What Is The Alt-Right?

Good question. It's kind of an amorphous mass, but for one explanation, click here for an article at Jacobinmag.com, by Matthew Phelan, entitled "Building the House of Breitbart." It's a long article, with lots of information. Here's one passage:

Several vying definitions of alt-right have been wielded since the term suddenly became a featured player in 2016’s political theater revue. In some contexts, it connotes the young, conservative, and largely male trolls who congregate at sites like 4chan and Reddit; in others, the readers of Breitbart.com, who obviously tend to skew older and who have apparently decided that the alt-right is just the latest iteration of Tea Party insurgency; it may represent any Trump supporter susceptible to racial appeals and strongman demagoguery; or, lastly, the very small cadre of white nationalists who began describing themselves as the alt-right around 2010, when a former executive editor for the libertarian Taki’s magazine named Richard Spencer founded AlternativeRight.com.

Phelan goes on to say:

The Left shouldn’t worry about this movement’s pitiful attempt to seize the pole position from the American avant-garde. The real danger is that, by raising up the alt-right as not only significant, but emblematic of Trump’s odious constituency, mainstream Democrats only help Bannon and Yiannopoulos provide aspiring demagogues with an bigger platform from which to court disaffected middle-class whites on a national scale.

And:

Unable and unwilling to erode Trump’s populist base with meaningful economic reforms, the Democratic Party has resorted to tarring that base as a deplorable, white-nationalist hoard. They hope that the specter of fascism will scare enough decent conservatives away from the party of Trump. But it’s equally possible that this tactic will encourage a redefinition of the still murky alt-right/alt-lite boundary around the broadest possible substrata of the conservative base.