My work on alt rock and the alt-right is focused very explicitly on an American context rooted in decades of right-wing backlash against a set of federal policies about employment and education opportunities referred to as “affirmative action.” Originating in Kennedy’s Executive Order 10925 (1961), affirmative action was intended to correct the distributive injustices created by centuries of racism and sexism by giving preferential treatment to white women and people of color in things like college admissions or the awarding of federal contracts.

As I explain in my forthcoming article in American Music, Cheryl Harris’s 1993 “Whiteness as Property” explicitly addresses affirmative action backlash, which by that time had been in the courts for nearly two decades. Lawsuits such as Bakke vs. The Regents of the University of California treated affirmative action as a kind of personal injury claim, reframing the political distributive issue as a private property infraction. In US tort law, for a plaintiff to be liable for injuries another person suffered, those injuries have to come directly from the plaintiff’s actions or negligence. Anti-affirmative action suits argued that present-day individual white men weren’t directly responsible for historical racism or sexism, so the opportunities affirmative action denied them actually made these men the victims of lost wages and opportunities. THEY were the ‘real’ victims of personal injury here, they claimed. Harris claims that these anti-affirmative action lawsuits remade whiteness-as-property around personal injury.

This legal and cultural milieu re-made mainstream white masculinity around victimhood and personal injury. Modern rock had long been what Lauren Goodlad called a domain of “men who feel and cry.” While that used to be a subcultural alternative to strong, hard, and stoic mainstream white masculinity, affirmative action backlash re-made mainstream white masculinity into terms compatible with modern rock’s typical sadboys. This is why alt rock crossed over when it did – not because of any changes in music or musical taste, but because it suddenly fit with a kind of masculinity mainstream bros identified with.

You can read more about that claim in my article when it comes out next year.

But one thing I didn’t really get to develop is that British neoreactionaries looked to a different part of the post-punk tradition for a different mechanism of performing white identity. Christopher Haworth’s study of the so-called “Dark Enlightenment”’s use of British industrial music zines from the 1980s and 1990s suggests that European neoreactionaries like Nick Land similarly were influenced by and shared affinities with alternative rock broadly construed. Drawing on industrial musicians like Psychic TV’s use of sublime escoterism and occultism, these Dark Enlightenment figures evoked a “whiteness [that] manifested in the protection from harm it provided to authors and artists to immerse themselves in the anti-rational, abject, and censored-including explorations of right-wing escoterism or the supernatural thinking that informed the Third Reich” (Hayworth 231). This music confronted listeners with all kinds of dis-order that threatened to overwhelm them, but this functioned like a test against which Dark Enlightenment denizens could prove their strength and rationality.

In enlightenment philosophy, aesthetic sublimity was the experience of being nearly overwhelmed by a stronger physical or intellectual force (like the Matterhorn or the idea of infinity), only to remember that one’s reason (i.e., one’s white masculinity) was an even more formidable force. As Kant (author of “What Is Enlightenment?) explains,

If something arouses in us, merely in apprehension and without any reasoning on our part, a feeling of the sublime, then it may indeed appear, in its form, contrapurposive to our power of judgment, incommensurate without power of exhibition, and as it were violent to our imagination (Crit of Judgment, 246).

The feeling of sublimity is tied to the threat of being overwhelmed by something “unbounded,” and thus transgressing the limits of our capacity for thought or reason. Kant is clear that “the sublime must not be sought in things of nature, but must be sought only in our ideas” (250) because natural things are objects of sensation rather than (purely) thought. For example, the idea of infinity is sublime because it transgresses any human idea of number or counting. However, when we realize that the idea of infinity is potentially overwhelming our capacity for reason, we also have proof that our capacity for thinking is more powerful than our capacity for sensation, because we can think and imagine things that are bigger and stronger than anything we could sense. As Kant puts it, “sublime is what even to be able to think proves that the mind has a power surpassing any standard of sense” (251). The feeling of sublimity is evidence that the human mind is stronger than anything else out there in the world.

In enlightenment aesthetics, discussions of race and gender pervade theories of the sublime. Kant, for example, thinks women and “oriental” men should not be able to experience the sublime. As Christine Battersby explains, for Edmund Burke, “the sublime that threatens to overwhelm the male ego via a form of mental rape that trenders him (temporarily) passive” (7); perhaps unsurprisingly, Burke also claims that the sight of a Black woman is enough to spur an experience of sublimity (A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of The Beautiful and Sublime, 144). In both cases, Burke understands the experience of the sublime as an encounter with challenges to white masculinity. As Battersby explains, the point of this encounter, and why it ultimately feels good in the end, is that it’s a chance to prove the strength and resoluteness of one’s white masculinity: “the ego encounter[s] ‘nature’ or a ‘feminine’ other, and then re-establish[es[ control via a return to a self that is confident in its underlying freedom, its mastery of otherness, and in the (male) poet or philosopher’s right to speak and be heard” (16). As theorized in the regular-degular Enlightenment, the sublime is an experience whereby the inner individual conquers feminized, non-white challenges to its white masculine identity and supremacy.

It’s not hard to see why white supremacist Dark Enlightenment figures would jump on this sort of theory of the sublime: it is literally a narrative of white masculine supremacy. Haworth’s article shows how post-punk and industrial music provided fodder for experiences of sublimity, which then feed DE politics: by talking about all this weird disgusting and nominally transgressive stuff, DE writers and their readers get to perform the white masculine supremacy they seek to platform politically.

This is something very different than what’s going on with the American alt-right’s use of alt rock. As my article shows, as the 90s unfolded the explicit politics of bands like Creed and Limp Bizkit – and the Clear Channel stations and DJs that platformed them – are directly aligned with what will be alt-right grievance culture: they perform the exact white masculine personal injury that we will later see echoed, for example, by manosphere influencers. Second, while the DE’s use of the sublime functions mainly at the level of the metaphysical, the alt rock/alt right use of personal injury is directly about private property in a very non-metaphysical and non-metaphorical sense. Instead of demonstrating reason’s incapacity to be transgressed by the irrational, the American alt-right claims that their property entitlement has been transgressed by women, feminists, immigrants, etc. There’s also a class difference: the bands and zines cited by DE figures in Haworth’s article are quite subcultural and typically require a certain amount of cultural and educational capital to be familiar with. 90s alt rock, however, is kind of THE definition of lowbrow. Chris Molanphy calls that period “Possibly the most loathed period for music of the last half-century.” So even though the British Dark Enlightenment and the American alt-right look to the post-punk tradition for aesthetic and political inspiration, they look to very different parts of that tradition for very different narratives and concepts.