Discourses of resilience in the US alt-right

ABSTRACT

The New Right movements known as the American alt-right regularly appeal to resilience and resistance. In this article, we examine whether and how they include resilience thinking in their discourses. We analyse alt-right discourses on indigeneity, frequently enunciated as the survival of race, on social norms, with a focus on gender, as well as on power and democracy to uncover the role played by resilience thinking. It is found that an illiberal ‘reactionary resilience’ is clearly manifest and linked to 1930s’ as well as newer ideas of identity, nature and politics. It plays an unlikely and important role in coagulating alt-right ideas of identity, survival and struggle in particular. Further, resilience as an assumption linked to nature as well as an operational concept, plays key roles in framing the publicly acceptable face of alt-right arguments and as a strategic and personal ethos in resisting social and political change.

KEYWORDS:

• Resilience
• alt-right
• new right
• nationalism

Introduction

Illiberal politics are on the rise worldwide. Scholarly and public attention has focussed on the rising confidence amongst actors who place themselves significantly to the right of established right-wing parties and define their agenda as resistance to ‘globalist values’, particularly identity and gender equality, migration and free trade (Bokhari & Yiannopoulos, 2016). A cursory look at the public interventions of these actors reveals that resistance and the resilience necessary to enact it are key themes. Though resilience is commonly identified as a progressive or liberal mode of politics, its role in alt-right discourse – a means to counter liberalism – reveals that it can also play an important role in illiberal politics. Resilience even acts as a unifying factor in their self-definition as politically resilient patriots as, for example, Alex Jones, an influential radio commentator and defender of gun rights, recommends ‘preparedness’ for his listeners and reminds them that ‘you are the resistance!’ (Infowars, n.d.).

In this article, we provide an analysis and conceptual account of how the alt-right incorporates forms of resilience thinking. These movements are not new; reactionary political traditions clearly have deep roots in all the societies in which they are occurring and have been rising in profile for several decades. This has been most marked in the election of Donald Trump, whose victory was assisted by online actors who, under the neologism ‘alt-right’, distinguish themselves from mainstream conservativism and seek to detoxify the ‘far-right’ brand (Love, 2017; Mudde, 2017). Whilst we are sensitive to the project of legitimation implicit to the term ‘alt-right’, it remains the defining term of reference here because it is the term by which these actors define themselves and because it captures online nature of the movement.

Whilst research has sought to unpick root causes, for example, linking the popular appeal of these actors to the economic side-effects of globalisation, a critical question is the degree to which there is a clear and cohesive intellectual and political project present in these movements. There is significant variety in ‘alt-right’ formations across spaces, countries and discursive levels in the west, Europe and America, and in non-western locations, from Russia to East Asia. There are, however, also some clear common political logics or sensibilities with diagrammatic resonances between these manifestations. The New Right is a contested assemblage of ideas linked together by common themes and assumptions. We are dealing with a range of political actors including theorists, violent groups and grassroots movements united by the aforementioned political logics. These are expressed in coherent and powerful discourses. Key among them is resilience in the face of change in identity, culture and values. Better identifying these themes allows us to explore why these ideas have appeal today, but also, how they resonate with the common sense established by mainstream trends in social and intellectual life.

The United States provides for a well contained and influential case study of the highly diverse constellation of reactionary intellectual and political movements worldwide. It provides the opportunity to identify common trends that cross diverse elements and are discursively consistent across media, from 4Chan to White Power music. Also notable in this context is William Connolly’s (2005) analysis of the confluence of religious identity politics and capitalism in the United States. His account of how identities attached to evangelical Christianity in the US constructed a resonant relationship with corporate interests offers a clear indication of the importance of acknowledging the local and historical contingency of any nationalist assemblage. The first aim of this article is to contribute to the emerging body of research which seeks to unpack the discourses and intellectual genealogies of the US alt-right (Nagle, 2017; Neiwert, 2017).

Our approach relies on discourse analysis. By dismantling and exploring the dynamics of alt-right discursive articulations, we retrieve its logic and mechanisms. Whilst our normative agenda is critical, we do not here engage in an ethical critique of these discourses. Rather, our aim is to map their internal logic and principles of coherence so that areas of cross-fertilisation and distinctiveness can be better understood. Specifically, we seek to unpack the role that ‘resilience thinking’ plays in the discourses of actors on the alt-right in the US context. In the first section, we outline resilience thought and explain why exploring discourses of resilience amongst reactionary actors have analytical value. We argue that reactionary political thought has always contained elements suggestive of resilience thinking, but that has been a diffusion of resilience into core areas of alt-right concern – race, identity, diversity and persistence.

In the subsequent three sections, we explore how resilience can be seen to operate within reactionary discourses on the alt-right in America in relation to identity, gender and culture before, in the final section, elaborating an understanding of these surprising politics of resilience. We find that alt-right discourse implicitly incorporates a distinct mechanism of community and individual resistance. It firstly posits resilience as access to the means, conditions and norms necessary for (an eventual) resistance – gun ownership, for example. Secondly, resilience is framed as a personal struggle to retain one’s ideas in the face of what they perceive as dominant liberal orthodoxy. This entails informational resilience to ‘fake news’ and epistemological resilience to all liberal interpretations of politics, the economy and social norms, which is framed as a vital precondition to eventually being able to resist and overthrow liberalism.

A reactionary resilience?

‘a fog descended over the entire nation’ (Infowars, n.d.).

Resilience is widely seen as a value which refers to whether an object, ecology, actor, or community has or may develop the capacity to manage the effects of external pressures; economic, ecological, social, technological and cognitive (Zebrowski, 2015). Resilience is treated here as a discourse rather than an objective scientific function, which has come to be adopted as a term of art by various actors in multiple fields of scientific and social practice. The concept of resilience has a strong or developing presence across diverse fields, from climate science to counter-terrorism. Across these varied research areas, resilience has become a predominant buzzword for planners, scholars, bureaucrats and policy makers. It has also been seen as a prized personal characteristic.

Whilst resilience as a term has diverse roles across these different fields, it is worth recognising that the term is contested. The discourse of resilience, or ‘resilience thinking’, folds in a variety of concepts and correlate values including adaptability, transformation, resistance, evolution, persistence, which may be variously assembled. The capacity to sustain or enhance the capacity of the local or indigenous to deal with or bounce back in the face of global environmental, technological, social or political stresses, has been seen to potentially preclude any transformative politics. For this reason, resilience thinking has been critiqued as concerned only with the development of ‘conducts or capabilities to cope with or withstand powerful forces outside our control’ (Vrasti & Michelsen, 2017). There have also, however, been various cases made for the transformative potentiality of resilience thinking in different contexts (Pelling, 2010). These debates go back to the original formulations of socio-ecological resilience by authors like Holling (1973).

Critical discourses on resilience suggest that it is inherently entangled with problematic politics. A contrast may be drawn between authors arguing that resilience is best understood as a discourse that has an ‘intuitive fit’ with (neo)liberalism, and those who suggest it moves beyond liberalism (Chandler, 2014a). These arguments posit that resilience can operate as a discursive vessel for contemporary power relations, inasmuch as it broadly aligns with Hayekian free market ideas and governmentality. The forms and modalities of administration, politics and freedom already predominant in developed liberal societies have found, in resilience thinking, a useful toolbox for development (Joseph, 2013). The alternative perspective has been that the discourse of resilience is better understood as building upon, but also projecting beyond forms of liberal governance (Chandler, 2014b). One area of this debate concerns the manner in which resilience thinking is framed as concerning the local, indigenous, historically embedded knowledge that underpins effective responses to crises, or sustainable life in an environment. Advocating for resilience may thus be read as demonstrative of the capture of indigenous rights movements by neoliberalism (see Lindroth and Sinevaara-Niskanen in this special issue), or as showing how new onto-political logics are transforming governance approaches (Chandler, 2018).

Current debates broadly agree that it is important to define the politics of resilience in relationship to temporalities of liberal governance. The presumption is that excavating the discourse of resilience functions to identify a set of political practices. Whilst we are concerned with the politics of resilience, and it is clear that liberal values have salience in this context, we do not presume that the politics of resilience is, or is likely to be, identifiable with this singular set of power relations. The diversity of fields in which resilience thinking functions seems likely to be open to significant variance in political utilities.

Our starting methodological assumption is genealogical: that the history of a thing, whether that thing is a ritual, practice, concept or discursive assemblage, is formed by its capture and mobilisation by actors and powers external to it. Concepts, like resilience, do not have inherent politics, but are mobilised politically by specific actors for specific functions in specific contexts, though some actors are more able to do this in certain contexts. The negotiation between persistence and change, to which resilience thinking relates, clearly touches upon all elements of politics and various articulations of the political. Resilience, like all discursive objects, is open to repurposing. The proliferation of ‘resilience’ as a term of art suggests the possibility that ‘resilience thinking’ must inevitably seep into new political spaces, with a new line of significance. It stands to reason that the pervasiveness of resilience thinking will find expression in varied political movements.

Given the widespread assumption that resilience is somehow expressive of trends associated with the historicity of liberalism (neo- or post-); to test whether such seepage is occurring, we seek out non-liberal movements and examine their discursive products for the markers of resilience thinking. The presence of resilience thinking within expressly non-liberal or illiberal discourses, movements or actors would, of course, support a hypothesis that concepts like resilience do not have a natural politics, they are deployed and redeployed by actors in the context of specific power relations to support varied political agendas.

The key relevant conceptual distinction concerns the contrast between acquiescence to the (ecological, economic, social, political) constraints of the present, an attempt to transform or over-throw those constraints through the creation of new conditions, or categorical resistance to conditions in the present in pursuit of a return to a previous condition of stability. The politics of resilience are often conceptualised as a matter of political acquiescence, though some attempts have been made to incorporate transformation or even revolution into the uses of term (Michelsen, 2017; Pelling, 2010). All concepts, rituals, practices or sensibilities are tracked by an ambulant genealogy. In any genealogy, what defines the passage of a thing through history are the disjunctions between the discrete moments where that thing (concept, practice, ritual, idea) is adopted and mobilised by a new power and set to new tasks. Asking if resilience plays a role in reactionary movements committed expressly to unpicking or reversing liberalism will provide an indication as to how this is taking place.

The pedigree of anti-modern resilience is key. The writings of fascist theorist Giulio Evola have in recent years been identified as a key inspiration and source by a wide range of figures on the US right including Richard Spencer (founder AlternativeRight.com), Steven Bannon (former editor of Breitbart), David Duke (previously Grand Dragon of the Klu Klux Klan) and Jared Tylor (founder of American Renaissance, a long-standing online platform advocating for ‘Race Realism’). Evola (1934) identified political ‘reaction’ as ‘counter-revolutionary’ thought set against the legacy of the French Revolution and committed to revolt against modernity in the name of cultural tradition. All traditionalist accounts view history as a regression from a prior golden age of mythic purity (Burnham, 1985; Spengler, 1918). Evola, with the range of modern figures following him, ascribed the degenerative tendency to the logic of modernity itself, in a manner not entirely dissonant with Frankfurt School pessimists. Evola’s (2001) objective was to ‘see if there still exist men capable of saying no’ to the consequences of the French Revolution. His metaphysics of the sacred distinguished him from other reactionaries like Guenon (1994), while the desire to sustain the possibility of some ‘dynamic return to first principles’ distinguished him from fascist Futurists, who embraced modernist progress (Furlong, 2011, p. 55). The epochal task is to mediate between ‘contingent and universal’, ‘the principles of tradition and changing historical circumstances’. The reactionary does not ‘cling to the past for its own sake [but] rather to give continuity to the principles of which the institutions, forms and cultures are contingent expressions’ (Evola, 1934; Furlong, 2011, p. 19).

The politics of resisting modernity have, however, been heavily reframed. As explained by Alain De Benoist, the father of the French Nouvelle Droite, and a key influence on the US alt-right: ‘modernity will not be transcended by returning to the past, but by means of certain premodern values in a decisively postmodern dimension’ (de Benoist & Champetier, 1999). Reactionary traditionalism, inasmuch as it roots its politics in a vision of salvation through ensuring the persistence of inherited attributes and values, would seem to be open to construal using the tools of resilience thinking. Alt-Right influencers like Alex Jones, for example, frame the right to bear arms as a norm to be protected against liberal encroachment. Resilience to gun control norms is separate from – and a key condition for – the right and capability for armed resistance. For this reason, we investigate whether logics of resilience are actually visible in the discourses of the contemporary alt-right.

There are intuitive grounds to hypothesise the potential for a reactionary political reading of resilience. Inasmuch as many uses of resilience thinking fetishise the historically and culturally rooted, the local, or the indigenous, resilience appears to have some resonance with the tradition of counter-revolutionary historicism. Resilience thinking is not logically opposed to non-liberal or illiberal problematisations of modernity. Resilience, because it is adaptive to, is always reactive to, the environment, to ensure some essential quality is maintained. Suggestive examples from the alt-right would include the role of nativism in resisting gradual change such as economic globalisation and gender equality. In this regard, resilience can imply a ‘salvation politics of tradition’ set against progressive, or revolutionary philosophies of history. In this sense, resilience thinking has intuitive resonances with traditionalist and reactionary critiques of modernity and modernist historiography, such as that espoused by Alexander Dugin (2014) in Russia, explicitly using the language of resilience, which impute that modernisation includes a militant transgression of the local, effecting variants of cultural death through the corruption of tradition and de-sacralisation, and which raise the question of what might be saved from the ruins of the present.

There are further reasons why we might hypothesise the likelihood of finding traces of resilience thinking in the US alt-right. The US alt-right has been recognised to be internally highly diverse. Folding together white ethno-nationalists, libertarians and cultural reactionaries concerned with, for example, changing gender roles, the alt-right contains strands which are closely allied with the anti-statist values of individual responsibility, innovation and resilient autonomy that underpin Hayekian neoliberalism, as well as strands which are virulently opposed to liberal democratic and market ideology. In these latter strands, the value assigned to collective persistence and inherently resilient indigenous traits is logically linked to racist or highly gendered repurposing.

Analysing alt-right discourse from a resilience perspective firstly reveals the political ambiguities of resilience thinking. In particular, it challenges the intuitive fit with liberalism. Secondly, it uncovers the changing rationalities of alt-right politics and, crucially, their interpolation with the liberal values they seek to challenge. In the following sections, we analyse discourses reflective of ‘resilience thinking’ and elaborate the conceptual framework of ‘reactionary resilience’. As we show, resilience thinking plays out at both the individual and collective level in alt-right discourse. We begin by examining correspondences between the way resilience is conceptualised as a positive value in indigeneity studies, and the way white nationalists and self-describing defenders of European ethnic identity frame their intellectual and political projects. We find that positions on the alt-right explicitly suggest a reiteration of more widespread discourses of positive resilient indigeneity. We then turn to the alt-right critique of cultural liberalism in the US, particularly around gender and political activity, which shares common themes with the literature on personal resilience. Finally, we turn to the alt-right critique of democracy, and note that alt-right discourses on political change are also suggestively inflected with resilience thinking.

Resilience in alt-right discourses of indigeneity

‘mankind as such does not exist’ (de Benoist & Champetier, 1999).

Common rhetorical comparisons of the alt-right to National Socialism or fascism point to the presence of social hatred, racism, or xenophobia therein (Rosenfeld, 2017). There are, of course, as noted above, relevant traditionalist and reactionary discourses that find their origins in the 1920s-30s, two of which, on modernity and race, we explore here. However, the rhetorical move in making these associations can obscure how the US alt-right addresses the very different domestic politics and international relations of the 2010s. Their solutions are, even when nostalgic of the 1930s, different and cannot be reduced to echoes of the past. Building on the French Nouvelle Droite, who ‘adapted the theories of Antonio Gramsci that political change follows cultural and social change’, the alt-right sees politics as ‘down-stream from culture’. This quote is attributed to Andrew Breitbart, founder of Breitbart.com, a website which is viewed as a key platform for alt-right discourse (Nagle, 2017, p. 40).

Issues of race are a common implicit or explicit concern on the alt-right as are related concerns relating to ethnic and cultural distinctiveness and uncontrolled immigration. This is reflected in Breitbart, long-standing platforms such as American Renaissance, and more explicit white nationalist publications such as Alt-Right.com and Stormfront.com. At the root of these discourses is an explicitly or tangentially raised rejection of the modernist ‘superstition-belief’ in a subjective ‘tabula rasa’ by which subjects are viewed as wholly constituted by, and thus entirely adaptive to, their lived environment. First articulated by the Nouvelle Droite, as de Benoist put it: ‘Man is not born like a blank page. Every single individual bears the general characteristics of the species, to which are added specific hereditary predispositions to certain particular aptitudes and modes of behaviour.’ (de Benoist & Champetier, 1999) This is the assumption underpinning what alt-right discourse sanitizes as ‘race realism’ (See ‘What Is Race Realism?,’ 2018).

The core argument is that American culture is predicated on inherited qualities inherent in white ethnic origin (“About Us – American Renaissance,” n.d.; Huntington, 2005). Tribalism is the term adopted by Jared Taylor, along with other strands of white nationalism, to articulate the argument that a disposition toward anti-miscegenation is natural or genetic. White supremacy was, he argues, central to the belief systems of most of the major political figures in the founding narrative of America, including Jefferson, Madison, Lincoln, Johnson, Garfield, Taft, Wilson, Harding, Truman and, claiming that ‘there is essentially no limit to the racist quotations one could unearth from prominent Americans of the past.’ His (1999) argument is that the hegemonic cultural presumption has now become that:

Whites are to pretend that race is meaningless. They have no legitimate group aspirations. Racial diversity is a good thing if it comes at the expense of whites. Slavery is a crime for which we – and only we – must be forever guilty.. We have no claim to this land… Whites are a uniquely wicked race, and the sooner we are shoved aside by virtuous non-whites the better.

The key discursive mechanism is the link between white survival and culture. Specifically, fear that whites will become the minority in the progression of this ‘racial revolution’, in which cultural change advances white extinction. Further, associating purity to survival, Taylor (1999) writes: ‘What do we do? Just toss the whole country into a blender and do away with race entirely. Of course, this really means doing away with whites.’ The argument of ‘race realists’ like Taylor is that race exists as a referent of identity and culture and must be sustained against miscegenation.

This is a reframing of an old pseudo-scientific theory (Gentile & Mussolini, 1932). In this biologically grounded frame, race determines identity categories, which in turn determine cultural, social and ethical norms and attributes. Races are ultimately established as Darwinian species struggling for survival. This biological-cultural-ethical axiom was the work of Giulio Evola and the second major conceptualisation developed on the basis of 1920-30s thought. Drawing on the 19^th C geopolitical tradition of Kjéllén, Ratzel and Haushofer that treated nations as races (Ratzel, 1897; Tunander, 2001, 2005; Wolkersdorfer, 1999), Evola framed race as determinant of civilisation, history, ethics and politics. Power, in his dottrina della razza, could be enacted by developing ‘racial and spiritual consciousness’ that activates ‘the heroic spirit’. There is therefore an immanent source of ‘the innate qualities of race, expressed in character, honourable sentiment, courage, loyalty and inner attitude to the world and life’, and in the same move, the individual is eliminated as a political referent, as the ‘pretence’ of the individual is but ‘sabotage’, a ‘subversion;’ of ‘national and racial sentiment’, which emerges as ‘a question of life or death for the entire European civilisation’ (Evola, 1941).

The Evolan biological-cultural-ethical discursive link is vital. It allows alt-right ideas to conclude that ‘mankind as such does not exist’ ‘as a scientific category’ and to enlist stereotypes and tropes as scientific proof of this logic (de Benoist & Champetier, 1999). Taylor and the indigeneity-defending alt-right argue that these inevitable struggles endanger whites because modern politics does not allow them the means for resilience. Whilst claiming to kick back against a changing common sense, in arguing that racial origin is part of cultural formation, the alt-right also makes an explicit appeal to logics which they see as held in common with wider debates around indigenous cultures under threat of extinction. As noted by Lindroth and Sinevaara-Niskanen in this special issue, it is a common assumption that ‘to be indigenous is to be resilient’ (Rotarangi & Russell, 2009). Resilience is deployed to name strategies that harness innate sources of adaptability. Policy as well as postcolonial and decolonial literatures have occasionally sustained that indigenous resilience can change the exterior conditions that inflict communities, an approach critiqued by Keck and Sakdapolrak (2013) for trapping indigenous communities in an adaptive passivity.

Alt-right discourse both explicitly and implicitly resonates with both arguments. The innate qualities of the white European-America are framed as in need of defence against dissolution or corruption by cultural and biological mixture. The argument, held in common with critical resilience literatures, is that the ethno-racially defined community cannot be simply relied upon to persist in the face of external pressures. Its resilience is limited and must be sustained against ‘colonisation’ by other ethnicities and cultures. This action explicitly requires unity between factions (like the 2017 Charlottesville ‘Unite the Right’ protest) to facilitate the ‘mission and purpose of the Alt-Right, and the resilience of our men and our ideas’ (Ahab, 2018).

Resilience is an essential part of alt-right arguments for identity segregation. Whilst assuming ‘the alt-right has benefited from diversity discourses’ is an overstatement (see Carrillo Arciniega, 2017), they adopt the discursive logic and content of societal resilience debates to frame their arguments (Law, 2017). This underpins ‘promotions of a racial threat that is strictly comparable to that facing indigenous peoples, universally, and depicting whites as “natives” cruelly deprived of equal protection’ (Land, 2012). Rather than treating biocultural diversity as a ‘burden’ to be reduced, indigenous ‘diversity is to be welcomed, and should be maintained and cultivated’, which requires maintenance and segregation, not integration (de Benoist & Champetier, 1999). This kind of reactionary argument for indigeneity is architectural to white nationalist discourse, grounding the refusal to ignore race. As argued by Milo Yiannopolous who was a leading advocate for the alt-right on Breitbart, this requires that ‘ethno-cultural identity […] should be acknowledged and recognized in the public sphere’. The move to incorporate white identities into arguments for indigeneity is grounded on the ‘natural conservativism [by which any group is] inclined to prioritise the interests of their tribe’, which results in the claim that ‘separation is necessary for distinctiveness’ (Bokhari & Yiannopoulos, 2016).

It could be argued alt-right discourses of segregation depend on ideas of resilience. Its inclusion in a survivalist frame is the key development when compared with 1930s racial theory. Where Evola advocated enacting race’s own identity power – anywhere in the world, from Milan to Abyssinia–the alt-right grounds its logic in resilience to migration. Their anti-migrant discourse, as espoused by Richard Spencer for example, only makes sense in light of the discourse of fragility or weak racial resilience articulated as the risk of ‘white genocide’ and the fragility of pure ‘whiteness’. Breitbart’s frequent appeals to the French novel The Camp of the Saints are expressive of this drive to foster conditions for racial survival (Goode, 2015). As Nick Land notes in The Dark Enlightenment (2012), one of the intellectual underpinnings of the alt-right (Sandifer, 2017), the discourse of fostering a ‘resilient whiteness’ emphasises that:

the prospective annihilation of the white race is attributed to its own systematic vulnerability, whether due to characteristic cultural traits (excessive altruism, susceptibility to moral manipulation, excessive hospitality, trust, universal reciprocity, guilt, or individualistic disdain for group identity), or more immediate biological factors (recessive genes supporting fragile Aryan phenotypes).

In this logic, the addition of norms to biological vulnerability leads to a survivalist need to promote resilience at the expense of ‘excessive altruism’. The meme below (Figure 1) exemplifies how these ideas come together with survivalist resilience as a core concept. On the one hand, it features natural white strength and resilience (‘at this contest’ for ‘resources’, ‘conquest & exploration’, ‘stronger and smarter’) enunciated as self-justifying natural law. At the same time, it is enacting an alt-right defence against claims that colonialism was negative or unjust, establishing discursive resilience against the historical revisionism of colonialism they call ‘liberal guilt’.

Figure 1. A widely shared Alt-Right meme. Source: 4Chan.

By appealing to indigeneity to justify their own arguments, the alt-right adapts forms of common sense discourse within liberalism to construct arguments for segregation and reversal of ‘universal reciprocity’. This process indicates the slippage of discursive modes into quite distinct political contexts, as we find an assemblage of ideas, some of the liberal origin, that have been redeployed against liberalism. At the very least, the discourse of indigenous resilience is clearly revealed here as highly politically ambivalent in its connotations.

Alt-right critique of cultural liberalism and the means of resilience

‘you are the resistance!’ (Infowars, n.d.).

alt-right discourse critiques cultural liberalism as a hegemonic ideology that needs natural and operationalised resilience and resistance,¹ for example through attacks on ‘Social Justice Warriors’ (Nash, 2017). The core claim is that liberal presuppositions on race and are a form of cognitive oppression, an assault on freedom of conscience and of thought. The alt-right combats this cognitive oppression through intentionally scandalous speech acts that, in their account, disturb and restructure the boundaries of acceptable thought. The US context is critical here, as legal protections for free speech and religion are mobilised to establish credibility and reasonableness.

Two crucial discursive structures and their appeal can be read through resilience thinking. The first builds upon the indigenous resilience examined above to argue that liberal political correctness works against the ethnic and cultural needs of indigenous ‘white’ America, and so underwrites their fragility. The second, however, unlike 1930s razzismo, bears upon the individual rather than the collective in framing the challenge to hegemonic cultural liberalism as a personal vocation and burden. In emphasising the travails of ‘taking the red pill’ and breaking with the cultural common sense, the alt-right adopts an ethos resonant of values attached to personal resilience in the very liberal discourses they seek to challenge.

This is particularly clear with respect to gender and family. The alt-right includes various anti-feminist communities, the ‘manosphere’, that frame themselves as speaking for a previously established common sense eroded by liberalism and united by a loathing of what they term ‘feminazi’ ‘gender ideology’. This construct refers to the broadly accepted presumption that gender identity and biological sex are not directly correlated, and that gender identity is rather defined and orientated by wider patterns of behaviour and diffuse societal structures. This research tradition has emphasised the personally oppressive consequences of presuming that sex is determinant of gender, in maintaining inequalities from work-places to domestic life, and in constituting homosexuality or trans identity as abnormal and/or unnatural. In this context, many gender studies authors and activists have also argued for increased sensitivity to the vulnerability, or low resilience, of these actors, to be enshrined in law. The alt-right reads these efforts as demonstrative of the hegemonic power of cultural liberalism engaged in an assault on, firstly, human nature and, secondly, freedom of expression.

Liberal ‘gender ideology’ is accused of perverting human nature, a shift to be resisted. The first step is, of course, taking the ‘red pill’: realising that cultural liberalism has upended biologically produced cultural norms crucial for survival. This discourse is grounded on the same logic as race, where a claim on biology determines culture and norms. The ‘Red Pill’ subsidiary Reddit thread features this idea as a core assumption, explaining how ‘gender ideology’ creates economic problems, leads to ‘misandry’ (man-hating), the loneliness of the ‘incels’ (involuntary celibates), and destroys masculine dignity (“r/TheRedPill,” n.d.). The ‘manosphere’ has a number of solutions to this ‘degeneracy’ including legalising rape (Roosh, 2015), ending masturbation and worshipping housewives (“Proud Boy Magazine,” n.d.), reverting society to tribes of warrior men relying on masturbation, ‘androphilia’ or prostitution for sexual fulfilment (Donovan, 2012), systematically deceiving women into sex (Roosh V, n.d.), and an all-out war on feminism and gender equality (‘A Voice for Men,’ n.d.). Though bewilderingly varied, the ‘manosphere’ agrees that the first step is to resist feminism and develop structures resilient to it.

Elliot Rodger’s 2014 attack at the University of California is a vital discursive case study. This 22-year-old student killed young women in his university ‘because the females of the human species were incapable of seeing the value in me’ – specifically because they had the freedom to choose whether to sleep with him – in what he termed ‘the Day of Retribution’ (Rodgers, 2014). Praising the attack and Rodger’s own claims, the Red Pill subreditt contains references to him as the ‘Perfect Gentleman’, his actions as the beginning of an ‘Incel Rebellion’ bound up in apocalyptic masculine resilient hero discourses. Rodgers and his supporters are extreme even by alt-right standards, but the drive to develop resilience against liberal gender equality norms is shared by the vast majority of the alt-right (see, for example, Bokhari & Yiannopoulos, 2016; Nagle, 2017; Neiwert, 2017). The alt-right’s coverage of Meghan Markle’s marriage to Prince Harry provides brutal instances of how gender and race come together through a frame of racial and cultural resilience. They reported the union as ‘mystery meat woman, who is marrying into a family that is still a symbol of the racial and cultural identity of native British people’, ‘deadly for his family and all it represents’ (Affirmative Affirmative Right, 2018). This pseudo-biological conceptual architecture grounds culture, norms and resilience to liberalism as both a natural attribute and as an operational concept. Like the resistance of the ‘incels’ against women’s free choice of partners, this exemplifies the discourse that ‘interbreeding’ and ‘feminazism’ attacks men, nature, family and humanity.

Free speech emerges as the central site of resilience against liberal mind control (See Damore, 2017). This argument can be seen clearly articulated in the online lectures and writings of Canadian psychologist, Jordan Peterson (2018), who rose to fame when Canada passed Bill C-16 requiring that trans individuals be addressed using the pronoun of their own choice. Peterson built a significant alt-right online following when he very publicly refused to do so arguing that legislating on language use was an infringement on freedom of expression (Independent Independent Man, 2017; J. Peterson, n.d.). His lectures deploy Jung’s psychological analytics to develop an account of individual responsibility directly counter-posed to the discourse of particular identity group vulnerability adopted by ‘cultural liberalism’.

In this discourse resilience appears, both implicitly and explicitly, as an operational concept. This is in some ways the alt-right challenge to what Aradau and Huysmans (2018) call the ‘assembly of credibility’. The individual is enjoined to foster resilience through accepting weaknesses and sins. The religious elements of the US context clearly play a role here, but the broader pattern aligns closely with the dominant ideas associated with neoliberalism. Individual productivity relies on responsibility, which in this case presupposes the ability to and normative value of, developing a thick skin to criticism and fighting liberal gender norms. Framing anonymous extreme verbal abuse as a performance of the value of individual responsibility seems incoherent. However, for actors in the online alt-right, it appears to be widely accepted that pushing the boundaries of acceptable speech has the capacity to restructure wider cultural trends by expressing the individual liberty of the troll from cultural liberal ideology. Through trolling, actors like Milo Yiannopolous show and perform resilience while claiming to reveal the emptiness and fragility of the assumptions of ‘snowflakes’ who need their feelings protected in law and who are unable to be resilient.

Alt-right resilience to state, power, democracy

‘their defeat will be, ultimately, a crushing one’ (Infowars, n.d.).

The subjectivity and believability of news is a key facet of alt-right resilience thinking. It is, crucially, a condition of possibility for all the discourses here analysed, particularly concerning the democratic process. While easily parodied as paranoid conspiracy theorists, the alt-right cleavage of fake/real is governed by a powerful conceptual structure predicated on believability according to speaker. That is, truth-tellers framed as speaking on behalf of the nation, its ‘real’ identity – white America – and breaking hegemonic discursive limitations. This enunciative position is, crucially, maintained by powerful in-discourse norm-framing signals such as Trump’s qualification of ‘both sides’ in reference to Charlottesville, his persistent references to Latino ‘animals’ and his border wall (whitehouse.gov, 2018). As with other nationalist discourses of truth, this is frequently defined against the lies propagated by identity traitors. Crucially, the alt-righter is encouraged to resist and develop resilience to these lies as with all liberal thinking. Truth-teller validity can have remarkable durability once established. Trump achieved this during the election campaign, which explains how, despite the farcical incompetence of issuing ‘alternative facts’ from the White House, Trump is still believed by followers. This is a discursive perfect storm where information is invalidated by resilience to ideological difference and truth determined by affiliation to discursive radicalism.

Alt-right discourses on democracy are the ultimate consequence of resilience to mainstream news, knowledge and the politics they inform. The position is predicated on dissatisfaction with a system that has betrayed them and which, due to liberal hegemony, is extremely unlikely to ever yield satisfactory results. Democracy is articulated as needing to be unpicked or reborn through a return to a pre-liberal value system centred on innate sources of resilience. The principle unifying claim is expressive of resilience thinking inasmuch as personal freedom is deemed to be placed at risk, or made vulnerable, by the same trends that weaken collective resilience: the power of hegemonic cultural liberal ideas. The individual response is thus a vital element in a collective political response (see Bokhari & Yiannopoulos, 2016 and subreddits r/EndDemocracy and/r/DebateAltRight/).

This decentralised and highly individualised political agency has deep roots. Amongst far-right violent extremists dedicated to overthrowing the state, resilience has long been part of the decentralised strategy of resistance to the power of the federal government – or potential for resistance to be precise (Beam, 1992). It is therefore critically important to locate the seeds of a non-liberal pattern of politics that revolves around concepts of vulnerability, persistence, adaptation, and which may be effectively parsed as a form of resilience thinking. In framing the problem as one of eroded resilience, it is likely that we are seeing fabric that may be reweaved into direct action, should electoral politics prove ineffective. Reading about alt-right ideas of revolution, insurgency and anti-Liberal resistance reveal the separation between Alt-Right discourses of resilience and resistance. The former is what is to be done now; it is the natural quality of whites and a personal ethos of preparing the conditions for their politics and supporters to survive intact. This is in turn a crucial condition for resistance and the other direct actions. This thinking was apparent in the recent Christchurch attack, which featured a manifesto by the attacker that included these themes of individual resistance against ‘replacement’ by non-whites (Wendling, 2019).

Across the online alt-right, social decay, calling up counter-strategies to adapt, is attached to the integral failures of liberal democracy. The answer is to return to pre-modern traditional principles. To acknowledge the inherently mythic nature of democracy, an objective reality which is suppressed only by the constant effort of a dedicated ‘media-industrial complex’, leads authors to advocate a surrender of the management of society to those who already control the actual levers of power. Nick Land suggests that neo-reactionaries advocate the form of a sovereign ‘neocameralist,’ authoritarian governance. In such a system, the state becomes a corporation, legitimised by technocratic efficacy in delivering value to its shareholders. Land suggests that the closest contemporary examples of illiberal but stable, prosperous and effective states are those of Hong Kong and Singapore. Democracy is defined as a ‘parasite’ which has transformed ‘local, painfully dysfunctional, intolerable, and thus urgently corrected behaviour patterns into global, numbed, and chronic socio-political pathologies’, its death is judged to be an inevitable consequence of its globalisation (Land, 2012).

It is easy to see how a populist authoritarian claiming to be ‘too rich to be bribed’, constitutes a possible ‘escape route’ for the alt-right. Conversely, given the manner in which resilience thinking operates in their discourses, it is likely that future electoral failure will not ensure a decline in these movements. The inherent trend to degeneration that the alt-right identifies with liberal modernity fuels the pursuit of resilience to the liberal ideology of modernity, rights and democracy, reconstituting the reactionary political aesthetic of tradition as the means to popular mobilisation. The ‘Dark Enlightenment’ is but one alt-right solution to the problem of democracy – others include a return to masculine warrior tribes, fascism, anarchy or racial states – but all cohere around the need to resist liberal democracy. Inurement to the mythos of democracy as corrosive for ‘self-reliance, industry and self-organisation’ reveals the presence of resilience in accounts of the value of ethno-cultural authenticity in alt-right discourse.

In sum, resilience is a key alt-right individual norm as well as an operational practice. Specifically, their call to resilience entails resisting any liberal shift in norms and the information (news) that supports such a shift. Infowars’ Alex Jones, for example, practices and encourages this resilience by refuting that any of the recent school shootings has taken place (particularly Sandy Hook, see infowars.com), accusing the government of staging the attack, including actors playing bereaved families, so as to take guns away from Americans. This also reveals the core mechanism at play: enact native resilience to false information supporting normative shift (‘the scientifically engineered lies of the globalists’), which in turn is needed for the separate – and equally mythical – act of resistance against liberal forces, and ‘their ultimate goal of enslaving humanity’ (“About Alex Jones,” n.d.). To be able to think against modernity is precisely to make possible the Evolan rescue of humanity from amidst its ruins. This formulation of a reactionary resilience proffers a purified subject whose strategic adoption of resilience is simultaneously archaic and futurist. Its operationalisation creates very real resilience to ideas, arguments and even information.

Conclusion: ‘natural’ and operational resilience

Is there any such thing as ‘reactionary resilience’? We have argued that the circulation of resilience thinking on the alt-right suggests that there is. We have explored how resilience is woven in and through alt-right thinking on indigeneity, race, gender, norms, politics and even truth. Discourses of white indigeneity bear enough similarities to broader accounts of resilient indigeneity that one can make the case for the alt-right as a discourse of resilience. Closely related discourses of individual liberation from liberal cultural and political ideology express a correlate project of resilience to ideological programming at the personal level.

Further, due to their grounding of most categories on biological identity, alt-right discourses double resilience: as both a ‘natural’ attribute and as an operational precept. Resilience is clearly separated from resistance in alt-right discourse. Resilience is framed as the immediate condition of possibility for any later resistance to be possible. Alt-right resilience is the natural quality and operational strategy that, if embraced, can protect the conditions (knowing the truth and rejecting lies, racial purity, possession of firearms, reproduction of whites) necessary for resistance (voting Trump, overthrowing liberals, revolution if necessary) against hegemonic liberalism and its transformation of society.

In discourses of indigeneity, resilience appears firstly as an evolutionary attribute of white men, which, secondly, must yet be protected. This idea of racial resilience establishes the radical objective of total segregation due to the recessive genetics of white phenotype attributes (which are, contradictorily, not resilient). In discourses of culture, resilience is the necessary ‘natural’ attribute of the strong. Resilience from liberal hegemony is also, however, a demonstration of an individual’s commitment as part of an operational strategy. Believing that resilience is both a natural attribute and a necessary operationalisation is a contradiction that only makes sense where resilience to liberalism allows for a recovering of the political subject from the brink of disaster (Evans & Reid, 2013) which is, crucially, a precursor to full salvation. In politics and democracy, alt-right resilience is also double: on the one hand resilience to liberal ideas and the truth of others (grounded on identity, in turn predicated on nature), and on the other resilience to corrosive decadent democracy. Finally, it is worth highlighting that the alt-right’s grounding in resilience thinking provides some cause for concern. Alt-right resilience thinking fosters forms of decentralised and networked subjectivity and counter-information as a precursor to any (also decentralised and networked) direct forms of resistance. In light of the prevalence of this discursive mode, it is very likely that the alt-right will prove itself to be highly resilient to the travails (and any negative coverage) of the Trump presidency. This reactionary discourse of resilience may all too easily, as it has in the past, find violent expression should it experience a likely interruption to its recent electoral successes.

Acknowledgments

We thank the two anonymous peer-reviewers who helped develop this paper and are also grateful to all those that have supported us in this research, particularly Eli Belilty for research support and Pablo’s third-year Nationalism students at KCL for unceasing inspiration.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nicholas Michelsen

Dr Nicholas Michelsen is Senior Lecturer in the Department of War studies, King’s College London. He writes about strategic communications, resilience, International Relations, philosophy and political theory. His book Politics and Suicide: The philosophy of political self-destruction was published by Routledge in 2015.

Pablo De Orellana

Dr Pablo de Orellana is based at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London and Co-Chair of the KCL Research Centre in International Relations. He earned his PhD in International Relations in 2016, specialising in diplomatic knowledge production. He has published on diplomatic communications, the role of identity in diplomacy, nationalist ideas, and has an upcoming monograph on the diplomacy of the First Vietnam War. His research focuses on the role of identity in diplomacy, nationalism, International Relations theory, as well as art history. Additional interests include art theory, the nexus between art and politics, literature and curating contemporary art exhibitions

Notes

1. The account of cultural liberalism as a hegemonic ideology is particularly articulated as ‘The Cathedral’ by Curtis Yarvin who, writing under the pen-name Mobius Moldbug, has been widely referenced as a key thinker in the alt-right.