Alt-America looks at the evolution of the far right over the last decade, leading up to its distinct influence on national politics in the 2016 election. The book ends its account in the early days of the Trump Administration. Events involving the Radical Right have continued to influence American politics, as Dave himself recounts in White supremacists have been marching in President Trump’s name. Literally. Washington Post 09/14/2017.
His book takes the reader through a tour of Radical Right groups, individuals and concepts, some of which have unfortunately become far too familiar in American politics. Patriot militias. Three Percenters. Steve Bannon. Gamergate. Oath Keepers. White nationalists. White supremacists. Milo Yiannopoulos. Alt-right. "Cultural Marxism." Richard Spencer. Men's rights activists (MRAs). Alex Jones and Infowars. Neo-Nazis.
But the book is not a collection of encyclopedia entries. It describes the evolution and mutual interactions of what we might a call "diverse" groups of characters and political trends. Because it's important to recognize that the far right is a fractious, quarrelsome bunch. Not just because, like with any political groups with limited resources and influence, there is often not much in the way of prestige or material rewards to hand out to supporters. So competition is intense and rivalries often bitter. It's also because the far right is particularly attractive to those who Dave describes as authoritarians (or rightwing authoritarians, RWAs) and "social dominators," terms he takes from the work of psychologist Robert Altemeyer. (John Dean also draws heavily on Altemeyer's work in his columns and his 2006 book, Conservatives Without Conscience.) RWAs and social dominators are inclined to find a lot of people to hate and to use intimidation and violence to act out their hatreds.
Altemeyer is quoted, "When social dominators are in the driver's seat, and right-wing authoritarians stand at their beck and call, unethical things appear much more likely to happen. True, sufficiently skilled social dominators served by dedicated followers can make the trains run on time. But you have to worry about what the trains may be hauling when dominators call the shots and high RWAs do the shooting." These are not people who put playing well with others as a high priority.
Here's a very recent example: White Lives Matter rally sparks infighting among white nationalists KSDK (St. Louis) 10/31/2017.
The "diversity" of these groups can also be misleading. The notorious segregationist Citizens Council (aka, White Citizens Council) was re-founded as the Council for Conservative Citizens (CCC), as recounted in the book. But most people would have a hard time distinguishing the ideology of the present-day CCC from its predecessor. Different branding or labeling doesn't always mean a difference in the "product," which in this case is a set of anti-democratic political ideas. And the John Birch Society, formed in the 1950s and until fairly recently the mothership of rightwing conspiracy theories, still casts a long shadow on the far right.
Dave describes in the book how people who identified with sectarian trends like the "Patriot" militias or "sovereign citizens" or neo-Confederates infiltrated Tea Party groups early after they formed in 2009. (Formed with some well-funded assistance from wealthy Republican donors and a fortune in free publicity from FOX News.) The boundaries between infiltrating, supporting and taking over in groups like this can often be cloudy. And in the process, the difference between deception and tailoring their messages can also be unclear. As he writes of the more recent online incarnations of the Radical Right, "The alt-right's memes and other cultural markers ... can be inscrutable to outsiders, and have served as a kind of secret handshake for alt-right cognoscenti."
For a variety of reasons, the language can also be coded. Something similar happens in cults, and some of the far-right groups can be very cult-like. So when a Three Percenter talks about "liberty," he likely means something different than what most Americans think when they hear the word. Another example comes to mind from the manners of segregation in the South in the 1950s and 1960s, manners which often could be elaborately neurotic. For example, white people who viewed themselves as respectably middle-class considered it rude and low-class to use the n-word. "Nigra" or "colored people" were the more polite terms. Although it was never clear to me whether one of those two was supposed to be marginally more acceptable than the other. However, considering the n-word to be low-class did not mean the people who considered it so were any less committed to maintaining segregation than their "redneck" neighbors.
So among far-right groups, some may be overt advocates of pseudoscientific or religion-based white racism. Others may insist that they are not racist, they are just concerned about the deficiencies of black "culture." Milder examples of this also pop up in things we hear in informal conversation, like when someone starts a sentence with, "Now I'm not a racist, but ..." You know immediately what's coming next is going to be something obnoxiously prejudiced. Sometimes it's hard to tell whether they are using that technique to try to make you think they really aren't racist because they are embarrassed of the label, or whether they are just mocking anyone who might think they aren't.
This has an interesting historical parallel in the Reconstruction period, during the time when Klan terrorism against blacks and white Republicans in the South was particularly intense from 1867 to 1872, violence well-documented in Congressional investigations of the time. But defenders of the Klan, including by northern Democrats hostile to Reconstruction, denied that such groups existed. Elaine Frantz Parsons wrote about this a few years ago. "The idea of the Klan as a fundamental threat to the nation coexisted in tension, throughout the Klan's existence, with the idea that the Klan was simply a product of overheated imagination." (Klan Skepticism and Denial in Reconstruction-Era Public Discourse Journal of Southern History 77:1;Feb 2011)
Today's very bad media habit of coding far-right terrorist acts committed by white perpetrators as the product of "lone nuts" serves a very similar function. Glenn Greenwald flagged a particularly egregious manifestation of this in 2010, Inside the mind of Newsweek on “terrorism” Salon 02/23/2010.Alt-America is especially good at describing this problem and its pernicious effect of leaving the impression that "terrorism" in the US is primarily something perpetrated by Muslims with an Islamist ideology. It's not. It's currently mostly a problem of white, Radical Right terrorists.
And the book illustrates how it requires some effort for law enforcement and the press to ignore white supremacist terrorism. Dylann Roof, who murdered nine African-American participants in a Bible study group in Charleston in 2016 had immersed himself in white-nationalist dogma from sources like the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer website. John Russell Houser shot up a crowd of movie-goers in Lafayette, Louisiana, in 2015, killing two people and wounding nine; he suffered from mental health problems and also identified with white-supremacist and neo-Nazi ideology. The book includes the story of Jerad and Amanda Miller, who in 2014 ambushed and murdered two Las Vegas police officers in a pizza shop. They laid a swastika flag on one of the bodies. The couple later killed another man in a Wal-Mart, where they also died in a shoot-out with police. They had also made a detailed plan to kill public officials in a courthouse. The two had been part of the "defenders" of the Bundy Ranch, where armed civilians faced off with the Bureau of Land Management over rancher Cliven Bundy's illegal misuse of public lands. They left a "manifesto filled with classic anti-New World Order rants."
Dave doesn't focus in particular on Christian Right groups in this book, though Christian dominionism and Christian Identity are persistent influences of the violent Radical Right. Christian Right groups have have been more broadly covered by people like Frederick Clarkson of the Political Research Association, Adele Stan, Sarah Posner and Jeff Sharlet.
While much of the book is devoted to relating the history of the various groups and trends, there are also sections devoted to a more analytical treatment of issues relevant to understanding the Radical Right and how it has successfully mainstreamed many of its ideas. He also provides some insight into how online recruiting for violent rightwing groups functions and how young white guys in particular are drawn into it. Even by targeting players of the Pokéman Go game popular in 2015. The transgressive style of being "politically incorrect" is a big draw. He cites the work of Keegan Hankes of the SPLC, who says, "people are first exposed to alt-right ideas via wildly over-the-top jokes that celebrate Nazis or other kind of ugly behavior designed to attract attention by the craziness."
In the final chapter, he looks at the danger that current trends could lead to a more authoritarian or fascist brand of government in the US via the acceptance of "eliminationist" attitudes toward hated groups, a concern with developing a "pure" community and glorification of violence against the less powerful, and hypernationalism. Unfortunately, these tendencies currently have friends in high places:
Eliminationist rhetoric is the backbone of Trump's appeal. His opening salvo in the campaign - the one that first catapulted him to the forefront in the race, in the polls, and proved wildly popular with Republican voters - was his vow, and subsequent proposed program, to deport all 12 million of the United States' undocumented immigrants (he used the deprecatory term "illegal alien") and to erect a gigantic wall on the nation's southern border. The language he used to justify such plans - labeling those immigrants "criminals," "killers," and "rapists" - is classic rhetoric designed to dehumanize an entire group of people by reducing them to objects fit only for elimination.This book doesn't wade into the current controversy in the Democratic Party over whether economic concerns or racial and gender prejudice are drawing people to radical right politics. He does note that local political swings to voting for Donald Trump in 2016 were heavily correlated with a recent increase in ethnic diversity, particularly with increases in the Latino population. And he notes, "Such demographic shifts related to race and ethnicity have a long history of also being powerful predictors of interracial violence and hate crimes." Which doesn't settle the complex question of the interaction of economic distress with xenophobic, racist or misogynist attitudes. But it is yet another reminder that motivations in political behavior are complex and determined by multiple factors interacting.
Dave encourages people to have actual conversations with people who have different political views, including with people who buy into some far right ideas. "One healing conversation at a time," he thinks can be helpful. But he also provides some useful advice in dealing with fanatics and hardcore haters: "There's really no point in trying to reach out to people who will only return your hand as a bloody stump."
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