Why we're seeing the rise of 'alt-right' in the West
Belayed by globalisation, "the West" has lost confidence in its golden child, is unsure of its place in the world and how to relate to the rest of the world; for the first time since the 18th century, the maytide of political revolutions in "the West" are poised to shift the gables of international order.
Is the clock of history turning away from an increasingly involuted West? Niall Ferguson, the popular Harvard historian, in his book Civilization differentiated between the West and "the Rest" by using the term "Resterners".
Are there good reasons for posing the sort of question that whether the momentum of history is moving away from the West? The question is intellectually mandated, first by the rise of the "alt-right" parallel to the involution of the very ideas that enshrined "the West" as the pinnacle of civilisational evolution in the post-Second World War era.
Second, the grand chroniclers of the uninhibited triumph of the West as a logical outcome of the inherent vitality of western values and world views found in the list of "New York Bestsellers" such as Ferguson, Francis Fukuyama and Parag Khanna need revision and not just revised editions.
The other aspect of this is the seemingly fly-by-night political populists who were deemed unfit for elections and mainstream politics suddenly redefining the political. This revisionist political group of "alt-right" dismisses much of liberal ideological enterprise as "political correctness" that silenced conservative opinion in a cosmopolitan diverse world as essentially extreme, racist and even neo-Nazi or neo-fascist.
The measuring instruments of political temperature have failed to read the biggest political churning yet in the last 27 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the course of his campaign, US president-elect Donald Trump called for "re-declaring Independence" of the US which had ceded its founding sovereignty to the "cosmopolitical" world order.
The "connectographic" world which was initially projected as a way of bringing in a new wave of prosperity was squandered away by excesses of American warlords and global capital overlords whose reach had no limits.
Parag Khanna talked of connected mega-cities driving the 21st century economy in a "global civilisation". In his misplaced futurism, described by a New York Times reviewer as "fluff" and that Parag Khanna “I’m afraid, does not know what he is talking about”, sees land, people, identity, culture, history as meaningless variables that could be bent at will by the inheritors of the future deed of a total world civilisation.
The "Alt-Right" has emerged as a meta-political doctrine, a neo-political collective with culture and politics as synonymous end-to-end. Politics was the driver of culture but in a historical role reversal, culture is defining politics. While culture was always latent with political imagination, the alt-right transformed it into a political movement.
The informal channels within digital media are the voice of this alt-right and mainstream media houses are becoming vulnerable by being identified too closely with entrenched "cosmopolitical" interests and as franchises of global finance weaponisation.
While the "cosmopolitical" regime integrated politics and finance investment, the "alt-right" integrated cultural and political dissent with the deceptive comfort that traditional media houses will perpetually keep a lid on dissent by labelling it as extreme, racist and regressive.
While the global "connectographic" governments were willing to pay a political price for economic gains, the "alt-right" was the first to put forth a coherently political argument that the political price was too high and economic gains restricted to finance powerhouses which came at the cost of the "real" economy which was defined by the ability to produce.
This new political philosophy of the West is a revolution against "connectographic" governments which saw every political barrier to the mission of global finance as enemy of the state. There was no such thing as national interest in practice.
Pankaj Mishra, in a New Yorker article ‘How Rousseau Predicted Trump’ described the political phenomenon as an “anti-elitist revolt”.
However, there is enough to suspect that the vanguard of this "anti-elitism" is a dissatisfied aspiration of another set of elites i.e. the "old money" which lost out to the Silicon Valley merchants who liquidated much of this old money by being the architects of the global "cosmopolitical" finance economy which did not need physical assets to build wealth but could simply create a network of finance where wealth was generated simply by being passed around without having to create or produce anything.
Titans of the old money have been brought to their knees by the millennial entrepreneurs. However, it would be unfair to presume that these old money titans are solely driven by loss of their own status and they are also culturally bound to old money patriotism where the national working class also had its role in society.
No doubt, these titans were at the same time patrons of the "old money" cultural world. Mishra rightly points out Rousseau’s sense of contradiction between man of "civilisation" and the "natural" man and it would be fair to assess that the alt-right has emerged from this essential contradiction which was driven to its critical point by the "connectographic" order.
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| A new term being used to explain the geist of the "alt-right" in the West is "post-fact" or "post-truth", but post-fact did not emerge with Brexit or Donald Trump. |
However, there is a contradiction within this alt-right itself since it is an anti-elite angst led politically by an old money elite. The old-world titans succeeded into manufacturing a political leadership for themselves by identifying with the plight of the working class.
However, if this is merely a strategic deployment of a political idea to mount an intra-elite coup then a further refinement of the current alt-right movement may emerge in its conflict with the alt-left. The alt-left is yet to emerge formally and it probably won’t anytime soon.
"The West" is looking for a new wave of prosperity and the political "revolutions" underway are being underestimated for being mere "populism". There are three phases in modern-era world politics; the Cold War (1945-1991), the post-Cold War unipolar world (1991-2010) and the so-called Cold War 2.0, which began in earnest when Putin decided that Russian national interests could no longer be secured only through defensive security profile and for the first time since the fall of the Soviet Union, it reactivated its far afield strategic doctrines manifest in the current situation unfolding in Syria as well as its over- arching stand-off with US and Europe.
Soviet Union's break up was an important signifier in this victorious narrative of "the West" with the challenge of communism defeated by an inherently superior capitalist system of US and West Europe. Finally "the West", in its third attempt, turned into a "civilisation" which it lacked throughout history compared to the Indian subcontinent and Chinese. Imperialism, Nazism and WW-II being the first two attempts at turning the West into a mother civilisation.
Lastly, a new term being used to explain the geist of the "alt-right" in the West is "post-fact" or "post-truth" which the Oxford Dictionary has introduced as one of the new words in its latest edition.
But post-fact did not emerge with Brexit or Trump. When Colin Powell and George Bush pushed for a war against WMDs, that was a post-truth moment. Tony Blair was recently indicted in the Chilcot Inquiry about misleading the British public and Parliament into entering the Iraq War of George Bush II.
Thus, post-truth has been around for a while except that it was a toxic info war controlled by mainstream political parties and media houses. The info-warriors of the new age are coming together with old money elites and neo-nationalists in a new alliance of the ‘alt-right’ in the West.
With the alt-right, "the West" has decided to turn itself into "the rest". What political discussion is generated in the "alt-right"-led West is not certain and much will depend on what historical point they take as their beginning.
The point of historical birth as a political movement is not the same as the point at which "zero history" begins for the movement. Europe has a different notion of it than the Americans to the extent that Europeans and even Russians can look to ancient Greece but that is not available to the Americans.
If the US and Europe are prepared to have a consensus of "the West" to include Russia into it through an "alt-right" cultural-political alliance, then "the rest" will also have to rethink.
We do not know the nature of the "alt-right" machine or beast depending on which history you give to the movement.