Who is Alt -Right and what do they represent? The term is broad – from armed uprisingers to armchair political experts, a right-wing supporter may be anyone – but they tend to have one thing in common.
According to new research by SUNY Binghamton faculty, people identified as alternative rights are often “systemically reasonable people” who want to maintain the traditional status quo as an antidote to insecurity.
Kanisha Bond, assistant professor of political science at Binghamton University, said the substitute means different things to different people, but the term is often used as a “go-to-all-out” of various right-leaning, extremist and reactionary ideologies in the American context.
Bond and her colleagues are interested in learning about social psychology, which may be the attraction of alternatives to the attraction of everyday personal identities.
“All sports are very diverse; almost one set of interests will bring people into one community with each other,” Bond said. “But, understanding more about people’s basic values or the way they look at the world is useful in explaining why some people are more or less leaning towards specific collective identities.”
Specifically, they want to explore the theory of system defense (thinking that individuals differ in their psychological direction, managing feelings of threats and distress by defending established systems – which can explain this attraction. “System reasons can attract anyone who thinks traditionalism contributes to order, especially when they experience certain understandings or real insecurity,” Bond said. “System rationalists don’t actually care who or what a particular authority is, but they care very much about maintaining what they think is security, and they think that maintaining stability is in the status quo. They believe that the antidote to their insecurity is a traditional orderist approach.”
Bond and her co-authors conducted two surveys of 4,700 Americans in June 2020 and January 2022. These surveys include self-identity issues such as “to what extent do you agree with the view of ‘replacement rights’ or ‘alt-right’ or ‘alt-right’?”. and support questions such as asking respondents in a timely manner whether they are supporters of the Alt-Right movement. They did not define “Alt-Right” for respondents in advance to ensure that all self-identities are based on respondents’ thoughts on what the term means to them.
The team used average responses on issues developed by Aaron Kay and John Jost to determine the existence of system merging beliefs. They measure the power of these beliefs in a seven-point range, from total disagreement to strong agreement.
New findings suggest that people who report higher levels of belief in system conciseness are more likely to identify with Alt-Right. Higher levels of systematic concise beliefs also seem to be associated with the legalization of protests that challenge existing social and racial inequality, such as the Black Lives Matter movement. The author also discovers meaningful racial and racial diversity in the “system justices.” Bond believes this may help us understand more about the broad appeal of Alt’s rights ideological messaging.
Bond and her colleagues are using the results of these investigations to study anti-lockdown protests during the COVID-19 pandemic. They are particularly interested in exploring the assumption that anti-lockdown protests were a “dry run” of the uprising at the U.S. Capitol on January 6.
Bond said it is important to take people’s beliefs about themselves and their understanding of the world seriously, especially in the face of ideologically extreme views. “I think a large part of this study is to make it clear that there are real political consequences for the interaction between these beliefs, especially in understanding the quality of democracy and the possibility of national unity, given the real and perceived inequalities of experience, access and security,” Bond said.
The paper was co-authored by Katherine Sawyer, assistant professor of political science at Stony Brook University; Hannah Ham, assistant professor of psychology at Brooklyn College.
“System Defense and Alternative Rights in the United States” published in Politics, groups and identities.
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