The alt-right and alt-left “caterwaul some of the same tunes in different keys,” writes Vanity Fair columnist James Wolcott (3/3/17).
President Donald Trump sparked outrage Tuesday afternoon after he equated Nazis and counter-protesters in Charlottesville. To do so, he referred to the anti-racist activists as the “alt-left,” with the implication that they were the equivalent of the “alt-right,” two sides to the same coin, showing there was, in his words, evil “on both sides.”
It’s important to remember that the “alt-left” rhetorical gambit—deliberately equating leftists with the alt-right, itself a euphemism for internet-savvy racism—was popularized by centrist pundits and Democratic Party apparatchiks in an attempt to stigmatize and smear those challenging the center-left establishment. As it turns out, there’s no way to suggest that unruly leftists are as bad as neo-Nazis without suggesting that neo-Nazis are no worse than unruly leftists.
As the New Republic’s Sarah Jones (8/16/17) noted, while coined by right-wing personalities such as Sean Hannity, the “alt-left” term quickly morphed into a catch-all smear employed by Clinton partisans and those charged with defending the more corporate, pro-war wing of the Democrats. It was a go-to smear online for The Nation’s Joan Walsh, Daily Beast’s Michael Weiss, Daily Kos and Vox Media founder Markos Moulitsas, Observer and Time writer Nick Cohen, Media Matters’ Eric Boehlert, self-appointed Clinton spinmeister Tom Watson, MSNBC’s Joy Ann Reid and Center for American Progress head Neera Tanden, among others.
“In many ways, this alt-left matches the alt-right…in their economic populism and bullying tactics.” –Gil Troy (Time, 12/7/16)
The term was similarly employed by historian Gil Troy in Time (12/6/16), Vanity Fair‘s James Wolcott (3/3/17) and Ray Suarez on NPR’s On the Media (6/12/17).
All these pundits and writers presumably thought equating leftists with Nazis (the logical implication of the “alt” prefix) was an easy way to score points and position themselves on the Reasonable Liberal Left. What they did instead was provide fodder for anyone on the right, looking to trivialize the threat of an emerging neo-Nazism, to “both sides” the problem out of existence.
There are hundreds of ways to criticize the left that don’t involve likening them to Nazis, but these weren’t the ones settled on by establishment-defending flacks in urgent need of a smear against left critics, especially after the disastrous 2016 election. The reliance on Nazifying Sanders backers, socialists, anti-fascists, anarchists and a whole host of anti-right, anti-centrist activists fed the toxic ideological stew that made Trump’s false equivalency not only possible, but entirely banal.
Labour under Jeremy Corbyn “offers a cautionary tale for Democrats as they attempt to rebound from a humiliating 2016 loss to Donald Trump,” the Washington Post (4/30/17) wrote.
The extent to which horseshoe-theory pablum is drilled into people’s heads, by everything from public schools to pop culture, can’t be overstated. Even everyday political terms—from “moderate” to “extremism,” from “radicals” to “the center”—are highly normative labels, tossed around without much thought. What constitutes extremism is just as ideologically worthless. As FAIR (4/20/17) noted after Bret Stephens’ hiring by the New York Times, anti-Arab racism, climate denial, rape apologia and non-stop warmongering are not considered outside the “mainstream”—but single-payer healthcare is.
UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was routinely called “hard left” (Washington Post, 4/30/17), “far left” (The Atlantic, 6/13/17) and “fringe” (New York Times, 9/5/16)—loaded labels meant to deride—while he advocated objectively popular programs such as free college, shoring up and protecting the National Health Service and raising taxes on the wealthy (FAIR.org, 9/6/16).
Managing the Overton window and setting the limits of debate, as media critics have noted for decades, is the corporate media’s primary function. This goes a long way toward explaining why nominal media liberals, charged with opposing Trump and the emerging far right, would prioritize demonizing the left—even if doing so helped pave the way for Trump’s neo-Nazi whitewashing.
Democrats won the congress and senate in 2006, gained seats in 2008, won the presidency in 2008 and retained it in 2012. How can it be this difficult? There has to be an answer within what was done just in the past decade.
Times have changed. More people now realize Ds and Rs are both wings of the same bird – the Oligarchy. It’s time for a new bird. 2018 is the year.
Why?
Trumpism doesn’t threaten the DNCistas and allied elites, at least in the short term.
An authentic left, if it’s doing its job
Does.
(Whether Sandersismo constitutes same is … um … arguable.)
Rubbish — blaming evil “centrist Dems” for Trump’s bilge is nonsense, as is treating any left disagreement or criticism of Sanders and his supporters as reactionary. “Alt-left” is an inevitable back-formation from “alt-right” (whose adherents embrace the term), and calling it thereby “equating leftists with Nazis” is just bullshit — none of the writers you cite did anything of the kind. It’s a clumsy term, yes, but to use as an excuse for this litany of exaggerations is entirely misleading. The intense and broad public reaction against Trump’s latest nonsense is encouraging, and FAIR’s response is to blame Democrats for Trump and Trumpism. Shameful.
Hi Michael King,
After looking at those examples provided, and lots I’d seen before, how can you not see that many of the DEMS supporters did starrt the term of alt- left? I was really amazed that the Dem camoaign went wacko so quickly . I ended up voting for a third party becauise I coul;d not tell the Hillary and the Donald apart. Welded to the money group they both seemed. However, all the writers mentioned in this article did use the alt-left term or close idea term and as you must have realized, Trump is a very savy guy in ferreting out attack points. YOu can’t say that the Dems didn’t turn into the snake that eats its own tail.
I am getting very worried about the Dems, because the centrists ones in , the party are acting like the GOPers and it seems we mainly have the corporate party for both. The article didn’t blame DEMS for Trump….. it just reflects what a viscious campaign that 2016 became. I think that the better term is corporatists for both parties. Maybe they should both be called the ancients, because if you look at the democracy of ancient Greece, it was just like what got set up in this nation, only the land owners could vote. We’ve come a long way since then, but I think, what with the wall streeters buying up all those 2007 houses, that we are going that way again.
I think the article is explaining—not blaming. I wish you could tell the difference.
Um, in what way are you addressing Mr King’s point? Nowhere in his post does he imply that the term “alt-left” was not started by Democrats. His issue seems to be with the loading of the alt-left term as being equivalent in weight to the term Nazi, which I can certainly understand.
The alt-right doesn’t consist of Nazis either, although there seem to be a lot of alt-righters who endorse Nazi positions. This isn’t just being anal-retentive, either. It’s a heterogenous movement that contains racial purity values and nationalistic ones, as well as some libertarian leanings and more that would take up too much space to name here. The point is that the label seems to refer to a group that is more homogenous in methods and behaviour than in ideology. The existence of groups with similar methods and behavior, but generally opposing ideology on the left is what’s being postulated here. At least in terms of online behaviour, that existence seems well-validated. I’m not on the ground in the physical demonstrations and the media bias when reporting on the US is absolutely shocking, so I can’t really speak to that.
Still, these commentators make a valid point and a good case for the label. Adam Johnson’s article seems to be grabbing an analogy that at least one article was careful to avoid (Gil Troy: “And condemning them equally doesn’t mean they’re equally dangerous, with the alt-right’s Hitlerism and hooliganism spiking since Trump’s election.”; I didn’t read all of the articles mentioned, because I frankly have better things to do than spend even more time on this fruitless comment that no-one will ever read than I already am). Based on that analogy, he criticizes the center-left for attacking the farther left more than they were attacking Trump, which, given the number and candour of anti-Trump articles on many of the sites named in comparison to the number of articles attacking far-left topics, seems misguided, if not disingenuous.
The painting of the “center-left establishment” as “nominal liberals” in fact strikes me as a clear (and successful) attempt by the author to distance himself from this group more than anything else. You can call it blaming or explaining, but disparaging, it most certainly is. And that is something I find concerning. The lack of any attempt to actually engage with opposing ideologies in a meaningful way (i.e. more than just labelling and ascription of group traits to individuals) is a major driver of why the US left and right are drifting so far apart. Alternative perspectives are perceived as wrong from the beginning if they come from the wrong group, so people never bother to try and understand what logic they may consist of. If this author is representative of “the left”, whatever that may be, then it looks like even “the center” is now an enemy whose arguments may be dismissed by virtue of a simple ad hominem. That is a bad sign for the US indeed. If groups that are clearly as opposed to one another in values as the alt-right and the center left are now “hard to tell apart” just because they both reflect some corporate interests (many of which don’t even align!), that implies the beholder is so far away from either that rapprochement seems unlikely.
Probably more accurate to say that centrist pundits have given the term alt-left more weight than it would have had.
Have noticed an uptick from sources like the AP and NYT using the word “centrist”, and the AP also has recommended against both the term alt-left and alt-right https://blog.ap.org/behind-the-news/how-to-describe-extremists-who-rallied-in-charlottesville (only makes it a harder to claim equivalence, though)
The Establishment’s ‘divide and conquer’ strategy is falling apart at the seams. Let’s put an end to them once and for all in 2018 by not voting for any candidate with a D or R next to their name. These white nationalists keep talking about “taking our country back.” Let’s show them how it’s done.
I agree with Adam Johnson. It’s really gross how the “mainstream media” will criticize Trump for his false equivalency, and then turn around and do the same thing. They even one up the President, by capitizing on American’s historical fear and hatred of Nazis, as a way to compare, and thereby delegitimization the so called “alt left” which can include anyone from the average Sanders supporter, to an anarchist. Just today I read an article by Washington Post Columnist Anne Applebaum “warning” Americans to resist the left of center liberals, because they’d turn our country into a “another Hungary”. Ugh! Since the election, I’ve come to Fair.org to get a saner perspective on the news and have never been disappointed. Thank you
Well said. Words do matter !
Thank you FAIR/Adam for once again doing the incredible mythbusting you do. excellent piece.