THE NEW RIGHT

A sometimes-confused, sometimes-insightful journey into extreme right-wing antinomy.

A self-described anarchist who appears as a commentator on the Fox News network, Malice (Dear Reader: The Unauthorized Autobiography of Kim Jong Il, 2014, etc.) begins his exploration of the new—read mostly alt—right by asserting that it is a grave mistake to equate all of its adherents to Nazis, adding, “even within an ideology, whether Nazism or progressivism, one will find a continuum of thought.” Still, many of his interlocutors in this winding book are disturbingly assured that Hitler, if not Jefferson Davis, had it right. Malice, who is also Jewish, doesn’t miss a beat when told by one after another that in the ideal new right state, he would not be allowed citizenship. His reasoning is often scattershot: Since two-thirds of fetuses with Down syndrome are aborted, he writes, “does that mean that inside the breast of every expectant mother beats the heart of a Nazi eugenicist?” Eugenics is but one plank of an extreme platform that, while on a continuum, also finds points in agreement in despising democracy not because it is democratic but because it’s “a bait-and-switch used by the left to foster their own elite.” One interesting though highly debatable speculation on Malice’s part is that some members of the new right are merely acting out creatively as a “response to progressivism and the Cathedral,” somewhere between true believers and anti-establishment rebels doing whatever the mainstream disapproves of. Also of note are the author’s observations on how the Trump administration has helped various strains of the new/alt-right to enter that mainstream—even if, he adds, there are many points of divergence, since Trump is a member of the despised “Cathedral,” the power elite, himself.

Of some interest to politics watchers but less insightful than Vegas Tenold’s Everything You Love Will Burn (2018) in describing what makes subscribers to fringe causes tick.