Abstract
The first thing to be said about this fascinating account of the state of Alt-America is that it really needs its comprehensive index. For more than two decades, investigative journalist David Neiwert has been keeping tabs on the far Right and the twenty-two pages of cross-referencing that conclude Alt-America: the rise of the radical Right in the age of Trump are vital if the reader is to be kept focused. Neiwert’s narrative does not always proceed in a straightforward linear fashion. It shifts back and forth, from the Tea Party to the Patriot movements, from border militia to neo-confederate organisations, from white supremacist Christian identity movements to Three Percenters, Oath Keepers, Truthers and Birthers. For those not overly familiar with US far-right politics, or who aren’t glued to the television each time armed groups and federal agents, whether at Ruby Rich, Montana, or Waco, Texas, are involved in a shoot-out, the number of threads interwoven into an exposé that displays both simplicity and complexity, can be daunting. But for those who persist, the rewards are many. Neiwert, whose reports on the far Right have appeared in American Prospect and the Washington Post, has an in-depth knowledge of its various factions, as well as their geneses. And in amassing the statistics that prove beyond doubt that far-right terrorism has, over the past decade, surpassed anything inspired by Islamist or any other ideology in the United States, Neiwert does vital public service. From 2008 to 2015, there were 201 cases of domestic terrorism in the US – with 115 crimes committed by rightwing extremists, compared to sixty-three cases of Islamist-inspired terrorism. We are constantly reminded of these cases and the ways in which the far Right is radicalising often disturbed white men. Take 21-year-old Dylann Roof, the perpetrator of the 2015 massacre in Charleston, South Carolina, who left nine black churchgoers dead, or John Russell Houser, a 59-year-old with a history of mental illness, who killed two women and injured nine others after going on a shooting rampage at a cinema in Louisiana.
Alt-America, more reportage than academic tome, is divided into thirteen chapters. In the introductory chapter ‘Into the Abyss’, Neiwert opens with a discussion of the immediate impact of Trump’s candidacy on what was previously a dispirited far-right scene, focusing largely on the relatively recent phenomenon of the Alt Right. Neiwert’s larger concern, which emerges in the chapters that follow, is the convergence since the 1990s between mainstream conservatism and what he describes as ‘the beating heart of white America, the ancient drumbeat of white identity politics’. The breakthrough for the Tea Party – which evolved out of the Young Republicans, and various rightwing thinktanks, such as Americans for Prosperity and the Independence Institute – was getting the support of Fox News, whose radio hosts urged people to sign up. Indeed, the Alt Right, so dubbed by Richard Spencer, also emerged as a breakaway from mainstream conservativism. Spencer, then editor of the paleoconservative Taki’s Magazine, coined the term to explain the rise of a new kind of conservatism, hostile to neoconservatism and open to racialist politics.
In Alt-America, Neiwert painstakingly documents the activities of violent far-right groupings within the larger context of this reconfigured conservatism. He outlines the workings of the various citizens’ militias and survivalist movements which are, in his view, a continuation of the white supremacist movements of the Civil Rights era, including the White Citizens Councils and the Ku Klux Klan. These militias first came to prominence in the Clinton era, drifting away awhile, before ‘roaring back to life’ with the nomination of Barack Obama. Likewise, the Patriot movements or Constitutionalists, which hold that most constitutional powers reside in local government and that the sheriff (and not the national constitution) is the primary authority of the land, have been given a new lease of life due to the rise of Trump. Neiwert shows how the influence of the Patriot movements and Constitutionalists is growing amongst law enforcement officers, with the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association and the Oath Keepers seeking to bring county sheriffs and police officers, as well as members of the military, into the constitutionalist belief system.
The idea that all these tendencies can be discussed as discrete phenomena is rebuffed by Neiwert who explains how the Tea Party provided the conduit for a revival of the Patriot movement and its militias. Indeed, it was the accommodation of the Patriot ideology into the programme of the Tea Party that helped channel this far-right tendency into the mainstream of American politics. Neiwert has an equally comprehensive understanding of the paranoia which is central to white identity politics, describing at great length the various conspiracy theories that constitute the mental space of Alt America, beyond fact or logic. The Birthers belief, popularised by Fox News host Glen Beck and then by Trump, that Barack Obama was not an American citizen but was born in Kenya and that his birth certificate was forged, is by now well-known outside the US. But we are perhaps less familiar with other conspiracy theories, such as the idea of a nefarious plot to impose a New World Order on Americans, by confiscating their guns and rounding them up into concentration camps run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), under the control of the Department of Homeland Security.
But if Neiwert proves himself an intrepid investigator of the far-right scene, he is not so perceptive in analysing US politics more broadly. If you are looking for a structural analysis of American capitalism, or to understand the vested interests of the powerful economic elites which backed Trump’s presidency, there’s not much to get your teeth into here. Corporate America and neoliberalism, are downplayed, to the extent that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are breezily described as the kind of liberals that a non-authoritarian electorate would support. And there are also some very careless passages about immigration which could be interpreted as blaming racism on a failure to manage diversity. While we might have much to learn from Neiwert’s emphasis on American culture and white identity politics, when culture is divorced from the profound impact of globalisation on the US economy and the social consequences of the hollowing-out of its manufacturing base, the explanations for far-right violence are inevitably found in individual personality traits. Hence, Neiwert reaches out to psychologists, and foregrounds the authoritarian personality as his favoured model of understanding fascism. (One chapter is even entitled ‘The Id Unleashed’.) The trouble is that the authoritarian personality explanation for Trumpism does not hold up, even in Neiwert’s own terms, given that large number of white working-class voters in the old industrial heartlands, who cast their ballot for Trump, previously supported the ‘liberal’ Obama. More work needs to be done if we are to understand why large sections of white working-class America, not aligned to any far-right faction, continue to support Trump, despite the fact that his tax cuts, his assault on health care and workers’ rights, including the revocation of Obama’s 2014 Fair Play and Safe Work Places executive order, are decidedly against their interests.