At the end of his 2018 movie BlacKkKlansman—which tells the true story of a black police officer who, in 1970s Colorado, went undercover with the Ku Klux Klan—Spike Lee cuts to newsreel footage of August 14, 2017, in Charlottesville, Virginia, quickly segueing to infamous comments made the next day by President Donald Trump. Protest at Charlottesville under the banner “Unite the Right” had brought together some familiar right-wing groups, including neo-Nazis, the Klan itself, and rural militias, but in the company of a newer group: the so-called “Alt-Right.”

In this well-researched book, Thomas J. Main’s concerns resemble Spike Lee’s. What is the Alt-Right? And how serious is it? Main is especially interested in the extent to which an emerging political force may overlap with forces at the institutional center of American political life and meanwhile fuse with forces of right-wing extremism, which have roots that are historically deep, even if they have rarely been institutionally strong. Main writes as a political scientist (his book’s assemblage of relevant documentation for the Alt-Right is masterful), but his ethical interest is also manifest: “Today (early 2018) the meteoric career of Stephen Bannon is all the talk of followers of American politics” (p. 210). Overtopicality can be a problem affecting contemporary writing on the Right, by alienating analysis from appreciation of the vagaries of the moment, and although for the greater part Main avoids this, the occasional presentist tendency is on show. For example, his first chapter makes the inflated claim that the Alt-Right represents the biggest philosophical threat to democratic liberalism to have emerged since communism (p. 8), all but ignoring the contemporary challenge of the ideology of political Islamism (itself exaggerated as a “civilizational” threat, at a moment of even more spectacular upheaval two decades ago).

The bulk of The Rise of the Alt-Right is organized into two discussions. Chapters 3 and 4 are addressed to “intellectual roots,” which connect up with the concern to gauge the possible permeation—infiltration?—of a mainstream. Chapters 5 through 9 focus on the “What is it?” question, which Main answers by trying to parse an ideological configuration. Initially, though, the book undertakes a path-clearing exercise, building a case for the potency of the influence of the Alt-Right notwithstanding its modest size in “relative” terms (p. 12). Main’s currency for this is “web traffic evidence” (p. 29), which is where his account is perhaps most accomplished, for he carefully tracks both range and frequency of visits made by U.S. citizens to online Alt-Right magazines (with names such as Daily Stormer and The Right Stuff), which he compares to information held on liberal publications (such as The Nation and New Republic). Visits to the Alt-Right sites, he concedes, may be dwarfed by the latter. Yet the matter should not end there. That is because Alt-Right actors knowingly pursue “metapolitics” (p. 12)—which act not upon people’s first-order political opinions but, rather, try to change their basic ideas about how politics works, similar to the way in which Antonio Gramsci perceived a cultural role for Marxian intellectuals. As Main cites one Alt-Right activist, the “‘intellectual work’” consists in “narrowing the gap between White America and White Nationalists” (p. 13).

Overall, Main is suitably open to thinking about the emergence of a new political force in terms of the challenge of new media. He is explicit that the rise of the Internet ensconces “a media of mass political communication quite different from television” (p. 92). However, there are also limits to the success he has in escaping some quite traditionalist assumptions. These have the effect of separating him from his material. A kind of methodological conservatism at times biases the lessons he draws out from his otherwise commendably researched source base.

First, consider the book’s handling of the Alt-Right’s ideological provenance. Main tracks this back to developments since the 1950s, effectively diagnosing an only porous boundary between hard and soft versions of the Right, whereby centrist conservatives have been persistently stalked at the margins: first by outlier figures such as Barry Goldwater, and later by “paleoconservatives” (for whom Main’s representative figures are Samuel Francis, a journalist, and Paul Gottfried, an academic). This discussion of the long-term conditions for the emergence of a new ideology is authoritative and sustained (pp. 33–85). But the weakness comes when Main is tracking the “crystallization” of the Alt-Right in the short term. Purportedly, between 2000 and 2016, the Alt-Right grew out of certain affinities with paleoconservatism, but what principally wrought the damage was the rise of the Internet. Main invokes a fairly conservative account of the sociology of political knowledge. Normally in the transmission of political ideas, as he understands it, “experts” feed “intellectuals,” who themselves feed “policy entrepreneurs,” who in turn feed the “mass media,” before lastly the media interfaces with “the public” (pp. 85–90). But after 2000, the Internet disrupts the chain, variously because unreliable, unverifiable political knowledge is diffused; the traditional “gatekeepers” are lost; and the “renewal of citizen democracy” turns out to be the “revenge of the mob” (pp. 92, 95, 97).

This is not just passing grouchiness on the author’s part. The conclusion similarly includes a call to “re-empower the gatekeepers whose position has recently been undercut without lapsing into mere censorship” (p. 254). So, there are differences, but as a political scientist’s prescription for the political present, The Rise of the Alt-Right calls to mind the dispiriting message of Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s (2018) How Democracies Die, which counsels greater institutional “forbearance” and, colloquially put, backroom dealing.

Second, consider Main’s way of conceiving his criteria for identifying an actual Alt-Right “ideology” where, methodologically, the shackles are on still. His essential ideological ingredients are fourfold: 1) rejection of the foundational principles of American politics, 2) white racialism, 3) anti-Americanism, and 4) vitriolic rhetoric. But vitriolic rhetoric is an odd-one-out. Unlike the others, it does not tally with values and/or concepts. The problems betokened may be general. How do we get to grips with style and substance in the Alt-Right? Do they even disentangle? And what can the analyst make of displays that are “ironically” racist? Elements such as provocation and “vice signaling” are surely central to what an Alt-Right is about. But you would not gather this from reading Main’s account alone.

The first and third criteria in Main’s scheme are questionable for different reasons. The author heavily features the Alt-Right’s supposed antipathy to “America.” But this is peculiar, on the one hand, because it seems to follow only from treating discursive censure of “actually existing” America as tantamount to denunciation of America per se (e.g., p. 195) and, on the other, because the “idea” of America being presupposed is far from uncontroversial. Main sees anti-Americanism in dissent from the emphases in the Federalist Papers and Declaration of Independence (pp. 149–53). But, by that standard, groups like Black Lives Matter will belong in the same ideological fold, for they likewise tend to be critical of such foundational documents. The correct point should probably just be that the Alt-Right opposes liberal democracy. But instead, alas, Trump’s claim for moral equivalence at Charlottesville only gets ambiguous refutation.

Lastly, although white racialism is a correct inclusion, the mistake is perhaps not to have explored how racism might work in symbiosis with fierce antifeminism, about which the book is largely silent. There are good reasons for supposing that, as much as in a crisis in “whiteness,” the Alt-Right’s cultural sources derive from a crisis of masculinity (e.g., see Annie Kelly, “The Alt-Right: Reactionary Rehabilitation for White Masculinity,” Soundings, 66, 2017). Alt-Right activists frequently abuse mainstream Rightists as “cuckservatives.” “Cuck” has an obvious connotation, but is also a reference to Internet pornography, whereby white men are sexually humiliated by watching their female partners engage in interracial sex. This is an unusually dramatic representation of an ongoing crisis in white male identity as perceived by the Alt-Right, but not the only instance in this book in which more open-minded attention to online sources could have better served ideological understanding.