A psychological perspective on the alt-right
Today, I stumbled upon the best summary of the distinction between Groypers vs BAP followers that I have seen thus far. My working theory of the alt-right is that it's a group of men projecting their deepest insecurities onto the outside world. Social media, whilst (unlike as much commentary critical of social media, and blaming it for radicalisation) not the cause of this, facilitates this congregation of like-minded men with similar vulnerabilities.
For instance, take the manosphere (an online subculture with much overlap with the alt-right, if not identical). It’s blatantly obvious that incels struggle with their relationships with women. Less obvious is that the other manosphere groups (PUAs, MRAs, and MGTOW) also have struggled with their relationships with women. PUAs are attracted to the subculture in order to learn how to get women into bed. MRAs and MGTOWs have often been in past intimate relationships that ended acrimoniously (hence their obsession with divorce rulings and child-custody proceedings, and the perceived bias towards females in those settings). Also more subtle is the implied belief amongst incels, many of whom are adult virgins, that all of their sexual or romantic problems will be solved upon losing that virginity. Yet they do not realise that losing one's virginity often opens up more questions and insecurities than it solves…
So for one large internet subculture associated with the alt-right, their insecurities with relationships drive their model of the world, and their approach to sociopolitical and cultural topics. Obviously, it's far easier to outsource blame into an “out group” perceived to be the cause of your issues, than actually working to address them, which may reveal uncomfortable truths about yourself that you're trying to mask. This comment on X generalises this theory to the other alt-right groups. Groypers yield insecurities relating to their socioeconomic position in life. BAP followers yield insecurities regarding their masculinity. One can think of this as another manifestation of the zero-sum culture of victimhood, which is ironic as the BAP subculture superficially manifests itself as a crude, low-IQ variant of Nietzschean philosophy.
For personal disclosure, I was briefly involved in MRA forums on Reddit a few years ago. I had endured an arduous breakup, then imprisoned my mind in a cycle of self-pity. Suffering from the evils of resentment in the past, my culture of victimhood post serves as a reminder to myself to practice virtue and rationality as a mental-health vaccine. I debated whether to write a “Why I have left the Manosphere?” post, but I’ve made my criticisms of online right-wing subcultures (including Manosphere groups) clear in previous posts1. Broadly put, their practice of zero-sum in vs out group thinking means that the charge of misogyny is correct here, and my disgust at the cancellations of the Great Awokening (inflating away the value of such epithets as misogyny) led me to overlook those rather obvious damning flaws. When Tate arrived on the scene, this became more transparent; his attitudes towards women obviously rooted in a desire for domination as opposed to a sober assessment of comparative advantage based on behavioural genetics or evolutionary psychology. Ultimately, I believe in the individual, not any arbitrary group. I abhor all forms of identity politics, whether woke or far-right or class-based (i.e. leftism).
As I write this, I’ve just stumbled across this prescient observation by Peter Thiel. He relates the rising popularity of extremist ideologies (Mamdani-style socialism and online Groyperism) amongst the young, and the fact that their support is mostly concentrated amongst the young, to our culture of gerontocracy. As well as being another factor that can explain support for the alt-right independently of this analysis, there is a compelling case to be made that gerontocracy is contributing to our declining fertility. To the extent that all variables that represent a feature of relationships (for e.g: number of times people have sex, virginity rates) can be modelled by the same search and matching frictions that encapsulate the dating and marriage markets (hence indirectly fertility), and that these frictions are worryingly moving in the wrong direction, if gerontocracy makes it harder to form intimate relationships, then this may manifest psychologically in the zero-sum thinking that we witness.
As Stantcheva et al have highlighted, zero-sum thinking of all kinds is correlated with economic hardship, and gerontocracy contributes to that. I don't think it's a stretch to extrapolate this thesis to social hardship too.
I also want no (confusion of) association with incels: the sex communists. I've always seen them as pathetically self-depreciating at best. If anything, more people have said that my ego is inflated!