Redefining Republican: Symbolic Boundary Transformation of Republicanism across Alt-Right Media, 2010–2025

• In Event: Transformations of Right Wing Politics

Abstract

How did the Alt-Right, which defined itself through opposition to the Republican establishment, come to be symbolically compatible with it? This paper argues that the alignment between the Alt-Right and mainstream Republicanism was made possible through symbolic labor rather than simply reflecting a case of ideological diffusion from the fringe to the mainstream. Drawing on a corpus of over 350K articles (2010-2025) from Alt-Right and conservative media outlets, I employ dependency parsing and structural topic modeling to examine how Republican identity was (re)constructed across the conservative media landscape over time. Approaching 2016, Alt-Right and mainstream conservative outlets grew increasingly similar in how they characterized Republicans. This convergence was selective rather than wholesale, however. Ethno-racial framing remained a persistent boundary, characteristic of explicitly Alt-Right outlets and largely absent from mainstream media even at peak convergence. These findings carry implications beyond the specific case of MAGA. They suggest that the symbolic alignment between the Alt-Right and the Republican Party preceded and enabled its institutional consolidation; movements and parties may converge discursively before they merge organizationally. Political identity boundaries are not fixed properties of actors or movements but are actively negotiated through sustained discursive labor within media ecosystems, with consequences for how we understand the conditions under which fringe movements reshape mainstream politics.

Author

• Kylie Fuller, New York University