the Southern Strategy of the late 1960s, to decades of immigration rhetoric, and to the argument that populist conservative media normalised grievances the alt-right then harvested. On this account the boundary is real but was drawn only after the movement became a liability.

A second criticism, from centrist analysts of radicalisation, holds that the label obscures more than it reveals. Grouping trolls, white nationalists, anti-feminist forums, and disaffected libertarians under one term inflated the movement’s apparent size and gave scattered participants a shared identity they had lacked. Some researchers argue the coverage of 2016 and 2017 did organising work the participants could not do themselves.

A third argument, from figures such as Paul Gottfried who supplied part of the movement’s early vocabulary, is that the alt-right was a symptom of the American right’s failure to address immigration, deindustrialisation, and campus speech restrictions through ordinary politics. On this reading the movement was a consequence of unrepresented opinion, and suppression without argument leaves the underlying conditions intact.

References

1. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (J. Dodsley, 1790).
2. Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Santayana (Henry Regnery, 1953).
3. Michael Oakeshott, “On Being Conservative,” in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (Methuen, 1962).
4. Sines v. Kessler, No. 3:17-cv-00072 (W.D. Va., verdict returned 23 November 2021).