The European Intellectual Origins of the Alt-Right

Abstract

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