Alt-Right Masculinities: an analysis

This is a repost of a recorded talk – now with transcript – from 2017, shortly after Donald Trump first became president.

It offers some still very salient and relevant understandings, that we may need even more now after Donald Trump’s second election victory

It is reported that young men, in the 18-29 age category, shifted a huge almost 30 percentage points from the Democrat presidential candidate in the 2020 election to the Republican candidate in 2024 (and women in that same age category shifted to the Republicans by about half as much).

The alt-right is disproportionately young and male, and is having a large impact on culture and society overall.

Understanding more of what it is about is important, and the following analysis can help with that.

“Alt-right masculinities, Ressentiment, and the ‘Dangerous Faggot’“
Presented by Dale Spencer, assistant professor at Carleton University (winter 2017; length = 22 minutes)

Transcript (will be refined momentarily):

So thank you everybody for coming.

[I’m] Dale Spencer, I’m in the Department of Law and Legal Studies, an assistant professor, and today I’m gonna be talking about the

alt-right masculinities, and I have the somewhat controversial topic — I mean a discussion — of the so-called “Dangerous Faggot” Milo Yiannopoulous: this is his title not mine.

So in late 2016 Richard Spencer the president of the National Policy Institute exclaimed in the wake of the election of Donald Trump and he said, “Heil Trump, Heil victory!” making the Nazi salute and he asserted in the same speech, and I quote, “We are not meant to live in shame weakness and disgrace, we were not meant to beg for moral validation for some of the most despicable creatures to ever inhabit the

planet.” He goes on to say that “America was until the last generation a white country designed for ourselves and our posterity. It is our creation, it is our inheritance, and it belongs to us,” end quote.

Richard Spencer’s statements — no relation to me <laughter> — represent the alt-right and the essence of their position on what America means to them.

What is particular about the alt-right which makes it different than its mainstream conservative counterparts, in my view, is the many different permutations that it can take on. So far as I can tell its complexity and formations has to a degree befuddled commentators and analysts. So in this presentation I’m going to try to make sense of some of the practices associated with the alt right masculinity.

I’m going to connect such practices to an analysis of ‘ressentiment’ that is part and parcel of the rise in popularity of this movement.

My contention here is that the alright is a form of idea-driven praxis that maintains a number of practices that are agonistically primed as a critique to socially progressive movements, and so in addition I address the figure of the ‘Dangerous Faggot’ Milo Yiannopoulous as an apologist — not necessarily a member — of the alt-right movement.

Here I offer somewhat of a sympathetic critique of the alt-right, to serve as what I see is a clarion call to oppose such a movement.

2:50 CONSERVATISM AS PHILOSOPHY AND MOVEMENT

I begin this presentation with a brief engagement with conservatism as a philosophy and movement. Conservatism as it’s found in diverse thinking as Edmund Burke, William Buckley, and others is predicated on the maintenance of the status quo.

Whereas conservative parties have been labeled as stupid, conservatism has – and I’ve known this for over a decade – like it or not has had has a very rich intellectual tradition.

Conservatism is an idea-driven practice that has evoked power besieged and power protected. It is an activist doctrine for an activist time. It waxes in response to movements from below and wanes in response to their disappearance.

At an ontological level, when a conservative libertarian looks upon society, he does not see isolated individuals: he sees private hierarchical groups, where a father governs his family and an owner his employees. Any challenges to the order of things are viewed with absolute contempt. Any democratic movements from below are viewed as a terrible disturbance.

4:15 LEARNING FROM THE ENEMY

Conservatism is ultimately counter-revolutionary. Conservatism as a philosophy and movement has been shown to adapt and adopt both consciously and unconsciously to the language of democratic reform to the cause of hierarchy.

For example David Horowitz, one of my favorite fellows — I’m saying that sarcastically — has encouraged conservatives to use the language that the left has deployed — and I’m quoting him here — “to use the language the left has deployed so effectively on behalf of its own agendas as the conservative viewpoint is quote unquote “under representative and underrepresented in the curriculum and on its reading lists” end quote”, and this is a case example of how conservatism ultimately learns from their opponents.

5:10 RELIANCE ON VICTIMHOOD

And the last aspect of conservatism I want to highlight before moving on to a discussion of the alt-right is in relation to the reliance on victimhood as a basis of political agency.

Far from being an invention of the politically correct, victimhood has been a talking point of the right ever since Burke, Edmund Burke, decried the mobs treatment of Marie Antoinette. The conservative speaks for a particular kind of victim: an injured group who has lost something of value, as opposed to the wretched of the earth whose chief complaint is that they never had anything to lose.

As the conservative pundit Andrew Sullivan states, “all conservatism begins with loss,” end quote. So this is to say that it is oriented to recovery and restoration, and agitates for reform in real time. For example in [Margaret] Thatcher we see the ideological permutation of conservatism, where the primary aim of her entire political movement was to destroy the newly-empowered trade unions: this was the point.

With these ingredients of conservatism in mind, I will now turn my attention to the topic of alt-right masculinities.

6:30 UNDERSTANDING MASCULINITIES via PIERRE BOURDIEU

So in this presentation for sake of clarity, I’m going to approach the masculinities through the work of Pierre Bourdieu.

So for Bourdieu, the act of being included as a man is evidence in the embodiment of the historical structures of the masculine order particular to specific spaces that involve forms of unconscious schemes of perception and appreciation. This is to say that particular types of habitus reflect the functioning systems of schemes of perception, thought, and action. They are not solely the result of performance or mere constructions, rather they are the continuous result of durable transformation of bodies and minds through processes of practical construction imposing a differential definition of what is considered the legitimate uses of the male body. A corporeal formation of specific masculinities is reflected in characteristic postures, types of speech — and that’s key terms here — and physical appearance that serve to naturalize masculinities on the one hand and signify group membership on the other.

So in this presentation I pay special attention to specific practices not necessarily the substance of the ideas (but I do comment on that) that signify normative conformance to a particular masculinity and group membership.

8:15 ‘FASHY’ FASHION

So I’m going to begin with the outfit and what it means literally.

So as Erynn [Masi] de Casanova has recently demonstrated, types of masculinity always have a uniform. Such uniforms mark group inclusion, they give a sense of belonging, and consist of body-reflexive practices that procure a particular image: they involve working on the body, fashioning it in particular ways, actually preening in specific ways that make you look out the way that you do. And so this indicates that distinct classes of men procure a dress culture that can be practiced across geographically-disperse communities.

In relation to alt-right masculinities, this is embodied in a particular image that adopts a far cleaner look than has been associated with neo-Nazis or other nationalist movements. For example if we look at Richard Spencer, and I’m just gonna move on to him, he’s a good-looking fella… and in the previous slide it had those that were in attendance at the National Policy Institute meeting which happened in late 2016 where he gave his address. We see this military sheen haircut, three-piece suit, and button-up shirt that’s characteristic of the alt-right masculinities.

What some commentators have found ironic — which I clearly do not — is that the men in the alt-right community are donning a hairstyle that has already been repurposed in the 21st century by young people, i.e. hipsters, whose ethos is radical safe-space inclusiveness not ethnophobic separatism with eugenic undertones. The look has become known as ‘fashy’ for fascist. Again, this is a conservative practice of consciously adopting the practices of the opposition for their own purposes; this is thoroughly conservative.

10:30 – TROLLING, DOXXING, FREE SPEECH, WEBSITES

Okay, another practice is the idea of trolling. Trolling involves hyper pernicious attacks on various groups including women, trans people, non-white peoples, and other peoples on the left. Such trolling can involve the distribution of racist meme images, it can involve alt-right art exhibits or a kind of case example is Jack Posobiec’s infiltration of anti-Trump protests with so-called “Rape Melania” signs. So in the Canadian context, in Edmonton, Toronto, and Richmond, the alt-right have used flyers to state such messages that ‘White Lives Matter’ — nobody had to tell me that — or memes that rebuke the Chinese taking over our country and placing bags of rice on people’s doorsteps.

The alt-right in Canada and elsewhere is also engaged in the practice of doxxing, whereby websites like 4chan are used to expose personal information about enemies. This can involve the act of swatting where somebody shows up at your house with massive amounts of guns because they call in some suicide scare or you’re murdering your children.

So 4chan as a community organizing website arguably has been the single greatest factor in explaining the popularity or the rise in popularity of the alt-right. Clinging to the libertarian free speech banner, 4chan brings together isolated men which since the website’s inception, has asserted their right to say anything no matter someone else’s feelings. This has meant and continues to mean posting swastikas, racial slurs, and content that delights in harming other people.

It is in this context that the uber troll Milo Yiannopoulous has risen to fame. Serving as the so-called technology editor — which I’m unsure whether or not he actually knows what anything about computers — for Breitbart News, Yiannopoulous intervened in 2014 in the GamerGate controversy where 4chan members rallied against the intrusion of so-called feminists into video game development. Milo is the perfect anti-feminist troll to roll out this critique beyond the internet to mainstream culture; he’s good-looking, there’s a bunch of different ways of looking at this, he’s also very savvy in terms of argumentation. And so to quote Dale Beran, “Milo is 4chan at its most earnest. After all, these men have finally discovered their issue, the thing that unites them: their failure and powerlessness, literally embodied to them by women” end quote.

To be clear the promulgation of alternative truths and other logical fallacies that Milo has become known for, is the essence of trolling practices associated with alt right masculinities. It is my contention that he’s merely the best at it.

13:45 RED-PILLING / CONSPIRACY

The next practice associated with alt-right masculinities is the — we can give

it a sort of verbiage — is this idea of ‘red-pilling’.

The alt-right maintains a predilection towards conspiracy theories. This is coupled with a more dark form of red-pilling that involves denying established historical truths. For example, 4chan and Reddit have served as prime avenues for alt-right males to red-pill the so-called politically-correct world on accepted history of the Holocaust. Holocaust denial is the red pill. It is what one takes when one wants to know the alternative truths about the world. To red pill is a marker of alt-right group membership. This can be seen in the recent YouTube star PewDiePie’s alignment with the alt-right: his kind of recent membership with them in terms of being red-pilled regarding the Holocaust.

14:55 THE VICTIM ROLE

The victim role is kind of one of the second-last I’m going to kind of take on.

The alt-right disdains when those in leftist circles take on the so-called victim rule, but take consider considerable liberties in taking on the role themselves. While the so-called mainstream media is viewed as the purveyor of lies about the world and the movement, Reddit and 4chan have been viewed as the bastion of free speech. After being kicked off Reddit, Simpson, a sub-reddit moderator, explained, and I quote, “It’s clear that Reddit has banned us because we were becoming very popular and spreading inconvenient truths about who’s ruining our country and robbing our children of a future” end quote. So any censorship is viewed as a form of victimization affront to their message that something valuable — America as a land for whites — has been taken away from them.

16:00 ‘RESSENTIMENT’ & ‘THE VANISHING MALE WORKER’

The last aspect of the alt-right masculinities I want to highlight is ‘ressentiment’ which I contend is what animates much of the fervor behind the support of the alt-right.

A French term exported into English, ressentiment is an experience of hostility directed at that which a subject identifies as the cause of their frustration. While Nietzsche focused his analysis of ressentiment on Christianity, more recent engagement with this emotion has focused on it as a class emotion that invokes particular calls to action. Here class antagonism and ressentiment is predicated on the belief that a particular class of individuals have gained an unfair advantage.

If we take into account what has been termed — and I am very sympathetic to this — “the vanishing male worker” in the US, and the fact that 16 per cent of prime-age men are unemployed or in precarious forms of labour, we can identify and understand the emergence of a distinct class of males living in their parents’ basements that have according to Dale Beran found their way on to 4chan. These men face the continuous painful reminder of their failure to participate in the working world due to corporate disinvestment in the US economy and the loss of opportunities to find working wages in factories.

Concomitantly women and immigrants are entering into their private worlds of video games and what remains of the job market respectively. And so in the facing the brunt of the abstract immaterial faceless economy, alt-right masculinities turn their brutal hostilities to women and immigrants as the source of their frustrations and failures: it is women and immigrants that have been given an unfair advantage; it is only in the creation of a safe space for people of a European descent that America will be great again. So this is a kind of classic example of victimhood. <…>

18:25 THE DOWNFALL OF MILO YIANNOPOULOUS

I would be remiss to say nothing of the recent downfall of Milo Yiannopoulous and what we can take away from his loss of being the conservative darling he once was. Just days before being disinvited as a keynote speaker at CPAC, and the cancellation of his $250,000 book deal (holy-moly!) with Schuster and Schuster, and the resignation of his position with Brietbart, Milo said the following regarding transgendered persons: he says, “I make no apologies for protecting women and children from men who are confused about their sexual identity in bathrooms” end quote. He then went on to justify his assertion by saying they are disproportionately involved with sex crimes. Well I can confirm as someone who researches sex offenders, that this is patently false.

This statement also brings me to another quote from Milo on the Joe Rogan Experience when he said, I quote, “In the gay world, some of the most enriching and incredibly life-affirming and -shaping relationships very often between younger boys and older men can be hugely positive experience for those young boys” end quote. Well it turns out in Canada and the United States, children cannot legally consent to sexual contact with adults – and from statistical studies on pedophilia, having been a sexual abuse victim is a strong predictor of becoming a perpetrator. So that aside, well one of the things we can do is we can actually now rationalize in some way, shape, or form his defense of being a Catholic in the Catholic Church (yikes!).

20:00 RESPONDING TO THE ALT-RIGHT

But the bigger question is what can we learn from this ‘Dangerous Faggot’?

Milo Yiannopoulous is basically a provocateur. He is the stereotypical court jester; he wants to provoke a reaction so that he can claim victim status. He continually sought and seeks to be a victim of this censurous left and all too often — and this is a fact — the left has so easily obliged, including blocking him from speaking at UC Berkeley which ridiculously made his popularity rise immensely as a voice of free speech. So as Milo gets his feet under him as he has been rejected by portions of the mainstream conservatives and the alt right, and he begins to start to build a website… how can we actually react differently to Milo’s and others on alt right seeking to agitate for the sake of attention?

Well, and some people are not going to like me saying this: we can begin by stop being professionally offended. We can stop by relishing in the preposterous, the competitions over who is the most progressive — which in my opinion borders on the comical — and we can stop shaming each other. We can recognize the common enemy, and recognize that you are all in a privileged space here at the University. We can be measured in how we respond, and keeping in mind that mass violence as it was witnessed at Berkeley actually creates martyrs.

So in addition, reflecting on the nature of conservatism, we need to keep in mind that ideas of solidarity, sympathy, and mutual support is doctrinally in opposition to the alt-right and other conservative movements: the preferred doctrine is care for yourself and no one else.

To paraphrase [Noam] Chomsky on this point, the very idea that we’re in it together, that we care about each other and we have responsibility for one another, is frightening to conservatism and it is at odds with their worldview in many ways. As such, shaming individuals on the alt-right may in the end proved inefficacious: they smile and nod at the pain of the wretched.

[Applause]