Turns out identifying with Nazis isn't the best political marketing

Allegra Kirkland reports for TPM that Far-Right Groups Are Struggling To Pull Off Any Events In Wake Of Charlottesville 09/29/2017.

In the United States, the Nazis for decades have been the villains in countless numbers of movies, TV shows, radio dramas, comic books, documentaries, even musicals (The Sound of Music). If any group is generally identified among Americans as evil - even among people who know little about the actual history of Nazism in Germany - its Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party.

So when the "alt-right" and other white supremacists staged their murderous presence in Charlottesville in August, it created a very negative impression, even among a lot of people who share many of their hatreds.

From Kirkland's report:

The racist far-right has been flailing since descending on Charlottesville, Virginia, in August for a rally that participants deemed a success for its huge turnout — until it turned deadly. Groups plan events and then cancel them in rapid succession, and people point fingers on Twitter at who they perceive to be leading the movement astray. An event intended to “Unite the Right” ended up doing the exact opposite.

“If this was initially seen as a victory for the movement, it’s actually been one of abject devastation,” Heidi Beirich, expert on extremism at the Southern Poverty Law Center, told TPM. “Look at the infighting that came in the wake of the event over whether it was the right tactics, if they should have been there in the first place, the groups that came, and the violence, obviously.”

“It was very painful to them and there’s a lot of reticence to go down that road again,” Beirich added. “They certainly don’t want to have a Charlottesville 2.0.”

The "alt-right" brand went from being an attempt to create a happy face for far-right white supremacist ideology to being widely identified with murdering Nazis:

Movement leaders of varying stripes all are saddled with the baggage of having attended an event where Ku Klux Klan leaders flew their banners, and where an ideological sympathizer rammed a car into a group of peaceful protesters, killing counter-protester Heather Heyer and injuring many more. The damage is particularly great for the so-called “alt-right,” a loosely defined group of white nationalists, anti-Semites and online trolls whose project has been putting a presentable, buttoned-up face on racism.

“The concept of the alt-right is to create a sort of mainstream version of an old hatred,” said Oren Segal, director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism. “When violence occurs at their events, it does undermine their effort to try to recruit and attract people to their cause as if it was somehow mainstream.” [my emphasis]

Kirkland also describes factional fighting in the alt-right spectrum. While factional fighting and jealousies petty and grand are part of all politics, they take particular forms for fringe groups. For one thing, people a fighting over a relatively small slice of political "territory" in such groups, and they generally lack the kind of incentives and resources large political parties have.

And white supremacist, Klan-style groups also tend to attract people not particularly distinguished for their "people skills."

But they aren't going away: Eleanor Klibanoff, Inside White Nationalists’ Longshot Plan To Win Over Appalachia 89.3 WFPL 09/20/2017.