The "New" Racist Right

While the founders of the new webzine Alternative Right argue that they are promoting cutting-edge new conservative ideas, their work is just a rehash of the same sexist and racist ideologies driven from the conservative movement decades ago.

The problem with the conservative movement, say the founders of the new webzine, Alternative Right, is that conservatives no longer want to ‘go there’.

“The conservative establishment is… brain dead,” said contributing editor and VDARE.com proprietor Peter Brimelow. “We’re trying to do something cutting-edge,” says editor Richard Spencer.

That’s all well and good, save the fact that the cutting-edge ideas that Alternative Right seeks to promote are actually tired, reactionary ideas that harken back to when people found out there were other races. In fact, their new ideas include concepts that the right largely exorcised fifty years ago, like denying women the right to vote.

The site’s frustration lies in their view that white, male conservatives lack the courage to address issues of sex and race with a sense of superiority. “There are races who, on average, are going to be superior,” says Spencer, with implication in tow.

The problem with conservatism today is that, as Spencer puts it, “the conservative establishment is full of politically correct purists” who lack the courage to take up the mantle of what should be a white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant America.

It’s tremendously ironic that Alternative Right’s charge against the conservative movement is political correctness, when they themselves hide their sexist and racist ideologies behind the gloss of sweet-sounding, pseudo-intellectual terms.

Instead of spouting racism, Alternative Right is engaging in the much more respectable-sounding analysis of ‘human biological diversity’ and ‘socio-biology’.

Rather than railing against the beast that is first-wave feminism, Richard Spencer’s magazine is actually writing about ‘paleo-masculinity’.

He’s not reactionary – he’s a ‘radical traditionalist’; He’s not castigating race X’s culture – he’s being ‘literary’.

What makes this all the more ironic is that, despite his critique of the right, Spencer was strikingly skittish when I asked if his goal was to make conservatism more ‘racially conscious’. “Racially-conscious? That’s a little bit of a ‘hot word’,” said Spencer.

The academic-sounding terminology might be impressive if backed up with anything but hysterics. Instead, Spencer comes out with statements like:

I would actually oppose mass Japanese immigration for the reason that they would most likely push out my children from getting into college. We might have a new Asian ruling class.

And that having women in the workplace contributes to:

... the wussification of society [and] an economy [that is] far more tame, bureaucratized and far less entrepreneurial.

It’s tough to classify Alternative Right’s ideology as either left or right, when really the ideas belong in some sort of padded room.

Spencer, however, plants his feet squarely in the right’s camp. “We are on the right in some fundamental way,” says Spencer, before admitting that his ideas have been “outside of the bounds of respectable left and right as it has been defined over the last fifty years.”

Exorcised from the mainstream decades ago, where does Alternative Right fit in now?

Spencer is not a Paul-istinian, for Ron Paul too suffers from the failings of political correctness. “Ron Paul is really not a man who is going to discuss some of these more ‘literary’ issues. He’s not going to discuss, say, America as a Western European or Anglo-Saxon Protestant nation,” Spencer says.

Despite this, the website does have a lot in common with the anti-war libertarians. “The right is still in love with war, and talk of spreading democracy.... I think there are people who basically have conservative values and want nothing to do with [this concept],” says Spencer.

That said, Alternative Right is not a libertarian site. “The state is necessary [to stop] immigration – people are not interchangeable… America is not going to be America if it is Hispanicized,” says Spencer.

Are they paleo-conservatives? No. “Sadly, a lot of paleo[-conservatives] now... have actually denounced human biological diversity. Paleo-conservatism is now irrelevant,” declares Spencer.

The website’s prevailing ideology doesn’t even fit within the category of white nationalism, or so Spencer claims. However, he stalled when asked to point out a few differences between his site and a white nationalist site.

“We’re going to talk about literary things, about culture,” said Spencer after some hesitation.

In other words – they’re going to be white nationalists, but, by God, they’re going to be a little fancy about it.