There is no burgeoning right-wing ‘‘alternative’’ Facebook or YouTube yet, but that development feels inevitable. The structures and communal ideals of the internet’s biggest platforms — the closest thing that exists to a dominant culture online — are just waiting to be inverted, seized and used for new ends, like the liberal discourse before them.

In 1993, somewhere near the peak of America’s infatuation with ‘‘alternative’’ music and culture, a feeling of crisis set in. Groups of young people had spent years building and participating in what felt to them like an independent subculture. But with breathtaking speed and audacity, its products and signifiers and favorite bands were being embraced and sent to market by the very corporations they were meant to be an alternative to. That year, in a seminal issue of The Baffler, the editor Thomas Frank’s essay ‘‘Alternative to What?’’ issued something of a state of the alt-union, pledging a long fight: ‘‘ ‘Popular culture’ is the enemy,’’ he wrote. It was, in his opinion, the character and the duty of the ‘‘alternative’’ to resist co-optation by corporate America. ‘‘For years they were too busy working their way up the corporate ladder to be bothered, but now what we have been building has begun to look usable, even marketable,’’ Frank wrote. His pessimism was palpable, but he held out hope: ‘‘We will not be devoured easily.’’

In retrospect, the essay is both overheated and prophetic, clearly ideological and narrow in its context. But its sensibility is clear. It demands safety from, not access to, the vast corporate system against which it defines itself. And more than anything, it presents the alternative as skeptical of, and in some ways incompatible with, power.

The new reactionary ‘‘alternative’’ movement is also keenly aware of power, but it craves it, worships it, is constantly devising plans to acquire it. It has traded a siege mentality for a war bearing; its platforms are less gathering places for expressions of dissent than staging grounds against the venues to which they’re opposed and against which they expect to win. Their rhetoric and style want to evoke, in some ghoulish upside-down way, heroic rebellion, regardless of how well their aims align with the powers that be. And so we get, for instance, the consummate ’90s outsider Alex Jones — against the world but also taking over the world, under attack from elites but also on the phone with the president.

At first glance, this seems incoherent. It’s a libertarian resistance with an authoritarian program; a counterculture that yearns for tradition. But again, fresh eyes might help us avoid underestimating what is happening here. This ‘‘alternative’’ is not limited by consistent adherence to its own principles. This self-described underdog sees nothing problematic in its affinity for power. In fact, it believes, rightly, that to the right audience, contradiction is exciting. Nothing could be better for an insurgent political force than to be seen as a scrappy outsider. And nothing could be better for the aspiring mainstream — this time not corporate, or cultural, but political — than to adopt the permanent pose of the alternative.