I think my chapter on the Alt-Right and the 2016 presidential election is especially important. There has been a lot of talk about Donald Trump being an Alt-Right president. I think that is wrong, and I do not say that as a defense of Trump. Donald Trump’s variety of right-wing populism and nativism definitely breaks from the conservatism of Bush, McCain, and Romney. Trump can and should be criticized for his actual rhetoric and policy positions. We can also be alarmed by Trump’s reluctance to denounce the Alt-Right. Ultimately, however, the Alt-Right, wants something much more radical than a border wall, a Muslim ban, and an end to DACA. At most, the Alt-Right views these things as a tentative start to their long-term goal. The ideological core of the Alt-Right wants to create a new racially pure ethnostate. I see no evidence that Trump has a similar vision.I compare Trump’s relationship with the Alt-Right to Bernie Sanders’ relationship with radical communists. Yes, the small and marginalized communist movement in the U.S. was (for the most part) quite enthusiastic about Sanders. He did, after all, represent an older and more radical egalitarian vision that the Democratic Party has rejected. Moreover, if Sanders had won the Democratic Party’s nomination and gone on to win in the general election, he would have pushed American politics far to the left, at least on economic issues. Yet, if conservatives had declared that a President Sanders represented the triumph of communism, and insisted he was about to nationalize the means of production and liquidate the Kulaks, they would have been justifiably ridiculed for engaging in ridiculous hyperbole.

I think we should view President Trump and the Alt-Right from a similar perspective. Declaring Donald Trump’s right-wing populist movement as synonymous with the Alt-Right requires either exaggerating the Alt-Right’s size by an order of magnitude, or downplaying the Alt-Right’s radicalism. I do not think either is helpful, if we wish to understand the current political situation.I could probably sell more books if I believed and could make the case that the Alt-Right represents an existential threat to our political order, and that I have an infallible plan that will stop the movement in its tracks. Neither of those things are true. My aspirations for the book are rather limited. I cannot claim to have a ten-point plan that will forever defeat the Alt-Right. Such a plan may not even be necessary; the tremendous infighting within the Alt-Right, which increased substantially after the recent rally in Charlottesville, VA (which ended with dozens of injuries and one death), may actually cause the movement to crack up on its own. My goal is to provide some conceptual clarity to an emotionally charged topic. Everyone is better served by having accurate information. I hope I provided that.

Thinking long term, I hope this book will be useful to future historians who want to make sense of this disconcerting period of American life. Much of the online material I read and people I corresponded with may not be accessible for very much longer. Many of the people I interviewed relied on pseudonyms (even I am unsure of their real identities), and should they abandon the Alt-Right, there will be no way to reach them. Similarly, there has been an aggressive push recently to deny the Alt-Right access to various online platforms. A number of major Alt-Right websites have already been shut down, and I suspect more online de-platforming is on its way. Although the book has only been out a few weeks, many of my citations are to URLs that no longer go anywhere, and can only be accessed via cumbersome online archives. As time goes on, and people look back on this era for lessons for the future, I hope this book provides a useful starting point. Although the Alt-Right itself may not survive as a movement, the ideas that motivate it will remain, and the tactics it honed will be used again. That alone will make this book a useful resource for some time.