White nationalism

White nationalism is a political and an ideological movement espousing the belief that a white national majority should be maintained within a historically white nation. White nationalists embrace ideologies that identify white people as a specific race and seek to inspire a nationalist pride in this race. White nationalism also posits white people as the dominant, superior race and opposes such actions as the immigration of non-whites, multiculturalism, and the general mixing of different racial groups. Some white nationalists believe that these actions will eventually lead to a “white genocide,” a popular conspiracy theory among white nationalist groups that posits the extinction of the white race.

The term white nationalism is often used synonymously with terms such as “white supremacism” and “white separatism.” However, white supremacists focus only on the belief that whites are the superior race while white separatists focus only on the establishment of an all-white ethnostate. White nationalists, on the other hand, combine both beliefs into their ideology, borrowing ideas about race and white pride from philosophies related to Nazism and concepts such as social Darwinism. White nationalism has a deep history within the United States, but the concept exists in many countries around the world. Although the movement denies a penchant for violence, a number of individuals with ties to white nationalism have incited violent incidents over the years.

Background

The origins of white nationalism date back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in America. One of the first organizations in the United States to adhere to white nationalist ideologies was the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), a white supremacist group that terrorized African American communities throughout the late nineteenth century following the abolition of slavery. The KKK hoped to sustain the racist lifestyle of the South and promoted white superiority among its members.

A second iteration of the KKK that emerged around 1915 emphasized a more white nationalist perspective, advocating ideas such as white pride and white power. White nationalist sentiment saw a surge in interest during this period. In 1916, American lawyer and writer Madison Grant published the book The Passing of the Great Race. This text promoted the need for racial purity across the world, arguing through pseudoscientific means that the United States’s “Nordic” white ancestry was under assault as a result of mass immigration. Grant believed that America’s founding Nordic race was responsible for all of western civilization’s greatest accomplishments, and the arrival of immigrants from regions of Southern and Eastern Europe such as Greeks, Armenians, and Jews were endangering continued American success.

Grant borrowed arguments from other espousers of “race science” such as Frenchman Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, who introduced the idea of a superior Aryan white race to the world in his 1848 work An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races. By the dawn of the twentieth century, a scientific movement known as eugenics had emerged in the United States, claiming that controlled breeding would ensure that the country’s descendants would inherit desirable hereditary traits. The eugenics movement primarily argued for the controlled breeding of non-whites, promoting the exceptional qualities of white European races. Eugenics proponents and race scientists put forward a number of poorly constructed arguments for their ideologies, claiming that immigrants were inferior peoples of “beaten races” whose offspring were overwhelmingly genetically inferior to white offspring. During this period, the term “race suicide” was coined. This term refers to the extinction of the white racial group due to an increase in non-white birth rates.

Grant’s book combined ideas about race science, race suicide, eugenics, and a superior white race. The Passing of the Great Race went on to have a ripple effect across the United States, influencing social and political policies throughout the early twentieth century. Multiple prominent politicians praised Grant’s work including former presidents Teddy Roosevelt, Warren Harding, and Calvin Coolidge. Grant also made many friends in Congress and used these connections to push a restricted agenda regarding immigration that influenced the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924. This act limited the number of immigrants who could enter the United States and banned the entrance of several Asian immigrant groups.

American immigration policy was later cited as a major influence of immigration policies in Nazi Germany during its reign between the 1930s and 1940s. The Nazis also studied American laws on citizenship and how the US government had withheld full citizenship rights to non-white people. German politician and Nazi leader Adolf Hitler referred to The Passing of the Great Race as a major source of inspiration for the Nazi’s mission. Hitler’s policies were also influenced by western ideas of eugenics, and the Nazis went on to implement a number of eugenics initiatives during their time in power.

Despite its American roots, Nazism did not find much support in the United States in light of the mass racial violence perpetrated during Nazi rule. The Nazi’s racist agenda was also built upon a fascist government. Although the United States still harbored deeply racist ideologies throughout the country, it aggressively opposed fascism. When World War II broke out, the United States fought against Germany with the Allied forces. The Allies came through victorious and brought an end to Nazism in 1945. In the decades to follow, the United States began to dismantle its own racist policies with laws such as the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the Immigration and Nationality Act.

Overview

Although views regarding race science and eugenics were relegated to the pseudoscientific annals of American history, these ideas never completely died out. In the United States, these ideas eventually blossomed into what would become the white nationalist movement of the twenty-first century. White nationalist seeds were sown in many parts of the country throughout the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, with strongholds existing primarily in southern states. White nationalism cited landmark civil rights legislation such as the Civil Rights Act and the Immigration and Nationality Act as the source of what they believed was the United States’s imminent white dispossession. These groups substituted the term “white genocide” for race suicide, which referred to the belief that white society was undergoing a systematic destruction due to the arrival of non-white immigrants, the spread of multiculturalism, and interracial relations.

White nationalism primarily existed underground for many decades following the civil rights movement before reemerging as an organized group. White nationalism was not exactly one united front as multiple branches of white nationalist groups sprouted up across the country. Remnants of the KKK remained in various parts of the country, although membership had greatly diminished by the late twentieth century. A group known as neo-Nazis emerged in the 1960s, borrowing ideology from Nazi Germany to promote its ethnocentric agenda. An array of white nationalist subcultures emerged in the years to follow.

White nationalism was often associated with far-right politics, which promoted extreme nationalism. Far-right white nationalism was especially popular among Internet users, and in the early 2010s a white nationalist movement known as the alt-right emerged online. This movement primarily exists on the Internet and promotes white nationalist principles via Internet humor and content such as memes. Far-right white nationalist groups, particularly those with alt-right tendencies, have been connected to a series of violent events throughout the 2010s including murder, mass shootings, and terrorist attacks. As of 2019, the Southern Poverty Law Center has listed more than 140 hate groups associated with white nationalism.

Broadly speaking, white nationalism promotes the creation of an all-white ethnostate, limiting their definition of whiteness to a select few European ancestries. White victimhood is a major theme within the white nationalist movement. White nationalists believe that the white race is under siege by people looking to establish a new multicultural order. They distrust mainstream media and academia, which they believe promote anti-white sentiments, as well as most politicians and established economic systems. White nationalists are often openly hostile to the immigrant community and denounce them as job-stealers and drivers of low wages.

White nationalists routinely cite dated texts in race science and eugenics when making arguments for their movement. The movement often quotes articles promoted by an organization known as American Renaissance, a think tank that disseminates pseudo-scientific studies and research regarding black criminality, eugenics, and scientific racism. Pat Buchanan’s 2001 book The Death of the West is also frequently mentioned as an essential text of the movement. In the book, Buchanan argues that an immigrant invasion is responsible for the declining birth rates of white people in the West, and this decline will turn the United States into a Third World nation by mid-century.

Many white nationalists identify as followers of the Christian faith, although some hold no religious beliefs at all. Antisemitism has become a major component of twenty-first-century white nationalism, although a hatred of Jewish people is not ubiquitous within the movement. Multiple white nationalist groups blame Jews for a number of perceived social ills, and some have established a Jewish conspiracy theory claiming that Jewish people are trying to take over the world.

White nationalism has established a number of its own media outlets to help spread its ideologies. A number of white nationalist magazines have cropped up that explicitly report on white nationalist-leaning stories. White nationalists have also developed other strategies for spreading their movement, such as infiltrating mainstream culture and undermining existing political institutions. They encourage white nationalists to seek out positions of power within their communities, urging them to hide their beliefs so they are better able to enact white nationalist policies in politics and society. Other groups of white nationalists promote an extreme strategy known as vanguardism, which insists that revolution is the only way to achieve a white ethnostate. Vanguardist white nationalists have no faith in existing political and social systems and believe radical change is necessary to achieve their goals.

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