{"id":30,"date":"2020-04-21T18:32:14","date_gmt":"2020-04-21T22:32:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/ldst490li\/?page_id=30"},"modified":"2020-05-04T16:34:21","modified_gmt":"2020-05-04T20:34:21","slug":"section-iii-characteristics-of-the-alt-right","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/ldst490li\/section-iii-characteristics-of-the-alt-right\/","title":{"rendered":"Characteristics of the Alt-Right"},"content":{"rendered":"

While onlookers may still assume that the alt right is united in its \u201c<\/span>enthusiasm for the political career of Donald Trump,<\/span><\/a>\u201d as <\/span>Atlantic<\/span><\/i> writer Angela Nagle states in a 2017 article, this statement, while it was never fully true, is even farther from being true today. Partly, members of the alt-right began to love Trump less because they believe the days of the \u201c<\/span>alt-right as a coordinated bloc<\/span><\/a>\u201d to be over as <\/span>Vice<\/span><\/i> writer Tess Owens explains in her article, \u201c<\/span>The Alt-Right\u2019s Love Affair with Trump Is Over. Here\u2019s Why<\/span><\/a>.\u201d Other members of the alt-right now \u201c<\/span>feel betrayed by him.<\/span><\/a>\u201d Trump promised sweeping immigration reform, but has failed to deliver on this front, as well as many other promises he made during the campaign trail. George Hawley, professor and author on the alt-right, said in 2019 that, \u201c<\/span>for the most part, as far as I can tell, there\u2019s no enthusiasm within the extreme right for President Trump.<\/span><\/a>\u201d This is not to say that Trump, his supporters, and the alt-right are completely separate entities with different beliefs and goals \u2013 in fact, the three groups should be viewed as parts of a Venn diagram, for they have unique characteristics, but also many commonalities.<\/span><\/p>\n

Alt-righters can seem, from the outside, to be a disjointed and indefinable group of people; however, there are common threads in their opinions and behavior. In a 2017 study of almost 500 people who identified as members of the alt-right (which is yet to be published), researchers Patrick Forscher and Nour Kteily found that the alt right, unsurprisingly, has \u201c<\/span>high support for groups that support and work for the benefit of white people.<\/span><\/a>\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Perhaps the most telling finding of the study was that participants were willing to admit their prejudice and hatred towards other groups of people. This is a particularly chilling finding because those who are not afraid to voice hatred are more likely to be willing to act on those sentiments. The alt-right and the control group differed extremely in their answers to questions regarding measures of \u201c<\/span>dehumanization, support for collective white action, and admitting to harassing others online.<\/span><\/a>\u201d\u00a0In the study, they rated different groups as being less evolved, including Muslims, Democrats, black people, Mexicans, journalists, and feminists, in ascending order. This survey demonstrates that social desirability bias, or the phenomenon of people not willing to admit their prejudice \u201c<\/span>for fear of being shamed,<\/span><\/a>\u201d did not apply to this group of alt-righters.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Aside from the lack of social desirability bias among alt-righters, they shared a number of personality traits that, when viewed as a whole, creates a profile of an average member of the alt-right. The alt-righters in the study scored higher than the control group on social dominance orientation, or the \u201c<\/span>preference that society maintains social order.<\/span><\/a>\u201d They scored higher on right-wing authoritarianism and slightly higher on what is known as \u201c<\/span>the dark triad of personality traits (psychopathy, Machiavellianism and narcissism).<\/span><\/a>\u201d\u00a0Surprisingly, the alt-righters who participated in the study are not socially isolated, which is a stereotype about the average alt-righter \u2013 the troubled man without family or friends who turns to the alt-right to get revenge on society. Despite being called \u201c<\/span>the lost boys<\/span><\/a>\u201d by <\/span>Atlantic<\/span><\/i> writer Angela Nagel, in reality, many alt-righters are not lost in the sense of being socially isolated at all.<\/span><\/p>\n

In short, the profile of an average person who identifies as a member of the alt-right is someone who is not afraid to voice their prejudice or hatred towards women or minority groups, and also is someone who is not socially isolated and has a preference for society to maintain a social order. As a society, we should be concerned about this profile because members of the alt-right have the desire to voice their views to the public, and because of that, they have the ability to influence many other people. If we are to grasp the makeup of the alt-right, we must understand that it has the potential to grow quickly and rapidly spread prejudice and hateful sentiments to anyone who will listen. <\/span><\/p>\n

Previous Page<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Next Page<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While onlookers may still assume that the alt right is united in its \u201centhusiasm for the political career of Donald Trump,\u201d as Atlantic writer Angela…<\/p>\n

Continue readingCharacteristics of the Alt-Right<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":3867,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"coauthors":[148179],"class_list":["post-30","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/ldst490li\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/30","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/ldst490li\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/ldst490li\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/ldst490li\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3867"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/ldst490li\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/ldst490li\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/30\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/ldst490li\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/ldst490li\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=30"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}