Made-up term used by people on the right

The Myth of the Alt-Left

It began as an epithet hurled from centrist liberals. Now it’s backfiring.

By SAM KRISS

The words “alt-left” sounded strange coming from Donald Trump’s mouth, but then most words do. After a weekend of violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, that left three dead, including an anti-fascist activist murdered by the far right, Trump has refused to unequivocally condemn the “alt-right” neo-Nazis responsible for the violence. Instead, he complains that his exterminationist supporters have been treated “very unfairly.” What about the violence of the anti-fascists, he wants to know: “What about the fact that they came charging with clubs in their hands, swinging clubs? Do they have any problem?”

The existence of this strange and terrifying alt-left is new to most people; Trump’s mention of it seemed like a transparent attempt to somehow pretend that the murderousness of the Nazis and the Klan is no worse than the people forced to defend themselves against it. And that’s exactly what the idea of an “alt-left” is. But not in the way you might think.

After Trump announced the existence of the alt-left on live TV, media outlets scurried to tell the world exactly where the term emerged from. CBS explains that it “came out of the conservative media.” CNN, quoting a director at the Anti-Defamation League, describes it as a “made-up term used by people on the right.” Heavy.com writes that “the term ‘alt-left’ began being used by the online conservative media in 2016 before it slowly migrated to more mainstream conservative voices, like Fox News’ Sean Hannity.” (Hannity, who repeatedly uses the term on his TV show, seems to be getting widespread credit.) The British Telegraph newspaper, meanwhile, flatters the president with a power of logodaedaly he definitely doesn’t have, claiming the phrase was “coined by Mr Trump” himself.

None of these explanations is really true. The term “alt-left” was probably simultaneously invented hundreds or thousands of times, always bearing a slightly different meaning depending on its inventor. But up until now, the people who most forcefully pushed the idea of an alt-left weren’t Nazis or 4chan posters or anyone else in the orbit of Trump and pro-Trump Republicans trying to invent a mythical opposite to the alt-right. The alt-left is, first and foremost, a figment of centrist Democrats.

Something like “alt-left” was always going to happen; it’s a product of whatever it is in our brains that conditions them to think in terms of opposites. As soon as everyone starts talking about the “alt-right”—that inchoate and incoherent grouping of Nazis, Klansmen, resentful failsons sweating from video games and chicken fingers, cynical media wannabes, bloviating internet commenters who think they’re Ignatius J. Reilly, and others who think they’re the Joker—that word seems to sit on one side of a seesaw, across from a silence waiting to be filled. If there’s an alt-right, there must, somewhere, somehow, be something called an alt-left, otherwise the universe is unbalanced. And while the universe is unbalanced—everywhere, from the points of terrifying heat scattered haphazardly across a lonely void, to the murder and oppression that break out constantly across the world and are never met with justice—for a lot of mediocre intellects, good judgment basically consists of pretending that everything balances out somehow, and all the ledgers are even. Something like the alt-right sticks out, a lexical blasphemy: to put the world in order, you have to invent something equivalent on the left.

Probably the first people to use the term were a small, strange band of alt-right offshoots with a few low-traffic websites, rejecting some of the reactionary-libertarian elements in traditional far-right ideology for some kind of Herrenvolk social democracy, a Strasserite-inflected vision where there are slightly higher taxes but no Jews allowed. These were undoubtedly the only people to have used “alt-left” unpejoratively, to describe themselves. While the alt-right has always been an organized, self-declared movement—a badge proudly worn by neo-Nazis like Richard Spencer to launder their racism—the alt-left is only an epithet, something that slung to help displace the contradictions in some other ideology. In the months up to August 2016, when Hillary Clinton delivered her speech in Reno, Nevada, lambasting internet Nazis, the epithetic use of the term was growing: The alt-left could mean Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, or Jill Stein and the Green Party, or teens inventing hundreds of new genders for themselves on Tumblr, or Marxist-Leninists sympathetic to Syria, Iran and North Korea. Mostly, use of the term was accompanied by a vague hesitancy—is this a thing? Could it be a thing? Should it be a thing? But the people using it all had one thing in common: They were fervent supporters of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, and they resented anyone on the left whose enthusiasm didn’t seem to match theirs.

After Clinton dragged the alt-right into the world’s headlines, use of “alt-left” exploded. Conservatives started using it too, as a reflexive insult lobbed at the Democrats in general, but for the most part it kept its original meaning. For the soon-to-be-doomed Clintonites, it was an incredibly useful term. If Clinton were simply to the right of Bernie Sanders, and Donald Trump to the right of her, then her project could be seen by some on the left as one that meant drifting toward Trumpism, an unacceptable compromise with evil. The invention of the alt-left allowed centrist liberals to pretend that something entirely different was going on: They were sandwiched between two sets of frothing fanatics who secretly had a lot in common with each other. It established their particular brand of liberalism, possibly encompassing a few “moderate Republicans,” as the only reasonable ground, besieged by alts.

What was called the alt-left was simply the left (the socialist left, as opposed to liberalism), with its “alt” dangling as a meaningless appendage. But in the context of the alt-right, “alt” could be made to mean “unacceptable.” Calling their opponents to the left an alt-left implied, circuitously but unmistakably, that they too were racists and sexists, transphobes and anti-Semites, without ever requiring the courage to directly make the accusation. But what united the alt-right and the imputed alt-left most of all was their habit of being rude to liberals online. (Of course, liberals are also rude online—everyone is rude online—but that didn’t seem to factor into the calculations.) The alt-left primarily defined itself by a discursive tone: strident, snarky, unapologetic. This alone was often enough to put them in the company of Nazis—it’s as if the worst thing about the Nazis weren’t their genocidal beliefs, but the rude words with which they expressed them.

This red-baiting sense of the term “alt-left” continued to be used right up until the murders in Charlottesville. (This landmark Vanity Fair article on the subject, published in March this year, gives you a flavor of the general tone of the discussion; there have been endless similar essays, but really they’re all the same.) Even as the Nazis and the Klan assembled in Virginia, some liberals were continuing to insist that the murderous far-right and the socialist left were essentially the same, or at the very least balanced each other out. One Twitter user captioned a picture of torch-wielding fascists with the words “when you critique Bernie Sanders.” Clinton insider Neera Tanden used the march as an opportunity to once again conjure up the fantasy that there are some on “the alt left who want to join with the fascists.” Mieke Eoyang, a director at the centrist Third Way think tank, mockingly proclaimed, “if the Bernie Bros wanted to make a show of force on behalf of progressive values, Saturday in Charlottesville would be a good time.” But as it happens, the people out in force in Virginia to oppose the far-right were not, for the most part, Clinton Democrats. They were socialists and communists: the Democratic Socialists on America, the Industrial Workers of the World, the Workers World Party and Black Lives Matter, among others. They were the alt-left.

Now that Trump has added “alt-left” to his armory of insults, many of these same centrist constituencies are appalled that anyone could ever draw a moral equivalence between fascists and those opposing them. But this is exactly what they did, and what they’ve been doing for over a year. There’s a pattern here. Immediately after the 2016 election, liberals pioneered the notion of “fake news”—made up or poorly sourced, inaccurate and hyperpartisan media, generated for furious clicks, misleading wide sectors of the population. It didn’t take long for the right to reclaim the term, hurling it back at the mainstream press. (After all, weren’t their breathless warnings over WMD as fake as anything the right-wing internet has to offer?) Now, “fake news” is firmly established in the reactionary lexicon, and liberals are horrified by it. They should be; it’s a brutish, philistine epithet, and never more so than when it’s coughed up from the throat of Donald Trump—but it’s their monster. They forgot that the criticisms they make of their enemies can also apply to themselves, and that, as long as that’s true, their clever production of phrases will always be immediately appropriated by the right. “Alt-left” has followed exactly the same course. The term was meant to imply that the socialist left and the most despicable creatures of the right are on the same moral plane. But it’s possible to make any number of connections: If liberals and fascists are both terrified by the notion of an active, unashamed leftist movement, and if they express that terror with the same nonsense phrase, what else might they have in common?