The next issue of Jacobin, “Journey to the Dark Side,” is out now. Subscribe for the first time at a discount.

A new right is alive in America — and it’s weird. While some alt-right figures like Richard Spencer aspire pretentiously to a style of European blood-and-soil right-identitarianism, the real creative energy behind the new right-wing sensibility online today springs from anonymous chan culture. Nihilistically reveling in shock, transgression, and trolling, you’re more likely to find these young men posting diaper porn, My Little Pony hate, and swastika-laden Pepe memes than listening to Wagner or reading Alain de Benoist.

Feminist analysis has often characterized the movement’s rank misogyny as a throwback to toxic patriarchal traditions. Its stylistic roots, however, could be more accurately traced back through avant-garde movements to the Marquis de Sade, whose scandalous libertinism and extreme pornographic writings led to his imprisonment, than it could to Edmund Burke, who wrote amid the tumult of the French Revolution that “manners are of more importance than laws.”