White nationalism in the United States

The history of white nationalism in the United States traces to the country's largely European demographic origins and its troubled race relations. The phenomenon is hard to fully separate from white supremacy and other non-nationalistic ideas.^[1]

The Naturalization Act of 1790 (1 Stat. 103) provided the first rules to be followed by the United States government in granting national citizenship. This law limited naturalization to immigrants who were "free white persons" of "good moral character." In 1856, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the Dred Scott v. Sandford decision that free blacks descended from slaves could not hold United States citizenship even if they had been born in the country.^[2]

In a 4 January 1848 speech to the Senate regarding the issue of whether or not to annex the entirety of Mexico after the Mexican-American war, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina said, "I know further, sir, that we have never dreamt of incorporating into our Union any but the Caucasian race—the free white race. To incorporate Mexico, would be the very first instance of the kind of incorporating an Indian race; for more than half of the Mexicans are Indians, and the other is composed chiefly of mixed tribes. I protest against such a union as that! Ours, sir, is the Government of a white race."^[3]

Major changes to this racial requirement for US citizenship did not occur until the years following the American Civil War. In 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was passed to grant birthright citizenship to black people born in the US, but it specifically excluded untaxed Indians, because they were separate nations. However, citizenship for other non-whites born in the US was not settled until 1898 with United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649, which concluded with an important precedent in its interpretation of the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. This racial definition of American citizenship has had consequences for perceptions of American identity.^[4]

Following the defeat of the Confederate States of America and the abolition of slavery in the United States at the end of the American Civil War, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) was founded as an insurgent group with the goal of maintaining the Southern racial system throughout the Reconstruction Era. The creation of this group was able to instill fear in African Americans while, in some cases, filling white Americans with pride in their race and reassurance in the fact that they will stay 'on top'. The message they gave to people around them was that, even though the Confederate States did not exist anymore, the same principle remained in their minds: whites were superior. Although the first incarnation of the KKK was focused on maintaining the Antebellum South, its second incarnation in the 1915-1940s period was much more oriented towards white nationalism and American nativism, with slogans such as "One Hundred Percent Americanism" and "America for Americans", in which "Americans" were understood to be white and Protestant. The 1915 film The Birth of a Nation is an example of an allegorical invocation of white nationalism during this time, and its positive portrayal of the first KKK is considered to be one of the factors which led to the emergence of the second KKK.^[5]

The second KKK was founded in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1915 and, starting in 1921, it adopted a modern business system of recruiting. The organization grew rapidly nationwide at a time of prosperity. Reflecting the social tensions of urban industrialization and vastly increased immigration, its membership grew most rapidly in cities and spread out of the South to the Midwest and West. The second KKK called for strict morality and better enforcement of prohibition. Its rhetoric promoted anti-Catholicism and nativism.^[6] Some local groups took part in attacks on private houses and carried out other violent activities. The violent episodes were generally in the South.^[7]

The second KKK was a formal fraternal organization, with a national and state structure. At its peak in the mid-1920s, the organization claimed to include about 15% of the nation's eligible population, approximately 4 to 5 million men. Internal divisions, criminal behavior by leaders, and external opposition brought about a collapse in membership, which had dropped to about 30,000 by 1930. It faded away in the 1940s.^[8]

Starting in the 1960s, white nationalism grew in the US as the conservative movement developed in mainstream society.^[9] Samuel P. Huntington argues that it developed as a reaction to a perceived decline in the essence of American identity as European, Anglo-Protestant and English-speaking.^[10] The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 had opened entry to the US to immigrants other than traditional Northern European and Germanic groups, and as a result it would significantly, and unintentionally, alter the demographic mix in the US.^[11] The civil rights movement and growing support for multiculturalism would also be contributing factors.^[12]

The slogan "white power" was popularized by American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell, who used the term in a debate with Stokely Carmichael of the Black Panther Party after Carmichael issued a call for "black power".^[13] Rockwell advocated a return to white control of all American institutions, and violently opposed any minority advancement. He rejected the Nazi idea of "master race", however, and accepted all white European nationalities in his ideology, including Turks.^[14]

One influential white nationalist in the United States was William Luther Pierce, who founded the National Alliance in 1974.^[15]

In the United States a movement calling for white separatism emerged in the 1980s.^[16] Leonard Zeskind has chronicled the movement in his book Blood and Politics, in which he argues that it has moved from the "margins to the mainstream".^[17]

The 2008 election of Barack Obama, constituting the first time that a nonwhite person had become President, heightened white nationalist fears. His time in office was followed by the first election of Donald Trump in 2016.^[19]

In the 2010s, the alt-right, a broad term covering many different far-right ideologies and groups in the United States, some of which endorse white nationalism, gained traction as an alternative to mainstream conservatism in its national politics.^[20]

In 2019, the Democratic-led U.S. House of Representatives passed an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2020 to study whether it would be possible to screen military enlistees for "white nationalist" beliefs. However, the Republican-controlled U.S. Senate eliminated those words before passing the bill, expanding the wording to "extremist and gang-related activity", rather than specifically referencing white nationalism.^[21]

Reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic were conditioned by the level of white Christian nationalist sentiment among Americans, with those who leaned more in this direction seeing the consequences of the pandemic through a more xenophobic and victim-blaming lens.^[22]

In the leadup to the second presidency of Donald Trump, a YouGov poll showed that 44% of Americans believed that he personally supports white nationalism.^[23] Amnesty International USA proclaimed Trump's first week in office as a rollout of white supremacist policies.^[24]

In 2016, the American National Election Studies survey conducted during Donald Trump's campaign for the presidency found that 38% of Americans expressed "strong feelings of white solidarity", 28% "strong feelings of white identity", 27% that whites suffer from discrimination in American society, while 6% agree with all these propositions.^[25]

In a July 2021 Morning Consult Poll found that among Republican-leaning male voters, 23 percent responded that they have a favorable view of white nationalist groups. Eleven percent of Republican men surveyed said they have a "very favorable" view while 12 percent said they are only "somewhat", With Democratic men it was 17 percent who said they have some form of "favorable" view of white nationalist groups.^[26]

Also in 2021, a poll found that in the state of Oregon, nearly four in 10 respondents strongly or somewhat agree with statements that reflect core arguments of white nationalism. In 2018, 31 percent believed that America had to protect or preserve its White European heritage, while in 2021 it went up to 40 percent.^[27]

In 2020, it was reported that white nationalist groups leaving flyers, stickers, banners and posters in public places more than doubled from 1,214 in 2018 to 2,713 in 2019.^[28][29][30]

According to journalist David D. Kirkpatrick, as of mid-2024, scholars of the far right estimate that 100,000 Americans "actively participate in organized white nationalist groups".^[31]

White nationalists are opposed to the coming mid-21st century majority-minority status of the United States.^[32][33]

During the 1980s the United States saw an increase in the number of esoteric subcultures within white nationalism. According to Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, these movements cover a wide variety of mutually influencing groups of a radically ethnocentric character which have emerged, especially in the English-speaking world, since World War II. These loose networks use a variety of mystical, occult or religious approaches in a defensive affirmation of white identity against modernity, liberalism, immigration, multiracialism, and multiculturalism.^[36] Some are neo-fascist, neo-Nazi or Third Positionist; others are politicised around some form of white ethnic nationalism or identity politics,^[36] and a few have national anarchist tendencies. One example is the neo-tribalist paganism promoted by Else Christensen's Odinist Fellowship.^[37] Especially notable is the prevalence of devotional forms and esoteric themes, so these subcultures often have the character of new religious movements.

Included under the same umbrella by Goodrick-Clarke are movements ranging from conservative revolutionary schools of thought (Nouvelle Droite, European New Right, Evolian Traditionalism) to white supremacist and white separatist interpretations of Christianity and paganism (Christian Identity, Creativity, Nordic racial paganism) to neo-Nazi subcultures (Esoteric Hitlerism, Nazi Satanism, National Socialist black metal).

North Idaho state Rep. Heather Scott—who in 2015 had paraded with a Confederate battle flag^[38]—in 2017 attempted to distinguish "white supremacy" from "white nationalism", claiming that the former was characterized by "extreme racism" and "violent acts" while the latter was merely nationalism by people who happen to be white, i.e. in her personal use of the term, a white nationalist is "no more than a Caucasian who [sic] for the Constitution and making America great again." Scott's interpretation of the term was rejected as "incorrect" by University of Idaho sociology professor Kristin Haltinner and as "patently false" by Vanderbilt University sociology professor Sophie Bjork-James.^[39]

While white nationalism prizes demographic dominance and societal power, some of its supporters are attracted simply because they seek to reverse cultural change in society.^[12]

Historically, white nationalists have pushed for the creation of Confederate monuments to push back at times of racial progress, such as Reconstruction and the civil rights movement.^[19]

In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks in 2001, white nationalism became more prevalent in popular culture and government-sanctioned culture.^[40][41] The comic book super hero Captain America, in an ironic co-optation, has been used for dog whistle politics by the alt-right in college campus recruitment in 2017.^[42][43]

White nationalism has also been found in other cultural movements, such as punk rock and the wellness movement.^[44]

People of color have been found to be concerned about Christian nationalism and its ties to white supremacy.^[45] A few of them support white nationalism and supremacy due to complicated historical factors such as colonialism, as well as the need to maintain their societal status in the modern day.^[46]

White nationalism became more intense among Southerners after the Civil War due to the conflict with the North and its relation to emancipating the slaves. Thomas Jefferson, the third President, once wrote on the subject of post-slavery white-black relations that "[d]eep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites" and "ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained" would make coexistence impossible.^[47][48]

In February 1962 George Lincoln Rockwell, the leader of the American Nazi Party, spoke at a Nation of Islam (NOI) rally in Chicago, where he was applauded by Elijah Muhammad as he pronounced: "I am proud to stand here before black men. I believe Elijah Muhammed is the Adolf Hitler of the black man!"^[49] Rockwell had attended, but did not speak at, an earlier NOI rally in Washington, D.C., in June 1961,^[50] and once, he even donated $20 to the NOI.^[51] In 1965, after breaking with the Nation of Islam and denouncing its separatist doctrine, Malcolm X told his followers that the Nation of Islam under Elijah Muhammad had made secret agreements with the American Nazi Party and the Ku Klux Klan.^[50]

Rockwell and other white supremacists (e.g. Willis Carto) also supported less well-known black separatist groups, such as Hassan Jeru-Ahmed's Blackman's Army of Liberation, in reference to which Rockwell told Los Angeles Times reporter Michael Drosnin in 1967 that if "Any Negro wants to go back to Africa, I'll carry him piggy-back."^[52]

Tom Metzger, a former Ku Klux Klan leader from California, spoke at a NOI rally in Los Angeles in September 1985 and donated $100 to the group.^[53] In October of that same year, over 200 prominent white supremacists met at former Klan leader Robert E. Miles's farm to discuss an alliance with Louis Farrakhan, head of the NOI.^[51] In attendance were Edward Reed Fields of the National States' Rights Party, Richard Girnt Butler of the Aryan Nations, Don Black, Roy Frankhouser, and Metzger, who said that "America is like a rotting carcass. The Jews are living off the carcass like the parasites they are. Farrakhan understands this."^[51]

In response to the success of Asian-heritage people in the tech industry (where they constitute many of the CEOs), Steve Bannon, a former advisor to Trump, argued: "A country is more than an economy. We're a civic society."^[12]

Some conservative Asian Americans have been argued to be complicit with white nationalism in the sense of acting against other minority groups' advancement and needs.^[54]

A few Hispanics have become attracted to white nationalism, due to their own significant white ancestry and discrimination against other groups.^[55]

Though Middle Eastern-origin peoples have been legally classified as white, they face racial prejudice and Islamophobia regardless, with some campaigning to include Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) Americans as a separate category in the census.^[56][57]

A 2020 survey of MENA showed that they considered white nationalism to be the biggest threat facing the United States.^[58]

Historically, several indigenous nations were absorbed into the United States by white settlers.^[59] In the modern day, some white nationalists oppose the sovereignty or autonomy of these peoples through legal means.^[60] Other white nationalists argue that akin to indigenous people, they also have the right to oppose modern-day immigration and invasion.^[61]

At the turn of the 20th century, a wave of European immigration challenged white American demographics as understood at the time, because the new arrivals came from regions that had not historically been part of the nation's ethnic stock. While some white people supported an expansion of the white demographic through the melting pot mechanism, others aimed to purify American whiteness by bringing previously discriminated-against American groups such as the mountain peoples of Appalachia into the mainstream.^[62] During the era of the KKK, several opponents of white nationalism fought for racial justice.^[63]

In the early 21st century, a greater level of white support for racial equality has contended with a rising white nationalist movement, producing greater frictions.^[64]

From the outset of his campaign, Donald Trump was endorsed by various white nationalist and white supremacist movements and leaders,^[65][66] (who were attracted to his accusation that Barack Obama was born in Africa, his denigration of immigrants as "criminals and rapists", of "shithole countries" in Africa and the Caribbean, and more recently that there is "a definite anti-white feeling" in the United States that he would correct, according to journalist David D. Kirkpatrick).^[31] On 24 February 2016, David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon, expressed vocal support for Trump's campaign on his radio show.^{[67][68][69][70]} Shortly thereafter in an interview with Jake Tapper, Trump repeatedly claimed to be ignorant of Duke and his support. Republican presidential rivals were quick to respond on his wavering, and Senator Marco Rubio stated the Duke endorsement made Trump unelectable.^[71] Others questioned his professed ignorance of Duke by pointing out that in 2000, Trump called him a "Klansman".^[72][73] Trump later blamed the incident on a poor earpiece he was given by CNN. Later the same day Trump stated that he had previously disavowed Duke in a tweet posted with a video on his Twitter account.^[74] On 3 March 2016, Trump stated: "David Duke is a bad person, who I disavowed on numerous occasions over the years. I disavowed him. I disavowed the KKK."^[75]

On 22 July 2016 (the day after Trump's nomination), Duke announced that he will be a candidate for the Republican nomination for the United States Senate election in Louisiana. He commented, "I'm overjoyed to see Donald Trump and most Americans embrace most of the issues that I've championed for years." A spokesperson for the Trump campaign said Trump "has disavowed David Duke and will continue to do so."^[76]

On 25 August 2016, Hillary Clinton gave a speech saying that Trump is "taking hate groups mainstream and helping a radical fringe take over the Republican Party."^[77] She identified this radical fringe with the "alt-right", a largely online variation of American far-right that embraces white nationalism and is anti-immigration. During the election season, the alt-right movement "evangelized" online in support of racist and anti-semitic ideologies.^[78] Clinton noted that Trump's campaign chief executive Stephen Bannon described his Breitbart News Network as "the platform for the alt-right".^[77] On 9 September 2016, several leaders of the alt-right community held a press conference, described by one reporter as the "coming-out party" of the little-known movement, to explain their goals.^[79] They affirmed their racialist beliefs, stating "Race is real, race matters, and race is the foundation of identity."^[80] Speakers called for a "White Homeland" and expounded on racial differences in intelligence. They also confirmed their support of Trump, saying "This is what a leader looks like."^[80]

Richard B. Spencer, who ran the white nationalist National Policy Institute, said, "Before Trump, our identity ideas, national ideas, they had no place to go". Spencer also referred to media as "Lügenpresse" in a speech he ended with "Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail victory!" to an audience that responded with Nazi salutes.^[81] The editor of the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer stated, "Virtually every alt-right Nazi I know is volunteering for the Trump campaign."^[82] Rocky Suhayda, chairman of the American Nazi Party said that although Trump "isn't one of us",^[83] his election would be a "real opportunity" for the white nationalist movement.^[84]

The Southern Poverty Law Center monitored Trump's campaign throughout the election and noted several instances where Trump and lower-level surrogates either used white nationalist rhetoric or engaged with figures in the white nationalist movement.^[85]

• American nationalism
• Christian nationalism in the United States