Alt-Right ‘cultural purity’, ideology and mainstream social policy discourse: towards a political anthropology of ‘mainstremeist’ ideology

Lux, Julia; Jordan, John David

Abstract

According to a well-rehearsed media trope, the ‘Alt-Right’ (‘alternative right’) burst into a shocked public consciousness in the run-up to the 2016 US presidential election (Caldwell, 2016; Collins, 2016). Curiously, this phenomenon materialised in media consciousness as a nebulous interconnectivity of white supremacists incubated in the obscure ‘dark web’ before spreading into the minds of poorly educated people via the unfiltered medium of the mainstream Internet (Cook, 2016; Caldwell, 2016). This definition was rapidly deployed by presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to attack Donald Trump's supporters as a ‘paranoid fringe’ (Ohlheiser and Dewey, 2016). Explaining the ability of this racist ‘fringe’ to somehow capture the White House similarly defaulted to the deeply classist, technophobic and socially convenient narrative of uneducated poor people exposed to bad ideas on the Internet (Ember, 2016; Weigel, 2016; Marwick and Lewis, 2017; Bartlett, 2018; Daniels, 2018).

• Publication Date: Jul 22, 2019
• Deposit Date: Mar 14, 2025
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Pages: 151-176
• Book Title: Social Policy Review 31
• ISBN: 9781447344001
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.46692/9781447344001.009