So What is Alt-Right Anyway?

John Derbyshire gives the following answer (HT: Malcolm Pollack):

So what, in my opinion, makes the Alt-Right a distinct thing — not by any means a party, a faction, or a movement, but a collection of souls with something in common?

Here's my answer: We don't like flagrant nonsense in the discussion of human affairs. We don't like being lied to. We especially don't like being lied to by credentialed academics like Jerry Coyne.

The lies are so flagrant, so outrageously obvious, you'd have to laugh at them, if not for the fact that laughing at them is close to being a criminal offense. "There is no such thing as race!" What a preposterous thing to say! What a multiply preposterous thing for an academic in the human sciences to say. Yet look! — they say it!

As Ann Coulter has quipped: It's like saying "there are no such things as mountains." When, after all, is a mountain just a hill? Similarly with "there are no such things as colors," since, after all, no-one can tell you how many colors there are, or the precise wavelength at which turquoise is more blue-ish than green-ish. How many neighborhoods are there in New York City? Beats me; so are there no such things as neighborhoods? This is infantile.

Much more to the point, it's like saying "there are no such things as families." When do you stop being a member of my family? Fourth cousin? Ninth cousin by marriage? So are there no such things as families?

But of course there are such things as families. And that's all races are: big old extended families of mostly-common deep ancestry.

This acquiescence in obvious lies — even by academics, who should be the guardians of truth — is characteristic of totalitarian societies. The money quote here is from Tony Daniels, a/k/a "Theodore Dalrymple." Quote:

>>In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is … in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.<<

Tony himself, I should say, lines up with Goodwhites in the Cold Civil War, not with us Badwhites of the Alt-Right. I very seriously doubt he'd consider himself a member of the Alt-Right. His insight there, however, is very penetrating, and could be inscribed on an Alt-Right banner, if we ever get around to brandishing banners.

And so it is with the NYU Student Council ninnies and the Student Diversity Initiative bedwetters, not one of whom is fit to shine James Watson's shoes.

They don't want to shine his shoes. They don't want to persuade or convince him. They want to humiliate him. They, midgets and mites, want to humiliate a giant, one of the world's greatest living scientists. And the cringing administrators at New York University want to help them!

That's what the Alt-Right is about; that's what unites us; disgust with, and resistance to, these liars and weasels and commissars.

While I agree with everything Derbyshire says above, though not with everything he says, the above is useless as a definition of Alt-Right.  Suppose I 'define' an airplane as a vehicle.  This fails as a definition, not because it is false, but because it specifies only a necessary condition for a thing's being an airplane. Every airplane is a vehicle, but not every vehicle is an airplane.  An adequate definition lays down individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for the application of a concept.  An adequate definition of 'airplane' must list those features that make airplanes different from other vehicles.

Similarly, an adequate definition of 'alternative Right' must list those features that make alt-rightists different from other sorts of conservatives.  On Derb's definition, I count as alt-right, when I am no such thing.

I hate leftist liars and crapweasels.  I have contempt for Jerry Coyne, or rather his attitudes and views. (See here.)  I hold that the silencing of James Watson is an outrage and a betrayal of the values and purposes of the university.  I find absurd the notion that race is a social construct.  No doubt racial theories are social constructs, but the notion that race and racial differences are is preposterous.  I agree with Dalrymple as quoted above.  And I share Derb's "disgust with, and resistance to, these liars and weasels and commissars."

So I have some serious conservative 'cred' in the sense of both credentials and credibility,  not to mention the civil courage to speak the truth as I sincerely see it under my real name publicly as I have been doing since 2004.

But none of these attitudes or commitments or virtues make me alt-right.

I am not exactly sure what 'alt-right' refers to, and apparently those who fly this flag don't either, as witness Derbyshire above, but I get the impression that the position includes some very specific theses that differentiate it from other types  of conservatism.  I hope to go into this in more detail later, but for now I'll mention the following: white tribalism, anti-semitism, rejection of classically liberal notions such as the value of toleration, rejection of the formal (as opposed to empirical) equality of persons and with it key elements in the documents of the American founding as well as in the Judeo-Christian tradition, and a rejection of the normative universality of truth and value.