Oh, please:
The dividing lines have become predictable: on one side line up liberal individualists, who maintain almost as a matter of faith that any form of personal expression is to be protected and even celebrated. On the other end lies a new brand of conservative nationalists, who—perhaps channeling their inner Paul Revere—see it as their personal responsibility to warn the nation when certain symbols and identities begin to threaten the values that (in their eyes) any self-respecting Western society ought to hold dear.
Though not often coupled together, both Islamists and the West’s conservative nationalists (whom we might term “Westernists”) place great importance on the communal dimension of human society. Both aim to privilege a certain set of beliefs and symbols at the local level, starting with the family, and both are inclined to prioritize the communities, regions, and nations in which they live. In this sense, both are also “supremacist” (we say this descriptively, not necessarily pejoratively).
Superficially, the alt-right "Westernists" have a common thread with "Islamists" in believing their respective societies are the best. But that's a pretty weak common element, unless you want to believe that Katy Perry Fans are similar to Metallica fans because each group believes their musical tastes are the best. Such comparisons can get ridiculous ("You're an upright biped? I'm an upright biped!").
But the very real and significant difference is that the Islamists seek to conquer and force the submission of the non-Islamist societies--whether Christian, Jewish, Hindu, or just non-Islamist Moslems; while the so-called "Westernists" just want the Islamists to leave the West alone and stop killing us or demanding that we limit our freedoms to accommodate your beliefs while living in the West.
And ascribing the alt-right as the leading movement in those who defend the West is just obscene. Liberal individualists are the most group-think minded of the West, in my view. And to the extent that they value the West while they denigrate and attack it, the liberal side relies on the majority of Westernists not in the alt-right who do value individual rights and freedoms and who are willing to defend the West to preserve what the West has spent many centuries building.
When you consider the eagerness of those so-called liberal individualists in the West to make common cause with the Islamists by "understanding" their rage at the West (while ignoring their rage against everyone else, too), it is astounding to read someone trying to claim that the overwhelming majority of people on the right who defend the Western world (which includes Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, in important ways, rebuking the claim that this is a white European thing--and I'll note that Germany and Italy weren't fully within the West's traditions of democracy and freedom until defeated in World War II and forcibly brought into the West--and Spain, for example, took longer than that) are defined by alt-right types who we reject (and I don't trust their definition of "Westernists" as the alt-right, which just seems to be "people we don't like").
The West is worthy of defending and you don't have to hate non-Western people, as the authors clearly believe, to want to preserve the West.
And if those "liberal individualists"--who have pilloried the West uniquely for every crime, real or imagined--while counting on others to defend the West successfully to maintain their contradictory rejectionist views and freedoms--had stood up for the West all along, people wouldn't look to nationalists (who in many ways reject the West's ideas of individual freedom to emphasize racial or religious differences) to defend the West.
