Over at The New Yorker, Benjamin Wallace-Wells asks “Is the Alt-Right for Real?”:
Richard Spencer, the white nationalist who came up with the term “alt-right,” described the movement in December as “an ideology around identity, European identity.” But the alt-right has often seemed more diffuse than that, more of a catch-all for the least presentable elements of the online right: white nationalists, neo-reactionaries, the male-victimhood clique of GamerGate. Late last year, BuzzFeed proclaimed that the movement, with a boost from the Trump campaign, “has hit it big,” and ever since anxious alarms have been issuing from the conservative mainstream. The Times columnist Ross Douthat worked to distinguish the reactionary tradition from the open racism of the alt-right. National Review denounced the “racism and moral rot” that characterized the movement. Commentary described the alt-right as a gathering force, and warned of a “coming conservative dark age.”
