Great observation and you hint at a simple solution - call them by their conventional moniker: the far-right. There's nothing new about their ideologies and "the far-right" elicit a different response from people than the newer and unfamiliar "alt-right".
As an aside, there are likely plenty of people on the left that feel similarly.
The far-left/left/center-left etc and right side counterparts are defined by policy and ideology, so whether they feel the GOP was in touch doesn't really make a difference.
You wouldn't call the Republicans "right" if they started handing out generous welfare packages to the masses.
Like their pre-Obama universal healthcare proposals? The one dimensional political spectrum, with n-right vs n-left, doesn't work at all.
It's not a good way of accurately gauging the political spectrum but I'm not sure I'd say it doesn't work at all. A better method would be to add two more axes so you have x, y and z which would allow you to measure social policy (services, infrastructure), fiscal policy (an increase or decrease in state assets, taxation) and international relations (trade, alliances). The end result would be a kind of tetrahedron that represents the shape of a party's policy (that's not the point of it - it's just an interesting feature of having a three dimensional gauge).
As it fails in such a modest charge, I'm comfortable saying that it doesn't work. The only variable that it would come close to measuring is individual freedom vs collective comfort. A multidimensional representation would do a better job, but it would quickly become so complex that it would be useless - as most people hold contradictory ideas.
That is why far-right does not accurately describe alt-right, think of it as a second dimension on the traditional spectrum.
Maybe I'm missing something but in this thread I haven't seen anything that shows how the alt-right is fundamentally different to, despite the flawed labeling system, what is standard fare for the far-right. What sits in this second dimension, and does the rule apply to the left? Is it consistent?
The alt-left, if it is presently a thing, is even less defined than the alt-right. But in the interest of maintaining symmetry, I'd say that it would have a progressive agenda by way of individualist means. Emergence?