Via Reason Magazine:
With slight variations, this has been a common refrain since the National Policy Institute (NPI), a white-nationalist think tank headed by alternativeright.com founder Richard Spencer, held a mid-November D.C. conference devoted to the alt-right’s future. The event—which attracted a few hundred attendees, a few hundred protesters, and international media attention—has renewed debate over whether referring to the “alt-right” by its chosen moniker is an affront to decency and lapse in press ethics that risks “normalizing” hate.
Even the Associated Press, print-media’s bastion of detached editorial authority, issued recent guidance that cautions against “using the term [alt-right] generically and without definition,” as “it is not well known and the term may exist primarily as a public-relations device to make its supporters’ actual beliefs less clear and more acceptable to a broader audience.” In the past, AP stated, “we have called such beliefs racist, neo-Nazi or white supremacist.” Reporters writing about those who claim the alt-right mantle should use quotation marks around the term of modify it with phrases such as “self-described” or “so-called alt-right,” AP advised.
At ThinkProgress, editors announced last week that they would “no longer treat ‘alt-right’ as an accurate descriptor of either a movement or its members” and would “only use the name when quoting others.” In its own coverage of “men like Spencer and groups like NPI, we will use terms we consider more accurate, such as ‘white nationalist’ or ‘white supremacist,” they stated, calling it a matter of editorial “clarity and accuracy,” as there is very little that “distinguishes the alt-right from more hidebound racist movements such as the American Nazi Party and the Ku Klux Klan.”
ThinkProgress is right that this is a matter of “clarity and accuracy.” It’s just hard to see how declaring a movement specific to our current cultural and political moment as synonymous with more broad and historical analogues actually serves the purpose of clarity or accuracy. As Julian Sanchez writes at The Washington Post, “The Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan and the Cambodian Khmer Rouge are (or were) all violent racist movements — and using the specific names instead of referring to them as ‘violent racists’ does not seem to have been much of an obstacle to recognizing them as such. They’re all also distinct historical phenomena, and our understanding of them would not be enhanced if we insisted on using the same generic description for all of them.”
People worrying that the term “alt-right” sugarcoats the bad beliefs of those it describes ignore the way most people actually relate to language and mass communication. Alt-right isn’t a term that previously meant something else in U.S. politics but got co-opted by racist extremists. It is a new term, and one still rapidly evolving and gaining meaning, which means alt-right is as alt-right does right now.
If those who self-identify as alt-right keep shouting “Heil Trump!” while throwing up Nazi salutes, blasting out hateful anti-Semitic memes, and espousing the dangers of race-mixing, people will get the picture. We don’t need thought-leaders to say “this movement calls itself alt-right but they’re really racists and anti-Semites!!!!” because the term alt-right itself will become synonymous with these beliefs. And it will do so in a way that’s specific to our current context, rather than muddying the waters with poor historical analogies.
The term “Nazi” isn’t a Kleenex or Xerox situation, where we just throw it around now to mean “all people with beliefs that skew nationalist or racist.” Nazis (and groups like the KKK) are inextricably connected to their originating times and contexts, and all the socio-political pathologies that flourished in them. And while there are certainly some parallels between the alt-right and historical hate-groups, considering them all interchangeable isn’t merely inaccurate, it also obfuscates the kind of real and meaningful differences that are crucial to understanding (and stopping) the alt-right’s rise.