White Americans’ Evaluations of the Alt-Right

Abstract

Citizens’ perceptions of the alt-right are not well explored in political science. We view the alt-right as a successor of the Tea Party movement. While the Tea Party described itself as organized around spending, the size of government, and the American Constitution, examinations of the movement found that the unifying concerns of people who identified with it or viewed it favorably were negative feelings about racial minorities and patriarchal views of gender roles. Using panel survey data, we show that whites with higher levels of hostile sexism, racial resentment, perceptions of discrimination against whites, and who were more favorable towards Donald Trump evaluated the alt-right movement more positively. We find no evidence that self-placed ideology informed these evaluations. On the whole, latent cultural conservatism appears to inform evaluations of the relatively unknown — at the time — alt-right movement.