COLIN LIDDELL: WALKING AWAY FROM A BROKEN BRAND

When the Alt-Right was founded in 2010—in as much as a loose umbrella term can be founded—it was meant to serve as a "big tent" area of intellectual freedom. At least that's how those who gravitated towards it in those early days saw it. I know I did. 

Under the slogan "Paper is overrated," Richard Spencer's original alternativeright-dot-com site used the potentialities of the internet age to give space once again to the various intellectual currents that had been laboriously purged from the "official" right over the previous five decades. The site also served as a platform to several new currents of thought as well. This rich intellectual diversity was the reason why the site caught on.

The same need that existed then, back in the Obama era, remains as strong today. In fact, it is even stronger, as new forms of censorship and deplatforming have begun to bite, despite the victory of Trump, from whom so much was hoped. More than this, the problems and ominous trends that the Alt-Right grew up to address, have only accelerated and intensified. 

But can the Alt-Right still effectively address these problems? The answer is yes and no. 

On the one hand, a large number of people have been prepped and red-pilled by all that has happened in recent years—the rise of the Alt-Right, the Brexit vote, Trump's election, and the disappointment of his administration. But on the other hand the actual term "Alt-Right" has increasingly become a handicap. 

While the living movement—or more correctly the movements—of which the term "Alt Right" was the banner, show every sign of continued growth and vitality, the banner itself has become tattered and tainted.

Worse than this, it has become an unfortunate marker that draws down long-range, deplatforming fire from our enemies, while warning them to avoid the more close quarters intellectual fighting at which we always prevail.

Why has this happened? 

There are several reasons, but these are all connected to leadership mistakes by those whose prominence in our movement was bolstered by a hostile media. It is unnecessary to name names here, or even go into possible narratives of infiltration and sabotage, as the essence of the thing is more illustrative than the personalities, feuds, and vendettas that may result. The detached macro-empirical view always reveals more than the emotionally-embedded micro-empirical one.

So what have been the main errors of the Alt-Right? 

This is a massive subject, but, to attempt to break it down, we could mention the following bullet points:

• ideological errors
• a culture of anonymity
• moral weaknesses—both personal and ideological
• tactical naivety
• poor movement hygiene
• self-ghettoisation

All of these factors—or areas—are interlinked in complex ways. We see how the movement's ideological errors have fuelled some of its moral weaknesses, which in turn have led to poor tactics. For example, its crude and over-simplistic critique on the JQ, only served to unify and empower Jews, while furthering the Alt-Right's self-ghettoisation. The same can be said for its culture of anonymity and its other trollish excesses.

In more general terms, the movement's ideological message became not only too fixed and simplistic, but following the movement's watershed moment—the November 2016 NPI Conference—it greatly narrowed into a form of negative identitarianism, i.e. not being this or that group.

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