But somehow it's been captured by the actual right wing. That's frightening. There's a lotta young male angst out there.
See this is exactly the problem the article talks about. A young man got so heavily invested in a community because they weren't dismissive of him. Maybe a lot of young men feel people are treating them dismissively and that a lot narratives other people espouse don't resonate with their personal experience.
Maybe we should consider why this anger is so much more common in young men. The narrative of "equality looks like aggression when you've always been the one on top" doesn't really apply to kids who are only 13, because no matter who was on top it wasn't kids.
It's kinda odd, because nothing you say in this line is dismissive at all. But because of the everyday association with 'young male angst' that many encounter, merely mentioning it like this is enough to lead some to conclude you are being dismissive. Almost as if the concept has been put down so much that merely mentioning it has become a form of dismissive slang.
Tbh, it's this sort of thing that fuels the alt right. I'm a young male and I have some political concerns. I don't consider myself alt-right. But, when you dismiss my concerns as "angst" - I'm far more likely to continue talking to them than to you.
Indeed, it worries me how much such concerns are being dismissed and suppressed.
Also, one of my favorite lines is "Still angry." And my favorite fantasy hero is Stover's Caine, who says that a lot.
I still remember 5+ years ago having periodic exposure to the term alt-right and having it more or less exclusively refer to relatively languid writings like Mencius Moldbug and NRx[1], in sharp contrast to the rowdier, meme-ier aesthetic it has today (eg /r/The_donald, from what little I've seen of it). I didn't see it come to refer to white-supremacy and other more well-known forms of the far-right until Hillary Clinton made the term a household name. After that point of course, it was a self-fulfilling Schelling point that coalesced around what she said it was: white supremacists et al flocked to it, and everyone not willing to be associated with them had to stop associating with the term, now that "everyone knew" what it referred to. Fascinating dynamic.
(Not that I'm suggesting that she created the movement, but rather that from my skewed sample, it seems that she made the _term_ well-defined, by bringing it into the limelight).
OTOH, this may have been a consequence of the fact that I had little exposure to chan or white supremacist subcultures et al and lots of exposure to often-iconoclastic longform blogs talking about every random topic, including politics. It's entirely possible that my sample of encounters with the term describes my filter more than it does the term.
It's a fascinating window into language, to see a term become widely-known, and by doing so, change its meaning. It's particularly interesting that it's difficult to know how close to how far off you were in your role as one of the proverbial blind men touching the elephant. Thanks for sharing your data point!
[1] I'm referring to the aesthetic and energy here, not the content, which wasn't quite "languid..".
You can thank Stormfront forums raiding 4chan for that.
/pol/ is a shitshow