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Concept
Alt-lite
Summary
The alt-lite, also known as the alt-light and the new right, is a loosely defined right-wing political movement whose members regard themselves as separate from both mainstream conservatism and the far-right, white nationalist alt-right. The concept is primarily associated with the United States, where it emerged in 2017.
No one who is labelled alt-lite accepts the term as a self-description. According to extremism scholar George Hawley, alt-lite was coined by white nationalists as a pejorative, in an attempt to exclude more moderate figures from the alt-right. The term alt-right had previously included "anyone that fell on the right of the political spectrum but had major problems with the conservative movement", including populists and libertarians. After the term alt-right was successfully reclaimed by white nationalists, previous adherents abandoned the term, and started calling themselves populists or civic nationalists.
The term alternative right was coined by Paul Gottfried, but was later adopted by Richard B. Spencer who sought to use it to promote white nationalist ideas across the political right in the United States. However, there remained differing views on the term; some understood it as an umbrella term for a broad range of rightists outside the neoconservatism then dominant in the U.S. conservative movement, including paleoconservatives, libertarians, localists, and right-wing populists as well as white nationalists. By 2010, many of the non-white-nationalist rightists who used the term distanced themselves from it after it became increasingly apparent that Spencer intended the term as a banner of white nationalism. In 2016, as the term became popularised in U.S. public discourse, it again came to be used by many people who were not white nationalists but who saw it as a useful term to refer to rightists outside the mainstream conservative movement.
Some have traced the recognition of the alt-lite—as a distinct entity from the alt-right—to what is seen as the consolidation of the alt-right as a white nationalist movement, while the alt-lite is more culturally nationalist.
Official source
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