Searched, couldn't find a thread on this.
On neoreactionaries
On paleocons
On 4chan
http://www.vox.com/2016/4/18/11434098/alt-right-explained
Much, much more at the link. It's a fascinating look at some of the right-wing elements out there.
It's far too easy to immerse yourself in an echo chamber and pretend that right-wingers are all the same. I know I'm guilty of this. There are certainly common threads running through each of the alt-right ideologies, but it's important to recognize that the right in the US, just like the left, is deeply divided.
Turn into paleothread if old.
The alt-right is often dismissed as white supremacist Trump supporters with Twitter accounts, and they are certainly that. But spend some time talking to key players and reading the movement's central texts, as I did, and you'll find it's more than a simple rebranding of the white nationalist movement. It's the product of the intersection of a longstanding, long-marginalized part of the conservative movement with both the most high-minded and the basest elements of internet culture. It's a mutated revival of a monster William F. Buckley thought he killed in the early 1990s, given new energy by the web.
And it's making its impact felt in a big way this election. In the past, when mainstream conservatives have gone up against racialist, conspiratorial elements on the right, they have emerged the victors. Buckley successively marginalized the John Birch Society in the 1950s, and then Pat Buchanan and his followers in the 1990s. People like Continetti and Young are trying to do the same thing to the alt-right. But with huge amounts of online energy behind the movement, and Trump likely to become the GOP nominee, it's not clear that this time the mainstream will win.
On neoreactionaries
"Democracy is as most writers before the 19th century agreed an ineffective and destructive system of government," Moldbug writes. Moldbug doesn't actually like the term "democracy." He prefers "demotism," or rule of the people, a label under which he sweeps modern-day developed democracies like the US or Western Europe but also the former Soviet bloc, Nazism, and fascism. "Universalist lawful democracy is the least demotist of demotisms, Demotism Lite if you will," he writes. "Compared to Communism and Nazism, there's much to be said for it. But this is a rather low bar."
The purpose of government, in the view of neoreactionaries, isn't to represent the will of the people. It's to govern well, full stop. "From the perspective of its subjects, what counts is not who runs the government but what the government does," Moldbug explains. "Good government is effective, lawful government. Bad government is ineffective, lawless government. How anyone reasonable could disagree with these statements is quite beyond me. And yet clearly almost everyone does."
And democratic government, the neoreactionaries insist, is not effective, lawful government. Because the will of the people is arbitrary and varying, it cannot have the consistency of real, durable law, and it creates incentives for wasteful and, worse still, left-wing government. Moldbug started as an Austrian-school libertarian, and most neoreactionaries have general small-government sympathies and express a fear that democracy inevitably leads to ever greater taxation and redistribution, and otherwise encroaches on individual liberty.
On paleocons
The term "paleoconservatism" is a retronym coined in the 1980s to characterize a brand of conservatism that was by then going extinct, a brand exemplified by Robert Taft, the Ohio senator and legendary isolationist who lost the 1952 Republican nomination to Dwight Eisenhower, and by Pat Buchanan in his 1992, 1996, and 2000 presidential runs.
Paleocons agree with mainstream conservatism on social issues they tend to be stridently anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ rights, pro-school prayer, and disproportionately traditionalist Catholic and on the evils of the welfare state, but part ways on international affairs, including immigration, trade, and warfare.
Paleocons are largely isolationist, warning America against foreign entanglements and dismissing neocon attempts at democracy promotion as hubristic and doomed to failure. They were overwhelmingly against the Iraq War, and tend to be heavily critical of Israel. They're also more fervently nationalist than mainstream Republicans. That translates into a very negative view of immigration, both due to its perceived economic harm to Americans and because of the "damage" it does to American culture, and into more support for tariffs and trade protection.
On 4chan
But in recent years, a vocal right-wing contingent has popped up. As New York magazine's Brian Feldman explains, part of this is an artifact of 4chan gaining popularity and its popular catchall board /b/ losing ground to alternatives, notably /pol/, or the "Politically Incorrect" chat board. "To the extent that there is a shared political ideology across /pol/, its a heavily ironic mix of garden-variety white supremacy and neo-reactionary movements," Feldman writes.
"Most days," the Daily Beast's Jacob Siegel writes, "/pol/ resembles nothing so much as [white supremacist blog] The Daily Stormer with the signal to noise dial turned only slightly." The Southern Poverty Law Center has taken notice, with fellow Keegan Hankes telling Siegel, "You cant understate 4chans role. I constantly see 4chan being mentioned by the more Internet- and tech-savvy guys in the white nationalist movement. Theyre getting their content from 4chan."
Hankes has noticed this trend on Reddit as well, noting in a Gawker essay that "Reddit increasingly is providing a home for anti-black racists and some of the most virulent and violent propaganda around."
This branch of the alt-right has also played an important role in the Gamergate movement, an ongoing effort to harass women in the video game industry until they shut up about equality and representation. Yiannopoulos, who before the controversy called gamers "pungent beta male bollock-scratchers and twelve-year-olds," jumped on it as a cause with reactionary potential. "GamerGate is remarkable and attracts the interest of people like me because it represents perhaps the first time in the last decade or more that a significant incursion has been made in the culture wars against guilt-mongerers, nannies, authoritarians and far-Left agitators," he wrote in late 2014.
The affinity between gamers and right politics makes sense. "Its not hard to see why this ideology would catch-on with white male geeks," Klint Finley writes in his excellent explainer on neoreaction. "It tells them that they are the natural rulers of the world, but that they are simultaneously being oppressed by a secret religious order. And the more media attention is paid to workplace inequality, gentrification and the wealth gap, the more their bias is confirmed."
"While GamerGate started off as a very diverse, vocal opponent to what they saw was unethical journalism (before it was debunked), many of the anonymous /pol/ rightists would take advantage of its anti-left character by creating sock-puppets," an anonymous 4channer and ex-Gamergater wrote last year. "Today it is hard to find a 4chan user that doesnt have an attachment to far right politics."
And this enthusiasm for far-right politics has bled into Trumpism. JaredTSwift, an alt-righter who got his start on 4chan, gushed to Motherboard's Oliver Lee, "Trump was meme-able and entertaining, and something like a ban on Muslim immigration would never have been considered before him."
http://www.vox.com/2016/4/18/11434098/alt-right-explained
Much, much more at the link. It's a fascinating look at some of the right-wing elements out there.
It's far too easy to immerse yourself in an echo chamber and pretend that right-wingers are all the same. I know I'm guilty of this. There are certainly common threads running through each of the alt-right ideologies, but it's important to recognize that the right in the US, just like the left, is deeply divided.
Turn into paleothread if old.