The Real Americans

 

White Nationalists assert that white people are a unique race, and as such, seek to maintain their white identity within a majoritarian white nation. But the demographics of this dominance are changing rapidly. The white nationalist agenda, specifically in the United States, is to support the dominance of white culture and ensure the rights of “besieged” white people.  

 

The assimilation and potential dominance of minorities into white society is thus perceived to be a threat to the survival of the white race, white mythology and its cultural heritage. This holds true for the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Hungary, Bulgaria, Russia and most white dominated countries. White nationalists, whether in the United States or around the world, believe they have become a minority group as non-whites and non-western people assimilate within these countries.  

 

Minorities and anti-racists point to “white privilege” as an enduring vestige of white hegemony in the United States. White privilege refers to the historical advantages white people have over people of color. Jesse Myerson in “White Anti-Racism Must Be Based in Solidarity, Not Altruism,” The Nation, February 5, 2018, argues in support of political scientist David Kaib’s argument that there are “two faces of privilege.” One face is composed of a higher quality of life, education, employment, living wage jobs, homeownership, retirement benefits, healthcare, etc. The second face is the societal privilege to dominate narratives, initiate dialogue and discussions, and monopolize control of public spaces. Though they are referred to as privileges, Kaib asserts that “privileges” should be defined as “rights.” In Critical Race Theory, 2017 edition, Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, argue that the compounding impact of marginalization felt by whites, as the once dominant ethnic identity in the United States, further compounds resentment by whites toward minorities in the attempt to remediate racism. Yet Delgado and Stefancic argue that the white claim of reverse discrimination is hollow since the greater task is reversing discrimination. 

 

Suffice it to say, white people have more access to these two privileges than non-whites. White people are more likely to find themselves in managerial positions with institutional power over non-whites. Still this is a far cry from the power to influence national and international government and institutions as noted by Critical Race Theorist, Derrick Bell, as argued in And We Are Not Saved: The Elusive Quest for Racial Justice, 1987. White privilege, Bell argues, maintains a social, political, and economic advantage over people of color, and in doing so, pits white people against people of color, specifically African Americans. The privileges that come from membership in “dominant” white groups, is prioritized by whites in order to maintain their very privilege. The dominance, according to Bell, can be reinforced by anti-racists who, in realizing their privilege, prefer not to be active in anti-racist resistance since their privileged position in society might be undermined. White people can also become hypersensitive to accusations of white racism. The fear is that they might be “outed” for racist attitudes as Robin Di Angelo argues in White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism, 2018. 

 

 

Sith Lords

 

Bell further argues that white privilege has undermined the democratic gains made by people of color. Since 1865, with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, African Americans have made little progress towards full democratic participation. For example, at the end of the Civil War and Reconstruction Era, the “Black Codes” were “legally” implemented to prevent people of color from owning property or “Codes” to intimidate and even use to put freed slaves in jail or prison for petty statutory violations. The establishment of Jim Crow laws clearly violated Reconstruction Era Civil Rights legislation as in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). The Supreme Court’s landmark decision overruling Plessy in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), resisted racial integration by southern states to which President Eisenhower responded with the use of federal troops.  

 

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 prompted states and local governments, predominantly Southern, to intimidate and obstruct African Americans from voting. The Southern Strategy, orchestrated by Kevin Phillips and Richard Nixon intended to create “dog whistle” racist slogans to turn whites (Dixiecrats) away from supporting civil rights and turning to regressive public policy supported by conservatives. The War on Drugs initiated by Bill Clinton and Joe Biden, disenfranchised millions of African American men through “broken windows policing,” “racial profiling,” “stop and frisk” police tactics, and “three strikes” legislation. All of this leading to a racist redux as described in recent scholarship by Michelle Alexander in The New Jim Crow, 2012, and J. Michael Higginbotham in Ghosts of Jim Crow, 2015. All of these factors constitute a social, political and economic advantage in favor of white people, according to Alexander and Higginbotham. It reinforces a form of institutional and systemic racism which Critical Race Theorists describe as “white privilege.” 

 

White nationalists reject the white privilege, systemic racist argument promulgated by Critical Race Theorists. Instead, they see themselves as the new “oppressed” minority who refer to themselves as the “Alt-Right” (alternative right). It has become a catchall phrase for a loose group of extreme right individuals and organizations who promote white nationalism which include white supremacists such as Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan. The Alt-Right, also describe themselves in terms of “white power” and “white pride.” They seek a resurgence or revolution in promoting the unique identity of the European heritage of white Americans. Its “soldiers,” as some describe themselves, are not lone wolves but highly organized cadres motivated by a coherent and deeply troubling worldview made up of white separatism, supremacy, virulent anticommunism, and Christian apocalyptic faith.  

 

In Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America, 2018, Kathleen Belew provides a history of the alt-right movement during the 1970s and 1980s that consolidated around a potent sense of betrayal of American world domination only to be forced to “retreat,” specifically from the Vietnam War, a war they felt they were not allowed to win. According to Belew, white nationalists and the Alt-Right blame “government” for America’s retreat as a world power and as a result, anti-government citizen groups and militia emerged. American government was to blame and a militant resistance to government resulted. In their mind’s, the white nationalists and Alt-Right, viewed government as an enemy. The Waco and Ruby Ridge incidents then galvanized white nationalists and the Alt-Right into acts of terrorism, such as Timothy McVey and the bombing in Oklahoma City, the Alfred P. Murrah building in 1995.  

 

Twenty years later, with the presidential campaign of Donald Trump, a resurgence in anti-government resentment was emboldened. The Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement unified white nationalists and the Alt-Right, along with various conservative elements including militant groups, like Klansmen, neo-Nazis, skinheads, radical tax protestors, veterans, and white separatists. They even formed a new movement of loosely affiliated independent cells to avoid detection. The white power and white pride movement operated with discipline and clarity, undertaking assassinations, armed robbery, counterfeiting, and weapons trafficking. Its command structure gave women a prominent place and put them in charge of brokering alliances and birthing future recruits. Belew’s disturbing account concludes that for the white nationalists and Alt-Right, their grievances intensified over the years and eventually led to violence as a logical course of action.  

 

Former US Navy intelligence officer, Malcolm Nance, argues that the Alt-Right, in The Plot to Destroy Democracy, 2018, and the Plot to Betray America, 2019, has become an integral part of the far-right agenda. Many of the Alt-Right conclude, nonetheless, that waging war on their own country, the United States, is justified. At the core of this unfolding is, what historian Carol Anderson describes as, “white rage” in White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide, 2017. She argues that "white rage” fuels the violence but that the that the media and public at large ignore the “kindling” which stoked the flames of this rage. What fuels white unrest is a white backlash of resentment, anger, and even rage that African Americans and other minorities are being “privileged” over whites. Thus, the tolerance of hyper policing and directed brutality at blacks.

 

 

Klan Evangelists

 

Narrow cherry-picked passages by Christian fundamentalists use interpretations of Hebrew and Christian scriptures that support racist beliefs. White nationalists tend to believe that a “conspiracy” against whites is being promoted as part of an attempted white genocide. They usually base their evidence for this on a partisan activist government implementing public policies on behalf of minorities, and the declining birth rate among whites and the increasing birth rate among minorities and immigrants. Their white culture and traditions are dying. In response the white nationalists scapegoat minorities, progressive legislation, and if necessary, violence to protect themselves from extinction. 

 

This also carries over to an oppressor/oppressed binary which offers no incentives for white people to live differently. In this binary, white people can only fall on the side of the oppressor and the inherent privileges that accompany whiteness. This model erases the history of white people engaged in personal, interpersonal, cultural, and systemic work to promote racial, social and economic justice. There is no recognized, historical alternative to toxic whiteness in this binary despite there actually being a history of anti-racist white people struggling to create an alternative white identity. This false narrative of white only racism needs revision, e.g., John Brown, the Abolitionists, Rev. William Sloan Coffin, etc. 

 

Today, Tea Party Patriots, white supremacists, white nationalists, the alt-right and conservative Republicans proclaim the same MAGA. Only this time the invocation conveys a heightened urgency and vitriol. They fear the growth of multiculturalism, modernism and progressivism in which their country, the white majority, is becoming a minority. Their world is slipping away, quickly, their WASP hegemony threatened. They adhere to a white supremacist Christianity in which Jesus is the king and savior of America, the country to which Second Coming of Jesus will play an integral part with Israel, though the supremacists are anti-Semitic and “unsaved” since Jews do not believe in Christian salvation. Nonetheless, Old Testament imagery of war, form the conquests of Joshua to the soldier King David are likened to Trump who is God’s instrument of salvation. 

 

The result is an ultranationalist militarist adherence to the absolute nature of the state and its charismatic leader Trump. An authoritarian apocalyptic religious faith solidifies the fascist state. The liberal state – administrative welfare state – is despise since it regulates and undermines personal “liberty.” On the other hand, forcing citizens to comply with their right-wing agenda is, in their mind, patriotism. Comparisons are made between Trump and Cyrus the Great, a pagan Babylonian king who freed the Jews from captivity to reclaim Israel. Point being that God can carry out her/his will in the “unchurched” like Trump, in the same way that God can work through pagan kings like Cyrus the Great to free Israel from captivity and bondage. Cyrus, as their argument goes, is the archetype of the ironic “vessel” (vessel theology) in which God carries out her/his plan of salvation, despite the superficial inconsistencies.  

 

For conservative Catholics, since Trump is advantageously against abortion, anything he does on a personal level or supports as public policy, even contrary to Catholic teaching, can be justified to a degree. Understood as ethical triumphalism, Catholic ethics calls for its faith community to form their consciences on Church teachings. This generally understood as the “continuum of life” ethics in which no one single overarching issue should take priority over others, unless one’s conscience directs them in good faith otherwise. Nevertheless, for American Catholic bishops, the hope is that with three Supreme Court picks, Trump will be able to overturn abortion. For the American bishops, there is no other compelling issue, not even climate extinction and the renewed threat by the pentagon of thermonuclear war.  

 

And for other conservative religious these appointments would mean a complete list of conservative and libertarian public policies that the Right have been dreaming of for the last forty years. This clearly includes the assaults on voting rights with the recent July decision which adversely affects minorities. In all, the vessel theology for conservative Christians appears to be a scriptural form of money laundering while conservative Catholic antiabortion triumphalism appears to be a gaslighting technique, intended as a diversion from other highly import ethical concerns. In their support of Trump both conservative Christians and Catholics tend to agree on vessel theology and the ethical primacy against abortion. It would appear that the continuum of life issues such as – the Church’s preferential option for the poor, the avoidance of environmental extinction, the end to endless wars and global economic domination of the world advocated by  

 

 

Ending Class Conflict

 

Most disturbing is the fictional account of the Antifascists (Antifa) and Black Lives Matter (BLM) as violent leftist terrorist groups. Nothing could be farther from the truth. In an internal memorandum, FBI Director Christopher Wray, found no evidence of Antifa’s or BLM’s involvement in national unrest, specifically with the George Floyd protests and riots as falsely reported by The Nation, June 2, 2020. The Washington Field Office memo states that “no intelligence indicating Antifa involvement” was initiated during the protests, as erroneously stated from Trump, Attorney General Barr, and various right-wing news outlets such as FOX News. On June 12, 2020, the New York Times in “Federal Arrests Show No Sign That Antifa Plotted Protests,” cleared Antifa and on June 22, 2020, the New York Times, “41 Cities, Many Sources: How False Antifa Rumors Spread Locally,” described how propaganda against Antifa was spread through the media community, most likely form conservative politicians and political action committees. The attempt was to falsely blame the uprising on orchestrated groups such as Antifa or BLM, according to Glenn Kirschner, former FBI, counterintelligence. Blaming a “left-wing” group was a ruse created to gaslight the public and divert attention from the “right-wing” police tactics condoned by the Trump administration. 

 

Cedric Robinson argues in the 2020 edition of Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, that wealth disparity, as a result of the capitalist economic system, coupled with corrective measures by way of Affirmative Action and welfare policies, makes upward movement into a more equitable economic and social class all the more difficult. This is not only true for blacks, but for whites as well. And this “class struggle” is one that elicits fear most in elites in that if the poor organize, not around color but on social class, the class consciousness of such a coalition would force the elite to share resources and wealth at their expense. Robinson sees this merging as one of the most important strategies in combatting the power elite’s dominance and the constant focus on identity politics as the problem. The deeper issue is the class divide and impoverishment that should unite whites and other minorities in the struggle for justice. 

 

Do Democrats have the courage and integrity to fight fascism? The answer to this question is only if they can clearly stand for antifascist policies and separate their liberal welfare state policies. This must be compared to the Republican’s continued effort to eliminate the liberal welfare state. Social science research, conducted by the Lake Research Partners, “Focus Group Findings on 2020 and 2022 Elections for Congress,” May 27, 2021, reveals that, as of the present moment, the Democratic Party has not provided distinct policy positions in opposition to the Republicans. Clearly, their moderate-centrist positions have not helped them. One might conclude that if the Democrats do not fix this problem, then the Democrats could very well loose the House and Senate in 2022. The outcome would be the institutionalization of Republican fascism in the United States as described thirty years ago in Russ Bellant’s, Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party: Domestic Fascist Networks and Their Effects on US Cold War Politics, 1991.  

 

Meanwhile white nationalism can also be understood in terms of US hegemony and the National Security State. William Krystal and his Project for a New American Century (PNAC), the elevated status of the military industrial complex, the development of a Space Force, unfettered neoliberal capitalism, increased poverty in the midst of exponential wealth, elite control of government, the threat to democratic freedoms through the new surveillance state, threats to civil liberties in the Patriot Act and the National Defense Authorization Act, attempted in Venezuela, illegal and harmful economic sanctions placed on Venezuela, racial and class disparities in the criminal justice system, police lawlessness and brutality, economic devastation in all levels of education, neglect of infrastructure development in inner cities, lack of affordable housing and universal health care, capital punishment as justice, nuclear war and the proliferation and the targeting of innocent civilians, nuclear war and the total destruction of the planet, and the corruption of the two major political parties, Israel’s oppression of Palestinians – are prioritized as a secondary consideration in the formation of conscience on ethical issues. See Families and Faith: How Religion Is Passed Down Across Generations, Vern Bingston, 2013.

 

Ed Martin

Tubac, Arizona

Long Beach, California