Major report on red-brown alliances from new anarchist website

Demonstration of the National Bolshevik Party in Russia,
9 May 2006

The term “red-brown alliance” refers to political collaboration or synthesis between fascists and radical leftists. Such alliances strengthen the far right, spread ideological poison and confusion among left-minded people, and are disastrous for building liberatory movements. Fascists have been pushing red-brown politics for generations – sometimes openly, sometimes by repackaging their ideas to sound leftist. Unfortunately, sections of the left have repeatedly gone along by forming coalitions with far rightists or offering platforms for far right propaganda.

Principled leftists have criticized this dynamic repeatedly, for example with regard to anti-Gulf War activism, the anti-globalization movement, Occupy Wall Street, and leftist media. However, the problem has continued and in some ways arguably has gotten worse.

Last month a highly detailed and informative new report appeared, titled “An Investigation into Red-Brown Alliances: Third Positionism, Russia, Ukraine, Syria, and the Western Left.” The 46,000-word report is the first post on a new blog, Ravings of a Radical Vagabond, whose author, “Vagabond,” is identified simply as “an Anarchist [who is] currently unaffiliated to any party, group or organization.” This means that the report (which I’ll call “Red-Brown Alliances” for short) can only be judged on its own merits. In my view, “Red-Brown Alliances” is a major contribution that’s based on careful research and solid politics, as witness the following excerpt from the conclusion:

“[P]olitical confusion [specifically referring to far right conspiracist ideas presented as left wing analysis] is dangerous as it serves as recruitment for fascism, which is obvious in how...the American neo-fascist movement is explicitly aiming to attract leftists by using anti-capitalist rhetoric, and how sections of the so-called ‘anti-imperialist Left’ repeat the same positions as fascists, for example concerning Syria, Libya and Ukraine, while remaining in denial about this fact and labeling all criticism of their reactionary positions as ‘McCarthyism’.

“As radical leftist anti-fascists, anti-racists, anti-colonialists, and anti-capitalists struggling for liberation, we can fight against imperialism, against racism, and against fascism at the same time, and we can oppose the American war machine and oppose colonialism without siding with reactionary and oppressive entities. We can support liberation in Palestine, Bahrain, India, Venezuela and everywhere else where people are struggling against oppression without allying to fascists or allowing them to try co-opting our movements. Unfortunately sections of the radical movement have failed or have been purposely misled by crypto-fascists.... [W]e badly need to do better, comrades.”

As corollary to the above, Vagabond emphasizes the importance of opposing both “the nationalist and colonialist ideology of Zionism” and the racist ideology of antisemitism – including hatred and scapegoating of Jews that is presented in the name of anti-Zionism.

“Red-Brown Alliances” begins with historical background on “some lesser known forms of fascism” that advocated an alliance with the Soviet Union or a synthesis of anti-capitalism with antisemitism and other far right themes. These included National Bolshevism and Strasserism in Germany of the 1920s and 30s, Francis Parker Yockey in the 1940s and 50s, and the origins of the European New Right and Third Positionism in the 1960s and 70s. The report continues with sections on Duginism and other fascist currents centered in Russia, the Lyndon LaRouche movement, Syrian far right groups such as the Syrian Social Nationalist Party and Mussalaha, and conspiracist organizations such as the Voltaire Network and the Centre for Research on Globalisation. There is extensive documentation of researchers and activists who have been featured on leftist media yet have far right politics. The last part of “Red-Brown Alliances” focuses on leftist organizations (such as Workers World Party and its offshoot the Party for Socialism and Liberation) and ostensibly left-leaning individuals (such as Ramsey Clark and Cynthia McKinney) who have long patterns of making common cause with fascists and other right-wing authoritarians in the name of anti-imperialism.

“Red-Brown Alliances” includes an extraordinary amount of information, and I can’t evaluate all of its statements, but for topics on which I am knowledgeable nearly everything rings true. For example, the report includes an unusually rich and nuanced discussion of the LaRouche network, noting its shifting uses of racism, complicated relationship with the Russian far right, and ripple-effect influence through former members (and still active conspiracists) William Engdahl and Webster Tarpley. On Ramsey Clark, the report doesn’t just detail his decades of support for LaRouche and other far right figures, but also notes that as U.S. attorney general in the 1960s, Clark set up coordination between the FBI’s COINTELPRO and the CIA’s own illegal domestic surveillance program.

In recent years, red-brown politics has often taken the form of far rightists and sections of the left converging in support of, or collaboration with, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government, policies, and international allies – notably the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad – because they clash with U.S. and western imperialist interests. Three Way Fight has addressed these convergences in the past, for example here, but Vagabond does so far more systematically and in greater detail.

“Red-Brown Alliances” emphasizes that Russia is under a right-wing capitalist state and “the very idea that the Russian government of Vladimir Putin might be anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist is pure propaganda with no basis in reality....” At the same time, the report warns against “Russophobic hate” and liberal conspiracy theories that blame right-wing successes in the United States on Putin’s secret manipulations. For example, Vagabond criticizes 2016 Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein for meeting with Putin and whitewashing the authoritarian nature of his rule, yet cautions that “the claims of American liberals that Stein is a ‘Russian asset’ are clearly conspiracy mongering meant to deflect from Hillary Clinton’s electoral loss due to her own mediocrity as a neoliberal candidate by scapegoating third party voters....”

In a report of this kind and on this scale, it’s to be expected that there will be some factual errors. So far, all I’ve found is that Vagabond garbles the name of the Bharatiya Janata Party (political vehicle of India’s fascistic Hindu nationalist movement and dominant force in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s governing coalition) as “Bharat Janatiya Party” and incorrectly says it supported the Axis powers during World War II. (In fact the BJP was only created in 1980, but leaders of its parent organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh [RSS], openly praised Hitler and the Nazis.) Hopefully Vagabond will correct such mistakes as they are identified. [Note: Vagabond immediately corrected the two errors in response to this post.]

“An Investigation into Red-Brown Alliances” is an important work that deserves to be widely read and discussed on the left. It has already been picked up by some other leftist sites, such as libcom.org. For supplemental links in English and French, see Tendance Coatesy blog’s useful commentary.

Thanks to John Garvey for alerting me to the “Red-Brown Alliances” report.

Photo credit: 

By Psalti Michel - 9 May 2006, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Image has been flipped to display flag emblems more clearly.

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On Lesser and Greater Evils (guest post by Rebecca Hill)


"Rather than seeking among our opponents for strategic allies, it would be much better to seek a principled alliance across the left to create a strong center of gravity from which to fight both the center and the right."

[Editor's note: Three Way Fight is pleased to publish the following article by Rebecca Hill, which appears here for the first time and offers a helpful analysis of the current political situation facing leftists in the U.S. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of Three Way Fight.]

"Don't normalize it" and "Don't be hysterical": These are the two alternating commands that we on the left see in our social media feeds every day. Each side, catching sight of the other, then spends the rest of the day castigating the other side for moral idiocy or hysterical stupidity. Trying to be neither a moral idiot nor a hysterical reactionary, I want to take a historical look at this debate about how to respond to Trumpism. I don't mean the recent history of the 2016 presidential campaign, nor the more distant history of Nazism in the 1930s. Instead, I trace much of the American left's strategic conflict over responding to Trumpism to the first era of post 9/11 mobilization. Even then, the American left had become so fragmented that we relied almost entirely on strategic alliances with other political forces that we might acknowledge as "lesser evils" but which we perceived as more powerful than closer potential allies. Rather than pushing the left to the front of American politics, this history of strategic alliances has made it more difficult for different parts of the left to talk to each other to build an actual left strategy, as each side now believes that the other is allied with the side that is not the lesser, but the greater evil. Here's how I think it happened.

Myopic focus on the Democratic Party
Most of us on the left are familiar with one narrative of the bad consequences of strategic alliances with the lesser evil. The story of the failure of the Democratic Party to represent the aims of the left is one that most of us could recite in our sleep. Instructed by years of experience, many on the left perceive the Democratic Party to be much like Charles Schulz's Lucy, offering to hold the football for Charlie Brown's running kick. That is, at one point on the way to political maturity, many of us may have been excited about the left argument for backing a particular Democratic Party candidate, only to find ourselves flat on our backs when those people pursued terrible policy agendas once elected. Long term consequences of such alliances for the left have been devastating, funneling emerging social movements into campaigns to elect politicians who betray left agendas. Even worse, despite arguing that a left movement will push these candidates to go further left, the broader left orbit of progressives generally refuse to seriously challenge Democratic Party politicians out of fear that any protest against Democrats will aid the Republican Party.

As I see it today, those leftists who argue that the Trump-Russia investigation as simply a Democratic Party strategy to avoid taking responsibility for their loss of the election to Trump is flawed by a myopic emphasis on these past experiences. Keeping the story of the 2016 primaries at the center of the field of vision, they don't see the significant disruptions in US centers of power forged by the simultaneous growth in domestic white-supremacist populism and the international effort by Russia to create a Eurasian power-bloc against NATO. The implication of the argument is that the political center is currently more dangerous than the far right. The assumption is that the far right is small and the center-right predictable.

However, the radical conservative movements that led to the Trump presidency have opened up a fault line within the Republican Party that casual observers on the left rarely care to parse. Even as we on the left warn our progressive friends not to overstate differences among right wing factions to the extent that they shout "Welcome to the Resistance!" to each mainstream GOP activist who breaks momentarily with Trump, we should understand where and how such breaks occur, and what they may mean in the long term for US politics. Just as overstating petty ideological or rhetorical differences can obscure a larger policy consensus, it is also important not to lump everyone on the right together. We chide those on the right who fail to understand differences between socialism and liberalism, and find it ludicrous when liberals refer to critics of the Democratic Party as the "alt-left." Similarly, we should understand the differences between the Never-Trump Republicans, the alt-right, "alt-light" and others within the Trumpist movement today.

Paleocons and libertarians versus the mainstream
George Hawley, who as a conservative is keenly aware of differences between mainstream conservatives and the far right, argues in his two books on the subject (Right Critics of American Conservatism and Making Sense of the Alt-Right) that the “Never-Trump Republicans” of today are heirs to a long effort at gate-keeping within the GOP. Hawley argues that neoconservatives have long been the dominant voice in mainstream conservative opinion. He defines the neocons broadly as hawkish in contrast with the isolationist conservatives of the 1930s, and sees them as more accepting of egalitarianism than the pre-World War II conservative movement. While Hawley understates the importance of racism in the party's mainstream as well as overstating the extent to which the GOP has marginalized the extremists in the party rather than themselves moving further right, his discussion of how neoconservatives have sought to exile paleoconservatives and libertarians from the conservative mainstream is informative. (For an account of how the effort to keep the far right within the GOP voting base has pushed conspiratorial ideology into the party rather than out of it, see Edward H. Miller, Nut Country: Right Wing Dallas and the Birth of the Southern Strategy and Dionne, et al., One Nation After Trump.)

Anti-Federal Reserve slogan draws Occupy
activists toward rightist conspiracy theories

Hawley describes David Frum's attack on anti-war Republicans in the National Review in 2003 over intervention in Iraq as a key moment in the neocons' current position. At that time, some activists and thinkers on the left advocated strategic alliances with these exiled paleoconservative and libertarians because of their opposition to US intervention, regardless of disagreements on many other issues. The most obvious example of this lesser-evil alliance appeared at CounterPunch, which still regularly publishes pieces by both paleocons and libertarians. Beyond CounterPunch, other left media outlets promoted the website Antiwar.com, run by the Pat Buchanan and Murray Rothbard supporter Justin Raimondo. Thus, despite seeming to have become entirely marginal relative to the rest of the GOP, paleoconservative arguments remained at the center of American popular discussion through the anti-War and the anti-Patriot Act Movements. Ron Paul's two presidential campaigns contributed to this growing libertarian-left fusion. In addition to opposing US intervention and domestic surveillance, Paul's campaigns promoted anti-Federal Reserve conspiracy discourse in the wake of the financial crisis, providing a mainstream space for white nationalist organizing, as these groups pushed the narrative of the 2008 collapse from “Wall Street banksters” toward conspiracy theories about “Jewish bankers” and “global elites.” In the Bush era, the mingling of right and left activists in movement spaces became obvious in the growth in the popularity of the "9/11 truth movement," conspiracy theorist huckster Alex Jones, bizarre anti-Federal Reserve documentaries, as well as in smaller ways, as in the emphasis on buying local and the increase of leftists involved in anti-vaccine and anti-GMO activism.

The decline in status of neoconservatives as a result of the debacle of the Iraq war and the associated domestic surveillance program was a crucial element in the growth of the Tea Party movement that gave us first, Sarah Palin, and then Donald Trump. Trump marked himself as different from neoconservative Republicans during the primaries because of his claim to have been against the war in 2003. In the general election, rather than shifting to the center as predicted, he relied on Steve Bannon’s populist attack on Hillary Clinton’s ties to Goldman Sachs, and today, continues to appeal to conspiracy theories about the "deep state" to dismiss stories of Russian hacking of the Clinton Campaign/DNC. (Journalist Joshua Green has made a point both online and in print of how important Bannon’s Clinton Cash was to the characterization of Hillary Clinton as “Crooked Hillary.”) The Democrats' attempts to appeal to what they perceive as widespread patriotic support for the "intelligence community" against Trump only plays into the fusion of libertarianism, paleoconservatism and some strands of the left.

Activists who later helped to found Three Way Fight warned of the dangers of any temporary alliances with economic nationalists during the “Battle of Seattle” in the 1999 Anti-Globalization movement in My Enemy's Enemy and Confronting Fascism. Today, the danger of fusing left and right populism appears much stronger because of the added international dimension as well as the new media environment.

Now, those who ignored this worry and allied with paleocons and libertarians describe the Never-Trumpers to be acting entirely in bad faith. In doing so, they ignore what Hawley explains has been a long-term transformation in the boundaries of acceptable conservative discourse, as neocons rejected overt racism and exiled the conspiratorial right from respectability. In this way, the neoconservatives can be understood as serving a similar centrist function in silencing and coopting right wing opponents just as the neoliberals of the Democratic Party have marginalized the left. In the meantime, courting those remnants to the right of the neocons has not led to any left victories, and from the perspective of larger dynamics, has added the voice of the left to the far right's argument that the Democratic center is in fact the greater, rather than the lesser evil. Slavoj Zizek took this logic furthest when he argued that Sanders supporters should seek to organize Bannon supporters for a joint fight against global capitalism.

Three political currents forming
What seems to be happening as a fall-out of a vastly unpopular war, increased anxiety about state powers of surveillance, the Great Recession, and the opening up of media through the internet is a crisis shaking both parties' centers of power. We can currently see in formation three separate political orientations: a broadly centrist interventionist neoliberalism created by the fusion of neoconservatives located at the National Review with the Clinton/Obama position represented by the New Republic; a right-wing economic nationalist and hard-racist position similar to the position of Buchanan which seemed to be coalescing at Breitbart; and a fragmented left that fails to create a meaningful power bloc because of sectarian conflict, branches of which will continue to advocate strategic alliances with the center or the anti-interventionist right depending on who they think represents the bigger immediate threat. (Following the Mercers' loyalty to Trump and ouster of Bannon from Breitbart it's not clear where the new center of the paleo-right will be. Also, where the alt-right will end up in the framework is not clear to me at this point, but they continue to build the base for the broader Breitbart "alt-light" wing, despite their own declared opposition to many of the particulars of alt-light politics.)

There is no current central representative of left opinion, but representative centers of gravity are the DSA/Bernie activists; Black Lives Matter, and the Women's March, though all these groups may at times accuse the others of being in alliance with one of the other two power blocs. The failure of the left to organize across cultural and sectarian boundaries within the US was exemplified in the contribution by some well-placed left media figures to articles about campus activists in 2015 that fueled a national moral panic about free speech on college campuses. These attacks on intolerant campus leftists ultimately fed Trump's support -- even as figures on the alt-right were playing up the same campus conflicts.

Leftists minimizing the far right threat
What appears currently to be the most dangerous formation on the left is the long-term result of what was initially described as a temporary strategic, issue-specific alliance between the anti-war left with libertarians and paleoconservatives, who have in the last several years been actively courted by the Russian state, as conservative journalist James Kirchik has chronicled. The recent investigations by CounterPunch of the personas “Alice Donovan” and “Sophie Mangal,” whose attack pieces on the Syrian opposition and praise for Bashar Al-Assad were published by both left- and right-leaning media outlets, indicates the extent to which the left is vulnerable to the same courtship when it fits their existing biases. CounterPunch had the decency to admit that they had been played by a foreign intelligence service. Those on the left who continue to dismiss all mention of Russian intelligence efforts in the US, whether they target left media or elections as "McCarthyism," fail to understand the ideological connections of international right-wing populist movements. It is not a “made up” story that alt-right activists chanted “Russia is our Friend” in a recent Charlottesviille march, or that Eurasianist ideologue Aleksander Dugin is often featured on Richard Spencer's website, or that Pat Buchanan has claimed Putin for the paleoconservative cause.

Assange offers job to ex-Google engineer who claims
gender gap in IT reflects innate biological differences

If the far right loves Putin for his authoritarianism, "traditionalism" and nationalism, some on the left continue to follow Russian media because they like the criticism of US intervention and buy uncritically the description of all the regime's opponents as fascists or the product of CIA manipulation. In a few notable cases, leftists have spoken about the Russian government offers of material support to struggling left organizations, as Micah White did in the Guardian. The most extreme exemplar of left-right fusion connected to the influence of Russia in US left politics is the current public support for Vladimir Putin by former Workers World Party activist Caleb Maupin, who has praised Putin on Sputnik as similar to both Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. But the more widely known figure supported by left-right alliance is Julian Assange, whose supporters on the left continue to overlook his overt statements of racism and sexism on social media because of their alliance with his position relative to the US security state.

While the Democratic Party is certainly largely responsible for the current situation, this exclusive focus on the wrongdoing of the DNC by some on the left minimizes the meaningful threat of the populist and white-nationalist right within the conservative movement, including longer term GOP projects of racial gerrymandering and voter suppression. This particular part of the left is much too sanguine about the hegemony of the multicultural neoliberal order. The contradictory nature of this position is apparent in the treatment of near-wins by Corbyn or Sanders as harbingers of neoliberalism's near death, in combination with the surprise with which this faction has greeted Brexit, Trump's election, and each sickening right-wing turn, such as the seating of large numbers of right-wing parties in European parliaments. No matter how often they come, right-wing populist victories are treated as "aberrations" and "flukes" that will be corrected and controlled by the centrist power bloc.  Meanwhile, we are to believe, the real danger to the left comes from the writing of Black progressive Ta-Nehisi Coates.

The mistaken theory has been that the centrist power bloc would never compromise with the Trump-Bannon side of the right wing, largely based on an understanding of the US deep state as inherently neoliberal, and by a mapping of European party dynamics from the 1930s onto the US in the 2010s. Despite the continuing evidence that their predictions have been entirely mistaken, these left opinion makers continue to deny that Trumpism represents a serious break in hegemonic influence of the political center, even as they anticipate its imminent overthrow by the Sanders/DSA current. However, elements of the security establishment in the US are themselves divided and partisan, and it is not at all clear that these forces are universally neoliberal. Indeed, it is common for some anti-interventionist media to feature ex-intelligence operatives or intellectuals whose opposition to US intervention was or is currently based in paleoconservatism.

It's also worth noting that the behavior of US political parties is different from those in 1930s Europe precisely because of the all-or-nothing stakes of the US election system. As a result, we have in the US neoconservative Republicans who may be horrified by Trumpean rhetoric, and yet continue to make compromises for the sake of the party's long-term survival, which they believe is seriously threatened by the demographic changes in the US. Among the dynamics that these critics of anti-Trumpist resistance fail to understand is the entryist strategy of the white nationalist right into youth groups through College Republican and libertarian organizations, a strategy that may have long-term impact on both the current structure of universities, and the center of political gravity within the GOP itself. The left understands that the parties are themselves powerful institutions with massive material assets. Keeping control of the electoral apparatus and retaining political bases in their support has become a desperate struggle that will lead to all manner of moral compromise and self-justification by neoconservatives with Trumpism, as we have already seen with the recent tax bill. Even Steve Bannon’s recent fall from grace was about personal disloyalty to Trump and failure to deliver electoral results, rather than a moral repudiation of his putrid ideology.

Left against right and center

Toward an alliance of leftists against center and right
The liberal welcoming of neoconservatives to the "resistance" against Trump is of course also short-sighted, and will likely result in the continuing rightward slide of the center. The most feared outcome of the current tactics of the #Resistance for the left is that, just as with the opposition to the Iraq War, engaging with the current mass resistance to Trump will produce more of the same: the sidelining of genuine left opposition as "wanting a free pony," while continuing to cede all populist ground to the right. This dynamic has ever been the danger of popular fronts. However, as I hope I have explained above, the anti-anti-Trump position comes with equally problematic entanglements.

Rather than continuing to play this game, we on the left would do well to think about how our own divisions continue to push us into alliances with what we perceive as less evil but stronger forces from the center (for progressives focused on domestic inequality) or the isolationist/Russophilic right (for the anti-interventionists). Rather than seeking among our opponents for strategic allies, it would be much better to think in the long term, seeking a principled alliance across the left to create a strong center of gravity from which to fight both the center and the right.

Works cited:

• "A Leader of the Same Caliber as Putin Desperately Needed in US – US Analyst," Sputnik, 17 October 2015, https://sputniknews.com/politics/201510171028680362-us-needs-new-leader-putin-russia/
• Anti-Fascist Forum, ed. My Enemy's Enemy: essays on globalization, fascism and the struggle against capitalism. Montreal: Kersplebedeb Publishing, 2003.
• Assange, Julian, et al., Tweet by Assange (8:41 am 2 September 2017) and replies, Twitter, https://twitter.com/julianassange/status/904006478616551425?lang=en
• Berlet, Chip. “Ron Paul’s Web of Denial,” Research for Progress (website), undated, http://www.researchforprogress.us/concepts/conspiracism/paul/denial.html.
• Buchanan, Patrick J. “Putin’s Paleoconservative Moment.” American Conservative, 17 December 2013, http://www.theamericanconservative.com/2013/12/17/putins-paleoconservative-moment/ 
• deBoer, Fredrik. "College Students Have Forgotten How to Fight the System." New Republic, 27 September 2015, https://newrepublic.com/article/122938/college-students-have-forgotten-how-fight-system 
• Dionne, E.J., Jr., et al. One Nation After Trump: A Guide for the Perplexed, the Disiullsioned, the Desperate and the Not-Yet Deported. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2017.
• Fekete, Liz. "Neoliberalism and Popular Racism: The Shifting Shape of the European Right." In The Politics of the Right, Socialist Register. London: Merlin Press, 2016.
• Green, Joshua. Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency. New York: Penguin, 2017.
• ---. "This Man is the Most Dangerous Political Operative in America." Bloomberg Business Week, 8 October 2015, https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/graphics/2015-steve-bannon/ 
• Hamerquist, Don, et al. Confronting Fascism: Discussion Documents for a Militant Movement. 2d. ed. Montreal, Quebec: Kersplebedeb Publishing, 2017 (first published 2002).
  
• Hawley, George. Making Sense of the Alt-Right. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017.
• ---. Right Critics of American Conservatism. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2016.
• Kirchick, James. "Paleocons for Putin." Daily Beast, 13 January 2014, https://www.thedailybeast.com/paleocons-for-putin 
• Landers, Jackson. "White Supremacists Return to Charlottesville Chanting 'Russia is Our Friend.'" Daily Beast, 7 October 2017, https://www.thedailybeast.com/richard-spencer-and-white-supremacists-return-to-charlottesville-chanting-you-will-not-replace-us
• Miller, Edward H. Nut Country: Right Wing Dallas and the Birth of the Southern Strategy. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2015.
• St. Clair, Jeffrey, and Joshua Frank. "Ghosts in the Propaganda Machine." CounterPunch, 5 January 2018, https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/01/05/ghosts-in-the-propaganda-machine/ 
• Sunshine, Spencer. “The Right Hand of Occupy Wall Street.” Political Research Associates (website), 23 February 2014, https://www.politicalresearch.org/2014/02/23/the-right-hand-of-occupy-wall-street-from-libertarians-to-nazis-the-fact-and-fiction-of-right-wing-involvement/ 
• White, Micah. "I started Occupy Wall Street. Russia tried to co-opt me." Guardian, 2 November 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/02/activist-russia-protest-occupy-black-lives-matter 
• Zizek, Slavoj. “Alt-right Trump supporters and left-wing Bernie Sanders fans should join together to defeat capitalism.” Independent, 26 November 2017, http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/donald-trump-steve-bannon-alt-right-bernie-sanders-hillary-clinton-anti-capitalism-together-a8076501.html

Photo credits:

1. Million Mask March, Boise Idaho, 5 November 2013. Photo by User:Bastolio (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.
2. Screenshot of Julian Assange tweet, 8 August 2017, 1:16 a.m.
3. Banner by Carolina Anti-Racists protesting Charlottesville "Unite the Right" rally, 12 August 2017. Photo by Anthony Crider [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

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Review: Making Sense of the Alt-Right by George Hawley

H-Net has published my review of political scientist George Hawley’s book Making Sense of the Alt-Right. On the plus side, the book is carefully researched and offers a good account of the alt-right’s development, hostility to conservatism, distinctive online tactics, and relationship with the Trump presidential campaign. On the minus side, it offers little new information or analysis, neglects crucial features of the alt-right (such as its gender politics and its relationship with the European New Right), and takes gratuitous and ill-informed swipes at antifa.

Here are a couple of excerpts from the review:

"Hawley’s examination of the Alt-Right’s relationship with mainstream conservatism is one of the book’s particular strengths. As he emphasizes, the Alt-Right is not just a racist version of conservatism but rather rejects the conservative movement’s main premises, 'the so-called three-legged stool of moral traditionalism, economic liberty, and strong national defense' (p. 4). This attack on conservatism grows out of the Alt-Right’s rejection of classical Enlightenment principles, such as liberty and equality, and also many Alt-Rightists’ hostility to politicized Christianity. Hawley argues that while many conservatives are bitterly opposed to the Alt-Right they are unlikely to defeat it, because of their own movement’s current weakness, the rise of numerous right-wing websites beyond conservatives’ control, and the fact that Alt-Rightists are not interested in 'a seat at the conservative table'; they simply want to destroy it (p. 113)."

*                    *                    *

"Hawley’s portrait of the Alt-Right is well researched and carefully argued. However, almost all of what he presents has been well covered before by news organs or antifascist researchers. Hawley’s book gives this analysis the imprimatur of a professional academic and the benefit of fresh interviews with a number of Alt-Right activists, such as Richard Spencer, Greg Johnson, Jared Taylor, and Lawrence Murray. Yet I had hoped Hawley would do more to put the Alt-Right in a broader political context. For example, the movement’s profound debt to the ENR [European New Right] and engagement with ENR figures—Alain de Benoist, Guillaume Faye, and Aleksandr Dugin—deserves much more attention than it receives. I also wish that Hawley had probed more deeply into some of the issues he touches on only in passing, for example, the pivotal role that anti-Jewish scapegoating plays in white nationalist ideology, the Alt-Right’s discussions of foreign policy, or its debates around homosexuality or abortion. Exploration of these topics would have given a fuller picture of the movement’s inner dynamics, political philosophies, and interplay with other far-right currents."

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