The Intellectuals

In November 2008, a professor named Paul Gottfried stood up in front of a few dozen people at the first gathering of his newly formed H.L. Mencken Club. It was an event that, at the time, made almost no impression on the general public. It attracted no press coverage or scholarly attention. In fact, before a reporter phoned him up in 2016, Gottfried himself says it had slipped his mind that, through his speech, he had inspired the name of a nascent political movement.

Gottfried's club was named after one of America's most famous early twentieth-century journalists and was inspired by Mencken's constant questioning of the "egalitarian creed, democratic crusades, and welfare statism with which American democracy was already identified during his lifetime."

It was not a good time for the right in America. Less than a month before, Barack Obama had been elected president, and Democrats had tightened their control on Congress. The presidency of George W. Bush was about to end amidst economic calamity and historically low approval figures.

Gottfried — bald, jowly and bespectacled — looked like a central casting version of what he was: a philosophy professor at a small college in Pennsylvania. He described himself as a "paleoconservative" — a term which, according to some sources, he also invented.

Paleoconservativism — a Stone Age-y play on "neoconservativism" — is a branch of thought that's had a rump of a following on the right in America for many years. Paleos dislike immigration and multiculturalism. In contrast to neoconservatives, they are skeptical of free trade and foreign military adventures. They look to the past and are strict traditionalists when it comes to gender, ethnicity, race and social order. It was a movement which held the seeds of the alt-right, and one that had been confined to the political fringes for decades. Before Trump, the most high-profile politician with paleoconservative leanings was Pat Buchanan, who in a presidential run in 2000 scored 0.4% of the popular vote.

Despite the small, subdued crowd, the Mencken Society's first meeting in a Baltimore hotel included some key characters in what would become the brain trust of the alt-right. Peter Brimelow, a British journalist and critic of multiculturalism and immigration, attended and spoke at the conference, as did Jared Taylor, editor of the far-right magazine American Renaissance.

Gottfried, standing in front of the audience, announced:

We are part of an attempt to put together an independent intellectual right, one that exists without movement establishment funding and one that our opponents would be delighted not to have to deal with. Our group is also full of young thinkers and activists, and if there is to be an independent right, our group will have to become its leaders.

He then launched into a ramble taking in Muslim control of the Iberian Peninsula, the last few decades of American conservative thought, Elizabeth I's defeat of the Spanish Armada and Flannery O'Connor.

While it was not headline-producing stuff, Gottfried did manage to identify the broad outlines and deep concerns of what would eventually become the alt-right movement. He gave a nod to the far-right websites Takimag and Brimelow's VDARE.com, from where most of the intellectual energy of the movement would come in the years before the alt-right gained anything like mainstream attention. He put his finger on the outsider nature of the small group and identified the Republican and conservative establishment as enemy number one.

"A question that has been asked of me and of others in this room is why we don't try to join the official conservative movement," he said. "This movement controls hundreds of millions of dollars, TV networks, strings of newspapers and magazines, multitudinous foundations and institutes, and a bevy of real and bleached blondes on Fox News."

He concluded that the establishment — or, as Gottfried put it, the "dark side" — wouldn't have them. He continued, sarcastically:

It has treated us, in contrast to such worthies as black nationalists, radical feminists, and open-borders advocates, as being unfit for admittance into the political conversation. We are not viewed as honorable dissenters but depicted as subhuman infidels or ignored in the same way as one would a senile uncle who occasionally wanders into one's living room.

Although he didn't go into much detail or name names, he hinted at the alt-right's obsession with race-based science and questionable theories about the relative intelligence levels of different ethnic groups, decrying what he described as censorship against anyone outside of what he saw as a neo-conservative and center-left consensus. "This imperial ban has been extended even to brilliant social scientists and statisticians who are viewed as excessively intimate with the wrong people," he said. And in just a few words he encapsulated the stubborn self-righteousness which would come to characterize the alt-right: "We are convinced that we are right in our historical and cultural observations while those who have quarantined us are wrong."

Gottfried never actually put a name on his imagined movement. A decade later, even as he continued to sympathize with some of the alt-right's leading figures, he rued being associated with it. But the title of his address was dramatic and catchy, and it contained the name that, in a shorter form, would stick: "The Decline and Rise of the Alternative Right."

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The Mencken Club continued its quest over the years of the Obama presidency, holding annual conferences and banging the drum for the "independent right." But a group holding meetings in Baltimore hotels with doddery professors behind lecterns wasn't ever going to build a mass movement in the internet age. Others took up the cause and advanced the idea of what was initially dubbed the "alternative right." Chief among them was Gottfried protégée Richard Spencer. Spencer's background included an expensive prep school in Texas and an academic career — Yale, Chicago, Virginia. He dropped out of Duke's Ph.D. program and eventually settled in the small town of Whitefish, Montana. In 2010, he founded the website AlternativeRight. com. It became the first thrust at defining the alt-right and developing a raw online communications strategy.

Spencer and Gottfried would later slightly disagree on who came up with the name "alternative right," with Spencer claiming authorship and Gottfried insisting it was a joint effort. However, Gottfried was made an editor of the new site, and Spencer plucked his inspiration from the professor's words, declaring that the effort marked "an attempt to forge a new intellectual right-wing that is independent and outside the 'conservative' establishment."

AlternativeRight.com was the first of Spencer's alt-right outlets, and, like the...