ABSTRACT
Since the 2016 election of Donald Trump and his empathy towards white nationalists (also called the ‘alt-right’), the visibility of various white power groups has increased. This chapter argues that while the Ku Klux Klan was viewed by many whites as a politically ‘dead’ organization in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, it has had an ‘afterlife’ in the form of many smaller units or ‘cells’ of organized racists. The alt-right represents a new life for an old social movement of white supremacists. This chapter contextualizes the newly emerged alt-right and its various formations within the historical context of the extremist right in the U.S. since the Civil War. Through an intersectional analysis of qualitative interviews with alt-right students on an American college campus, the authors show how white supremacist ideologies have been recycled and ‘translated’ into a language that mainstream whites who are not activists can embrace. It details the continuities in white nationalism and white power movements in the post-Civil Rights, post-Obama-era and pays particular attention to the new communicational possibilities for the extreme right in the digital age by analyzing on- and offline activities of young alt-righters.
