“You Will Not Replace Us”: The Melancholic Nationalism of Whiteness

II

To pursue this diagnosis, it will be useful to ask some guiding questions: If a politics of white grievance is founded in perceived loss, then what sort of attachments could mobilize these expressions of deflection and rage? What, in short, is the good of whiteness that motivates such anxieties? For scholars of white supremacy, these questions cannot be understood apart from the American legacy of white settler colonialism, where an imagined republic of liberty was historically predicated upon the violent displacement, dispossession, and subordination of indigenous and Black populations. This linkage of freedom and subordination reflects what Aziz Rana terms the “two faces” of American freedom—a relational logic that founds the right to white dominion upon the normative disqualification of the non-white. ¹³ And this grammar of domination found its foremost anti-Black articulation in the institution of chattel slavery, where racialized others were reduced to property, fungible objects to be used according to white desires and white pleasures. ¹⁴ As Cheryl Harris has argued, to be white in the world forged by chattel slavery is defined by a distinct position upon a landscape of power. It is to be the one who cannot become the property of another—set against the Black slave, the ultimate foreclosure of sovereignty within the American political imagination. ¹⁵

In broad terms, then, white racial formation is historically rooted in a hierarchical field of power that naturalizes structures of domination through the governing fiction of race. ¹⁶ To understand the abiding investment in whiteness as a structure of civic membership, however, it is necessary to track how this category has been institutionalized so as to provide a wide-ranging set of civic benefits for white identification. In this connection, historians of race have dedicated particular attention to the compensatory function of whiteness for those whites who existed in a class world far from the wealthy planters of the Southern gentry and thus suffered a variety of status wounds. In the face of economic and social disparities, the symbolic good of whiteness offered these laborers a ground for full membership within the republic, no matter their diminished material status. As Joel Olson writes, for instance, “the races were produced and hierarchically ordered through the powers and prerogatives of citizenship. . . . Poor English colonists came to identify themselves as ‘white.’ They shared this new identity with the planters, further elevating their status and self-esteem. . . . In allying themselves with the large planters, poor whites traded class solidarity for whiteness and its accompanying privileges.” ¹⁷ In the famous phrase of W. E. B. Du Bois, whiteness served as a kind of “psychological wage” in the Reconstruction South that both compensated for dispossession (in material, cultural, and political terms) and foreclosed the possibility of class-based solidarities across racial lines. The privileges that accompanied white identification were significant, ranging from “titles of courtesy” to a racial monopoly on public office to employment opportunities to full access to public space (among other things). ¹⁸ Moreover, historians have demonstrated that the political work of whiteness was hardly exhausted as a regional compromise to allay class grievances within a particular historical moment. Indeed, the history of labor immigration to the United States has routinely reflected efforts by European immigrants to leverage their whiteness so as to facilitate social inclusion and secure political capital. ¹⁹

Minimally, then, whiteness is a political creation that has been totemically misrecognized as a natural heritage, and this racio-political status has historically provided access to a range of goods on the contested ground of civil society. Accordingly, the benefits of white citizenship extend beyond a privileged position in the status economy of civic life. ²⁰ Rather, the symbolic advantages of white identification have been redoubled by a material and legal organization that allots protections, liberties, or opportunities to white subjects while exposing populations of color to rightlessness, labor predation, extrajudicial violence, or resource deprivation. This institutionalized disqualification of Blackness as a structure of comparative white advantage is what Saidiya Hartman has termed the abiding “afterlife of slavery.” ²¹ And for Cheryl Harris, this means that whiteness has historically provided a kind of “consolation prize” on the variegated field of class—a guarantee that whites, even when suffering relative losses, will never sink to the social position allotted for Blackness. ²²

If the foregoing details some central historical features of white racial citizenship, recent movements for white nonreplacement are distinguished by a more strongly politicized stance of hegemony: the effort to claim the nation as a white nation, even as demographic shifts erode white numerical majorities. As Ghassan Hage argues, for instance, the proprietary demands of ethnonationalists typically take two distinct paths. On the one hand, these arguments pursue a symbolic good—an entitlement to the resources of the national space as well as a claim to be “at home” therein. In programmatic terms (that will require further exploration below), “I belong here because civic space reflects the traditions, beliefs, and cultures that have formed my sensibilities, judgments, values, and aspirations.” On the other hand, the appeal to belonging characteristically shifts in object and scope; the nation, as a locus of collective decision-making, belongs to me/us (itself a restricted class of citizens). ²³ In Hage’s terms, “the belief that one has a right over the nation, involves the belief in one’s possession of the right to contribute . . . to its management such that it remains “one’s” home. . . . To inhabit the nation in this way is to inhabit what is often referred to as the national will.” ²⁴ From this point, it is possible to identify a more politically substantive vision (and thus a more substantive fantasy of loss) that motivates the political imaginary of white nationalism. To insist upon irreplaceability is to demand something more than a symbolic good or specified set of benefits from one’s racial standing. Rather, this insistence reflects a claim to political supremacy, a dominant or exclusive right to participate in the collective ordering by which the nation is articulated, its burdens assigned, and its benefits allotted. This right is owed to the white subject, regardless of how the demographic terrain of the nation has been undone and reshaped under conditions of globalization. Or, to bring out the antipluralist logic of white ethnonationalism, the claim to nonreplacement asserts itself as the only true possessor of the national will—a position that refuses the plurality of a meaningfully democratic demos. ²⁵

At this point, some critical questions can be posed. To insist upon the nonfungibility of a historically hegemonic group under conditions of demographic change is not simply to assert an essential role within a given nation’s culture, but rather to claim a present and futural right to shape the nation in accordance with the interests of that group. Or, put slightly differently, to insist on irreplaceability is to assert an enduring right to dominion that is contrary to the normative foundations for a democratic polity. As Danielle Allen has argued, for instance, the heart of democratic practice is founded within the classic Aristotelian formulation—to participate in a reciprocal process of ruling and being-ruled, in turn. And this reciprocity introduces some of the normative torsions distinct to democratic life. In Allen’s terms, “democracy puts its citizens under a strange form of psychological pressure by building them up as sovereigns and then regularly undermining each citizen’s experience of sovereignty.” ²⁶ Indeed, to be a democratic citizen is not to experience undiminished civic sovereignty, but to experience loss on a range of decisions that reflect one’s deepest commitments and to inhabit this disappointment against the elusive promise of self-rule. Accordingly, the virtue of the democratic citizen is to cultivate the practices of citizenship necessary to endure the frustrations bound up with collective rule and allot these burdens more equitably among the groups that make up the space of citizenship. ²⁷

This grammar of mutuality throws into relief the clearest democratic pathologies bound up with the white insistence upon nonreplacement. Where democratic virtue entails a reciprocal process of citizen rule, premised upon the essential plurality of the demos, a wealth of ethnographic and survey evidence suggests that the ethnonationalist position is founded upon a refusal of such mutuality or the ideal of democratic equality. Instead, the gains of other groups are experienced by white identitarians as intolerable losses, within a zero-sum accounting of civic standing. Even efforts to repair historical wrongs or expand civic equality are persistently read as evidence that the historical primacy of whiteness (reflected by a historically majority status) is in a state of terminal decline. ²⁸ And it is this possessive, antipluralist calculus that mobilizes the claim to white dominion, no matter shifting demographic realities. Within the political imaginary of white supremacy, the alternative can only represent what Patrick Buchanan derides as “ethnomasochism”—a “disease of the heart” that would celebrate the disappearance of one’s own group from the historical stage. ²⁹

III

Minimally, then, the ethnonationalist claim to nonreplacement represents an aberrant model of democratic citizenship. To assert a permanent claim to civic mastery is to substitute the historic privileges of racial citizenship for the normative demands of a democratic polity—particularly one shaped by demographic transformation. As the remainder of the essay will argue, however, such a diagnosis is importantly incomplete in that it neglects the psychodynamics of these replacement anxieties and the normative complications that follow. Indeed, political supremacy (construed in cognitivist terms) is hardly sufficient to account for the lurid fantasies of “white genocide” that are invoked by those who fear the displacement of white hegemony—or, in the European context, those who invoke the narrative of “the Great Replacement.” ³⁰ Moreover, such a diagnosis is doubly inadequate to capture the disorientation and rage characteristic of contemporary white nationalism.

In the “replaceist” literature, there is no shortage of examples designed to highlight the racial and ethnic transformations currently transforming civic space—typically figured through the rhetoric of a “demographic invasion,” occupying force, or “genocide by replacement.” ³¹ For some, the symptoms of replacement are to be found in unfamiliar cultural forms that are inserted into the public sphere or, conversely, those symbols, holidays, or icons that are displaced in their previously unquestioned hegemony. ³² Samuel Huntington argues, for instance, that the erosion of national identity is evidenced by the proliferation of non-English languages in public spaces, the clustering of ethnic groups within residential microworlds (a process he describes in the militarized terms of ethnic “beachheads”), or the heightened presence of political symbology from other nations in public space (flags, anthems, etc.). ³³ On other accounts, the index of cultural displacement rests at the macrodemographic level, in comparative rates of fertility and reproduction (a diagnosis that draws from an established literature of racial anxiety over Black reproduction). ³⁴ For those who promote the “white genocide,” “white erasure,” or “white extermination” thesis, for instance, the fundamental site of ethnological warfare is located within the “enhanced reproductive rates” of cultural newcomers, who undertake a slow, demographic transformation that will eventually enable the capture of both cultural and political institutions. Such “demographic swamping” is only magnified, on this story, by the declining birth rates of the white population. ³⁵

If these sorts of claims are staples of recent ethnonationalist literature, they are adequately theorized only by interrogating the psychodynamics that lend them such force within the discursive universe of white nationalism. For instance, any reading that limits itself to the political demands of white supremacy would miss the atmosphere of loss that lends to white nationalist discourse its characteristic tendencies toward rage and resentment. As Arlie Hochschild argues, a fundamental grievance of radicalized whites is that the nation has become estranged or alien to them—it “no longer feels like their own.” ³⁶ And this sense of estrangement was given notorious public voice by the television news personality, Laura Ingraham, who lamented “in some parts of the country, it does seem like the America we know and love doesn’t exist anymore. . . . They’re changes that none of us ever voted for and most of us don’t like.” ³⁷ To grasp these affectual currents, it is necessary to theorize the nation more rigorously than a site of decision making for the allotment of benefits, burdens, and protections. Rather, the nation must be approached as a space of meaning through which the subject thinks, knows, and feels itself—a horizon of practices and traditions in light of which a civic future is legible—and ultimately, a libidinal site, fraught with anxieties of attachment, displacement, and loss.

Some helpful leads in this direction can be found in Wendy Brown’s effort to link white grievance politics with a Nietzschean grammar of ressentiment. To home in on the core parallel, the zero-sum logic of ethnonationalism construes white displacement comparatively, in relation to others—more specifically, those groups that are ostensibly gaining while the white subject is in decline (declines that are typically linked to decades of economic restructuring, the decline of traditional manufacturing centers, outsourcing practices, changing technologies of labor, etc.). ³⁸ And this displacement takes symbolic form, we are told, when the identity category of whiteness can no longer be avowed as a source of pride, even as all other identities are celebrated through a discourse of diversity. Accordingly, accounts of white replacement typically invoke a double-loss; this process entails not only the loss of material or political advantages but also symbolic denigration—within a “politically correct” discursive landscape, the assertion of whiteness is derided as backward or racist. This narrative of ressentiment does not, however, limit itself to a tale of relative gain or decline, indifferent to questions of agency. As Hochschild elaborates, the anger that animates many of her subjects stems from a consistent “deep story”: the economic and social losses of the white subject cannot be reduced to the accidents of history or the unplanned consequences of economic globalization, and neither is it merely that others are “cutting in line” for the status and benefits formerly reserved for “hardworking Americans” (itself construed in deracinated, masculinist terms); rather, these losses are engineered by institutional strategies to promote other groups and cultures over the “native,” white subject. ³⁹ Put differently, these losses are not simply losses, but what has been taken from the white subject and given to others. This narrative takes particularly virulent form in the wake of a Black president, presented as a readily identifiable source of agency for what would otherwise remain obscure causal mechanisms. ⁴⁰ For Brown, then, white ressentiment eventuates in “a permanent politics of revenge” against all those forces and enemies that have disenfranchised the cultural mythology of the white, working male (e.g., feminists, cosmopolitans, multiculturalists, globalists, etc.). ⁴¹ This politics of resentment is transfixed by its ostensible enemies, so that its normative imagination is limited to a reactive stance, tearing down and undoing the work of those by whom it has ostensibly been wronged.

Where these Nietzschean reflections usefully detail the reactive dimension of ethnonationalist discourse, they only begin to explore its orienting psychodynamics. More substantive inroads can be secured through the resources of psychoanalytic theory, where the subject is defined not through its plenitude or self-sufficiency, but rather in relation to a field of loss–the job one did not get, the parent who withdrew, or the lover who found another. ⁴² Perhaps most famously, Freud offers that there are importantly different forms of theorizing loss as it shapes the practice of selfhood. ⁴³ In mourning, the subject undertakes a project of libidinal untangling, where the object can be reflectively understood as lost and new cathexes are enabled. This is a process of working through loss, so that the subject might invest these libidinal energies anew and become other than what she or he has been. In contrast, the melancholic subject is the one that cannot let go of the lost object. The trauma is instead interiorized into the ego and the libidinal investment magnified. The melancholic cannot have done with this object that becomes ever more central to the subject’s meaning, as the attachment is restaged in pathological forms. As a broad literature demonstrates, there are many ways to theorize melancholia as a form of subjecthood. ⁴⁴ And yet, critics have cautioned against straightforwardly applying the categories of psychotherapy to political practice. Where the therapeutic framework reflects the experience of an individual and its object-relations, political theory demands a critical language that accounts for collective experiences, losses, and aspirations. Likewise, the therapeutic aims of the psychoanalytic encounter have been challenged by those who question its relevance for the world-transformative aspirations of politics. For instance, Nancy Luxon contends that an uncritical application of psychoanalytic norms and categories might “collapse the structural into the psychological, and so miss the ways in which political change draws on dynamics different from the psychoanalytic couch.” ⁴⁵ And David McIvor fears the Freudian intimation that loss is something to be “gotten over,” which obscures the significant political question: how communities must learn to live with or negotiate traumas that are enduring and socially destructive. ⁴⁶

More productive critical avenues, however, are opened by those for whom psychoanalytic resources are rooted within collective forms of experience and agency. Those who theorize the politics of feeling, for instance, have persuasively argued that the affects take social form—such that subjects are persistently inscribed within economies of feeling that open them up to transpersonal fears, joys, aggressions, sorrows, and excitations. ⁴⁷ To hew more closely to the psychodynamics of loss, Freud himself proposes that “mourning is regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on.” ⁴⁸ From this lead, theorists have explored collective traumas to identify what might be termed a melancholic social existence. Seth Moglen, for example, broadens the framework of melancholia beyond individuated object-relations and instead highlights the traumatic character of shared loss when structured by an inadequate social epistemology. As he argues, “in cases of socially induced, collective loss . . . sufferers must be able to name the causes of their grief and the objects of their anger. . . . People experience structural social injuries as traumas when they do not possess adequate analyses of the processes or formations that have harmed them.” ⁴⁹ What is most significant in this passage is the mediated dimension of social melancholia. It is not the brute, individual experience of loss that is determinant, but rather loss as structured in narrative terms—an experience that becomes traumatic when socially available narratives lack resources for sufferers to (1) adequately cognize the forces behind their losses or (2) secure social recognition for their dispossession.

This narratival turn sheds helpful light on the central trope of the white nationalist social imaginary. To paraphrase Hochschild’s work on white resentment politics, the framing narrative can be rendered in rough strokes: “we whites, of a certain class, have suffered a series of losses that explain our degraded social position today. Not only have other (raced, gendered, ethnic) groups been promoted ahead of us through governmental interventions; instead, we have also been deprived of opportunities to feel and assert pride in our own white identity. We have suffered losses that go unrecognized and unappreciated while other groups are celebrated. We are strangers in our own land.” ⁵⁰ It would be easy to read this narrative as a vernacular history of perceived cultural decline. What is most noteworthy in this story, however, is the work that it performs in constituting subjects of whiteness as aggrieved, melancholic subjects. Such a reading is prepared by Jeffrey Alexander’s insistence that the propagation of narrative (through material, visual, and discursive means) is essential to constructing trauma as a social form. It is only through publicly circulated “scripts about who did what to whom” that suffering can transcend the status of passing event, enter into social memory, and structure a group’s “sense of who they are, where they came from, and where they want to go.” ⁵¹ The central script of contemporary white nationalism, then, performs an important double duty. What presents itself as a descriptive narrative of decline doubles as a publicly circulated framework through which the white nationalist subject is formed around the pathos of loss, now made legible in distinctly politicized terms—as the conscious endeavor of other groups, within a zero-sum calculus of social benefit. The nation and its history are not just slipping away from the white subject but are rather being taken by undeserving others. This narratival shift from loss to displacement likewise helps to explain the distinct affectual reflex characteristic of the white nationalist literature: a rage against those who have surpassed the white subject—or, likewise, those political institutions and elites who facilitate the rise of these others (a fantasy in which the classic features of a “paranoiac” politics looms large). ⁵²

It is now possible to unpack more fully the meaning of the call that has become a rallying cry of contemporary white nationalism: you will not replace us. Important cues can be found in the grammar of the charge. It is not simply an insistence that a given “we” not be replaced (a formulation in which agency retreats into the passive voice); rather, it is an insistence that a you will not replace this “us” that properly defines the nation. The accusative work of the slogan draws from its semantic ambiguity. At one level, the rallying cry of white insurgence renders the “you” to cast the agent of replacement in explicitly anti-Semitic terms—Jewish elites, enacting policies to erode white cultural and demographic majorities. ⁵³ Here, it is significant that the demonstrators at Charlottesville periodically filled in the indeterminate “you” of the chant with the more specific variant: “Jews will not replace us!” This version of the slogan demonstrates the polemical fiction of “the Jew” within much of the white nationalist literature—the agent of “globalism,” working to destroy the cultural unit of the nation in favor of transnational loyalties, abstract circuits of capital, and global institutions of governance (themselves ostensibly controlled by Jewish interests). ⁵⁴ And yet, the full resonance of this ethnonationalist slogan can be appreciated only by reading the “you” in yet another sense (also drawn from the characteristic tropes of white nationalist literature). This “you” is not the imagined source of replacement policies, but rather the amorphous set of agents who are ostensibly displacing white masculinity as the privileged national subject (e.g., women, feminists, liberals, Blacks, Muslims, multiculturalists, globalists, corrupt political elites, and cosmopolitans of all stripes), all the while promoting a discourse of “diversity” through which this displacement cannot be recognized or sympathetically considered. If the resentments and anxieties at the heart of this slogan are now legible, what remains to be explored in the remaining sections are the distinct politics of a melancholic nationalism. To do so is to confront both its internal torsions and political costs.

IV

To approach social movements through the framework of melancholia is not unique. Douglas Crimp, for instance, appeals to melancholia as a productive affect—the source of rage that could mobilize a movement politics against conditions of violence. ⁵⁵ Judith Butler enlists melancholia as a structure for subjecthood, more generally, as a marker of those attachments that must be foresworn to achieve normalized patterns of identity. ⁵⁶ Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich famously characterize the melancholy of postwar Germany, in which introspection on the shame of National Socialism was too quickly sidestepped in favor of a newfound national pride. ⁵⁷ And in the closest precedent to current concerns, Paul Gilroy diagnoses the resentment toward multicultural otherness as a token of Britain’s “postcolonial melancholia”—that is, an inability to own up to the violence embedded within the nation’s colonial past. ⁵⁸ According to Gilroy, these dark-skinned reminders of an imperial history are remnants of a past that cannot be acknowledged or worked through; they are tokens of an unavowable bad conscience and thus objects of rage.

The distinctiveness of the present analysis can be recognized, however, by interrogating what undergirds the fear of replacement. It would be easy to identify a white or Anglo nation as the object in a state of perceived crisis or loss—this is the love object no longer under one’s control, no longer reflecting the will of the possessor—the coveted object now in the hands of another. In the narratives of white replacement, however, it is not solely a right to order the nation that is perceived to be threatened, but rather a good more fundamental to the self-understanding of the white subject: a loss of the conditions under which this subject is intelligible to itself as white. From this point, it is possible to cast the rage of the nationalist in terms more robust than is characteristic. ⁵⁹ When the melancholic nationalist rages against a nation in a state of loss, the reaction well exceeds the loss of political sovereignty or a Burkean commitment to traditions as the repository of collective wisdom. Rather, this subject mourns the loss of those conditions under which whiteness yields the status to which she or he has historically been entitled. And likewise, this grief (as structured through the narratives detailed above) gives way to rage toward those antagonists who are ostensibly transforming not only these conditions, but also the discursive field upon which such transformations could be recognized as losses (e.g., the characteristic New Right scorn toward discourses of equality, diversity, or multiculturalism). ⁶⁰

The normative implications of this point gain greater specificity when read against Jonathan Lear’s reflections on a different case of cultural loss: the crisis experienced by the indigenous Crow tribe under conditions of white settler colonialism. As the Crow were confined to reservations and brought under increasing federal regulation, they were progressively unable to engage in a variety of practices on the basis of which their form of life could be recognized as meaningfully Crow. Through this process, they lost something more than a specific object (whether this be a nation, an ideal, a territory, or a concrete object of love); rather, they lost the conditions and the conceptions of the good under which their lives could be practiced in ways that would be intelligible as their own. ⁶¹ Here, Lear argues, the Crow enter a profound psychodynamics of lived grief and disorientation. When taken at face-value, public narratives of white replacement lay claim to a similar grammar of cultural loss. And yet, even a superficial approach to the historical politics of whiteness demonstrates that it would be grotesque to establish a moral equivalence between these situations or to analogize white racial melancholy to the trauma of the colonized. ⁶² More specifically, if contemporary white nationalism persistently invokes a situation of loss, at stake is not merely the possibility of living a recognizably white life (as a question of cultural intelligibility, distinct from questions of power). To revisit a point detailed above, it is rather racially inscribed advantage (i.e., a claim to deserve more), founded within symbolic and material hegemony, that forges the historical meaning of whiteness in the American context. And yet, it is essential to the structuring narratives of white nationalism that this status is persistently miscognized as pride in a racialized identity (typically presented as “white culture”), as detached from any expectations of differential desert, powers, or public standing.

Although it is tempting to diagnose this discrepancy as a simple instance of bad faith, Charles Mills has helpfully highlighted how such lacunae reflect the “inverted” epistemology characteristic of racialized hierarchies of power. ⁶³ That is, where the ethnonationalist explicitly demands only the preservation of tradition or culture, this appeal rests upon an incapacity to acknowledge the histories of domination through which the white subject enjoys its identity as status. In Mills’s terms, this subject suffers from “an inverted epistemology, an epistemology of ignorance, a particular pattern of localized and global cognitive dysfunctions (which are psychologically and socially functional), producing the ironic outcome that whites will in general be unable to understand the world they themselves have made.” ⁶⁴ The formulation cannot be taken on wholesale—particularly the quasi-therapeutic discourse of dysfunction. That said, this racialized epistemology helps to explain one of the hallmarks of the melancholic nationalism diagnosed here: an inability to come to terms with the violence in which the subject has been implicated by chains of material and symbolic benefit. Within this distorted economy of knowledge, the historical violence that forges and maintains the politics of whiteness does not rise to the level of “productive shame,” but rather remains unavowable, unassimilable within the narratives of worth, accomplishment, or pride that surround whiteness. ⁶⁵ What can be grieved is the material advantage or cultural primacy perceived to be threatened by movements of civic equality, but not the histories of domination through which this hegemony was forged. Within this racial epistemology, such histories are, instead, assigned to a nonactionable past, severed from the presentist resources for calculating moral and political culpability.

To elaborate the politics of this melancholia, however, it is necessary to dig further into its iconic demand (you will not replace us). The political legacy of this formula rests in the future tense of the appeal: that the dominance of the white subject must be carried into the future, no matter the demographic and cultural shifts that are underway in the space of the nation. To flesh out this imperative, the politics of white nationalism (particularly those movements bound up with the replacement narrative) insist upon a variety of transformative projects. For some, the perceived crisis demands a project of restoration (e.g., to return to immigration protocols and levels of previous generations). For others, it demands “natalist” policies, to bolster the reproductive rates of white populations (currently flagging behind “replacement-level” rates), so as to keep pace with the heightened reproduction of ethnic competitors. ⁶⁶ And for yet others, it calls for an “ethnostate”: a monumental effort of social engineering where non-whites would be “repatriated” to their ostensible nations of origin or, alternately, assigned to competing ethnostates. ⁶⁷ In this connection, no small effort has been dedicated to delineating the locations and constituencies of these racialized territories (e.g., Cascadia, New Albion, Ozarkia, etc.) within a partitioned national geography. ⁶⁸ What rests at the heart of this melancholic nationalism, however, is the insistence upon repeating a mythicized past of the nation in which white culture ostensibly had its meaning and place. This subject does not simply inhabit a framework of loss in the abstract; rather, she or he is defined by the melancholic identification with the lost object and the correlative demand to restage or repeat its attachment. ⁶⁹ As Moglen puts the classic melancholic compulsion, “To the degree that victims of social injuries seek only to retrieve what they have lost in the mode of rigid replication, the work of mourning remains unfinished and obstructed. In social as in private processes of grieving, the capacity to imagine only replication is a sign that the bereaved can gain access to libidinal energies only to the degree that they remain exclusively attached to something lost.” ⁷⁰

It would be too easy to assign to the ethnonationalist a repetition-compulsion, drawn from individual psychopathology, and close the book on its social or political meaning. Instead, the insistence upon a position of racial indispensibility sheds light on the core political pathology of white nationalism—a refusal of the futurity that is essential to politics. To draw from the psychoanalytic resources introduced above, the crucial distinction between mourning and melancholia does not reduce to whether one can grapple with the past or come to terms with the ongoing reverberations of trauma within the present [Nachträglichkeit]. Instead, the distinction reflects diverging relationships toward temporality. The work of mourning represents a mode of working through these investments so as to enable different investments in the future. In contrast, the melancholic failure to work through these losses yields a fundamental inability to live in the present, as a field with its own constraints, openings, and possibilities. As the Mitscherlichs describe the situation of a Germany that refused to come to terms with its past violence: “a very considerable expenditure of psychic energy is needed to maintain this separation of acceptable and unacceptable memories; and what is consumed in the defense of a self anxious to protect itself against bitter reproaches of conscience and doubts of its own worth is thus unavailable for mastering the present.” ⁷¹ Or, in Jeffrey Prager’s pithy formulation, “melancholia disables individuals from living currently.” ⁷² To read contemporary white nationalism as a form of aggrieved melancholy thus reveals the full range of its political pathologies. Where much of the literature rightly highlights the resentments, anxieties, and hatreds that attend this renewed turn toward the ethnos, what too often goes unacknowledged is how the psychodynamics of melancholia cuts these ethnonationalist movements from the world-creating powers that are essential to the field of politics—or, to the futurity that the creative work of politics requires. ⁷³

V

To this point, the essay has tracked the destructive psychodynamics of contemporary white nationalism. To close on a more generative set of possibilities, however, it is useful to ask how the white political imagination could resist the antipolitics of melancholic fixation. There is no shortage of proposals in the literature treated above. For instance, Juliet Hooker contends that if democratic nations are to live up to their egalitarian commitments, “white citizens will need to accept the loss of political mastery. They will have to accept being ruled in turn.” ⁷⁴ Seth Moglen highlights the need to create new social narratives, more adequate to render losses legible within the civic arena. ⁷⁵ And many others have proposed an “abolitionist” approach—one that calls whites to “abandon” their whiteness and dismantle institutional arrangements that treat whiteness as a basis for entitlement, status, or power. ⁷⁶ All such proposals address important features of white grievance politics, particularly its efforts to translate a history of racial advantage into institutional capture. As argued throughout, however, such approaches do not sufficiently engage the motivational depth of white melancholia, the distinct forms of political subjectivity forged by loss, or the politics that stems from melancholic rage.

Indeed, if alternatives to this melancholic nationalism are to be viable, they must take root within the white political imaginary, so as to open less violent responses to perceived loss. More specifically, moving beyond the revanchist malice of white supremacy would require the white subject to enter a position unfamiliar within the racialized history of the republic—one that sheds the expectations of cultural, political, or economic entitlement that have, to this point, been constitutive of whiteness as a political formation. ⁷⁷ Here again, the structuring work of narrative proves essential. The experience of demographic transformation need not be framed as a pure loss that can only yield rage against one’s presumed adversaries, nor must it limit the white subject to an aggressive melancholy that longs for a miscognized past. Rather, more democratically sustainable responses would require different narratives of civic transformation, equipped with different cognitive, normative, and affectual resources.

A useful hint in this direction is provided by Simon Stow, who has detailed the disparate politics of mourning that run through American civic history. As Stow argues, polities are characteristically shaped by the stories they tell about their dead and their related experiences of grieving cherished practices, traditions, or persons that have been lost. Accordingly, the most significant political question is not whether losses should or should not structure the body politic, as all communities are shaped, to some degree, by this experience. The operative question is rather which approaches to loss are most “conducive to the political well-being” of a given polity—more specifically, which practices of mourning would allow an “us” to “‘go on together’ as a democratic polity in the face of loss.” ⁷⁸ For Stow, significant strains of the American tradition demonstrate the temptation toward a nostalgic culture of grief that seeks to “heal” the nation by a return to a mythicized past of wholeness, harmony, or greatness. ⁷⁹ Such tropes of reconstitution are a familiar staple of crisis politics, where times of loss are met by a “recommitment to the polity’s idealized vision of itself.” ⁸⁰ To recapitulate a moment from above, this politics of nostalgia displays itself in the candidate who pitched his racialized nationalism (“Make America White Again”) as a return to Norman Rockwell’s America—safe, trusting, and whole. ⁸¹ And yet, Stow notes an alternative, “tragic” strain of mourning with greater democratic resources—an approach to loss that would not seek an imagined moment of mastery or wholeness but would rather mark the finitude of political institutions and the violence by which “togetherness” has historically been forged and maintained. To mourn in this tragic sense is not to redeem the present through an idealized past but to register the shortcomings of the community in light of its own structuring myths and to spur practices of critical reflection that would enable a more democratically sustainable future. ⁸²

The distinction is significant for the argument tracked to this point. As detailed throughout, the politics of white grievance hinges upon a melancholic narrative of racial displacement and a correlative insistence that the polity be restored as a site of white culture. A wide literature has demonstrated, however, the manifold difficulties to this revanchist project, not the least of which is the status of the good to be reconstituted. Where the literature of replacement presents whiteness as a historic culture, based within racial or genetic predispositions, whiteness (as detailed previously) is ultimately a political or positional formation, defined against those categories of the non-white that are abjected for whiteness to gain its meaning. ⁸³ This legacy haunts even critically nuanced proposals to restage whiteness as a source of solidarity that would nevertheless concede its history of violence and privilege. ⁸⁴ Accordingly, Ian Haney López describes such projects of white restitution as “dangerous,” as whiteness has been “invariably” given content through “relationships of domination and subordination, normativity and marginality, privilege and disadvantage.” ⁸⁵ In contrast, a tragic civic sensibility would approach the proclaimed crisis of white displacement through different narratives, oriented toward a different criterion. The task is not to restore some mythicized, racial core of the nation, but rather to open the possibility of “going on” in a manner more responsive to the pluralism of the civic body and the ongoing reverberations of white hegemony.

Though aspirational, the gesture need not remain at the formal level. The foregoing has proposed that a more democratically sustainable approach to demographic transformation would call for a chastened racial lens—one that could acknowledge the violence that has attended the formation and maintenance of whiteness as a positional status. The injunction to “go on together” in a more meaningfully democratic fashion, however, suggests possibilities to develop reparative narratives through a different site of foundational loss, noted quickly above: how the powers of whiteness have historically forestalled a politics of material equality or class alliance by securing social, political, and material benefit along possessive, racialized lines. This path of civic reckoning would avoid a fuzzy injunction for civic “togetherness” (an aspiration that risks absorbing the agonic difficulties of politics into an ethical injunction), or a “moralist” position that asserts a normative imperative, regardless of the commitments, ideals, aspirations, and grievances held by actors themselves. Rather, this memorial narrative would thematize the solidarities suppressed by the racial polity, and thus highlight its abiding democratic costs. Minimally, the possessive logic of whiteness (and the antiblackness at its heart) has undercut the capacity to mobilize diverse constituencies toward more equitable futures. And, in doing so, this invidious racial practice has yielded a loss of democratic potency, reflected by grievances over powerlessness and class predation that range widely across the contemporary racio-political spectrum. To memorialize these solidarities, then, is not simply to mark their suppression (or the significant costs that result), but to broaden and reinvigorate the civic imagination—to sketch possibilities for combinations, mobilizations, and constituencies that have historically been foreclosed by the cleavages of whiteness.