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October 12 - October 14, 2024
falsehoods predating the Trump administration by years, decades, even centuries: that America belongs to white people; that the BIPOC struggle for liberation is terrorism; that progressive politics are a vise tightening around individual freedom; that patriotism sometimes means sacrificing democratic norms on the altar of nationalism.
Trumpism prioritizes white needs and wants over collective well-being, and white feeling over hard fact. Permissive of white bigotry and cruelty, it forces a narrow vision of America onto policy-making and storytelling.
White nationalists make explicit ideas that are already coded, veiled, or circumscribed in the wider white imagination. Hate is what many white Americans would see if they looked in a fun-house mirror: a distorted but familiar reflection.
White supremacy lurks in mediocrity and civility as much as it fuels slurs and violence. It conceals itself in the false promises of Christian kindness, race blindness, and e pluribus unum.
On November 3, the day before the Iran hostage crisis overtook headlines, a group of white supremacists attacked an antiracism event organized by members of the Communist Workers’ Party in Greensboro, North Carolina. Four white men and a black woman were shot and killed. The perpetrators were acquitted in both state and federal court. Among them were neo-Nazis and Klan members who found common cause in their opposition to liberal politics—“distinctions among white power factions melted away,” writes historian Kathleen Belew, and “anti-communism was used as an alibi for racism.”18 The alibi
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the September 11 attacks, two endless foreign wars, the financial crisis, the election of a black president, rising immigration, Trump’s populist candidacy—the digital revolution heralded white nationalism’s next groundswell. National unease, for reasons both real and imagined, was rampant. Recoil was all but inevitable. And women were likely to be on the front lines.
Hate can be understood as a social bond, a complex phenomenon that occurs among people as a means of mattering and belonging.
Researchers have described the “underlying force” of extremism as “the basic human desire to matter and have meaning in one’s life.” They call this “the quest for personal significance,” and there are three main parts: need, narrative, and network.
In November 2009, she traveled with fellow neo-Nazis to Phoenix, Arizona, for a rally demanding the protection of U.S. borders—the group wanted the government to halt the immigration of anyone who wasn’t white and expel people already in America who weren’t white. The NSM dubbed the Phoenix rally “America First,” a slogan that, in the early twentieth century, had been used by isolationist politicians and the Klan; Donald Trump would later invoke it in his race to the White House.
Talking about bigotry as a matter of degrees and justifying it by way of comparison is for the benefit of the people doing it.
A study described in a 2009 book found that young girls “quickly learn to smile, work quietly, be neat, defer to boys, and speak only when spoken to.”4 The effect cultivates benevolent sexism, as women are pigeonholed as pleasing, civilizing, and selfless forces. They are told to absorb misogyny without complaint, and they are often policed and punished when they don’t.
With its blind nativism and hero worship, Trumpism had tapped into the notion that there was one people worthier than others—in this case, white Americans who supported the president.
Meanwhile, women who opposed suffrage tended to be married, wealthy, and white. In the north, these women were often located in cities and already engaged in civic or charitable activities; they viewed voting as unnecessary for their ambitions and well-being. In the south, female opponents tended to be upper-class women who, in the wake of the Civil War, were anxious about further disruption to the racial and social order that might diminish their position.
Women’s political participation was crucial to the perpetuation of white supremacy. During the peak years of the ERA debate, surveys found that opponents of the amendment were significantly influenced by their religious and cultural networks—regular attendance at church, for instance, exposed them to “traditional images of women and the family” and also made “them especially available for mobilization.”
Since the demise of the ERA, white women have often challenged egalitarianism or opposed its champions. A majority of white women haven’t voted for a Democratic presidential nominee since 1996—and before that, the last time they had done so was 1964.20
In 2017, more than 60 percent of white women in Alabama voted for Roy Moore for the U.S. Senate, despite the Republican candidate being accused of sexual assault and misconduct with teenage girls.
political analyst Alexis Grenell wrote in a 2018 New York Times op-ed, that “the gender gap in politics is really a color line.”
Author bell hooks once described feminism as “a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression.” Choice feminism isn’t that: It’s the belief that every decision has equal value so long as a woman makes it.
Choice feminism flattens or obscures the complex factors that curate and curtail women’s existences: sexism, racism, occupational segregation, late-stage capitalism, economic inequality, and more. It seeks instead to make women feel empowered by will alone, a simple and intoxicating notion. In practice, choice feminism is too often about safeguarding privilege under the guise of individual liberty.
You can be a choice feminist if you buy into systems of oppression or oppose them—if you want to expand social benefits or slash them, if you’re a protester outside an abortion clinic or a volunteer ushering patients in the door, if you’re building a corporate empire on the backs of underpaid employees or an advocate for a fifteen-dollar-an-hour minimum wage.
Tradwives and white nationalists share core objectives (more babies), myths (America’s moral decline), and iconography (happy heterosexual families).
The modern evangelical movement has racist roots. The Southern Baptist Convention was founded in the 1800s by people who defended slavery as a matter of faith.
Mainstream conservative Christians and the far right shared antifeminist, homophobic, and other intolerant beliefs; the ideological intersections could be gateways. Mothers, meanwhile, were a shared object of reverence.
When alt-right proponents wanted to suggest that they had strength in numbers, they could point to all the people agreeing with them on the internet. When they wanted to distance themselves from someone—a murderer, say—they could suggest the person wasn’t really alt-right. They’d never met him, or chatted with him, or seen him at a conference. They washed their hands of responsibility for the online ecosystem that nurtured violence.
Everyone has “the potential for resisting false ideas,” a trio of researchers note in a paper about Spinoza’s theory, “but this potential can only be realized when the person has (a) logical ability, (b) correct information, and (c) motivation and cognitive resources.”
Research shows that people become more credulous of an idea the more times they encounter it. In what’s known as the illusory truth effect, people are more likely to perceive statements that they’ve encountered on multiple occasions as true even if they already know the statements are false.
UDC-approved textbooks were used widely until the 1970s, and not only in the South. Generations of Americans were denied an accurate education about the Civil War.
The further from reality someone’s belief is, the less likely they are to course correct.
People embrace conspiracism for the same reasons they find God or start reading the future in the stars: They’ve experienced anxiety, ostracism, or a sense of losing control. They are seeking stories to explain what’s happening. Narratives become sources of power, validation, even superiority.
If anxiety is conspiracy theories’ fuel, technology is their propulsion.
Trump has floated numerous right-wing conspiracy theories online and in public appearances. “A lot of people are saying” is a typical lead-in to whatever unfounded notion the president is promoting.
Early in his presidential campaign, Trump began pulling this material into the spotlight. He retweeted the account @WhiteGenocideTM and shared an infographic with fake statistics about black criminality; researchers traced it back to a now-defunct Twitter account with the bio “We should have listened to that Austrian chap with the little mustache.”
While writing the book, I thought often of a comment I read on YouTube, left beneath a far-right video by a supportive viewer: No need to talk to any media ever. We are our own media now.
the mere existence of the Trump administration is evidence of the political salience of explicit appeals to white interests. The idea that white nationalism is going anywhere, much less anytime soon, is wishful thinking.
Magnifying my gloom were encounters with white people who identified as moderate or liberal who made statements that I recognized as precisely the kind of bait white nationalists use to make their case to the mainstream.
