Making Sense of The Alt-Right
George Hawley
New York: Columbia University Press, 2017, 218 pp.
With any book, it helps to take into account who wrote it and who published it. George Hawley is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Alabama. Assistant professor is the lowest professor rank. Hawley’s a young faculty member, in his early thirties by the looks of his picture with his young child on his website — just starting his academic career, or so he hopes. Assistant professor is probationary status. At the end of six years typically, you are checked out by senior faculty and administrators and if you pass muster, you get promoted to associate professor and granted permanent status, or tenure, at the university. If you don’t get tenured, it’s the help wanted ads over breakfast, so the stakes are extremely high for young Hawley. (With tenure, there’s just one more promotion, and it can be anytime, or never, to full professor.) A must for getting tenure is a good publication record — publish or perish is real — which means Hawley had to give the editors at Columbia University Press what they wanted or he was dead in the water.
All to say, don’t expect an assistant professor to take intellectual or professional risks—such as running up against the PC doctrine of today’s universities and academic presses; or to go much, if at all, beyond the boundaries of his (or, of course, her) academic discipline, political science in this case — integrating, say, history, philosophy, psychology, and/or literature into his considerations; or to produce mature scholarship so early in his career. Do expect diligence, however—nobody works harder than an assistant professor.
In sum, I got what I expected from this book. That means a 4, perhaps 5, on a 10 scale—not bad, but it could have been a lot better. That acknowledged, this book was worth my time—in fact, I read it in a single setting. Professor Hawley thinks clearly enough (for this stage of his working life), he writes reasonably well, and he obviously devoted much time and effort to this project. I profited from his descriptions of what’s going on with the internet (the Alt-Right, he reports, is largely an internet phenomenon, much of it anonymous), about which I am clueless. I also found helpful the distinction he draws between the Alt-Right and the “Alt-Lite.” Alt-Lites he mentions include Milo Yiannopoulos, Mike Cernovich, Joseph Paul Watson, and the only two women in the book, Ann Coulter and Laura Southern. No Alt-Right women, such as Lana Lokteff of Red Ice Radio, in this presentation. The quotes in the book from Hawley’s interviews, including those with Richard Spencer, were very good, though you couldn’t prove it by me that he took in and worked with what these people actually said. Read more