The European Intellectual Origins of the Alt-Right

This article places the intellectual inspirations behind the white nationalism of the Alt-Right in a Transatlantic context. It does so by first focusing on the late 1960s and the rise of New Right Movements throughout Europe that sprang up as a response to the New Left, which involved a hatred of liberal internationalism and multiculturalism, a thorough critique of global capitalism, and, in one way or another, promoted an identitarian form of race-based politics. The pivotal New Right figure here is Alain de Benoist whose key ideas this paper will summarize. The paper then shows how Benoist’s thought made its way into United States by the 1990s. I will conclude by unpacking a strange argument that it was in fact cultural Marxists, and specifically European emigre thinkers fleeing the Nazis, who provided a model for how the alt-Right could pursue a cultural revolution that would overthrow liberal understandings of race and identity