I will start with my thesis: the alt-right — and its underlying ideological undercurrents—represent the greatest threat to Western civilization since at least the fall of Soviet communism, and perhaps even since the fall of National Socialism.

Why? My answer will not surprise you if you are familiar with me, and my writings on economics. The answer is opportunity cost. The rise of the alt-right represents the beginning of a war within Western civilization between those who believe in modern liberal democracy—free markets, free trade, freedom of movement, freedom of association, freedom of speech—and those who don’t.

It promises the kind of infra-civilizational struggle that Islam has been dogged with throughout the course of much of its history. Such events carry an inordinately massive opportunity cost.

Why? Well, the first danger is regressivism. It is an objective fact that liberal civilization—free trade, freedom of movement and freedom of speech, etc—results in greater economic growth, which is correlated with higher quality of life across a spectrum of factors including higher quality medical care, longer lifespans, poverty reduction, etc. Abandoning modern liberal democracy and replacing it with some kind of authoritarian-populist system of ethnonationalism—as the alt-right demands—would have the opportunity cost of losing these benefits that come simply from the dynamic process of individuals possessing different skills, background and temperaments interacting economically and fulfilling each others’ needs. Indeed, civilizations that have turned inward historically have not fared well. Consider, for example, the fate of the Ming dynasty.

But the opportunity costs will be far higher than this. The alt-right, more or less in the mould of their Nazi forefathers, is a system of aggression against people from different ethnic and ideological backgrounds. What is the opportunity cost of this? Well, let’s start by looking at what the cost of building Trump’s wall and deporting all of the undocumented migrants in the United States would be. That’s $400–600 billion according to current fairly conservative estimates. You can do an awful lot of useful things—like exploring space, discovering new and improved cures for diseases, or caring for the sick and needy— with those resources. In the alt-right’s ideal universe, those resources get burned on aggression, instead. Of course, deporting illegal migrants is only the start of their wasteful splurging. The last time European ethnonationalism was ascendant, Hitler and Mussolini and their allies wasted tens of trillions of dollars of time, life and productive capital destroying Europe and the world in their delusional quest for lebensraum and Aryan purity. Similarly, as I noted earlier, the Islamic civilization has been wasting its time fighting itself over ideological matters in much this manner for most of its history. One of liberal civilization’s great innovations is in skirting all of this nonsense by agreeing to disagree and tolerate each other’s differences.

Then, of course, there lies the opportunity costs of alienating productive members of society. Hitler’s reich chose a program of expulsion and extermination against the Jews, and lost many great physicists—such as Albert Einstein—to Britain, America, and the Soviet Union. Ethnonationalism today promises to do much the same thing.

Clearly, then, I am no friend of the alt-right, nor an impartial observer. I want it to perish from the face off the earth, to fall off into the abyss and never return. I want to obliterate it utterly. Ironically, this has a high opportunity cost — as the Allies discovered in their fight against Nazism. But the intervening seventy years of peace and human flourishing that have given birth to computing, robotics, commercial air transportation, global container shipping, and the other facts of modern global capitalism that we each benefit from, at least, show that these efforts can be highly worthwhile.

To defeat it, it must be understood. We must strive to understand how these old, divisive evils have come to rise again from the ashes of the past. The answer, I have come to believe, is historical grievance.

What is this grievance? Well, it is different for every body. And certainly, it may have been amplified by economic factors such as unemployment and inequality that have sprawled out since the financial crisis. Those factors may have made the population more receptive to it. But this grievance is the outcome of demographic change. Increasing numbers of white people in the United States and Europe feel diminished in the present and threatened by the future.

Who are these white people? I am not convinced that race is a real thing on a biological level. Sure, all humans are different on a genetic level. And these ancestral differences can be generalized to a certain degree based upon shared common ancestry. But the classification of racial difference and similarity is really based upon the most superficial and skin-deep of differences (i.e. skin colour), as opposed to classification based on deeper genetic factors. Conceptions of whiteness in Western civilization have been highly variable over the decades, with various subgroups (Italians, Germans, Irish, Slavs, Latinos, Arabs, etc) being at various times included and excluded on a very arbitrary basis.

Indeed, the Greco-Roman civilizations which gave us the philosophical basis for Western civilization were highly ethnically and culturally diverse empires. They were melting pots that sucked in humans of a variety of ethnicities from across the globe. Many Roman emperors, for instance, had stereotypically African features such as extremely curly hair. One Roman emperor was even known as Philip The Arab.

Nonetheless, as a self-identified and superficial quality, whiteness is very real and for very many years particularly in America was an extremely dominant concept. Who did or didn’t have white skin was the difference between who was the slavemaster and who was the slave. It was the difference between who could eat at the whites-only restaurant, and who couldn’t. It was the difference between who did and who didn’t have to move to the back of the bus. It was —like maleness— a matter of who did and who didn’t have power. Whiteness ultimately encompasses a large spectrum of different people and different interests. Today, elderly whites seem to be expressing that the country they grew up with—where they had more power—has disappeared. Younger whites—particularly young white men on the internet seem to be expressing that they lack prospects for relationships or jobs—for instance, they may feel that women and employers are more attracted to immigrants and foreigners.

So the influx of global migration that has accompanied the last forty years has left a lot of white Americans and white Europeans feeling increasingly on the edge of a demographic precipice. With the end of American and global slavery and then the end segregation and thereby the end of explicit legal white supremacy, whites have to a greater and greater extent seen the implicit white supremacy of being the majority slip away. At the same time, with the end of Apartheid in South Africa and Zimbabwe, they have seen what can happen when whites who have for many years basked in the warm glow of white supremacy become a minority.

To be very explicit: many white people feel like they are about to become a minority in places they believe to be their own homelands; places which fifty or sixty years ago were dominated by whiteness. This is especially true now as the civil wars in Syria and Sudan have pushed greater influxes of migrants toward the West, while simultaneously bands of hardcore Islamic extremists—who very much define themselves in opposition to liberal Western civilization—such as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State continue to wage a campaign of guerrilla warfare against the West.

This fear of becoming a minority appears to have been exploded out of proportion into the rather absurd notion of “white genocide”; in other words, that ethnic diversity is somehow an attempt to exterminate white people. As Andrew Anglin of The Daily Stormer writes:

The core concept of the movement, upon which all else is based, is that Whites are undergoing an extermination, via mass immigration into White countries which was enabled by a corrosive liberal ideology of White self-hatred, and that the Jews are at the center of this agenda.

Listening to Trump supporters like Anglin, and alt-right figures such as Lana Lotkeff, Richard Spencer, and Jazzhands McFeels these people feel like this is their last chance. Although the supposed white genocide is completely nonexistent—there are more white people alive today than at any point in history, so the notion of an extermination is utterly absurd—America’s demographics are rapidly changing. Whites are projected to become a minority by the 2040s. In the under-5s, whites are already a minority. That, again, is not an extermination. But it is a very major change in power.

Of course, in my view, these fears are overstated, largely because I am a humanist who doesn’t even think that race is a real thing, but rather that it is an imperial system used to designate who does and who doesn’t have power. For me, the real essence of Western civilization is not some illusory whiteness or white majority that needs to be maintained, but is instead the liberal values of free expression, freedom of association, freedom of religion, free trade, etc, which are independent of the social construct of race. Those rights are for everyone, and they exist regardless of who is or isn’t the majority. They are universal values and universal benefits that cost very little.

The alt-right, ironically, seems determined to throw these values under the bus in the pursuit of some illusory superficial whiteness, and replace them instead with tribal unity, religious and racial purity and cultural homogeneity. Ironically, it is these very values (albeit from an Islamic perspective) that also characterize the values of the reactionary Islam of the Islamic state.

Obviously, it is possible for any civilization—with or without inbound migration—to abandon liberal universalism and instead replace it with reactionary values. Indeed, the rise of the illiberal and anti-liberal alt-right and their candidate Trump seems to illustrate that the view that liberal values are somehow “white” values is wrong.

The alt-right, then, can be thought of as an un-Western reimagination of the West. It is about trying to rebirth the West in the mould of the Islamic state — undemocratic, authoritarian, xenophobic, arbitrarily violent — with one superficial difference: whiter skin colour.

Indeed, the resurgent white supremacism of the alt-right can be seen as a reaction to the Islamic supremacism of groups like al-Qaeda and the Islamic state; “THEY are violent and xenophobic! We should be too!” Or as Donald Trump puts it: “time to get tough!”

It is my view that white grievance and the rise of the alt-right will not derail our civilization to a very great extent. Would many of these Trump supporters be so receptive to his message if it were not for the aftermath of a once-in-a-generation financial crisis? I doubt it. So, it is also my view that this resurgent ethnonationalism is but a bump on the road to a post-national globalist future. Technology—fiber optic internet, international goods transportation, air flight—has already made post-national economics and society into an unavoidable reality. We live in a highly globalized world, whether Trump and the Brexiteers and the angry young men on the internet like it or not.

But it is also my view that this could be a very big, very ugly bump in the road with a very massive opportunity cost. The shit-slinging edgelords of the alt-right—those deplorable ones who are motivated more by hatred and supremacism than by economic fear—have sufficient expertise in cultural warfare to activate a large and angry rump of desperate and politically and economically disaffected middle class whites who together under the charismatic leadership of a fascist like Trump can make life very miserable for nonwhites and progressives in the years to come.

I spent much of the last half decade advocating for economic measures—job retraining, redistribution, infrastructure creation—to reduce economic inequality and unemployment for that angry and disaffected rump that I have watched slowly grow and fester and metamorphosize since the financial crisis. The utter failure of Western political leadership to really tackle these matters has made this rump into prime targets for the illiberal hatred and anti-democratic suspicions of the alt-right edgelords. Unaddressed economic concerns—particularly soaring inequality in the wake of the financial crisis—have primed America for Trump, even if Trump himself is primed to make it vastly worse by slashing help to the needy, and slashing taxes for the wealthiest.

Can that situation be reversed? Not in time to stop Trump this year. If Trump loses, I hope that major progress can be made before 2020.

Even then, this white grievance will go nowhere fast. It is fuelled by hunger for power and domination. Even if Clinton is successful, it will simmer beneath the surface, waiting to explode outward once again.

And if Trump is successful, the opportunity cost will be huge.