Mutated through new information technologies and drawing strength from feelings of economic and demographic dislocation, fascist and sectarian ideologies have found a home in the hearts of members of a new generation of Americans.
Whether most people have connected the dots or not, a violent struggle is already playing out. Over the past few years, a steady drumbeat of massacres have been carried out by extremists associated with the new far-right. These attacks have targeted
synagogues,
mosques, and communities where
immigrants are concentrated. In their wake, the shooters left behind
manifestos damning a world that they claimed was shrinking in space for people like them.
What these ideologues drifting within the currents of this movement have really been waiting for, however, is a real crisis, one that would give them an opportunity to put their ideas of racial warfare and ethnic purification into full effect. That crisis is here.
The combination of the coronavirus and the sudden collapse of the American economy has given society an exogenous shock unseen in generations. The pandemic and the social tensions it has unleashed are likely to supercharge the forces that gave rise to the new far-right extremism, even as they
produce countervailing energies that could revive the best promises of liberalism.
Americans are experiencing levels of unemployment unprecedented in their modern history. According to some estimates,
nearly half of these jobs may never return. At the same time, stunning acts of symbolic cultural transformation are playing out in real time. As statues of polarizing figures tied to America’s European founding come crashing down one after another, often with the support of liberal white Americans, the political project of those on the extremes — particularly white nationalists — is simultaneously jeopardized and emboldened.
On the surface, it seems that events are driving the U.S. in the opposite direction of white nationalist goals and that they will likely taste defeat. But, on the other hand, a structural collapse of American society that fractures it along ethnic lines is the prerequisite for their own dark vision of a society purified by the fires of racial violence.
“One of the things that white nationalists have always been interested in is imposing their own understanding of time: a narrative of what the past looked like and what the future should look like,” said Alexandra Minna Stern, the author of “
Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate: How the Alt-Right is Warping the American Imagination.” “In that sense, the coronavirus and the protests have destabilized time. History is being rewritten and the marginalized are being recognized.”
“For white nationalists, this is a crisis as well as an opportunity,” Stern said. “In their opinion, movements like Black Lives Matter are a form of identity politics par excellence. If it is succeeding and gaining currency, then in their view white racial consciousness might rise as well.”
This is not to equate the Black Lives Matter movement with white nationalists of course. But amid the roiling social changes we are now witnessing, many of them progressive, far-right identitarians also see an opportunity at hand.
IT SHOULD GO without saying that it is a choice to view things from an ethno-nationalist perspective. In the U.S., that choice is today not an obviously popular one. A large proportion — perhaps even the majority of the tens of millions who came out into the streets in the
unprecedented protest movement triggered by the killing of George Floyd — were white Americans. It remains to be seen how long this support will last, but the spontaneous outrage over the murder of an unarmed Black man by a white police officer is noble and encouraging.
However, those white people who are ethno-nationalists — and there are many of them — will likely view these developments much more darkly: as a sign that they are on the verge of being displaced from their privileged historical role in American society, or, even worse, reduced to a marginalized minority. In a country with loose social bonds and easy access to weaponry, it doesn’t take many people thinking that way to do serious harm.
If you peer into the shadows, you can already see the contours of a threat that will be with us for years to come. In early May, a group of men, described by prosecutors as having “U.S. military experience,” were arrested and charged with trying to spark violence as part of a broader plot to cause the collapse of the federal government and trigger a civil war. A number of
shootings and
car-ramming attacks carried out during the recent protests should signal that there are people ready for their most extreme beliefs to reach praxis.
https://theintercept.com/2020/06/19/militia-vigilantes-police-brutality-protests/