Demonstrators Rally in Chicago, IL in Solidarity with Charlottesville, VA after White Nationalist Attacks, August 13, 2017. Christopher Dilts/SIPA USA/Press Association. All rights reserved.‘This song’s just a reminder to
remind your fellow man that this kind of thing still lives today in that
ghost-robed Ku Klux Klan’,
Bob
Dylan, The
Death Of Emmett Till (1963)
As
someone who has spent my academic career working on the American far-right, I
was shocked, but not surprised by the Unite the Right rally and scenes of (tiki)
torch wielding, swastika bearing and sieg heiling ‘alt-right’ ‘activists’,
white nationalists and fascists marching through Charlottesville, Virginia on
12 August 2017. The rally, ‘protest’ or ‘riot’ as it has been described, was
organized by alt-right white nationalist figurehead Jason Kessler in defense of
the statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee located in Emancipation Park.
This followed a Klan rally about the statue in the same city on 8 July.
The
battle over confederate monuments was reignited following Dylann Roof’s attack
on the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina
on 17 June 2015. Images of Roof with the flag sparked calls for the removal of
such symbols, which led to opposition from the far-right. Unite
the Right was also, as the name indicates, an attempt to unite diverse and
disparate far-right groups and movements to build upon their already
established unity around President Trump and present a show of force. Those
attending ranged from neo-confederates, neo-Nazis and Identitarians to militias, and
included Ku Klux Klan groups and former Grand Dragon David Duke, the
neo-Confederate League of the South, Daily Stormer clubs, the National
Socialist Movement, alt-right figurehead Richard Spencer, the Fraternal Order
of Alt-Knights, Traditionalist Youth Network and Traditionalist Worker Party
with leader Matthew Heimbach, Vanguard America, American Guard and leader Augustus
Invictus, the Nationalist Front, Identity Evropa, Anti-Communist Action, the 3
Percenters, and Oath Keepers, as well as various state militias.
Unite
the Right was branded an alt-right rally, but three things were made clear by
those present: 1. It was not limited to young men in suits attempting to look
respectable or social media savvy activists and trolls; 2. The term alt-right
is problematic for how it conceals the white nationalism and fascism of those
within it and fellow travellers; and 3. The term is, despite this concealment
and the fact that it is the language of the far-right, to a certain degree
appropriate for a (loose) movement that was able to mainstream white
nationalism and fascism and make them part of popular culture, the media landscape
and the national dialogue.
Taking our country back
There
were a number of violent incidents at the rally, including attacks on
anti-racist and anti-fascist counter protestors. In one horrific incident, a
car, driven by a rally participant, ploughed into counter-protestors, killing
Heather Heyer and injuring 19 others. The
accused attacker, who has been arrested and charged, is known white supremacist
affiliated with Vanguard America, James A. Fields. Heyer
has since been attacked and her funeral threatened by far-right activists on
social media and in The Daily Stormer. In another case, Deandre
Harris was also chased by a group of white men and beaten up. The Governor of Virginia Terry McAuliffe declared a state of emergency
and the FBI ordered a civil rights investigation. The FBI
and Department of Homeland Security had previously warned of the threat of
white supremacist extremism and violence, something President Trump
ignored. Trump did make a statement almost immediately following Heyer’s death,
but not only failed to denounce the far-right, but distracted from them and
spread the blame with a false equivalence: ‘We
condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred,
bigotry and violence on many sides, on many sides … It's been going on for a
long time in our country. Not Donald Trump. Not Barack Obama. It's been going
on for a long, long time’. In addition to repeating ‘many sides’
twice, the reference to Obama and history was an implicit response to
criticisms that not only was Trump a factor in this rally, but responsible for the
wider resurgence of the far-right and mainstreaming and normalization of
racism. Charlottesville Mayor Michael Signer said:
‘Look
at the campaign he ran. Look at the intentional courting, both on the one hand
all of these white supremacist, white nationalist groups like that,
anti-Semitic groups, and then look on the other hand the repeated failure to
step up and condemn, denounce, silence, put to bed, all of those different
efforts just like we saw yesterday, and this is not hard’.
The
Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) had also said that ‘Trump's
run for office electrified the radical right, which saw in him a champion of
the idea that America is fundamentally a white man's country’.
Former Grand Dragon of the KKK David Duke asserted this at the rally itself: ‘We are
determined to take our country back. We are going to fulfil the promises of
Donald Trump. That’s what we believed in, that’s why we voted for Donald Trump.
Because he said he’s going to take our country back’.
The
link between Trump and such movements, and his responsibility for the rally and
its violence, can be seen in his campaign rhetoric about immigrants and
refugees, Mexicans, Muslims and Black Lives Matter, his appeal to white
socio-economic and cultural alienation and victimization, as well as courting
of racists and organized far-right white nationalists. It is worth mentioning
that this wave of reaction started earlier, building on Trump’s promotion of
anti-Obama ‘Birtherism’ and capitalizing on the rise in racism and far-right
activism and violence that occurred in response to Obama’s election, as Homeland Security and
the SPLC
both reported in 2009.
In
terms of courting the far-right that united in Charlottesville, during the
campaign Trump received
endorsements from Rocky Suhayda of the American Nazi Party, Don Black of
Stormfront, the Klan and former Grand Dragon David Duke, as
well as ‘alt-right’
figurehead Richard Spencer and ‘alt-right’ gateway figures from Breitbart such
as Steve Bannon (who now works in the White House) and Milo Yiannopoulos. When
challenged on the Duke endorsement, Trump failed to reject it and denounce the
man and wider far-right: ‘I
don't know – did he endorse me, or what's going on? Because I know nothing
about David Duke; I know nothing about white supremacists’.
Following
the election, the SPLC reported
a rise in hate groups, which they attribute to Trump’s campaign and
victory. They also reported
a spike in hate-based harassment and attacks against various
groups post-election. Between 9 November, the day after the election, and 14
November, they collected 437 reports of hate incidents. This rose to
1,094 by mid-December. The SPLC linked
the rise in such incidents to Trump’s campaign and
victory, and noted graffiti on targets reading ‘Make
America White Again’ (a play on his slogan ‘Make America Great Again’) and
‘Vote Trump’.
While
many criticized Trump’s response to Charlottesville, the far-right was
generally happy. According to Andrew Anglin of the neo-Nazi The Daily Stormer:
‘Trump
comments were good. He didn’t attack us. He just said the nation should come
together. Nothing specific against us. He said that we need to study why people
are so angry, and implied that there was hate… on both sides! So he implied the
antifa are haters. There was virtually no counter-signaling of us at all. He
said he loves us all. Also refused to answer a question about White
Nationalists supporting him. No condemnation at all. When asked to condemn, he
just walked out of the room. Really, really good. God bless him’.
David
Duke had issues with the wide distribution of blame, saying: ‘I would recommend
you take a good look in the mirror and remember it was White Americans who put
you in the presidency, not radical leftists’. After a great deal of
pressure and two days, Trump finally condemned the rally participants and wider
far-right: ‘Racism
is evil, … And those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs,
including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups that
are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans’.
Telling the truth like it is
Trump,
however, soon reverted to his original position and doubled down, criticizing
so-called ‘alt-left’ groups who he claimed were ‘very, very violent’, arguing
that there is ‘blame on both sides’. He also claimed that there are, ‘some very fine people on both sides’,
denying many on the right were Nazis and white nationalists: ‘Many of those
people were there to protest the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee …
This week, it is Robert E. Lee and this week, Stonewall Jackson. Is it George
Washington next? You have to ask yourself, where does it stop?’. This made Duke
happier, ‘Thank
you President Trump for your honesty & courage to tell the truth’.
Trump’s
second statement, declaring that racism and the far-right have been around long
before him and Obama was true though (although not in a way that removes
responsibility from him). Racism has been around since the founding and
building of the country through white settler colonialism, manifest destiny and
slavery, and continues in its structures, institutions and policies despite
claims about a post-racial America that accompanied Obama’s election.
The
far-right arrived in the form of the post-Civil War Ku Klux Klan in the 1860s,
and has returned, been revived or resurgent at many times throughout American
history, so neither racism nor white nationalists, supremacists and wider
far-right are as un-American as Trump, who used racism to ‘Make America Great
Again’, claimed.
His
third statement reference to George Washington as a slaveowner acknowledges the
place of racism at the very core of American history, although he only did it
to defend the far-right. Although the far-right have risen, declined and risen
again throughout American history, it has changed in form and discourse, as
well as relation to power, but rarely has it been in or represented by those in
the White House, whether it be Trump,
Bannon or Sebastian Gorka. It is for this reason, that it is
worthwhile looking back at the history of the far-right and organized white
supremacy and nationalism to see where both the militant violent fascists and
legitimized, electoral and policy-oriented racist far-right that converge
with Trump, come from and what they relate to.
Five eras of far right
The
‘Unite the Right’ rally reminds me of developments in the 1980s, when former
Klansman and Aryan Nations founder Richard Butler opened his compound in Hayden
Lake, Coeur d'Alene, Idaho to the wider far-right for his Annual Aryan National
Congress (ANC). After a history where the Ku Klux Klan dominated the racist
far-right, Aryan Nations not only attempted to steal the crown, but unite and
lead the racist right. Although not every group wanted to join, the ANCs played
host to a diverse group of white supremacists, white separatists, neo-Nazis,
Klan paramilitaries, posses, Christian Patriots, survivalists, neo-confederates
and more.[1] It was at one of these
meetings in 1983 that Bob Mathews and Bruce Pierce formed The Order, which went
on a murder and crime spree that took the life of Denver talk radio DJ Alan
Berg in 1984,[2]
a case made famous by Oliver Stone in Talk Radio and
Costa-Gavras in Betrayed.
The
latter also included a scene at one of the congresses. A real ANC can be seen
in the documentary Blood
in the Face, by James Ridgeway, assisted amongst others by
Michael Moore. Louis Theroux also visited on one of his Weird
Weekends. Where this differs is that none of the participants felt
emboldened by the president and it took place within the confines of a secure
compound with only racists, right-wing extremists and fellow travellers
attending. Where this differs is that none of the participants felt
emboldened by the president and it took place within the confines of a secure
compound with only racists, right-wing extremists and fellow travellers
attending.
I
was also reminded of the Greensboro
massacre, which did impact a community and involved targets and
victims. This occurred on 3 November 1979, when members of the Communist
Workers' Party (CWP) and Workers Viewpoint Organization (WVO) participated in a
textile workers’ march defending Black workers in Greensboro, North Carolina.
The CWP had opposed the Ku Klux Klan, American Nazis Party and other groups,
who confronted them and killed five CWP and civil rights activists, as well as
wounding others.[3]
According to James Ridgeway, this was one of the first incidents of what has
been termed the ‘fifth era’ or post-civil rights era.[4]
It
was this era that provides the template for the current diversity and attempted
unification of the far-right (from white supremacist to neo-confederate to
neo-Nazi), the organization around perceived white victimization and loss of
America and militant violence. What is significantly different about these two
periods is their relation to state power. The history of the far-right was,
until the 1970s, dominated by the Ku Klux Klan, its traditional white
supremacy, system-supportive ideology and close connections to governmental and
institutional power (local, state and sometimes federal), defending racist laws
and practices such as segregation. This was probably the last time as indicated
by Trump and his racist and far-right followers that America was deemed ‘great’ by them.
According
to Henry Louis Gates Jr., Trump’s support and success ‘clearly represented a backlash against the progress
black people have made since 1965’. The
success of civil rights and voting rights have been a source of material for
post-racial claims and narratives since Obama’s election (how far ‘we’ve’
come),[5] as well as resentment on
the part of the far-right and a wider racist backlash which occurred in and
challenged the ‘post-racial’ claim. This also represented a crisis point,
fuelling anger and resentment for the Klan at the time, known as the third or
civil rights era Klan, which in turn fuelled the fifth era.
Un-American
activities
After
a decade defending segregation, enforcing legal white supremacy and opposing
civil and voting rights in league with the local and state government, law
enforcement and white society, the tide turned for the Klan following the June
1964 murders of civil rights workers James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman and
Michael Schwerner by Klansmen and including Neshoba Sheriff Lawrence Rainey and
Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price in Mississippi. President Lyndon Johnson and
Attorney General Robert Kennedy pressured FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to
launch the FBI’s Internal Security Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO)
‘White Hate Groups’ program.[6] Following the 1965 murder
of voting rights activist Viola Liuzzo, the House of Representatives Committee
on Un-American Activities (HUAC) held hearings on the Activities Of Ku Klux Klan Organizations In The United States,
which produced the report The
Present-day Ku Klux Klan Movement in 1967 and condemned the Klan
as un-American.
While
these were responses to violence and political pressure, it also allowed the
federal government to remove an obstacle to the enforcement of legislation and
disentangle the Klan from legitimate, mainstream southern society such that this
could be redeemed and reconstructed. The same occurred in the first era when
the Klan first emerged in response to emancipation and reconstruction in
1867-8, preoccupied with the threat to whites particularly white women, from
free former slaves, and were defeated by anti-Klan legislation and Ulysses S
Grant in 1871.[7]
While the third era shows what a far-right with political power and influence
can look like, unlike the current manifestation of the far-right, it had no
power and influence on a federal or national level. While the third era shows what a far-right with political power and influence
can look like, unlike the current manifestation of the far-right, it had no
power and influence on a federal or national level.
For
the Klan, civil rights, voting rights, COINTELPRO and HUAC represented not only
their failure to ‘maintain white supremacy’, their stated objective, but also
their persecution by the federal government. It is here that the contemporary
far-right’s discourse of white victimization has its modern origins, although
it can also be seen in the post-civil war first era, which is now being played
out in the defense of confederate monuments.
In
response, a split has occurred in the Klan about how to respond to a
country that has allegedly abandoned whites, and reversed the racial order of
things. David Duke pursued a mainstreaming strategy, leaving the Klan but
largely following his predecessors’ non-violent, legitimate path, establishing
the National Association for the Advancement of White People (NAAWP) and
running unsuccessfully for President in 1988 and successfully for Louisiana
State Legislature in 1989.[8]
This
is sometimes referred to as the fourth era. Yet, most followed the more radical
path expressed by Texas Klansman Louis Beam Jr. in his call-to-arms ‘where
ballots fail, bullets will prevail’.[9] This was a rejection of the Klan’s mainstream
tactics in favour of more violent and insurgent ones, which defined the fifth
era in the late 1970s to the 1990s.
This
era saw the paramilitarization of the Klan in the form of Beam’s Texas
Emergency Reserve and Frazier Glenn Miller’s White Patriot Party. Like Duke,
Miller spans the eras. It was his followers who were involved in the Greensboro
Massacre and he was convicted for the April 2015 shootings at a Jewish
Community Centre and retirement home in Kansas. The traditional Klan was also
replaced in significance by Aryan Nations and other groups such as National
Alliance, White Aryan Resistance, Posse Comitatus and The Order. In addition to
which, traditional white supremacy was pushed to the side by the growth of
anti-government patriotism, Nazism and white separatism. It is here that the
extreme politics of post-civil rights white victimization, fascism and violence
we see today manifested themselves and mobilized, but against the federal
government as opposed to in league with and emboldened by it. What we are seeing today is the extremism of the
fifth era and national institutional legitimacy of the second era.
This
era saw violent attacks not only on left-wing activists, by IRS officers and
local law enforcement, particularly during the farm crisis of the 1980s. The
mobilization of the far-right during the farm crisis and deindustrialization of
the 1980s played on the theme of white alienation and victimization that we see
perpetuated by Trump. The 1990s saw increasing anti-government radicalization with the
1992 siege at Ruby Ridge, emergence of the Militia movement and bombing of the
Alfred Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on 19 April 1995. All of these
were mentioned as precedents and threats in the Homeland Security and SPLC
reports following Obama’s election.
It
was rare for fifth era activists to run for elected office. One exception was
Posse Comitatus member James Wickstrom, who ran unsuccessfully for Wisconsin
State Senate in 1980 while also (ironically) serving as the Posse’s National
Director of Counter Insurgency and founder of the sovereign township of
Tigerton Dell.[10]
The fifth era did not have a Trump or anyone in office to look to or legitimise
them.
If
we want to see what it looks like for the far-right to have national power and
influence, we have to go back further to the second era in 1915, when the Klan
re-formed after being whitewashed and rehabilitated by DW Griffith in Birth of a Nation.
Although
re-formed in Georgia, the second era Klan capitalized on the 100 per cent
American white nationalist nativism of the day, something Trump’s ‘Make America
Great Again’ and anti-immigrant politics reference and share common traits
with. The Klan of the era saw themselves defending the nation from within
against immigrant ‘aliens,’ Jews, Catholics and communists, as well as black
people, and it was mainstream, popular and influential on a state and federal
level.
At
the peak of the era in 1925, the Klan had up to five million members.[11]
On 8
August 1925, more than 50,000 members of the Klan marched on Washington, D.C. and
Texas Klansman Earl Mayfield was elected to the U.S. Senate. Most
significantly, Congress passed the Klan-supported 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, which
was intended to end the ‘indiscriminate
acceptance of all races’, limiting immigration and introduced
permanent restrictions designed to keep out Southern and Eastern Europeans,
particularly Italians and Jews, Africans and those from the Middle East, as well
as barring Asian immigration.[12]
It
was this act that Jeff Sessions, who has previously expressed admiration for
the Klan, referenced when he expressed support and admiration regarding the contemporary
concern about immigration in a
2015 interview with Stephen Bannon. It was also in this era that Trump’s
father Fred was a member and arrested at a riot in 1927.
Dangerous convergence
America
is a haunted house of hate. What we are seeing today is the extremism of the
fifth era and national institutional legitimacy of the second era. It is this
convergence which is so dangerous and we must not let one distract from the
other, but address them both, as well as the racism that runs through American
society even when there is not a revival or resurgence of the far-right in
whatever form it may take.
[1] Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt, The
Silent Brotherhood: The Chilling Inside Story of America’s Violent,
Anti-Government Militia Movement, New York: Signet, 1990.
[2] Ibid.
[3] J. Ridgeway, Blood in the Face: The Ku
Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, Nazi Skinheads, and the Rise of a New White Culture, New
York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1990, p. 79.
[4] Ibid.
[5] C. Dickey, ‘Journey Through a Troubled South’, Newsweek, 11 Aug. 2008, pp. 22-32; Chicago Herald Tribune, ‘Election 2008’, 5 Nov. 2008, pp. 6-7; USA Today, ‘Reflections on Living
History’, 21 Jan. 2009, pp. 14a-15a; Newsweek,
‘Commemorative Inaugural Issue’, 20 Jan. 2009; A. Fetini, et al., ‘One Dream
Realized’, Time: Special Inauguration
Preview, 26 Jan. 2009, pp. 28-31.
[6] C. Hewitt, Understanding
Terrorism in America: From the Klan to Al Qaeda (London: Routledge, 2003),
pp. 97-98; D. Cunningham, Klansville,
U.S.A.: The Rise and Fall of the Civil Rights Era Ku Klux Klan, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2012, p. 197.
[7] J. Ridgeway, Blood in the
Face: The Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, Nazi Skinheads, and the Rise of a New
White Culture, New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1990, p. 34.
[8] S. Diamond, Roads to
Dominion: Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States, New York: Guilford Press, 1995, pp.
264-265.
[9] J. Ridgeway, Blood in the
Face, p. 87.
[10] Ridgeway, Blood in the Face, p.117.
[11] D. Chalmers, Hooded
Americanism: The First Century of the Ku Klux Klan 1865-196., Garden City:
Doubleday, 1965, p. 31; D. Chalmers, Hooded Americanism: The First Century of
the Ku Klux Klan. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007, p. 33.
[12] M. Cox and M. Durham, ‘The Politics of Anger: The Extreme Right in
the United States’, The Politics of the
Extreme Right: From the Margins to the Mainstream, London: Pinter, 2000,
pp. 290-291,