Liberalism believes that society should be organized in accordance with certain unchangeable and inviolable human rights, especially the rights to life, liberty and property. It also holds that traditions do not carry any inherent value, that social practices ought to be continuously adjusted for the greater benefit of humanity, and that there should be no foundational assumptions (such as the Divine Right of Kings, hereditary status or established religion) that take precedence over other aspects of government.

The modern ideology of Liberalism can be traced back to the Humanism which challenged the authority of the established church in Renaissance Europe, and more particularly to the 17th and 18th Century British and French Enlightenment thinkers, and the movement towards self-government in colonial America. John Locke's "Two Treatises on Government" of 1689 established two fundamental liberal ideas: economic liberty (meaning the right to have and use property) and intellectual liberty (including freedom of conscience). His natural rights theory ("natural rights" for Locke being essentially life, liberty and property) was the distant forerunner of the modern conception of human rights, although he saw the right to property as more important than the right to participate in government and public decision-making, and he did not endorse democracy, fearing that giving power to the people would erode the sanctity of private property.

Using Nietzsche’s thoughts on nihilism, Gertz argues that digital technologies are provoking and accentuating a form of ‘passive nihilism’ and once this has been identified it should prompt greater critical scrutiny of the role technology is playing in the modern era.

Metaphysical nihilism has to do with the structure of reality. It is the claim that there are no evaluative or normative facts about the world around us. Nothing is truly valuable or morally obligatory. We may project these moral properties onto reality; but they are always an illusion. To put it another way, any claims we might make such as ‘charity is good’ or ‘torture is forbidden’ are necessarily false. Metaphysical nihilism comes in different flavours, depending on the normative or evaluative properties that are thought not to exist. One can be an evaluative nihilist (i.e. believe that nothing is good or bad) or a normative nihilist (i.e. believe that nothing is forbidden, permitted, or obligatory) or an existential nihilist (i.e. believe that life has no meaning or purpose). One can be all three of these things or only one or two. When I think about nihilism, it is the metaphysical kind of nihilism that first springs to mind (this may, admittedly, be a personal quirk).

Practical nihilism has to do with how one behaves. Do you act as if there are no evaluative or normative facts? Do you assume your life has no purpose and that nothing you do really matters? If so, you are a practical nihilist. Practical nihilism often goes hand-in-hand with metaphysical nihilism. Thus, if there are no evaluative or normative facts about reality it is natural to assume that this will have some knock-on implications for how people will behave (though see this article by Guy Kahane for a contrasting view). But they do not have to go hand-in-hand. One can be a metaphysical nihilist without being a practical nihilist. In other words, you can accept that there are no evaluative or normative facts but still remain committed to a strong personal code of ethics or values. Indeed, some famous nihilists have argued, arguably paradoxically, that this is what one ought to do in response to the truth of metaphysical nihilism. For example, Albert Camus, in his essay The Myth of Sisyphus, argues that we have to embrace the absurdity of existence and play the game as best we can.

freedom, toleration, individual rights, constitutional democracy and the rule of law.

Liberals hold that political organizations are justified by the contribution they make to the interests of individuals, interests which can be understood apart from the idea of society and politics.

Since those purposes do not naturally harmonize with one another, a framework of rules may be necessary so that individuals know what they can count on for their own purposes and what they must concede to the purposes of others.

e study the extent to which liberals and conservatives encounter counter-attitudinal messages in two distinct ways: (a) by the accounts they follow and (b) by the tweets they receive from those accounts, either directly or indirectly (via retweets). More than a third of respondents do not follow any media sources, but among those who do, we find a substantial amount of overlap (51%) in the ideological distributions of accounts followed by users on opposite ends of the political spectrum. At the same time, however, we find asymmetries in individuals’ willingness to venture into cross-cutting spaces, with conservatives more likely to follow media and political accounts classified as left-leaning than the reverse. Finally, we argue that such choices are likely tempered by online news watching behavior.

The diversity of content disseminated by new media has created opportunities such as the ability for more voices to be heard.

New media emerged in the late 1980s when entertainment platforms, like talk radio, television talk shows, and tabloid newspapers, took on prominent political roles and gave rise to the infotainment genre. Infotainment obscures the lines between news and entertainment, and privileges sensational, scandal-driven stories over hard news (Jebril, et al., 2013). Politicians turned to new media to circumvent the mainstream press’ control over the news agenda.

he public became more involved with the actual production and distribution of political content. Citizen journalists were eyewitnesses to events that professional journalists did not cover. Non-elites offered their perspectives on political affairs to politicians and peers. Members of the public also were responsible for recording and posting videos that could go viral and influence the course of events (Wallsten, 2010).

A 2004 Harvard Kennedy School of Government report noted that, at least early on, “the strongest voice to emerge from the blogosphere came from the right end of the political spectrum.” This is a reflection of the digital divide discussed elsewhere on this site. In this particular case conservative Republicans, who tend to be wealthier, got on the Web sooner than other demographics. By the 2000 election 36% of people online were registered Republicans while 28% were registered Democrats.

Dean was the not the first politician to exploit the Internet. In 1998 two thirds of the money for Jesse Ventura’s successful Minnesota gubernatorial campaign came from online contributions. In 2000 John McCain’s campaign raised $6.8 million in the aftermath of his victory in the Republican New Hampshire primary. In all, McCain managed to consistently reach about 40,000 supporters online. At its height the Dean campaign had about 190,000 supporters online. However, more than the numbers, the distinguishing characteristic of the Dean organization was its decentralized nature.

“You could say I was red-pilled by Nietzsche.” That’s how white nationalist leader Richard Spencer described his intellectual awakening to the Atlantic’s Graeme Wood last June. “Red-pilled” is a common alt-right term for that “eureka moment” one experiences upon confrontation with some dark and previously buried truth.

For Spencer and other alt-right enthusiasts of the 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, that dark truth goes something like this: All the modern pieties about race, peace, equality, justice, civility, universal suffrage — that’s all bullshit. These are constructs cooked up by human beings and later enshrined as eternal truths.

It’s a paradox: They believe the West has grown degenerate and weak because it internalized Christian values, but they find themselves defending Christendom because they believe it’s the glue that binds European culture together.

In late July, FBI Director Christopher Wray reported that the FBI had made as many domestic terrorism arrests in 2019 as it did in all of 2018 — and further, that “a majority of the domestic terrorism cases that we’ve investigated are motivated by some version of what you might call white supremacist violence.”

It’s called “accelerationism,” and it rests on the idea that Western governments are irreparably corrupt. As a result, the best thing white supremacists can do is accelerate their demise by sowing chaos and creating political tension. Accelerationist ideas have been cited in mass shooters’ manifestos — explicitly, in the case of the New Zealand killer — and are frequently referenced in white supremacist web forums and chat rooms.

Christchurch shooter Brenton Tarrant’s motivation was a mix of hate and fear: Like all contemporary white supremacists, he believed non-white population growth was an existential threat to his race. His manifesto is titled “The Great Replacement,” a term coined by a French writer but in context refers to the theory of “white genocide” by demography that goes back decades in the white supremacist movement. Tarrant’s plan for stopping white genocide drew liberally from accelerationist ideas; he literally titled a section of the manifesto “Destabilization and Accelerationism: tactics for victory.”

The alt-right is an online subculture marked by its devotion to the execution of a racist, misogynistic, and xenophobic politics through trolling, pranking, meme-making, and mass murder. It is this devotion to far-right politics through the discordant conjunction of humor and suicidal violence this article seeks to explain by situating the movement for the first time within its constitutive online relationships.

Left and right are viewed as social constructs that serve to orient and to bind people to political choices over the last two centuries mostly within established Western liberal democracies.

Recent findings have shown that individual differences in personality traits, basic values, and core political values account for a significant portion of preference for left and right across several polities. It has been argued that affinities between individual differences in personality and political preferences have developed over time under conditions of choice in which people's dispositions and value priorities could meet contingent political offers. Time and opportunities of free choice made possible the establishment of distinctive ideological identities that ultimately find their roots in people's personalities.