The Nature of the Alt-Right

<p>The presidential campaign and eventual election of president Donald Trump emboldened and highlighted the existence of a fringe group known as the alt-right, short for alternative right. While the term was coined in 2008 by white nationalist Richard Spencer, it was the campaign rhetoric of Trump which brought national and global attention to an internet fringe group which ideologically aligned with the president’s often racist and hyper-nationalist agenda. This study aims to explain the nature of the alt-right and ask to what degree it can be considered as fascist. An ideal type of fascism has been constructed drawing on authors such as Michael Mann, Robert Paxton and Roger Eatwell and I aim to use this to explore the connections between twentieth century fascism and the alt-right. I argue that the alt-right should be viewed as fascist, acting within a period of history which is reminiscent of the proto-fascist era of interwar Europe. Although independent of Trump, the alt-right’s white nationalist/neo-Nazi agenda is explicitly and implicitly supported and encouraged by the new president.</p>

The Nature of the Alt-Right

<p>The presidential campaign and eventual election of president Donald Trump emboldened and highlighted the existence of a fringe group known as the alt-right, short for alternative right. While the term was coined in 2008 by white nationalist Richard Spencer, it was the campaign rhetoric of Trump which brought national and global attention to an internet fringe group which ideologically aligned with the president’s often racist and hyper-nationalist agenda. This study aims to explain the nature of the alt-right and ask to what degree it can be considered as fascist. An ideal type of fascism has been constructed drawing on authors such as Michael Mann, Robert Paxton and Roger Eatwell and I aim to use this to explore the connections between twentieth century fascism and the alt-right. I argue that the alt-right should be viewed as fascist, acting within a period of history which is reminiscent of the proto-fascist era of interwar Europe. Although independent of Trump, the alt-right’s white nationalist/neo-Nazi agenda is explicitly and implicitly supported and encouraged by the new president.</p>

The Morphology of Prometheus, Literary Geography and the Geoethical Project

This paper explores mappings, musings and ‘thought experiments’ in literary geography to consider how they may contribute to geoethical pedagogy and research. Representations of Prometheus from the fourteenth century onwards have traveled along three broad symbological roads: first, as the creator, and bringer of fire; second as a bound figure in chains, and thirdly, unbound. However, it was the harnessing of fire by our species a millennium prior that gave rise to the myth of Prometheus and set into motion the geophysical process of combustion which “facilitated the transformation of much of the terrestrial surface […] and in the process pushed the parameters of the earth system into a new geological epoch.” As the geophysicist Professor Michael Mann observes, global warming and loss of biodiversity constitutes an ethical problem. The remediation of the Prometheus myth in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or the modern Prometheus (1818), Jonathan Fetter-Vorm’s Trinity: A Graphic History of the First Atomic Bomb (2012) and William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies (1954) provides the means to explore the geographical, historical and cultural contingencies of geoethical dilemmas contributing to the framing of the Anthropocene and Gaia heuristics. This paper argues for the necessity of scholars in the arts, humanities and geosciences to share and exchange idiographic and nomothetic perspectives in order to forge a geoethical dialectic that fuses poetic and positivistic methods into transcendent ontologies and epistemologies to address the existential questions of global warming and loss of biodiversity as we enter the age of the Anthropocene.

Redes de poder: consideraciones sobre la élite neoliberal de poder y conocimiento en Guatemala

Este artículo toma Guatemala como caso de estudio a fin de aportar consideraciones sobre la élite neoliberal del poder y del conocimiento. Partiendo de la investigación sobre la estructura del poder y la teoría del poder social de Michael Mann, así como el análisis de redes, el estudio explora la red nacional de think tanks de derechas/neoliberales en Guatemala y detecta los enlaces clave o núcleo central dentro de dicha red. Basándose en datos reales, el análisis revela las conexiones empresariales del personal de estos think tanks neoliberales. Así pues, el artículo presenta las primeras consideraciones sobre aquellos que ocupan posiciones privilegiadas de poder dentro de la red de think tanks y, por lo tanto, tienen capacidades para el establecimiento de contactos y la transferencia de conocimiento en el ámbito del poder económico e ideológico.

Kolor pieniędzy. Filmowy styl Michaela Manna

According to film studies experts, Michael Mann’s movies has the look and the smell of reality. The polisensoric character of his works is used to exhibit the aura of non-screen reality. Michael Mann uses narrative and stylistic elements to show the destructive side of social inequalities. In his genre films, he is presenting themes of social injustice and toxic corporate system (which are often hidden behind the elegant façade of late capitalism’s aesthetics).

De la paz imperfecta a la agencia pacifista

El objetivo del estudio es contribuir, desde la doble perspectiva de la paz imperfecta y del giro epistemológico, a revisar críticamente el concepto de poder como base para la agencia pacifista. Originalidad: este trabajo se centra, por primera vez, en la agencia como posibilidad para que la paz ocupe cada vez un mayor espacio personal, público y político. Método: es un trabajo de investigación cualitativa que, desde una perspectiva compleja, parte del concepto de paz imperfecta y del giro epistemológico, empleando las estrategias del análisis crítico de textos de investigación para la paz y escritos que versan sobre el concepto de poder, especialmente de Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Michael Mann, Kenneth Boulding y John Holloway, entre otras/os. Este diálogo nos permite concluir que el poder también puede ser considerado como la capacidad que tenemos todos de actuar de manera coordinada para promover el desarrollo de las capacidades humanas deseables. Entendido de esta forma, el poder genera paz, la cual debe ocupar el mayor espacio personal, público y político. Así las cosas, esta extensión capilar de la paz no debe valorarse solo como una medida del empoderamiento pacifista, sino una consecuencia de la agencia pacifista.

On Pros and Cons and Bills and Gates: The Heist Film as Pleasure

This article tries to shed light on the multiple, but underrated pleasures of the heist film – a genre that has attracted numerous major directors from Jean-Pierre Melville and Stanley Kubrick to Michael Mann and Steven Soderbergh, but has received limited scholarly attention. I approach the genre from a, broadly, philosophical perspective and draw on thinkers such as Peter Sloterdijk, Georg Simmel, Paul Souriau and Bruno Latour to argue that their emphasis on (1) skillful action and kinaesthetic empathy, (2) smooth transgression of boundaries and (3) well-functioning social collaboration and we-connection, the genre's best exemplars satisfy, in fictional and quasi-utopian form, a number of real-life desires.

Social Innovation, Power, and Marginalization

The neo-Weberian theoretical model, which Michael Mann presents in his The Sources of Social Power, reduces the multitude of relations of interaction in social networks to ideological, economic, military, and political sources of social power. Taking Mann’s IEMP model as its point of departure this chapter makes an attempt to develop such an approach in the theory of innovation, which would go beyond the ordinary dichotomy between technological and social innovation, recognizing instead that there are several types of innovation and there is a social aspect to all of them. By integrating Mann’s approach to the Social Grid model (Beckert 2010), the capabilities approach to well-being (Sen 1999; Nussbaum 2000) and to an extension of the IEMP model to a NACEMP model, which also includes nature (N), artefacts (A), and the whole culture (C) as sources of power, a new approach to power, innovations, and marginalization is outlined.