Alternative Left

"Alternative left" and "alt-left" are labels for more than one thing, and neither names a single organization with a shared program. In United States politics in the mid-2010s, "alt-left" was used chiefly as an epithet, built as a counterpart to the alt-right, and applied to a shifting set of left-wing targets, from militant counter-protesters to, in some commentators' usage, mainstream liberals and journalists. The alt-right was a name embraced by white nationalists, including Richard Spencer; news organizations and extremism researchers found no comparable movement that called itself the alt-left. The Associated Press described "alt-left" as a term some people use for far-left factions and told its journalists to use it only in quotation and with a definition.

The phrase became a national story on 15 August 2017. At a news conference after the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, President Donald Trump asked, "What about the alt-left that came charging at, as you say, the alt-right?" and said those counter-protesters had come "charging with clubs." Oren Segal of the Anti-Defamation League's Center on Extremism called "alt-left" a made-up term meant to suggest a left-wing equivalent of the anti-Semitic groups that called themselves alt-right, and political scientist George Hawley said there was "no such movement," even though left-wing extremists existed. Mark Pitcavage, a senior fellow at the same ADL center, wrote that the "alt left" was "not a thing" but "just an insult," while Segal separately described physical confrontation by anti-fascist militants as a real and distinct problem.

The epithet was already in circulation, and not only on the right. Snopes traced a sharp rise in searches to a November 2016 on-air dispute in which Fox News host Sean Hannity used the term, and CBS News documented his later posts applying "alt-left" to news outlets. Some liberal commentary used it differently, for socialists and anti-establishment left figures rather than for Democrats as such; CBS pointed to an April 2017 New York magazine piece that grouped Bernie Sanders with France's Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Britain's Jeremy Corbyn as signs of a contemporary "alt-left." A separate, much smaller usage was self-applied: a 2015 site, AltLeft.com, described its politics as "the left of the AltRight," a niche Snopes judged was not what Trump was referring to. In Switzerland, a national party named the Alternative Left (Alternative Linke) had been created about a year before the 2011 federal elections to gather forces to the left of the Social Democrats and the Greens; the Neue Zürcher Zeitung later called that national structure a top-down project that lacked a grassroots base, even as it drew attention with an initiative against lump-sum taxation of wealthy foreigners.

Scholars have treated the American phrase as a naming fight more than as a stable ideology. Benjamin Moffitt argues that, across "alt-right," "alt-lite," and "alt-left," the modifier "alt" marked a preference for how politics should be conducted—a rejection of mainstream norms of conduct, joined to vulgarity, incivility, and an extremely adversarial style—rather than a shared answer to what society should look like. Writing in 2018, Steve Fuller described "alt-left" as a contested and often pejorative label, one that far-right media had tried to fix on anti-fascist clashes, and he speculated that left-wing actors might someday reclaim it for a reorientation of their own. The Swiss party name and the American epithet share wording and little else: one was an attempt to unite electoral groups to the left of social democracy, and the other was a label mostly applied by opponents.

Terminology

"Alt-left" and "alternative left"

“Alternative left” and “alt-left” overlap in English but are not names for one current. The longer phrase is a descriptive label for left-wing politics offered as an alternative to established social-democratic or communist parties. The clipped form “alt-left,” built on the pattern of “alt-right,” is chiefly a 2010s American media and online coinage. Merriam-Webster has no entry for it. Dictionary.com labels the noun disparaging: a purported extreme-left faction, or liberals using extreme anti-establishment messaging, invoked mainly by the self-named alt-right to suggest a parallel and also by some liberals to mark off positions further left.

The words also point elsewhere. In Switzerland, a congress in Lausanne on 29 May 2010 founded a party under the name “La Gauche – Linke Alternative – La Sinistra.” Swissinfo reported about 200 people from 20 cantons, aiming at disappointed members of the Social Democratic Party and the Greens and at opposition to neoliberalism. In French historiography, les gauches alternatives is an analytic category, not a slogan. In a 2017 Revue historique introduction, Philippe Buton, Sébastien Repaire, and Isabelle Sommier define it as the political sensibilities that call for a break with capitalism while criticizing, to varying degrees, the institutional left—ranging from the New Left and far-left groups to libertarian, feminist, and ecological currents. That usage does not depend on the English “alt-left.”

Pejorative, analytic, and self-applied uses

In U.S. argument the clipped term is mostly an epithet. After Hillary Clinton criticized the alt-right in 2016, Joseph Farah of WorldNetDaily published “Let’s take a look at the ‘Alt Left’” (28 August 2016), offering the phrase as a counterpart aimed at the Democratic Party. Fox News host Sean Hannity then used it repeatedly. In the Washington Post on 1 December 2016, Aaron Blake wrote that the alt-right “was coined by the people who comprise the movement,” while “alt-left” “was coined by its opponents and doesn’t actually have any subscribers.” The alt-right name is widely traced to the white nationalist Richard Spencer; “alt-left” did not arise as a comparable self-description.

Style guidance after the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville treated the word as contested. In an Associated Press note updated on 16 August 2017, vice president for standards John Daniszewski defined “alt-left” as “A term that some use to describe far-left factions,” and said to avoid it except in quotation and always to define it, as with “alt-right.” He told PBS NewsHour that “alt-left” did not seem to be “something that anyone calls themselves” and was “meant to be pejorative.” CBS News called it “not really a group, and more of just an epithet,” meant to imply moral equivalence with the alt-right; it noted that some liberals used the word for politicians to their left, while Hannity often applied it to mainstream liberals. Mark Pitcavage of the Anti-Defamation League said it “refers to no actual group or movement or network.”

A narrow self-description did precede that wider use. Snopes, on 17 August 2017, noted AltLeft.com, founded in 2015, which called its outlook “the left of the AltRight” and placed it “where Ralph Nader and Pat Buchanan begin to meet.” Snopes called the site small and “most likely not what Trump meant” when, on 15 August 2017, Donald Trump asked about an “alt-left” he said had charged at the alt-right in Charlottesville.

Scholars have also used “alt” as a modifier rather than a party name. In Political Studies, Benjamin Moffitt argues that across “alt-right,” “alt-lite,” and “alt-left,” the prefix marked less a desired society than a style—rejection of mainstream civility, with vulgarity and an extremely adversarial stance. The epithet, the small-site self-description, the party name, and the scholarly category remain distinct referents.

United States political usage

The 2016 election

In the 2016 United States presidential election, "alt-left" spread as a reply to talk of the alt-right, not as the name of a campaign faction. On 25 August in Reno, Hillary Clinton said Donald Trump had "built his campaign on prejudice and paranoia" and was helping a "radical fringe" take over the Republican Party, linking that fringe to Steve Bannon and Breitbart News. The same day Trump told CNN's Anderson Cooper, "Nobody even knows what it is," and added, "frankly, there's no Alt-Right or Alt-Left. All I'm embracing is common sense."

On 28 August, WorldNetDaily founder Joseph Farah published "Let's take a look at the 'Alt Left,'" casting the Democratic Party as the extremism Clinton had assigned to the right. Aaron Blake of The Washington Post wrote in December that the phrase had already appeared on WorldNetDaily and CNS News, and that Trump's remark carried it onto conservative television: Lou Dobbs the night of the Cooper interview; a Washington Times commentator on Media Buzz, arguing the press should apply the label to Clinton's "alt-left supporters" if it applied bigotry charges to Trump's; Gary Bauer on CNN on 11 September ("not alt-right" and "not alt-left" but "alt-delete"); and Dobbs again on 4 October.

After the election, the conservative group One Nation headlined a 1 December release, "Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders Lead Alt-Left in Hijacking of Bipartisan Medical Research Bill," aimed at Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. Blake's column that day read the line as a Republican answer to Democrats' attaching "alt-right" to Bannon and the incoming administration. The alt-right, he wrote, had been named by adherents such as Richard Spencer; "alt-left" had been "coined by its opponents and doesn't actually have any subscribers."

Conservative media

The broadcasts later tied to a search spike were on Fox News. On 14 November 2016, transition adviser Anthony Scaramucci told Sean Hannity that the "alt-left" thought Trump voters were "misogynists and misanthropes and negative people." Hannity closed by asking whether the "mainstream liberal, alt-left media" owed the president-elect an apology. On 22 November he debated BuzzFeed reporter Rosie Gray, who had covered the alt-right, over whether an "alt-radical left" existed. Snopes reported on 17 August 2017 that Google Trends showed searches rising with that broadcast and jumping again after Trump's mid-August remarks, with no widespread earlier use on Reddit or 4chan.

Into 2017 Hannity often aimed the label at the press—"MSM alt left media" (17 February), "Alt Left Propaganda media" (4 March)—rather than at a named group. PBS NewsHour distinguished uses against Democrats as a party, against a mainstream left said to be out of step with most Americans, and, by April, against violent campus protests. Mark Pitcavage of the Anti-Defamation League said it "refers to no actual group or movement or network"; an Associated Press standards editor said it did not appear to be a name anyone applied to themselves. That usage was already in place when, on 15 August 2017, Trump asked "What about the alt-left" and turned the epithet into a presidential talking point.

Criticism inside the Democratic coalition

Liberal writers used it as well, usually for people to their left rather than for the party as a whole. In the March 2017 Vanity Fair, James Wolcott called an "alt-left" a "mirror image distortion" of the alt-right—"the same loathing of Clinton, rejection of 'identity politics,' and itch for a reckoning"—and located it in hostility to Barack Obama and Clinton and in outlets such as Jacobin and The Intercept. Sarah Jones answered the same day in The New Republic that there was "no such thing as the 'alt-left,'" and that Wolcott had equated dislike of someone's politics with a movement built around white supremacy.

An April 2017 New York survey of the new far right treated the candidacies of Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn, and Jean-Luc Mélenchon as "evidence of an active contemporary 'alt-left'": an alternative to "corporate-friendly" center-left liberalism, visible in Democratic Socialists of America growth and the podcast Chapo Trap House, and often hostile to identity politics that did not center class. "The alt-left hates nothing more than being called the alt-left," the item said. CBS News noted the difference in targets: Hannity often meant mainstream liberals and the press, while some liberal writers meant socialists, social democrats, and others further left.

In a 16 August 2017 Politico Magazine opinion essay, Sam Kriss called the epithet "first and foremost, a figment of centrist Democrats," aimed at Sanders-aligned critics of Clinton and only later taken up on the right. News accounts instead placed the widest pre-2017 circulation in conservative media, while also recording liberal uses against the coalition's left edge.

Charlottesville and the August 2017 debate

The president's remarks

The August 2017 argument over an “alt-left” followed the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Jason Kessler organized the August 12 demonstration, which a federal judge allowed to proceed as a permitted protest at Emancipation Park against removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee. Participants included white nationalists and neo-Nazis. Opponents included clergy trained for nonviolent protest and militants, among them antifa participants who, New York Times reporters on the scene wrote, used clubs. That afternoon James Alex Fields Jr. drove into counter-protesters, killing Heather Heyer and injuring dozens—the Charlottesville car attack. He later pleaded guilty to 29 federal hate-crime counts and admitted he struck the crowd because of the actual or perceived race, color, national origin, and religion of people in it.

President Donald Trump’s first comment, at a bill signing on August 12, was: “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides, on many sides.” Vox called that wording a false equivalency. On August 14 a prepared statement said “Racism is evil” and named “the KKK, neo Nazis, white supremacists and other hate groups” as “criminals and thugs” who “cause violence in its name.” On August 15, questioned at Trump Tower after an infrastructure announcement, he said he had waited for the facts, then returned to shared blame. Asked about Senator John McCain and the alt-right, he told a reporter to “define alt-right” and asked, “what about the alt-left that came charging at the, as you say, the alt right? Do they have any semblance of guilt?” He said counter-protesters “came charging with clubs in their hands swinging clubs,” and that a group “came charging in without a permit” and was “very, very violent.”

He said he had “condemned neo-Nazis” and that “not all of those people were neo-Nazis” or “white supremacists by any stretch.” Some, he said, were there to protest the Lee statue; “you had some very bad people in that group,” but “you also had people that were very fine people on both sides.” Asked if he was putting “the alt-left and white supremacists on the same moral plane,” he answered, “I am not putting anybody on a moral plane,” while also saying, “I think there is blame on both sides.” He added that he was “not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally,” and described people on the other side in “black outfits” with “helmets” and “baseball bats.” Of the driver he said, “The driver of the car is a murderer,” and that the act could be called terrorism or murder.

Researchers, politicians, and news organizations

Oren Segal, director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, told CNN it was a “made-up term” used “to suggest there is a similar movement on the left,” with “no equivalent” to the antisemitic and bigoted groups that called themselves alt-right—a label Richard Spencer used for himself. Segal also said “there is violence on the left,” that anti-fascists’ physical confrontations were “an extremists tactic,” and that “there is also bigotry on the left.” George Hawley of the University of Alabama said no group had adopted the name: “There is no such movement as the alt-left. Obviously, there are left-wing extremists but there is no congruence between the far-left and the alt-right.” Mark Pitcavage, then a senior research fellow at the same ADL center, wrote that left-wing extremists were real, “But the ‘alt left’ is not a thing. It’s just an insult.”

A New York Times fact check quoted Brian Levin of California State University, San Bernardino, who said treating some counter-protesters’ violence as comparable to Fields’s attack created “a structural and moral false equivalency.” J. J. MacNab of George Washington University’s Program on Extremism called antifa and “black block” street brawls and property damage “reprehensible” but “not domestic terrorism.” CBS News reporter Paula Reid, who covered the weekend, said “pretty much every white supremacist demonstrator they saw” had a helmet, shield, firearm, or baton, while most counter-protesters were unarmed and many were clergy or students, though some had come “to cause trouble.” CBS correspondent John Dickerson said the remarks assigned blame to the left rather than showing “moral disgust” toward neo-Nazis.

Mitt Romney wrote, “One side is racist, bigoted, Nazi. The other opposes racism and bigotry. Morally different universes.” Elizabeth Warren wrote that the president “just defended neo-Nazis and blamed those who condemn their racism and hate.” Bernie Sanders wrote that the violence “was not caused by the ‘alt-left,’ (whatever that may be). It was caused by Neo-Nazis and white supremacists.” John Daniszewski, Associated Press vice president for standards, told AP journalists on August 15—in a note updated the next day—to avoid “alt-left” except in quotation and to define it, the same rule AP applied to “alt-right,” which it called a euphemism that could disguise racist aims. The note described antifa as far-left-leaning militant groups that resist neo-Nazis and white supremacists at demonstrations, and defined “alt-left” as “a term that some use to describe far-left factions.”

Self-described online currents

In the mid-2010s a few low-traffic websites used “alt-left” or “alternative left” as a self-description. Reporters looking for an organized counterpart to the alt-right found only this minor current, distinct from the epithet later applied to protesters, Democratic factions, or the left at large.

Early websites and manifestos

The site later fact-checkers singled out was AltLeft.com, online by 2015, which called itself “the left wing of the AltRight.” On 14 November 2015 a pseudonymous author, Rabbit, posted “A Clockwork Greenshirt – Introducing the Alt Left.” It placed the “AltLeft” in “that small space where Ralph Nader and Pat Buchanan begin to meet,” compared that point to the moment Benito Mussolini “ditched marxism and moved toward fascism,” and asked whether the project could be “divorced from political correctness and white ethnomasochism.”

Rabbit wrote that adherents were mostly white people with “typically leftist views on economics, the environment and some social issues” who believed “the new left” had turned hostile to whites. A guide opposed laissez-faire capitalism and favored mercantilism, tariffs, and “soft socialism,” glossed as “Norway without 3rd world immigration,” plus “state capitalism (but racially conscious),” and, for some readers, “fascist ideology or national bolshevism.” On race it said the AltLeft was “for racially aware whites,” that “culture is a biological expression of race,” and that average genetic differences in IQ and behavior exist between races. It called most non-white immigration “counterproductive” if it made whites a minority, and claimed a “disproportionate number of Jews with tendencies to oppose white people collectively acting in their interests.” It also backed eugenics and expressed indifference toward abortion, homosexuality, and prostitution, noting that not every point applied to every reader.

Snopes, quoting an archived copy after Donald Trump said “alt-left” in August 2017, called the site “a small group” and “most likely not what Trump meant.” Salon’s Matthew Sheffield described it as “white nationalism mixed with left-wing economics,” “probably closer in spirit to the actual alt-right,” and wrote that “almost no one besides ‘Rabbit’” willingly used the label.

Class-focused and heterodox variants

A different self-description is documented mainly on its author’s blog. On 18 August 2015 Robert Lindsay asked whether he should start an “Alternative Left”: “Economically Leftist or liberal (left on economics)” and “Socially Conservative or at least sane (right on social issues),” “a leftwing mirror of the Alternative Right.” In the same thread he wrote that it would support legal cannabis and same-sex marriage, treat climate change as real and potentially catastrophic, and still call homosexuality “bad for society” and “not normal,” to be tolerated rather than encouraged.

In Politico Magazine, Sam Kriss grouped the self-applied uses around racial exclusion rather than a class program. He called the authors “a small, strange band of alt-right offshoots with a few low-traffic websites,” after a “Herrenvolk social democracy” or “Strasserite-inflected vision” of “slightly higher taxes but no Jews allowed,” and “undoubtedly the only people to have used ‘alt-left’ unpejoratively, to describe themselves.”

Scale and internal disputes

The current stayed marginal. Snopes found no widespread use of “alt-left” on Reddit or 4chan before Fox News host Sean Hannity used it on 22 November 2016. That December, Aaron Blake wrote in The Washington Post that the alt-right name had been coined by adherents, Richard Spencer among them, while “alt-left” was “coined by its opponents and doesn’t actually have any subscribers.”

Tim Squirrell’s Quartz analysis of about 500 million Reddit comments found roughly 1,400 uses of “alt-left” in the first week of August 2017, mostly in gaming forums. After Trump’s remarks on the Unite the Right rally, use rose to nearly 30,000 in the week of 14 August, including 8,701 comments in r/The_Donald, more than in every smaller subreddit combined. Squirrell read the spike as a push to associate the phrase with violence, not as a self-identified community growing.

Disputes over the label are recorded mainly in the posts themselves. Readers of a 15 January 2016 Counter-Currents reprint of Rabbit’s essay wrote that the program was already national socialism, or simply part of the alt-right. In January 2017 Lindsay wrote that he was renouncing a tendency he called “the Left Wing of the Alt Right,” naming Rabbit as its best-known writer, on the ground that race overrode left-wing economics there and that, he said, its members had backed Trump. Sheffield’s conclusion was that the United States had little market for what he called socialist-flavored white nationalism.

European parties and movements

The Swiss Alternative Left

In Switzerland, “alternative left” was adopted as the name of an attempted national party. On 21 November 2009 about 200 people, roughly 120 of them from French-speaking Switzerland, met in Schaffhausen and decided in principle to found La Gauche – Linke Alternative – La Sinistra. They elected a 25-member coordinating committee, discussed a 20-point catalogue prepared in the cantons, and then voted to take more time over a program; the body was to exist at first only at federal level, so that people already in cantonal groups could join as individuals. The founding congress in Lausanne on 29 May 2010 again drew about 200 people, from 20 cantons. Delegates adopted nine principles, presented the party as a home for voters disappointed with the Social Democratic Party and the Greens and for younger people, and committed it to opposing neoliberalism and to an ecology “possible for everyone.” They rejected a ban on executive office and left open list combinations with those two parties. Swissinfo noted that, apart from the Party of Labour, earlier formations further left had rarely outlasted their founders, and that nationwide mergers had usually failed over ideological differences.

The national project’s main joint campaign was an initiative to abolish lump-sum taxation of wealthy foreign residents who do not work in Switzerland. In the federal vote of 30 November 2014 about 59 percent of voters rejected it, and Schaffhausen was the only one of the 26 cantons to vote yes. Markus Bischoff of the Zurich Alternative Liste still called the minority a “tremendous result” for putting fair taxation on the national agenda. By 2015 the Neue Zürcher Zeitung was describing the national Alternative Linke, created about a year before the 2011 election, as a Kopfgeburt—a scheme born in the head—whose tax campaign had brought publicity but not an organization. Jean Batou of solidaritéS in Geneva said a few people had tried to impose a national structure from above without a base; Jean-Michel Dolivo in Vaud called the project an empty verbal shell. solidaritéS and the Party of Labour then ran one list in Vaud and Geneva, while the Zurich Alternative Liste, after lifting its cantonal share to 2.98 percent, continued alone.

French historiography of "gauches alternatives"

French historians have used gauches alternatives in the plural for a field rather than for one party. Introducing a 2017 dossier in the Revue historique, Philippe Buton, Sébastien Repaire, and Isabelle Sommier—drawing on a seminar held from 2012 to 2014 at the Centre d’histoire de Sciences Po, with the University of Reims—defined those “alternative lefts” as the political sensibilities that call for a break with capitalism while criticizing, more or less radically, the institutional left. The plural was deliberate: unlike “communism” in the singular, the category gathered the 1960s New Left, Trotskyist and Maoist groups, libertarian and autonomist currents, and later feminist, LGBT, and ecological experiments. The dossier runs from the ferment of May 1968 to the end of the century, with the French Communist Party as a shared reference point—an external antagonist for anarchists, early ecologists, and some feminists, and a rival claimant to revolutionary legitimacy for Trotskyists and Maoists.

Repaire’s follow-up asked whether Les Verts, founded in 1984, were themselves an alternative left. Many early leaders came from the Unified Socialist Party, and for a short period the Greens sought convergence with other alternative-left currents while presenting ecology as a paradigm beyond socialism and liberalism. After 1986 a majority around Antoine Waechter’s “neither right nor left” dropped that project; in 1988 some activists still hesitated between Waechter and Pierre Juquin, and Repaire argues that the convergence failed.

Left-libertarian and green-alternative parties

Comparative politics had already used “alternative” for a party type. In World Politics in 1988, Herbert Kitschelt grouped new left-socialist and ecology parties that had appeared since the 1960s in about half of the advanced Western democracies: they shared egalitarian and libertarian tenets and appealed to younger, educated voters. High economic development was a favorable precondition, he argued, but electoral success tracked domestic opportunity structures more than economic crisis, and the parties expressed a new cleavage in competitive party systems rather than a passing protest.

Ferdinand Müller-Rommel’s 1989 volume New Politics in Western Europe surveyed “green parties and alternative lists” together, with chapters on the United Greens and the Alternative List/Green Alternative in Austria, the ecologists and Agalev in Belgium, Die Grünen in West Germany, Les Verts in France, the Greng Alternative in Luxembourg, and the green and alternative parties in Switzerland. The Swiss split is set out in the Historical Dictionary of Switzerland. In 1983 moderate “cucumber” greens, who refused a left–right placement, formed the Federation of Green Parties, renamed the Green Party of Switzerland in 1986, while more clearly left-wing and grassroots “melon” groups—the Democratic Alternative in Bern, Grün-Alternative lists in Zurich and Basel, and others—formed the Grüne Alternative der Schweiz. After most sections of the Progressive Organizations (POCH) joined, that current became the Green Alliance of Switzerland and, in the 1987 National Council election—amid forest dieback and the disasters at Chernobyl and Schweizerhalle—won four seats, beside nine seats and 4.9 percent for the Green Party. Most alternative sections entered the Green Party in 1991; from 1993 the merged party was called the Greens–Green Party of Switzerland.

Liesbet Hooghe, Gary Marks, and Carole J. Wilson later made “alternative” one pole of a scale. From a 1999 expert survey of 125 parties, they defined a new-politics dimension running from green/alternative/libertarian (GAL) to traditional/authoritarian/nationalist (TAN). The GAL pole, they wrote, combines ecology, alternative politics including participatory democracy, and libertarianism—the cluster earlier labeled postmaterialist versus materialist by Ronald Inglehart, new politics versus old politics by Müller-Rommel, and left-libertarian versus authoritarian by Kitschelt. Economic left–right position was strongly related to stances on European integration, but GAL–TAN was, in their results, the most powerful and consistent predictor of where parties stood on integration and on related EU policies.

Movements to which the label has been applied

In the mid-2010s, commentators attached “alt-left,” and less often “alternative left,” to currents that already had other names. Some meant street militants; others meant electoral figures to the left of center-left parties. CBS News called the clipped term “not really a group, and more of just an epithet,” and reported that few, if any, people on the left claimed it.

Anti-fascist and autonomist activism

The street referent became explicit when President Donald Trump, at a 15 August 2017 news conference, asked about an “alt-left” he said had come “charging with clubs.” The next day the Associated Press separated the things being blurred. Antifa, it wrote, is shorthand for anti-fascists, “an umbrella description for the far-left-leaning militant groups that resist neo-Nazis and white supremacists at demonstrations and other events.” The movement “calls itself antifa” and “emulates historic anti-fascist actors in Europe going back to the 1930s.” “Alt-left,” by contrast, was “a term that some use to describe far-left factions,” to be avoided except in quotation and always defined.

The militants’ own names are older and narrower. In the United States, crews that later used “antifa” grew partly from Anti-Racist Action, organized in Minnesota in the 1980s against neo-Nazi skinheads. Historian Mark Bray, author of the 2017 book Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, told Rolling Stone that many groups took the antifa name around 2011–2013, worked in small “affinity groups,” and used the black bloc—masked participants in black converging on a demonstration. In a New Republic interview he described activists as Marxists, socialists, anarchists, or some mix, acting from “collective self-defense,” and called “alt-left” red-baiting. The alt-right name, which Richard Spencer coined and adherents embraced, had “analytical content,” he said; naming an “alt-left” built “a false political and moral equivalency.” Rolling Stone argued that Trump and Sean Hannity were applying that epithet to antifa.

European anti-fascist and autonomous scenes are separate histories. Antifaschistische Aktion was a 1932 campaign of the Communist Party of Germany. Deutsche Welle notes that “antifa” is short for anti-fascist, that postwar German antifa revived in squatter and extra-parliamentary circles in the 1970s and 1980s, and that many autonomous groups identify with the label to different degrees. During the 2017 Hamburg G20 protests, DW described the black bloc as a tactic rather than an organization: “hard-left activists, often autonomous anarchists,” in a practice that “rose to prominence in the 1980s” in West German protests against nuclear plants and squatter evictions. In Italy, a 1977 wave known as autonomia included Autonomia Operaia, an extra-parliamentary current hostile to the Communist Party and the unions—again, not the American epithet.

The New Left, political ecology, and radical-left parties

A second use was rhetorical and electoral. An April 2017 New York magazine survey of the far right, discussed with other U.S. usages above, called the candidacies of Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn, and Jean-Luc Mélenchon “evidence of an active contemporary ‘alt-left,’” meaning an alternative to “corporate-friendly” center-left liberalism, and added that “the alt-left hates nothing more than being called the alt-left.” CBS News cited that passage as a liberal use, distinct from Hannity’s habit of aiming the same words at mainstream liberals. The item also named rising Democratic Socialists of America membership and Chapo Trap House, and said the people so labeled rejected the name.

That analogy does not absorb older movements. The New Left was a transatlantic current from the late 1950s and 1960s, set against both Soviet communism and mainstream social democracy. French historians’ category gauches alternatives—a break with capitalism together with criticism of the institutional left, including the New Left and ecological currents—is an analytic label in that scholarship, treated with European parties above, and does not depend on the English epithet. Political ecology and eco-socialism are arguments about environment and capitalism within and after those traditions, not a faction that took the 2010s name. Parliamentary radical-left parties such as Die Linke, Syriza, and Podemos were not the referents in that New York passage or in Trump’s remarks about counter-protesters. “Alternative” in their European setting, including the Swiss Alternative Left, usually marks distance from social democracy or older communist parties, not the American epithet.

Contested fit

Researchers who track extremist movements treated the bundling as a category error. Oren Segal of the Anti-Defamation League told CNN that “alt-left” was a “made-up term” used to suggest a left equivalent of groups that call themselves alt-right. He also said anti-fascists “engage with those they oppose through physical confrontation,” an “extremist tactic,” and that “there is also bigotry on the left.” George Hawley, a political scientist at the University of Alabama, said there is “no such movement as the alt-left” and “no congruence between the far-left and the alt-right,” even though “left-wing extremists” exist. Mark Pitcavage of the ADL, quoted by PBS NewsHour, said the term “refers to no actual group or movement or network.” AP standards editor John Daniszewski said it did not seem to be “something that anyone calls themselves.”

The dispute is about reference. Anti-fascist crews, autonomous scenes, the New Left, ecological lefts, and radical-left parties have separate ages, tactics, and relations to elections. The 2017 epithet suggested they formed one counterpart to a movement whose participants had named themselves. Researchers, and several of the people labeled, rejected that suggestion.

Scholarship

"Alt" as political style

The main peer-reviewed treatment is Benjamin Moffitt’s Political Studies article (2024; online 2023). Set against efforts to map anti-system politics beyond left–right, it argues that “alt” named a style rather than a preferred social order: rejection of mainstream norms of conduct, and an embrace of vulgarity, incivility, and an extremely adversarial stance, given a countercultural sheen by a popular-cultural sense of “alternative.” Left and right still marked substantive commitments.

The labels were not parallel. “Alt-right” was a self-description among white nationalists; “alt-lite” was largely an internal insult; “alt-left,” Moffitt writes, did not come from the left, was not a self-descriptor, and stood in a parasitic relation to the other terms. He traces it to an offhand 2016 remark by Donald Trump and to right-wing and centrist media after the 2017 Unite the Right rally. Stephen Cushion’s article in the Journal of Alternative & Community Media uses “alt-left media” differently, for the British sites The Canary and Evolve Politics (2015–2019) and their criticism of professional journalism, not as a counterpart to the alt-right.

Cleavages and party systems

In comparative politics, “alternative” is a pole of competition, not the American epithet. Herbert Kitschelt’s 1988 World Politics article argued that new left-socialist and ecology parties since the 1960s shared egalitarian and libertarian tenets and drew younger, educated voters. Development favored their emergence, but success tracked domestic political opportunity structures more than crisis, and he read the pattern as a new cleavage rather than transient protest.

Liesbet Hooghe, Gary Marks, and Carole J. Wilson later measured a “new politics” axis from green/alternative/libertarian (GAL) to traditional/authoritarian/nationalist (TAN). Expert judgments on Western European parties found this axis, more than conventional left–right, the strongest source of variation in positions on European integration. In a paper for the Journal of European Public Policy, Hooghe and Marks argue that immigration, integration, and trade produced a transnational cleavage centered on reaction against European integration and immigration, with green and other GAL parties opposite radical-right TAN parties. Because established parties are programmatically sticky, they write, change comes through rising parties. In that literature “alternative” means participatory, post-materialist politics on the GAL pole.

Extremism research and equivalence claims

A left counterpart to the alt-right is separate from whether people coded as left-wing extremists use violence. After Trump applied “alt-left” to Charlottesville counter-protesters, specialists told CNN it named no movement. George Hawley said there was “no such movement as the alt-left” and “no congruence between the far-left and the alt-right,” while noting that left-wing extremists exist. Oren Segal of the Anti-Defamation League called it a “made-up term” implying a parallel to self-described alt-right groups; Mark Pitcavage, also of the ADL, called it “just an insult,” while saying left-wing extremists exist and that some anti-fascists use physical confrontation. Those were expert comments, not journal articles.

Richard Rogers of the University of Amsterdam, writing in February 2019 in MONITOR, an outlet of the European University Institute, compared “Alt Left” with Antifa. On Twitter (December 2016–January 2017) the hashtag spaces barely overlapped, and “alt left” was used mainly by right-wing and pro-Trump accounts. On Reddit (January–November 2017) it concentrated in pro-Trump forums and, after Charlottesville, was tied to violence and to Antifa; he also reported news mainstreaming, especially on Fox News. He called the “Alt Left” an artificial “faux public” rather than a self-identified left public. It does not measure offline organization.

Jasko, LaFree, Piazza, and Becker (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2022) tested whether left- and right-wing extremists are similarly willing to use violence. They did not code an “alt-left.” In START’s Profiles of Individual Radicalization in the United States—people linked to ideologically motivated U.S. crimes, 1948–2018; about 59 percent right-wing, 23 percent left-wing, and 18 percent Islamist—the predicted probability that a radical act was violent rather than nonviolent was 0.33 (left-wing), 0.61 (right-wing), and 0.62 (Islamist). Left-wing individuals had 68 percent lower odds of a violent act than right-wing individuals before covariates; the right-wing/Islamist gap was not significant, and the left–right difference held with demographic controls.

In the Global Terrorism Database, terrorism is “the threatened or actual use of illegal force and violence by non-state actors to attain a political, economic, religious, or social goal through fear, coercion, or intimidation.” From 182,848 cases (1970–2017) they kept events whose identified perpetrator was responsible for at least five attacks and could be coded far-right, far-left, or Islamist: 71,979 attacks by 523 groups. Before covariates, Islamist attacks had 131 percent higher odds of fatalities than right-wing attacks, and left-wing attacks had 45 percent lower odds (predicted probability of a fatal attack: Islamist 0.55, right-wing 0.35, left-wing 0.23). Open-source gaps, heavier coverage of serious cases, and ideology assigned by matching group names or generic labels limit the result. These figures neither identify a movement equivalent to the alt-right nor show that left-wing extremist violence is absent.

Reception and later use

Criticism of the label

After Donald Trump asked, at a 15 August 2017 news conference on the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, what “the alt-left that came charging at” the alt-right had done, researchers disputed the idea that the phrase named a matching movement. Oren Segal, director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, told CNN that “alt-left” was a “made-up term” used on the right to “suggest there is a similar movement on the left,” with no equivalent to the antisemitic and bigoted groups that called themselves alt-right. He said anti-fascists used physical confrontation, an “extremist tactic,” and that “there is also bigotry on the left,” but that left-wing groups were not repackaging themselves for a mainstream audience as he said the far right had. Mark Pitcavage, a senior research fellow at the same center, wrote that “there are extremists on the left, including very problematic ones,” but that “the ‘alt left’ is not a thing. It’s just an insult.” George Hawley of the University of Alabama told CNN the label had been “most aggressively pushed” by Fox News host Sean Hannity, that no group had adopted it, and that there was “no such movement as the alt-left” and “no congruence between the far-left and the alt-right.”

Mitt Romney wrote: “No, not the same. One side is racist, bigoted, Nazi. The other opposes racism and bigotry. Morally different universes.” Senator Bernie Sanders wrote that the violence in Charlottesville “was not caused by the ‘alt-left,’ (whatever that may be)” but “by Neo-Nazis and white supremacists.” On 16 August the Associated Press told writers that “‘alt-left’ has recently been coined by some to describe far-left factions” and, like “alt-right,” should be avoided “unless in a quotation” and always defined; its style entry calls it “a term that some use to describe far-left factions.”

Snopes argued on 17 August that, unlike “alt-right,” which adherents had coined, “alt-left” was aimed at an inconsistently defined set of liberals and leftists to imply extremism on both sides. It reported that users on 4chan’s /pol/ board urged one another to spread the president’s phrase as a label, and that within about an hour Mike Cernovich—whom Snopes called an “alt-right” social-media figure—blamed that day’s terrorist attack in Spain on the “alt-left,” which Snopes cited as showing that the phrase had no fixed meaning.

After 2017

In February 2019 Richard Rogers of the University of Amsterdam concluded, in a Monitor Racism study of news, Twitter, and Reddit, that the “Alt Left” was “an artificial construct, a faux public, brought into being by Trump supporters as a kind of equal counterpart, in social media and the news, to the Alt Right.” He wrote that it “resonates significantly on Fox News,” that mainstream attention had been “in relative decline since Charlottesville” while it retained “strength in the alternative right news space,” and that on Reddit it clustered in pro-Trump forums and, after August 2017, was associated with violence. In July 2019 the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported that experts still called the alt-left artificial and that, unlike the alt-right, “the far left do not call or associate themselves with the term alt-left.” Steve Fuller, a professor of social epistemology at the University of Warwick, told the ABC that alt-right outlets, particularly Breitbart News, used the label against anti-fascists, saying “the alt-right wants the alt-left to appear as socially dysfunctional,” while also describing some far-left tactics, including no-platforming, as “symbolic violence.”

Benjamin Moffitt’s 2024 article in Political Studies looks back on “alt-right,” “alt-lite,” and “alt-left.” Its abstract argues that “alt” marked “a preference about how politics should be done”—a rejection of “mainstream norms of political conduct” for “vulgarity, incivility and an extremely adversarial approach”—and says the article considers the modifier’s legacy.

Attempts at reclamation

On 15 January 2018 Fuller argued, in a commentary on the London School of Economics EUROPP blog, that “Alt-Left” was often pejorative but that left-wing actors might reclaim it. The post states that it gives the author’s views, not those of EUROPP or the LSE. He wrote that Breitbart had pre-empted a “proper” alt-left by attaching the epithet to anti-fascists, and proposed a positive idea of freedom and of “progress” rather than a politics defined only against the alt-right. Later work did not describe that proposal catching on as a self-description: Rogers found the term carried chiefly by pro-Trump users, and in 2019 the ABC reported that far-left groups did not associate themselves with it.