Alt-Right Week: What Is the American Far Right?

Today's far-right is a congeries of self-identified "sovereign citizens" (who, like Walt Whitman, believe they are "entire unto themselves"), "3%ers" (an allusion to the mythical number of Americans who fought the British during the Revolutionary War), and elderly white tea-party retirees on Medicare and Social Security who resent having to support "free-loaders" ("Not my child, not my problem!"). There are also play-acting pagan Odinists, "f**k yeah" gun-nuts, and bored millennials enchanted by Ayn Rand's hero, John Galt, of Atlas Shrugged. In addition to buttoned-down Mormon "freemen," camouflaged border vigilantes, black-clad neo-Nazi stormtroopers, and their Confederate-flag-waving cousins, there are sellers of over-the-counter male-enhancement cures and rare coins, Czech gas masks, cheap Belize real estate, and "White Pride World Wide!" coffee mugs, ball caps, and bumper stickers, alongside vendors of unregulated nutraceuticals, survival go-packs, and home security systems. These and countless other trajectories are overseen by a handful of billionaire funders of nontaxable "educational foundations," staffed with the "great minds" of the "conservative movement."

This poses a problem for analysts: How do we count their number? Given, one, their overlapping and sometimes contradictory affinities; two, that group names and individual affiliations are transitory; and three, that far-right operatives have seized control of GOP apparatuses throughout the Deep South, the Midwest, and the Rocky Mountain region, lending them a patina of conventional legitimacy, the short answer is: No one can be certain. But this, we do know.

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