Neoliberalism, the Alt-Right and the Intellectual Dark Web

Alan Finlayson

doi:10.1177/02632764211036731

Abstract

Drawing on research from digital media studies, political theory and rhetoric, this article explores online radical conservative and reactionary ‘ideological entrepreneurs’. It argues that online media are uniting an ‘ideological family’ around concepts of natural inequality and hostility to those who deny them. Placing this phenomenon in context, the article shows how online culture reinvigorates well-established discourses of opposition to bureaucrats, intellectuals and experts of all kinds, rejecting one version of the neoliberal state and of its personnel, a ‘new class’ understood to dominate through discursive, cultural power and imagined through the figures of the ‘Social Justice Warrior’ and the ‘Cultural Marxist’. In competing for a share of the marketplace of ideas, these ideological entrepreneurs promise insights – the revelations of the ‘red pill’ – critiquing ‘actually-existing’ neoliberalism yet insisting on the ‘rationality’ of governance through markets and promising adherents techniques for achieving success as liberated entrepreneurial selves.

Highlights

In The New Way of the World, Dardot and Laval explain the rise of neoliberalism, partly with reference to ‘ideological entrepreneurs’, the writers, academics and intellectuals who used their position, their media platform, to ‘struggle head-on against all forms of progressivism and social reform’ (2013: 132–3)
In a second section, drawing on the theory of political ideologies, I argue that online media erode distinctions between these kinds of politics, which converge around hostility to a particular conceptualisation of ‘liberalism’ understood as the constitutive inability to recognise natural limits to equality and to social justice
We have to attend to the histories of ideas and ideologies on which people draw when making sense of politics for themselves

Summary

Introduction

In The New Way of the World, Dardot and Laval explain the rise of neoliberalism, partly with reference to ‘ideological entrepreneurs’, the writers, academics and intellectuals who used their position, their media platform, to ‘struggle head-on against all forms of progressivism and social reform’ (2013: 132–3). Keywords alt-right, conservatism, digital culture, ideologies, neoliberalism, online politics, rhetoric

Results

Conclusion