Political Spectrum Terminology Overhaul: The Alt-Left, the Alt-Right, and the "New Right"

Greetings and salutations.

I know that sometimes I can rambling on, and so not to beat a dead horse here, I must ask - is it just me? Or does it seem that a slight few humans in the current global political climate are actually capable of defining what varying political philosophies they stand for accurately? I mean, the average person must at the very least be able to place themselves on an illustrated spectrum of political "disorders", right? Well, probably not.

In fact, I have more often than not found that many people are absolutely incapable of issuing what should otherwise be an easy to relate distinction about themselves. Instead, they are often so accustomed to the layers of culture war ideology and media brainwashing, that it is psychologically less taxing for them to not take on the Sisyphean task of lying to themselves and dodge such questions altogether. "I'm apolitical", is the usual, and oh so very political way of putting that supposed "non-stance".

Generally speaking, most people view the spectrum of political parties and philosophies as a flat, straight line that moves seamlessly from the left to right in a nice, methodical order. Others have tried to reshuffle the paradigm in order to place their own beliefs in a more favorable light, or to encompass orthodoxies and authoritarian extremes (on both ends) as only being on one side or the other of the scale. But what everyone does seem to agree on is that the term "moderate" always tends to fall, bundled with a series of hyphenates somewhere close to that intangible middle space at the center of most charts.

I personally support a model where "Classical Liberal" falls at the direct center of the scale. By this I mean someone who has embraced the ideals of the Enlightenment, as the Founding Fathers did, and I must add that this is far more a philosophic belief and mode of thinking rather than a dogmatic ideology or a system holding up a specific political party.

Within reason I feel that the scale does go both left and right from center, but, I envision the whole picture as more an upside down triangle, with the most radical movements of the far left and far right meeting at the pinnacle down at the bottom.

Surely, in matters of philosophy or party, the left moves "leftward" from the Classical Liberal center, to perhaps what is best described as the "Left Independent", to the Moderate Liberals or Moderate Democrats, who are the type of Democrat who is as likely to swing to a Republican candidate in an election, if the candidate details a more effective plan to deal with whatever pressing issue is at hand than their partisan opponent. To the immediate left of these more moderate Democrats is the domain of the donkey, the stagnating DNC Corporatist front, otherwise known as the "Mainstream Democrat Party". These Democrats can just as easily be referred to as the dreaded "Neo-Liberal", since as a phenomena their version of the party is the one that replaced the original Democratic Party as it existed through the nineteenth century (From Andrew Jackson to Woodrow Wilson) and truly took form in tandem to Roosevelt's Socialist-influenced "New Deal" policies of the early 1930's. This shift paralleled a similar, but earlier, change in the British Labor Party in the first decade of the twentieth century.

This wing moves further left into "Democratic Socialism" and blurs into a triptych of vague distinctions that includes terms like "Classical Socialists" and/or "Progressives". One group of self-appointed Marxist Progressives who once owned their moniker but now refute it due to the right wing co-opting it into a pejorative, are the "Social Justice Warriors" - who are possibly best described by the more technically correct term "Intersectionalists". Intersectionalism is a Marxist re-distribution of wealth principle that functions on the notion of legislating fairness in society based on a new, yet ever changing politically correct etno-social identitarian hierarchy. Thus, Intersectionalists are for the most part staunch believers in their "revised" vision of Affirmative Action-type legalism as based on a per situation pecking order of identitarian victimization.

From there the "hard" left members of the actual Socialist parties are only topped by the variety of Communist fringe groups that hybridize the pure Communist message with various Syndicalist tendencies. Some of these groups allow for some elements of Capitalism, and some do not, while some represent various Intersectional identities such as elements of the LBGT community. Those who are considered to be the furthest left are the Anarcho-Communist Syndicalists, who hold that Anarchy is the path to Global Communism, but as we have seen, these Communists only express Anarchy through wanton property damage and seem to lack any real identification with actual Anarchistic principles of liberty and responsibility. They are anti-Capitalist and anti-Constitutional, and this group more often than not presents themselves as an "Anti-Fascist" front, even though they tend to utilize Fascist tactics, authoritarian messaging, and totalitarian methods themselves. I guess this shouldn't surprise anyone since they are merely simulating the Communist regimes that they do so admire - Stalin's Soviet Union, the abusiveness of Castro's Cuban oligarchic junta, and Mao's Confucian bureaucrats meet Trotskyite Chinese authoritarians.

As anyone can see, and as Orwell made so crystal clear in his books "Animal Farm" and "1984", the far left tends to embrace the same totalitarian extremes that they accuse rightist regimes of, and these groups on the "Alt Left" are in intention, essence and practice, no different from the abusiveness plied by any plutocracy, monarchical oligarchy, fascist state, or third world military-driven despotic regime. Sadly, many liberals who actually stand closer to center secretly admire these street fighting thugs as noble partisan "warriors" for the "greater cause", and even compare them to the actual Anti-Nazi Partisans in World War II. Of course, what they do share with them is in fact the over-arching theory of Marxist Globalism. Nevertheless, these "Latte Liberals" fail at every turn to disavow the fascistic acts of groups like Antifa, yet at the same time attack their mirror image, the so-called "Alt Right".

This of course brings us to the right, though just which right are we talking about when we say "Alt Right". Indeed this has become somewhat problematic since I suggest that there are TWO "Alt Rights", who frankly couldn't have less to do with one another.

But let's ride this train the same way as we did for the left, starting at the Classical Liberal center, where the philosophic building blocs that both left and right share and remains to this day. From there I would say that another philosophic, not-party, related distinction like "skeptic" be placed. While many skeptics themselves might resist the idea of being placed an inch over the center to the right, their skepticism in the context of the culture war between left and right for the last fifty years qualifies them, regardless of how socially liberal they might describe themselves, to be innately at odds with the orthodoxy of leftist thought. Thus, the skeptics "devils advocate" opinion often matches the beliefs of those further to the right.

Surely there must be a place for "Right Independent" or "Moderate Republican" around the same zone as the skeptics, and these folks, like their Left Independent counterparts are capable of more fluid voting patterns than those who are more dogmatically partisan to the farther right. From there I envision the next step to the right is the "GOP Corporatist front" or the "Mainstream Republican Party". Like its leftist mirror, this is not a uniform front because it includes both RINOS (Republicans in Name Only), who share much of the same Corporatist thinking as those Democrat swamp dwellers that they often agree with on many issues. Sharing that boat with them, and separated by a thin gray line, are the "Neo-Cons" - who represent the Republican establishment and are manifested in the Bush family and the "Never Trumper" movement. Recently G.W. Bush came out to criticize Trump, which only makes sense, since these Corporatists have been on notice since the Tea Party that they do not speak for the majority of those on the right, and in fact, quite the contrary. Needless to say, the GOP still tried to force its candidates on registered Republican voters in the last election with yet another Bush, this time in the form of Jeb leading the way. However, unlike the DNC, who, regardless of how popular Bernie Sanders was, dictated who their "anointed" candidate was to be to their registered voting stock, Republicans stated in no unclear terms that they would reject GOP-sanctioned candidates and dismember the apparatus if the party attempted the same type of wrangling.

Thus, good ole' Jeb Bush ran pretty much in the eighth position in the grand scheme of possible nominees, trailing behind Donald Trump, the populist moderate left NYC Republican; Ted Cruz, the Libertarian with religious Conservative underpinnings, John Kasich, the Rino-ish Independent leaning Republican; Marco Rubio, the moderate Libertarian leaning Republican; Ben Carson, the religious Conservative; Rand Paul, the Libertarian; and Carly Fiorina, the moderate Corporatist-Conservative. He also had to contend with Rick Santorum, who later supported Rubio, and Mike Huckabee, a religious Conservative who backed Trump. Excluding Kasich and Fiorina's waffling, all of the other candidates backed Trump, except for, you guessed it, Jeb Bush.The 2016 election crystallized the long term effect that the Tea Party had on the Republican Party and illustrated that the Reformation was well under way. Rino and Neo-Con control of the party would not be supported by the "New Right".

To the right of the Rinos and Neo-Cons, stood the Traditional Conservatives (the Old Guard of William F. Buckley and the like), and the religious right (converts of the post-Reagan era of the new money South), and the Tea Party Constitutional Anarcho-Libertarians (not the party, the philosophy), and Civic Nationalists, who now all stood together in an alliance, accepting the diversity of the right and their shared beliefs rather than what divided them. To the far right were the radicals who leaned the most extreme, and that is where the confusion in the media took root. As an example of this, the right, or rather, Republicans, had ended slavery, repealed the Jim Crow laws, passed Child labor laws, founded "green" and "health" government agencies like the EPA, the FDA, passed the Civil Right law of 1964 (to great Democrat objections), ratified Roe versus Wade, passed the ERA, and the placed the various Americans with Disabilities Acts into law, yet, the left, and the Democrats, through their dominance in media and academia have convinced the general public that all of these great social measures were put into effect because of them. The exact opposite of the reality.   

You see, while the left has long attempted to distance itself from their totalitarian leanings, they have never fully dismissed that the Communists do not stand on the left side of the spectrum. However, they have distanced themselves from, say, the Nazis, who they insist are a "right-wing extremist" party, even though the term Nazi itself is a German acronym for the "National Socialist German Workers Party". I contend that Fascists can exist on either end of the spectrum at the bottom of the inverse pinnacle. Was Hitler's state Fascist? Sure. But so was the Ancient Roman Empire, Franco's Spain, and many other regimes that didn't fuse their Fascism with racial identitarianism, or Socialist economics. The Hitlerian state operated on fascist principles, and German society was radicalized culturally by racial identitarianism, which both fed nationalism, but the economy was indeed quite Socialist.

In America, the far right, now dubbed, the "Alt Right", was set to be conflated with "Nazis" in the media and popular consciousness. Surely, everyone who voted for Trump wasn't a Nazi, that would mean that hundreds of millions were, "like literally Hitler, and stuff, dude". Well, surely they weren't, and aren't, but that is what the left media wished the left to believe, and so, anyone right of the DNC, including Classical Liberals and Skeptics were put on notice.

The opportunistic white identitarians eagerly took on the mantle of "Alt Right", as  a means to piggyback on the populism that was sweeping the land. This meant that there are now two types of people claiming the term. The first are the Conservatives of the Anarcho-Capitalist variety, and the other are actual Nazis that the first were mistaken for by the media. But what is the difference, you might ask. Nazis, now as then, are not actually on the right, and their identification as such is a manipulative illusion of the left.

If you listen to self-professed white identitarians like Jared Taylor and Richard Spencer firsthand, you quickly find that they do not hold the Constitution dear in the manner a far Conservative like say, Ben Shapiro, Ann Coulter or even the dreaded Steve "gasp" Bannon does. Likewise, they do not hold Capitalism dear the way a Conservative does. They hold race sacred, and their Fascistic desire is to replace the existing government with one more suiting their goals. Like Hitler, as well as his Communist opponents, they are willing to use Democracy in order to put themselves in a position of power, but once they are elected, those "inconvenient" Democratic principles are soon dispensed with. These Neo-Nazi "Alt-Righters" are no different. They do not hold the values of the right sacred, because they are not actually patriots, or on the right.

They are at the pinnacle of the triangle beneath us all - Alt for sure.

Thus, even though I contest they are not even really best described of as being on the right, the white supremacists have ruined the term Alt Right for the Anarcho-Libertarian and Far-Right Conservatives of the Alt Right. No amount of distancing and disavowing them will make a difference to that taint now. Therefore, I suggest that the post-Tea Party generation fully embrace the term "New Right" and abandon Alt Right to the wolves.

I have a feeling the term might just stick. What do you think?

Till next time.