Neoliberalism, the Alt-Right and the Intellectual Dark Web

Finlayson, Alan ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3939-349X (2021) Neoliberalism, the Alt-Right and the Intellectual Dark Web. Theory, Culture and Society, 38 (6). pp. 167-190. ISSN 0263-2764

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Abstract

Drawing on research from digital media studies, political theory and rhetoric this article explores online radical conservative and reactionary ‘ideological entrepreneurs’. It argues that online media are uniting an ‘ideological family’ around concepts of natural inequality and hostility to those who deny them. Placing this phenomenon in context the article shows how online culture reinvigorates well-established discourses of opposition to bureaucrats, intellectuals and experts of all kinds, rejecting one version of the neoliberal state and of its personnel, a ‘new class’ understood to dominate through discursive, cultural, power and imagined through the figures of the ‘Social Justice Warrior’ and the ‘Cultural Marxist’. In competing for a share of the marketplace of ideas these ideological entrepreneurs promise insights – the revelations of the ‘red pill’ - critiquing ‘actually-existing’ neoliberalism yet insisting on the ‘rationality’ of governance through markets and promising adherents techniques for achieving success as liberated entrepreneurial selves.

Item Type:	Article
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of Politics, Philosophy, Language and Communication Studies (former - to 2024)
UEA Research Groups:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Research Groups > Policy & Politics Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Research Groups > Cultural Politics, Communications & Media Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Research Groups > Political, Social and International Studies
Depositing User:	LivePure Connector
Date Deposited:	09 Apr 2021 23:48
Last Modified:	18 Dec 2024 01:32
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/79651
DOI:	10.1177/02632764211036731

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