Who
are the white supremacists? There has been no formal survey, for obvious
reasons, but there are several noticeable patterns.
Geographically,
they come from America’s heartland—small towns, rural cities, swelling
suburban sprawl outside larger Sunbelt cities. These aren’t the
prosperous towns, but the single-story working-class exurbs that stretch
for what feels like forever in the corridor between Long Beach and San
Diego (not the San Fernando Valley), or along the southern tier of
Pennsylvania, or spread all through the Upper Peninsula of Michigan,
across the vast high plains of eastern Washington and Oregon, through
Idaho and Montana. There are plenty in the declining cities of the Rust
Belt, in Dearborn and Flint, Buffalo and Milwaukee, in the bars that
remain in the shadows of the hulking deserted factories that once were
America’s manufacturing centers. And that doesn’t even touch the former
states of the Confederacy, where flying the Confederate flag is a
culturally approved symbol of “southern pride”—in the same way that
wearing a swastika would be a symbol of German “heritage” (except it’s
illegal in Germany to wear a swastika).
There’s a large rural
component. Although “the spread of far-right groups over the last decade
has not been limited to rural areas alone,” writes Osha Gray Davidson,
“the social and economic unraveling of rural communities—especially in
the midwest—has provided far-right groups with new audiences for their
messages of hate. Some of these groups have enjoyed considerable success
in their rural campaign.” For many farmers facing foreclosures, the Far
Right promises to help them save their land have been appealing,
offering farmers various schemes and legal maneuvers to help prevent
foreclosures, blaming the farmers’ troubles on Jewish bankers and the
one-world government. “As rural communities started to collapse,”
Davidson writes, the Far Right “could be seen at farm auctions
comforting families . . . confirming what rural people knew to be true:
that their livelihoods, their families, their communities—their very
lives—were falling apart.” In stark contrast to the government
indifference encountered by rural Americans, a range of Far Right
groups, most recently the militias, have seemingly provided support,
community, and answers.
In
that sense, the contemporary militias and other white supremacist
groups are following in the footsteps of the Ku Klux Klan, the Posse
Comitatus, and other Far Right patriot groups who recruited members in
rural America throughout the 1980s. They tap into a long history of
racial and ethnic paranoia in rural America, as well as an equally long
tradition of collective local action and vigilante justice. There
remains a widespread notion that “Jews, African-Americans, and other
minority-group members ‘do not entirely belong,’” which may, in part,
“be responsible for rural people’s easy acceptance of the far right’s
agenda of hate,” writes Matthew Snipp. “The far right didn’t create
bigotry in the Midwest; it didn’t need to,” Davidson concludes. “It
merely had to tap into the existing undercurrent of prejudice once this
had been inflamed by widespread economic failure and social discontent.”
And
many have moved from their deindustrializing cities, foreclosed
suburban tracts, and wasted farmlands to smaller rural areas because
they seek the companionship of like-minded fellows, in relatively remote
areas far from large numbers of nonwhites and Jews and where they can
organize, train, and build protective fortresses. Many groups have
established refuge in rural communities, where they can practice
military tactics, stockpile food and weapons, hone their survivalist
skills, and become self-sufficient in preparation for Armageddon, the
final race war, or whatever cataclysm they envision. Think of it as the
twenty-first-century version of postwar suburban “white flight”—but on
steroids.
They’re certainly Christian, but not just any
Christian—they’re evangelical Protestant, Pentacostalist, and members of
radical sects that preach racial purity as the Word of Jesus.
(Catholicism is certainly stocked with conservatives on social issues,
but white supremacists tap into such a long and ignoble tradition of
anti-Catholicism that they tend to have their own right-wing
organizations, mostly fighting against women’s rights and gay rights.)
Some belong to churches like the Christian Identity Church, which gained
a foothold on the Far Right in the early 1980s. Christian Identity’s
focus on racism and anti-Semitism provides the theological underpinnings
to the shift from a more “traditional agrarian protest” to
paramilitarism. It is from the Christian Identity movement that the Far
Right gets its theological claims that Adam is the ancestor of the
Caucasian race, whereas non-whites are pre-Adamic “mud people,” without
souls, and Jews are the children of Satan. According to this doctrine,
Jesus was not Jewish and not from the Middle East; actually, he was
northern European, his Second Coming is close at hand, and followers can
hasten the apocalypse. It is the birthright of Anglo-Saxons to
establish God’s kingdom on earth; America’s and Britain’s “birthright is
to be the wealthiest, most powerful nations on earth . . . able, by
divine right, to dominate and colonize the world.”
A large
proportion of the extreme right wing are military veterans. Several
leaders served in Vietnam and were shocked at the national disgust that
greeted them as they returned home after that debacle. “America’s
failure to win that war was a truly profound blow,” writes William J.
Gibson. “If Americans were no longer winners, then who were they?” Some
veterans believed they were sold out by the government, caving in to
effeminate cowardly protesters; they can no longer trust the government
to fight for what is right. Bo Gritz, a former Green Beret in Vietnam,
returned to Southeast Asia several times in clandestine missions to
search for prisoners of war and was the real-life basis for the film
Rambo. He uses his military heroism to increase his credibility among
potential recruits; one brochure describes him as “this country’s most
decorated Vietnam veteran” who “killed some 400 Communists in his
illustrious military career.” In 1993 Gritz began a traveling SPIKE
(Specially Prepared Individuals for Key Events) training program, a
rigorous survival course in paramilitary techniques.
Many of the
younger guys are veterans of the first Gulf War, a war that they came to
believe was fought for no moral principles at all, but simply to make
America’s oil supply safer and to protect Israel from possible Arab
attack. They feel they’ve been used, pawns in a larger political game,
serving their country honorably only to be spit out and stepped on when
they returned home to slashed veteran benefits, bureaucratic
indifference to post-traumatic stress disorder, and general social
contempt for having fought in the war in the first place. They believed
they were entitled to be hailed as heroes, as had earlier generations of
American veterans, not to be scorned as outcasts. Now a guy like Bo
Gritz symbolizes “true” warrior-style masculinity, and reclaiming their
manhood is the reward for signing up with the Far Right.
THE CLASS ORIGINS OF RACIAL POLITICS
Perhaps
what binds them all together, though, is class. Rural or small town,
urban or suburban, the extreme Right is populated by downwardly mobile,
lower-middle-class white men. All of the men I interviewed—all—fitted
this class profile. When I compared with other ethnographies and other
surveys, they all had the same profile as well.
In the United
States, class is often a proxy for race. When politicians speak of the
“urban poor,” we know it’s a code for black people. When they talk about
“welfare queens,” we know the race of that woman driving the late-model
Cadillac. In polite society, racism remains hidden behind a screen
spelled CLASS.
On the extreme Right, by contrast, race is a proxy
for class. Among the white supremacists, when they speak of race
consciousness, defending white people, protesting for equal rights for
white people, they actually don’t mean all white people. They don’t mean
Wall Street bankers and lawyers, though they are pretty much entirely
white and male. They don’t mean white male doctors, or lawyers, or
architects, or even engineers. They don’t mean the legions of young
white hipster guys, or computer geeks flocking to the Silicon Valley, or
the legions of white preppies in their boat shoes and seersucker
jackets “interning” at white-shoe law firms in major cities. Not at all.
They mean middle-and working-class white people. Race consciousness is
actually class consciousness without actually having to “see” class.
“Race blindness” leads working-class people to turn right; if they did
see class, they’d turn left and make common cause with different races
in the same economic class.
That’s certainly what I found among
them. Most are in their mid-thirties to early forties, educated at least
through high school and often beyond. (The average age of the guys I
talked with was thirty-six.) They are the sons of skilled workers in
industries like textiles and tobacco, the sons of the owners of small
farms, shops, and grocery stores. Buffeted by global political and
economic forces, the sons have inherited little of their fathers’
legacies. The family farms have been lost to foreclosure, the small
shops squeezed out by Walmarts and malls. These young men face a spiral
of downward mobility and economic uncertainty. They complain that they
are squeezed between the omnivorous jaws of global capital concentration
and a federal bureaucracy that is at best indifferent to their plight
and at worst complicit in their demise.
And they’re right. It is
the lower middle class—that strata of independent farmers, small
shopkeepers, craft and highly skilled workers, and small-scale
entrepreneurs—that has been hit hardest by globalization. “Western
industry has displaced traditional crafts—female as well as male—and
large-scale multinational-controlled agriculture has downgraded the
independent farmer to the status of hired hand,” writes journalist
Barbara Ehrenreich. This has resulted in massive male
displacement—migration, downward mobility. It has been felt the most not
by the adult men who were the tradesmen, shopkeepers, and skilled
workers, but by their sons, by the young men whose inheritance has been
seemingly stolen from them. They feel entitled and deprived—and furious.
These angry young men are the foot soldiers of the armies of rage that
have sprung up around the world.
What’s important to note is that
they are literally the sons. It was their fathers who closed the family
store, who lost the family farm. Some are men who have worked all their
adult lives, hoping to pass on the family farm to their sons and retire
comfortably. They believed that if they worked hard, their legacy would
be ensured, but they leave their sons little but a legacy of
foreclosures, economic insecurity, and debt.
It was their status
next to their father’s and grandfather’s names on the cabinetmaking
storefront that said “Jones and Sons.” These were businesses that came
not only with the ability to make a living, but came with dignity, with a
sense of craft pride, a sense that you owned your own store or farm,
owned and controlled your own labor—even employed some other people—and
that this economic autonomy had been a source of great pride in the
family for generations. In a near-throwaway footnote in his classic
study of identity development, “Childhood and Society” (1950), Erik
Erikson locates the origins of young men’s anger in a multigenerational
story:
In psychoanalytic patients the overwhelming
importance of the grandfather is often apparent. He may have been a
blacksmith of the old world or a railroad builder of the new, and as yet
proud Jew or an unreconstructed Southerner. What these grandfathers
have in common is that fact that they were the last representatives of a
more homogeneous world, masterly and cruel with good conscience,
disciplined and pious without loss of self-esteem. Their world invented
bigger and better machinery like gigantic playthings which were not
expected to challenge the social values of the men who made them. Their
mastery persists in their grandsons as a stubborn, an angry sense of
superiority. Overtly inhibited, they yet can accept others only on terms
of prearranged privilege.
“It wasn’t my daddy’s
farm,” said Andy, “it was my granddaddy’s, and his daddy’s, and his
daddy’s. Five generations of Hoosier farmers.” Generations of Hoosier
men, who worked the farm, supported a family, made a living with
dignity. They proved their masculinity in that most time-honored way in
America: as family providers. And it was their fathers who lost it all,
squandered their birthright. Instead of getting angry at their fathers,
Andy and his comrades claim the mantle of the grandfathers, displace
their rage outward, onto an impermeable and unfeeling government
bureaucracy that didn’t offer help, onto soulless corporations that
squeezed them mercilessly. By displacing their anger onto those enormous
faceless entities, the sons justify their political rage and rescue
their own fathers from their anger.
Some can’t do it. Some of the
sons—and the fathers—turn their rage inward. We have already discussed
the wave of suicides that rippled across the American heartland in the
1980s and 1990s—spawning widespread concern and a series of Farm Aid
concerts to raise awareness. The number of suicides in America’s Midwest
was higher in the 1990s than during the Great Depression; suicide was
the leading cause of agricultural fatalities for two decades—by far. Men
were five times more likely to kill themselves than die by accident.
“To fail several generations of relatives (both backwards and forwards
into those unborn descendants who will now not be able to farm), to see
yourself as the one weak link in a strong chain that spans more than a
century, is a terrible, and for some, an unbearable burden,” writes Osha
Gray Davidson. “When a fellow in a steel mill loses his job, he has
basically lost his paycheck,” a physician at the University of Iowa
explained. “When an Iowa farmer loses his farm, he’s lost the guts of
his life.”
One woman, speaking at a town meeting in Tonkawa, Oklahoma, in 1991, provided an eloquent narrative of this process:
I
am a 46-year-old mother of three children. We have lost two farms since
1980, my mother in law’s farm as well as our own. We were forced to
sell 160 acres of land that was very special to us. It was homesteaded
by my husband’s great grandfather and for years had served as home to
our cow and calf operation which we were forced to sell just a few
months before we sold the land.
My husband became completely
consumed by our circumstances caused by the farm crisis. He left me. Our
family continued to deteriorate and our marriage ended in divorce. We
had been through natural crises before—drought, flood, crop
failure—these we accepted and went on.
But when the threat of
losing everything comes to your doorstep because of the bad economy, low
commodity prices and high interest on your base notes has left you
hopelessly in debt, your faith is sometimes shaken. No one likes to
consider that their life has been pointless.
Others
direct this seething rage outward. “Many debt ridden farm families will
become more suspicious of government, as their self-worth, their sense
of belonging, their hope for the future deteriorates,” predicted
Oklahoma psychologist Glen Wallace presciently in 1989. “The farms are
gone,” writes Dyer, “yet the farmers remain. They’ve been transformed
into a wildfire of rage, fueled by the grief of their loss and blown by
the winds of conspiracy and hate-filled rhetoric.” “It is hardly
surprising, then, that American men—lacking confidence in the government
and the economy, troubled by the changing relations between the sexes,
uncertain of their identity or their future—began to
dream, to
fantasize about the powers and features of another kind of man who could
retake and reorder the world. And the hero of all these dreams was the
paramilitary warrior.” The contemporary white supremacist movement is
the embodiment of these warrior dreams.
Their plan is to get even.
Unlike Joe Wesbecker, some guys don’t just get even by rampaging
through their factory floor or their corporate offices, shooting at
their former colleagues and coworkers. They get mad, and they get
organized. They cobble together a theory that explains their
plight—grafting together fringe elements of evangelical Christianity,
traditional anti-Semitism and racism, and general right-wing paranoia
into an amalgam that is loosely held together by a nostalgic vision of
hardy, independent frontier manhood. Like the guys who go postal, they
externalize their rage—their anguish is clearly the fault of someone
else—but they don’t externalize it to their immediate surroundings,
their boss, supervisor, or coworkers. Instead, it’s larger, more
powerful, and pernicious social forces—Jews, Muslims, minorities
generally, women.
These are the sons of small-town America, the
Jeffersonian yeoman of the nineteenth century, disfigured by global
restructuring and economic downturns. They come from the “large and
growing number of US citizens disaffected from and alienated by a
government that seems indifferent, if not hostile, to their interests.
This predominantly white, male, and middle-and working-class sector has
been buffeted by global economic restructuring with its attendant job
losses, declining real wages, and social dislocations. While under
economic stress, this sector has also seen its traditional privileges
and status challenged by 1960s-style social movements, such as feminism,
minority rights, and environmentalism.”
The sons of these farmers
and shopkeepers expected to—and felt entitled to—inherit their fathers’
legacy. And when it became evident it was not going to happen, they
became murderously angry—at a system that emasculated their fathers and
threatens their manhood. They live in what they call a “Walmart economy”
and are governed by a “nanny state” that doles out their birthright to
ungrateful and undeserving immigrants. What they want, says one guy, is
to “take back what is rightfully ours.”
*
So, who are they
really, these hundred thousand white supremacists? They’re every white
guy who believed that this land was his land, was made for you and me.
They’re every down-on-his-luck guy who just wanted to live a decent life
but got stepped on, every character in a Bruce Springsteen or Merle
Haggard song, every cop, soldier, auto mechanic, steelworker, and
construction worker in America’s small towns who can’t make ends meet
and wonders why everyone else is getting a break except him. But instead
of becoming Tom Joad, a left-leaning populist, they take a hard right
turn, ultimately supporting the very people who have dispossessed them.
They’re
America’s Everymen, whose pain at downward mobility and whose anger at
what they see as an indifferent government have become twisted by a hate
that tells them they are better than others, disfigured by a resentment
so deep that there are no more bridges to be built, no more ladders of
upward mobility to be climbed, a howl of pain mangled into the scream of
a warrior. Their rage is as sad as it is frightening, as impotent as it
is shrill.
WALKING THE PATRIOTIC CAPITALIST TIGHTROPE
You
might think that the political ideology of the white supremacist
movement is as simple as their list of enemies: put down minorities,
expel immigrants, push the women out of the workplace, and round up and
execute the gays and the Jews. But it’s not nearly so simple. Actually,
they have to navigate some treacherous ideological waters and reconcile
seemingly contradictory ideological visions with their emotions.
There
are three parts to their ideological vision. For one thing, they are
ferociously procapitalist. They are firm believers in the free market
and free enterprise. They just don’t like what it’s brought. They like
capitalism; they just hate corporations. They identify, often, as the
vast middle class of office workers and white-collar employees, even
though that is hardly their class background. (They’ve a fungible
understanding of class warfare.) “For generations, white middle class
men defined themselves by their careers, believing that loyalty to
employers would be rewarded by job security and, therefore, the ability
to provide for their families” is the way one issue of Racial Loyalty (a
racist skinhead magazine) puts it. “But the past decade—marked by an
epidemic of takeovers, mergers, downsizings and consolidations—has
shattered that illusion.”
Aryans support capitalist enterprise and
entrepreneurship, even those who make it rich, but especially the
virtues of the small proprietor, but are vehemently antiurban,
anticosmopolitan, and anticorporate. In their eyes, Wall Street is ruled
by Jewish-influenced corporate plutocrats who hate “real” Americans.
Theirs is the Jeffersonian vision of a nation of
producers—not
financiers, not bankers, and not those other “masters of the universe”
whose entire careers consist of cutting the cake ever more finely and
living on the crumbs. It’s Andrew Jackson’s producerist attack on the
“parasitic” bankers. It is “the desire to own small property, to produce
crops and foodstuffs, to control local affairs, to be served but never
coerced by a representative government, and to have traditional ways of
life and labor respected,” writes historian Catherine Stock.
White
supremacists see themselves as squeezed between global capital and an
emasculated state that supports voracious global profiteering. In the
song “No Crime Being White,” Day of the Sword, a popular racist skinhead
band, confronts the greedy class:
The birthplace is the death of our race.
Our brothers being laid off is a truth we have to face.
Take my job, it’s equal opportunity
The least I can do, you were so oppressed by me
I’ve only put in twenty years now.
Suddenly my country favors gooks and spicks and queers.
Fuck you, then, boy I hope you’re happy when your new employees are the reason why your business ends.
Second,
the extreme Right is extremely patriotic. They love their country,
their flag, and everything it stands for. These are the guys who get
teary at the playing of the national anthem, who choke up when they hear
the word America. They have bumper stickers on their pick ups that show
the flag with the slogan “These colors don’t run.”
The problem is
that the America they love doesn’t happen to be the America in which
they live. They love America—but they hate its government. They believe
that the government has become so un-American that it has joined in
global institutions that undermine and threaten the American way of
life. Many fuse critiques of international organizations such as the
United Nations with protectionism and neoisolationism, arguing that all
internationalisms are part of a larger Zionist conspiracy. Some embrace a
grand imperial vision of American (and other Aryan) domination and the
final subjugation of “inferior races.”
As he traveled through the
rural West, journalist Joel Dyer constantly heard these refrains:
“Environmentalists wouldn’t let me run my cows cause some damn little
sparrow they said was endangered lived on my place,” “They took my
farm,” “The IRS took everything I owned.” “These people believe the
government is responsible for where they are, because they are finding
themselves ignored, basically, by the economic system. People are losing
their homes, their farms, their jobs, their sources of income.
Corporations have been allowed to move wherever they want, and to take
away jobs by the truckload. People are becoming economically
dispossessed.”
NAFTA took away American jobs; what they see as the
“Burger King” economy leaves no room at the top, so “many youngsters
see themselves as being forced to compete with nonwhites for the
available minimum wage, service economy jobs that have replaced their
parents’ unionized industry opportunities.”
That such ardent
patriots are so passionately antigovernment might strike the observer as
contradictory. After all, are these not the same men who served their
country in Vietnam or in the Gulf War? Are these not the same men who
believe so passionately in the American Dream? Are they not the backbone
of the Reagan Revolution? Indeed, they are. The extreme Right faces the
difficult cognitive task of maintaining their faith in America and in
capitalism and simultaneously providing an analysis of an indifferent
state, at best, or an actively interventionist one, at worst, and a way
to embrace capitalism, despite a cynical corporate logic that leaves
them, often literally, out in the cold—homeless, jobless, hopeless.
Finally,
they believe themselves to be the true heirs of the real America. They
are the ones who are entitled to inherit the bounty of the American
system. It’s their birthright—as native-born, white American men. As
sociologist Lillian Rubin puts it, “It’s this confluence of forces—the
racial and cultural diversity of our new immigrant population; the
claims on the resources of the nation now being made by those minorities
who, for generations, have called America their home; the failure of
some of our basic institutions to serve the needs of our people; the
contracting economy, which threatens the mobility aspirations of working
class families—all these have come together to leave white workers
feeling as if everyone else is getting a piece of the action while they
get nothing.”
This persistent reversal—white men as victim, the
“other” as undeservedly privileged—resounds through the rhetoric of the
extreme Right. Take, for example, Pat Buchanan’s “A Brief for Whitey,” a
response to candidate Barack Obama’s call for a national conversation
about race in America: “It is the same old con, the same old shakedown.
America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here
that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into
a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and
reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever
known.”
And now, I suppose, Buchanan would say,
we’re supposed to apologize to
them? Pay
them
reparations? They should be kissing our feet with gratitude! But no. We
live in a fun-house version of America, Buchanan argues, where
minorities rule and white folks are the new oppressed minority. It was
ours, but it’s not anymore. It has been taken—because we let it! And the
fact that it has been stolen from us leaves white American men feeling
emasculated—and furious.
It is through a decidedly gendered and
sexualized rhetoric of masculinity that this contradiction between
loving America and hating its government, loving capitalism and hating
its corporate iterations, is resolved. Racism, nativism, anti-Semitism,
antifeminism—these discourses of hate provide an explanation for the
feelings of entitlement thwarted, fixing the blame squarely on “others”
whom the state must now serve at the expense of white men. The unifying
theme is gender.
These men feel emasculated by big money and big
government. In their eyes, most white American men collude in their
emasculation. They’ve grown soft, feminized, weak. White supremacist
websites abound with complaints about the “whimpering collapse of the
blond male,” the “legions of sissies and weaklings, of flabby,
limp-wristed, non-aggressive, non-physical, indecisive, slack-jawed,
fearful males who, while still heterosexual in theory and practice, have
not even a vestige of the old macho spirit.”
Excerpted from “Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era” by
Michael Kimmel. Published by Nation Books, a member of the Perseus
Books Group. Copyright © 2013 by Michael Kimmel. All rights reserved.
