@timorl Incorrect, the term alt-right was coined by Paul Gottfried who himself is not a member of the alt-right community. He used it as a descriptive term in its full form "alternative right" which as a descriptive term is also applicable to those on the left.

@freemo
But it was quickly adopted by people describing themselves that way, while I have never seen anyone describe themselves as "alt-left". It also can be understood more specifically than "far-right", with some views and policies that are definitely part of it. I couldn't say the same about "alt-left", I have only seen it used as "left I don't like". My main problem is that I have no idea which part of the left you are referring to.

@timorl I use alternative right not as a label that they identify with but I use it the same way Paul did, an accurate descriptor.

Alternative left, like alternative right, means the group of people who hold alternative views to the traditional liberal views of the left, yet still describe themselves as left despite their contradiction of the ideals.

In this case it refers to the members of the left who act in ways that assault personal liverties and freedoms as well as equality among races, religions, and sex, which tend to be the driving ideals of the more classical left.

By extension this also tends to include virtually everyone on the left who deals in extremism as well with almost no exceptions.

So I use it in the same way Paul originally used the term, as an apt descriptor for a group of people.

It should also be pointed out the vast majority of people who are labeled as alt-right do in fact deny that label, just as the vast majority of people who are alt-left will deny that label.

@freemo
I think it's a good point, though, that the right is willing to identify a line and say : that's too far, it's unacceptable and the extremists claiming to be on the right are not part of us. The left has no line of extremism that is too extreme to be part of the left.

And that's used as we see here too deny its existence. If we don't label anyone on the left too extreme, it means there's no extremists on the left. (In other contexts the left also also labels everyone on the right as extremists, so extremist means everyone to one side of me on a spectrum, and no one on the other side of me.)

It seems healthier to know how far is too far, and when to deny those who claim to be associated with you.
@timorl

@SecondJon I don't think that is quite fair. The alt-right is part of the right, inasmuch the left/right categorization in politics makes sense. They share the same base values, even though some accents are shifted and, of course, they are more extreme than the mainstream.

Besides the left is not a single movement (just like the right), so they cannot exclude someone just like that. The movements within both broad types of political thought exclude one another to an extent. For example, on the left, most movements exclude tankies, progressive liberals and socialists exclude each other, and many people are annoyed by the "regressive left", which itself maybe isn't a movement, but some people losing sight of important ideals, usually in the pursuit of perceived justice (I suspect @freemo was mostly thinking of them when complaining, his description seems appropriate). I might not know the inner workings of the right to understand exactly who excludes whom, but there is definitely some beef between libertarians and most other people, and, as you say, conservatives are unsurprisingly not fond of the alt-right. And, thankfully, no one likes neo-nazis.

Although, at least in the US, among the parties the left one seems to be better at excluding non-mainstream movements, just look at the 2016 presidential nominations. Not that I think this is good...

Also, my arguments were not about exclusion, but inclusion. Who considers themselves to be a part of a movement usually defines a movement better than other people trying to categorize. There are many movements on the left, SJWs, socdems, liberal progressives, socialists, tankies, and some of them are clearly extreme, far-left and so on, but none of them call themselves "alt-left". On the right, on the other hand, one of the movements calls itself "alt-right", and, what is more, it's not the only extreme, far-right movement there. My point is, it's the ideological self-identification that is important.

@timorl
I'm not sure that calling yourself an alternative to the right makes you part of the right. Seems to be the opposite.

I'm also unsure of what values are shared between the right and the alternative.
@freemo

@SecondJon
They call themselves an alternative right, not an alternative to the right. The broad values they share are focus on individual responsibility, nationalism, admiration for the 19th century version of family. Ones that I don't expect you to share, but are definitely still in the domain of the right, are white supremacy and exclusion of "deviancy" in the sense of sufficiently different people. In practice they also support many policies od the right, the most visible being anti-immigration, isolationism, and fighting against LGBT+ related social change.

This assumes we are still talking in the left/right framework, where every social movement has to land in one of these two categories. But if we don't, then it would definitely not make sense to talk about the "alt-left", because the meaning @freemo described does not make sense without this assumption.

@timorl
Interesting. So if the label is alternative right, you take that to mean nothing more than a part of the right. I'm not sure I've heard that use of alternative before, I've always seen it used more or less as the dictionary defines it, which is to draw a clear distinction.

You're right, I don't identify with the evil motives you assign to the right, which makes it all seem like an effigy to attack, rather than any kind of objective perspective.

But I'm not a political theory expert. I tend to think along the spectrum of big centralized government power (left) to less government (right). But I know that's not how everyone sees things. Your spectrum seems to go from good (left) to bad (right).
@freemo

@timorl @freemo
In the end, this seems to be about how the alternative right self identifies. But their own label is that it's different from, not part of the right. An alternative universe would not be a subset of the universe, but something different from but coexistent with. Mac OS is an alternative operating system, not a subset of windows OS.

So I don't think X and Alternative X are the same thing, by definition, but clearly 2 different and contrasting options.

As for shared values, I see shared values of the alt right and the left, you see values shared with the right. I suppose it's all a matter of perspective.

@SecondJon @freemo

Blah, I'm trying to answer your points in order, but they are a bit split between posts, I hope this is possible to understand.

No, "alternative" here means still part of the right, but an alternative to current implementations. A good example on the left is the rise of Green parties started in the '70s. They offered an alternative to the labour and progressive movements, that mostly concentrated on eco-politics, which were completely ignored by their contemporaries on the left. At the same time it's hard to argue that Greens are not on the left of the political spectrum -- unless you think they aren't?

By all that is unholy, how did you get me identifying left/right with good/evil?! When I describe one of the most extreme movements on the right of course it's hard not to make everything sound evil. If I described tankies maybe you'd think I think left is evil and right is good? And why do you think "individual responsibility" is evil? Or "nationalism" for that matter, people usually support it in moderate quantities, especially on the right, and you have to get quite far left to think of it as purely evil.

The scale you are describing is I believe anarchism/statism, and I never saw it described as right/left, it's relatively (though not completely) orthogonal to this classification. Maybe you confused it with laissez-faire/regulation, which is often called economic right/economic left? When someone says "right" or "left" without the "economic" modifier, they rarely mean this (with the exception of some libertarians, who for some reason like to think of themselves as being the purest form of right; just because you like jumping to conclusions -- I actually think the libertarian ideology has quite a lot of useful ideas, and as a whole it offers an extremely useful perspective).

// Answers to the next post start here.

Once again, they identify as right, just check any of their writings, check which politicians they support, or read up what the actual definitions of left and right are (Wikipedia is an acceptable start, even if enough nuance is lost, that it's barely the truth). They essentially looked at the contemporary movements on the right in the US, and decided that they are all lacking in expressing what they perceived as the core values of the right. Therefore they started an alternative to these movements, that was still on the right. They think the left is completely idiotic, so they want nothing to do with them.

You are also wrong about the usage of the word alternative, and I don't even have to provide an example, because you did it for me. You write "alternative operating system" about Mac OS, which is an operating system. I'm not sure how you missed that. For "alternative" to be used like to want, you'd have to call Mac OS an "alternative Windows", which barely makes sense. You could say "alternative *to* Windows", but there is no "to" in "alternative right".

Finally we are getting to something interesting though -- what shared values do you see between the left and alt-right? I know of some, but not many and I'm interested in your perspective. Just as a precommitment, a md5 of what I have: cb99745252729798e37c501a858cf2f4

@timorl @SecondJon

I think you both are missing one important fact.. People int he alt-right consider themselves part of the right but alternative to the mainstream views and consider their own views to be the "true" right ideals, as most extreamist groups do.

But similarly the classical right view them very differently. They see them as anti-right, entierly outside of the right and not representative of it. They reject their ideals as "false".

Wether the group is outside or inclusive to the right depends entierly on who you ask.

However the left seems to have its alt-left embraces by the mainstream left far more so than the counter scenario on the right in my expiernce. Though the pattern does still apply for them as well.

@freemo @SecondJon Maybe the left accepts its more extreme movements because they are less violent? (I assume we are talking about the west here?) At least as far as I know recent deaths by far-left extremism are much *much* rarer than far-right (mostly alt-right).

Also, what specific far-left movement (or set of movements?) do you mean by alt-left @freemo ? I still feel like we are talking about something that might not exist, so I'd like a pointer.