After Trump announced the existence of the alt-left on live TV, media outlets scurried to tell the world exactly where the term emerged from.
CBS explains that it “came out of the conservative media.” CNN, quoting a director at the Anti-Defamation League,
describes it as a “made-up term used by people on the right.” Heavy.com
writes that “the term ‘alt-left’ began being used by the online conservative media in 2016 before it slowly migrated to more mainstream conservative voices, like Fox News’ Sean Hannity.” (Hannity, who repeatedly uses the term on his TV show, seems to be getting widespread credit.) The British
Telegraph newspaper, meanwhile, flatters the president with a power of logodaedaly he definitely doesn’t have,
claiming the phrase was “coined by Mr Trump” himself.
None of these explanations is really true. The term “alt-left” was probably simultaneously invented hundreds or thousands of times, always bearing a slightly different meaning depending on its inventor. But up until now, the people who most forcefully pushed the idea of an alt-left weren’t Nazis or 4chan posters or anyone else in the orbit of Trump and pro-Trump Republicans trying to invent a mythical opposite to the alt-right. The alt-left is, first and foremost, a figment of centrist Democrats.
Something like “alt-left” was always going to happen; it’s a product of whatever it is in our brains that conditions them to think in terms of opposites. As soon as everyone starts talking about the “alt-right”—that inchoate and incoherent grouping of Nazis, Klansmen, resentful failsons sweating from video games and chicken fingers, cynical media wannabes, bloviating internet commenters who think they’re Ignatius J. Reilly, and others who think they’re the Joker—that word seems to sit on one side of a seesaw, across from a silence waiting to be filled. If there’s an alt-right, there
must, somewhere, somehow, be something called an alt-left, otherwise the universe is unbalanced. And while the universe
is unbalanced—everywhere, from the points of terrifying heat scattered haphazardly across a lonely void, to the murder and oppression that break out constantly across the world and are never met with justice—for a lot of mediocre intellects, good judgment basically consists of
pretending that everything balances out somehow, and all the ledgers are even. Something like the alt-right sticks out, a lexical blasphemy: to put the world in order, you have to invent something equivalent on the left.
Probably the first people to use the term were a small, strange band of alt-right offshoots with a few low-traffic websites, rejecting some of the reactionary-libertarian elements in traditional far-right ideology for some kind of
Herrenvolk social democracy, a Strasserite-inflected vision where there are slightly higher taxes but no Jews allowed. These were undoubtedly the only people to have used “alt-left” unpejoratively, to describe
themselves. While the alt-right has always been an organized, self-declared movement—a badge proudly worn by neo-Nazis like Richard Spencer to launder their racism—the alt-left is only an epithet, something that slung to help displace the contradictions in some
other ideology. In the months up to August 2016, when Hillary Clinton delivered
her speech in Reno, Nevada, lambasting internet Nazis, the epithetic use of the term
was growing: The alt-left could mean Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, or Jill Stein and the Green Party, or teens inventing hundreds of new genders for themselves on Tumblr, or Marxist-Leninists sympathetic to Syria, Iran and North Korea. Mostly, use of the term was accompanied by a vague hesitancy—is this a thing? Could it be a thing? Should it be a thing? But the people using it all had one thing in common: They were fervent supporters of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, and they resented anyone on the left whose enthusiasm didn’t seem to match theirs.
After Clinton dragged the alt-right into the world’s headlines, use of “alt-left” exploded. Conservatives started using it too, as a reflexive insult lobbed at the Democrats in general, but for the most part it kept its original meaning. For the soon-to-be-doomed Clintonites, it was an incredibly useful term. If Clinton were simply to the right of Bernie Sanders, and Donald Trump to the right of her, then her project could be seen by some on the left as one that meant drifting toward Trumpism, an unacceptable compromise with evil. The invention of the alt-left allowed centrist liberals to pretend that something entirely different was going on: They were sandwiched between two sets of frothing fanatics who secretly had a lot in common with each other. It established their particular brand of liberalism, possibly encompassing a few “moderate Republicans,” as the only reasonable ground, besieged by alts
