White Americans’ Evaluations of the Alt-Right

Abstract

Citizens’ perceptions of the alt-right are not well explored in political science. We view the alt-right as a successor of the Tea Party movement. While the Tea Party described itself as organized around spending, the size of government, and the American Constitution, examinations of the movement found that the unifying concerns of people who identified with it or viewed it favorably were negative feelings about racial minorities and patriarchal views of gender roles. Using panel survey data, we show that whites with higher levels of hostile sexism, racial resentment, perceptions of discrimination against whites, and who were more favorable towards Donald Trump evaluated the alt-right movement more positively. We find no evidence that self-placed ideology informed these evaluations. On the whole, latent cultural conservatism appears to inform evaluations of the relatively unknown — at the time — alt-right movement.

The genetic essentialism of the alt-right

“…Therefore, even though the narrative may suggest a socioenvironmental impetus for behavior, priming racial differences may induce similar cognitive processes as narratives that rely primarily on genetic explanations for behavior. Although we expect that racial priming would be particularly salient for alt-right supporters as they are driven by racial resentment (Banda and Cluverius, 2023), a discussion of violent criminality itself is likely associated with ideas of racial immutability in the alt-right, whether or not race is explicitly referenced. Thus, similar to our expectation of the effect of racial priming in the general population, we may anticipate any narrative of violent criminality, whether or not it explicitly mentions race, to particularly motivate essentialist thinking in the alt-right.…”

Local Gun Safety Enforcement, Sheriffs, and Right-Wing Political Extremism

“…We also consider alternative explanations for sheriffs’ extreme views on guns. RWE attitudes and gun preferences are associated with conservatism and Republicanism in the United States (Banda and Cluverius 2021; Cluverius, Banda and Daly 2020). These factors are also associated with preferences for gun control (Hayes, Fortunato and Hibbing 2021; Pearson-Merkowitz and Dyck 2017).…”