Is Masculinism an Ideology?: The Case of the Alt-Right

• In Event: Sources of Restraint in the American Republic

Abstract

What is the Alt-Right? Why are its most visible members nearly all young, white, and male? What kind of men are these—and what do they believe? New ideologies arise rarely. Their markers, often profuse and seemingly contradictory, render old categorizations inadequate. When the Alt-Right came to public attention from late 2015, public figures, media commentators, and the general public found themselves grasping for adequate terminology. They found no help among scholars. Despite being in operation in various guises, both online and in print, for nearly a decade, Alt-Right figures had prompted virtually no published scholarship of any kind. Why were scholars caught off-guard? Granted, the movement may have seemed utterly marginal, confined to small websites, online discussion forums, social media accounts, and sparsely-attended conferences. But there is much to be said for the case Roger Griffin, a leading scholar of fascism and the radical right, has advanced for the sober study of precisely such ‘groupuscules.’ Responding to Griffin, a prominent scholar of extremism declared, ‘All groupuscules should probably appear somewhere on our radar screens.’ If so, the lack of scholarly output about the Alt-Right must be seen as a scholarly failure.

Setting aside characterizations produced by journalists and politicians, what may scholars find when delving directly into movement discourses? Here, a wide number of categorizations might seem fitting: white nationalist, white supremacist, populist, racist, eugenicist, Nordicist, Aryanist, paternalist, patriarchalist, heterosexist, sexist, ageist, ableist, neo-fascist, neo-Nazi, ethnocentric, Eurocentric, anti-American, anti-democratic, anti-capitalist, anti-conservative, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, anti-refugee, anti-pornography, anti-feminist, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, fatphobic, xenophobic, and Islamophobic. Depending upon the particular figure or platform one observes, all such characterizations have some degree of truth to them. And the list above is no doubt incomplete. Such terms are even accepted by some as self-descriptors within the movement—albeit typically with heavy doses of irony. One of the most influential Alt-Right figures, Andrew Anglin, editor of the Daily Stormer, claims the movement drew ideas and recruits out of a combination of political and social communities—in his words: troll culture, conspiracy theorism, libertarianism, paleoconservatism, the manosphere, Gamergate, the old white nationalist movement, and the European identitarian movements. Richard Spencer’s own preferred descriptor is, indeed, identitarian.

The Alt-Right presents a challenge because it is a new movement still taking shape both operationally and ideologically. In the present work, I advance a framework for analyzing both what the Alt-Right believes and how operates. First, in considering Alt-Right ideology, I advance a new category for characterizing and analyzing certain gendered ideologies: 'masculinism.' Space does not here permit a full development of masculinism as a category of ideological characterization and analysis, but I show how Michael Freeden’s framework for analyzing the ‘morphology’ of political concepts within ideologies provides a crucial starting point. Key to recognizing an ideology as masculinist is the centralization of a concept of masculinity—albeit a highly contested one—within an ideology’s overall conceptual morphology. Second, I propose a Deleuzean approach to analyzing how radical movements operate. On such an approach, I outline how the Alt-Right stands organizationally and strategically. I propose characterizing the Alt-Right’s operational modalities as illustrative of a new 'rhizomatic Right.'

A further puzzle arises here, however: if the Alt-Right is a masculinist ideology, that ideology appears in open conflict with the rhizomatic operational modes it practices. Eschewing direct political engagement and party formation, the movement seeks to instantiate patriarchal, hierarchal, and phallocentric masculinities through leaderless, networked, and acentric strategies and practices. As a case study, I focus on one particular site, Anglin’s Daily Stormer, identifying the masculinist discourses there deployed and analyzing how they have taken shape, operate, and may yet develop. A key component of this discourse is a form of futurity generating a logistics of affect, especially around fear of decline and hope of revival. I conclude with some prognostications regarding the movement’s possible futures and some reflections on how further research into the Alt-Right and masculinist ideologies may be pursued—and, indeed, how masculinism and rhizomatics, the former as a category of ideological classification and the latter as a mode of radical operational practice, can be better theorized.

Author

• Josh Vandiver, Ball State University