The Scholars Who Study the Alt-Right, a Movement Defined by White Supremacists

Ever since Donald J. Trump was elected president last month, public discussion about the small, fringe movement known as the alt-right has exploded. Its members support a wide range of extremist views, including those that are anti-Semitic, white supremacist, and misogynist, and they supported Mr. Trump enthusiastically.

The handful of academics who study the alt-right are being tapped time and time again to explain where the movement came from and what it means as anxiety builds about the alt-right, which counts white supremacists like Richard B. Spencer among its standard-bearers.

People drawn to the alt-right have for years operated anonymously in obscure corners of the internet. But when Mr. Trump became the Republican Party’s presidential candidate, the movement “was able to really troll its way into mainstream conversation,” says George Hawley, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa.

It gained significant attention in August, when Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, denounced Mr. Trump for having ties to the extreme movement, and when Stephen K. Bannon, a former executive of Breitbart News, was tapped to run Mr. Trump’s campaign. Mr. Bannon has called Breitbart “the platform for the alt-right,” though he denies that the website is in any way associated with the movement.

Mr. Trump stoked new concerns about the movement after the election by naming Mr. Bannon as his chief White House strategist. The president-elect has since tried to distance himself from the alt-right.

“They really only had limited influence in the marketplace of ideas for many years,” George J. Michael, an associate professor of criminal justice at Westfield State University, says of the extreme conservatives who identify with the alt-right. “That’s one thing that has changed over the last few months.”

As a small but growing group of scholars pursue research projects examining the alt-right, they’re encountering a number of challenges. For instance, how does one define the group? While white nationalism is a subset of the alt-right, Mr. Michael says, those who embrace the label include “a broad array of right-wing actors,” including isolationists, cultural conservatives, and libertarians. And their ideology is far from monolithic, he adds; many members of the movement don’t seem to care about conservative dogma.

The half-dozen professors who spoke with The Chronicle believe that academics have a critical role to play in understanding the alt-right’s goals and weighing its possible influence as Mr. Trump assumes the presidency.

Early Alt-Right Scholar

One academic has recently been credited with beating many others to the punch on the alt-right: Carol M. Swain, a professor of political science and law at Vanderbilt University. (Ms. Swain has drawn backlash for her comments about Islam and the Black Lives Matter movement, among other things, and for criticizing students who spoke out against her on her public Facebook page. Last year, some called for the university to suspend her and investigate her conduct.)

Fourteen years ago, Ms. Swain wrote a book titled The New White Nationalism in America: Its Challenge to Integration. It features interviews with figures associated with the alt-right today, including Jared Taylor, founder and editor of the American Renaissance, a prominent white-nationalist publication. The book discusses, as she puts it, “the conditions converging to create an opportunity for the ideas of the more intellectual white nationalists to seep into the mainstream white culture.”

“We are so focused as a society on identity politics — race, gender, sexual orientation — that it was very easy for them,” she says. Moreover, with the rise of the internet, people could get involved in fringe movements without exposing themselves, she adds.

At the time, Ms. Swain says her work was dismissed by many as sensationalist. “People thought I’d lost my mind,” she says. “But I thought this was the most important book I’d ever written.”

Mr. Hawley, of Alabama, may become one of the first scholars to publish a book specifically focused on the alt-right. Earlier this year he published Right-Wing Critics of American Conservatism, which explores how “the conservative movement that was known for six decades is now really showing its age.” His next book, which he hopes will come out next year, is based on interviews with several dozen members of the alt-right movement.

“A few were clearly trolling me,” he says, “but most seem to have been honestly explaining their positions.”

How did he find them? Twitter, for the most part, he says. Keeping his sources anonymous was central to his strategy: “I don’t know the real names of most of these people.” He also says his previous book probably put many in the alt-right at ease. While it didn’t offer “a favorable portrayal of the movement,” he says, “there was a general consensus that it was accurate and fair.”

Thomas J. Main, a professor in Baruch College’s Marxe School of Public and International Affairs, says as a longtime moderate conservative he feels compelled to conduct research on the alt-right, which he considers “a kind of degeneration of the conservative movement.”

Mr. Main has started analyzing alt-right trends. He’s tracked unique visits to alt-right websites over the past six months, finding that Jared Taylor’s American Renaissance, Richard Spencer’s Radix Journal, and other similar sites earned a total of three million visits per month and that website visits grew over that period by nearly 18 percent. American Renaissance alone saw a 36 percent increase.

Mr. Main hopes to flesh out his analysis in more detail, write an intellectual history of the alt-right’s development, and examine the question of “how ideas mesh with politics in the 21st century.” He says he has been trying to secure support for his alt-right research for most of the past year, but has had little success convincing publishers and funders. “I hope that changes in this new political environment,” he says.

Mr. Michael, of Westfield State, is putting together a proposal to edit a book on the alt-right that examines its different segments, from Breitbart to Taki’s Magazine, a site that bills itself as a “Libertarian webzine.” “What needs to be done is serious analysis that will capture the nuances of the movement rather than paint it with a broad brush,” he says.

‘What Did We Miss?’

At a time when many journalists, political analysts, and pollsters are reflecting on how they didn’t see Mr. Trump’s victory coming, some professors say the alt-right’s rise suggests that scholars have a similar obligation to question their assumptions.

“Now we need to say, What did we miss? How does this make us rethink what we thought we understood?” says Nicole Hemmer, an assistant professor at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, which studies presidential scholarship, political history, and public policy. Ms. Hemmer recently published a book titled Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics.

Bringing historical clarity to an amorphous movement is one way academics can contribute to the broader debate about the alt-right, Ms. Hemmer says. In a Vox article published last week, she says she tried to do just that, examining the evolution of racism and white nationalism from the Ku Klux Klan and white nationalism to the alt-right.

Given the importance of digital media to the alt-right, Ms. Hemmer would also like to see scholars “treat media as a central political institution and give it the same kind of close scrutiny that we give to political parties, voters, or courts.”

Ms. Swain, of Vanderbilt, says she’s nearing retirement and isn’t sure she’ll do research on the alt-right. But she has a message for scholars who want to. “We need to look at white identity — not to demonize it, but to study it in the same way that we study black identity and black people’s concerns,” she says.

Ms. Swain emphasizes that she’d rather do away with identity politics altogether. But as long as it continues to exist, she says, “scholars have to acknowledge that white interests and white identity are going to grow.”

She wonders how many academics will be willing to tackle the alt-right as a field of research. “I do see a role for scholars,” she says, “but I don’t know how many will be brave enough to go out and do it.” They might be afraid of being labeled racist, she says.

As Mr. Trump takes office, alt-right adherents will be watching intently to see if he carries out his campaign promises on immigration and Muslims. And depending on whether he does, at least a few academics will be watching how the movement reacts. “It’s really imperative,” Ms. Hemmer says, “that historians and scholars in general stay engaged with the public conversation that’s happening around the alt-right — and American politics more generally.”

Still, Mr. Hawley cautions that the influence of the alt-right, particularly the white-nationalist segment of it, shouldn’t be exaggerated by academics or anyone else. “The idea that they have access to power in America,” he says, “is a gross overstatement.”

Sarah Brown writes about a range of higher-education topics, including sexual assault, race on campus, and Greek life. Follow her on Twitter @Brown_e_Points, or email her at sarah.brown@chronicle.com.