Considering White Nationalism in the USA:
Questions about the Nature of the State and Nation
Middle Americanism and Christian Identity
By Leonard Zeskind
This essay was originally written for a September 1997 symposium held by the Northwest Coalition against Malicious Harassment on the topic of an “American Armageddon.” My contribution, entitled at the time, “Religion and the Construction of Contemporary American White Nationalism,” was then published in 1998 in a collection called American Armageddon: Religion, Revolution and the Right, edited by Eric Ward. That small book has been out of print and largely out of circulation. Although this essay suffers from many faults, including the attempt at that time to squeeze some of my own particular ideas into a more general discussion organized by others, I have edited it only slightly, in order to correct the most egregious grammatical errors. My errors of political assessment, however, remain in the text-. It remains more an amalgam of ideas, rather than a cohesive argument.
This paper is an exploration of the confluence of theologically constructed white racial nationalism with Christian nationalism, creating a new type of American nationalism. This new form of American nationalism has been dubbed Middle American Nationalism and opposes both internationalist secular elites "above" and multi-cultural threats "below."
Middle American Nationalism expresses itself in venues which are readily identifiable: common law courts, militia and other Christian patriot movements. In addition, if the pale skin of the current anti-immigrant movement is scratched, just below the surface Middle American Nationalism appears-blood red. Similarly, the principal white constituencies for movements opposed to affirmative action and other forms of racial integration are often Middle American nationalist; although they have also gained acceptance (and succor) by supposedly “de-racianated” (white) elites. The same can be said of the drive against public education, which includes fostering prayer in school. But Middle American Nationalism is also represented in venues which are not immediately obvious: battles in the deep South over display of the Confederate flag by state governments, contemporary conflicts over monuments to the Civil War and Reconstruction (the white Liberty Monument in New Orleans) or government battles with Indians (Custer battleground in South Dakota). One element which all these differing forms of Middle American Nationalism share is a similar Founding Fathers-Constitution origin mythology.
It is my contention that Middle American Nationalism emerges directly from a ground of economic, geopolitical, social and cultural complexities. It is not a secondary effect whose true mechanical cause is to be found elsewhere. Like the steam created by burning coal, oxygen and water, white nationalism powers a tremendous turbine which sends electricity to working class taverns, high-priced restaurants and middle class homes throughout a city.
1. Nation and State
This discussion of Middle American Nationalism must perforce begin by defining nations and nationalism. Both are socially constructed, not phenomena of nature. We can not send a space probe to measure the number nations on the planetary surface, like hydrocarbons on Mars. As a result, there is little "scientific" consensus about what constitutes a nation or nationalism. In fact, there are great controversies over these definitions. For the purposes here, it is helpful to make several distinctions, primarily using examples from Eastern Europe, where nationalist conflicts are more readily defined.
The first distinction is between nation and state. For example, the former Yugoslavia and the former Soviet Union were states. Each was a definite geo-political entity with a unified military and police apparatus, defined borders (protected by customs officials) separating it from other states and an integrated economic structure with a single currency. The United States of America is just such a state, as is Mexico, France, the United Kingdom and the Republic of South Africa.
American white nationalists are divided over whether to (re)capture the entire USA state apparatus or try to carve a new one out of the old Confederacy or the Pacific Northwest.
A state is not totally consonant with a government. During Yugoslavia's last years as a unified state it suffered from a divided form of government in which powers to tax, etc. were shuffled between the federal government and that of each of its six constituent republics. In the USA we obviously have a federal form of government(s) with powers divided between various sovereignties: Indian nations, the 50 states, the District of Columbia, counties and cities–all within the state apparatus of the USA.
In the case of Yugoslavia, the Serbian and Croatian nations–both created out of history–have survived the collapse of the Yugo-state. Both nations would also survive any future collapse or absorption of their respective republics. One of the sources of the civil war in Bosnia is the question of whether or not a Bosnian nation–which by definition would include Catholics, Orthodox Christians, Moslems and Jews–exists independently of the Bosnian state apparatus. The preliminary answer seems to be No; lending credence to the observation that nations (unlike states), can not be created by (international) administrative fiat.
Webster's New Twentieth Century Dictionary Second Edition gives as its first definition of nation: "A stable, historically developed community of people with a territory, economic life, distinctive culture, and language in common." This is a good point from which to begin our discussion of a nation, yet there are several immediate problems we encounter.
Continuing with our example, in the Yugo-state Serbia and Croatia shared a common language, common economy and contiguous territory. The principal differences between the two stemmed from their religious identities: the Christian Orthodox character of the Serbs and the Catholic character of the Croatians. Did they share a common culture? Yes and no.
The Tito regime tried creating cultural glue based on an internationalist ethic and a Yugo nation-state origin myth rooted in a common partisan struggle against fascist Italy and Nazi Germany during World War II. Once the communist government collapsed, however, its official national origin mythology collapsed also. Religious differences and historic grievances, some dating back hundreds of years, predominated over their common language, economy and territory. Croats and Serbs each traced their respective nations to differing origins with different histories, martyrs, churches and even relationships to Hitler. In fact, in the 1990s much of the civil war has been fought using language and symbols from World War II.
If the Serbia and Croatia exemplify the importance of religion and culture in defining nations, they also illustrate the difficulty in assigning territory to nations. Large numbers of ethnic Serbs live outside of the borders of the Serbian Republic governed from Belgrade. Some live in territory nominally governed by Croatia or Bosnia. They no longer share a common contiguous territory with Serbs governed by Belgrade. If the principal difference between themselves and their Croatian or Bosnian neighbors is religion on the one hand, and between themselves and their Belgrade-governed kin is territory on the other, of what nation are these Serbs?
There are other instances where nationalities live in contiguous territory currently divided among several geo-political (administrative) states. For example, the Ovambo people/tribe in southern Angola and northern Namibia were divided by European colonialists. But the Ovambo had no national struggle as such because the destiny of the Ovambo people became completely intertwined with the struggle against Portuguese, German and South African colonialism. Conversely, Kurds live in contiguous territory, which is also divided by several states—Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria. They have fought an unsuccessful battle for national independence against each of these states since World War I. Are Kurds, like the Ovambo, an ethnic group, rather than a nation?
The notion of a common territory, then, is complicated. Similar questions can be raised about each of the criteria for nationhood listed by Webster. One relevant point can be made here: If the above distinctions between nation, state and government hold true, then it is possible in the same moment to be loyal to what is regarded as one's own nation and treasonous towards the state (and government) which encompasses it.
The International Relations Dictionary emphasizes self-consciousness as a distinguishing characteristic of a nation and nationalism: "A small group which shares a common ideology, common institutions and customs, and a sense of homogeneity … there is also a strong group sense of belonging associated with a particular territory considered to be particularly its own."
This self-consciousness expresses itself in the "common culture" mentioned in the Webster definition above. It is most often directed towards what is presumed to be the common origin of the nation, its common destiny and its common borders–who is in the nation and who is out. Self-consciousness is also reflected in nationalism as an ideology.
According to academic convention, nationalism as a modern ideology emerged with the first stages of the European Enlightenment, and was a vehicle for popular revolt against feudal elites. By this standard, nations were formed side-by-side with capitalism through the creation and delineation of markets. Much of the far right's discussion of nationalism, on the other hand, focuses on "organic" communities established over generations reaching back to a pre-Enlightenment past. In contrast to the nation-as-defined-market ideology, the far right sees the nation-as-extended-family. The latter notion lends itself easily to the notion that nations are consonant with race.
It is useful to compare the far right's organicism with the role of nationalism as an ideology which spurs the creation of new nations where none existed previously. Consider the experience in Africa, particularly at the height of the anti-colonial period, when nationalists carved independent states out of colonial empires. Here the elaboration of a nationalist ideology necessarily preceded the creation of a nation and was a precondition for the birth of independent states. This was exactly the reverse of the European experience, where nationalist ideology flowed from a stable community with a common culture, economy, etc.
Eduardo Mondlane, an early advocate of Mozambican independence argued: "Like all African nationalism, the Mozambican form was born out of the experience of European colonialism…The nationalist assertion did not rise out of a stable community, in history a linguistic, territorial, economic and cultural unity. In Mozambique, it was colonial domination which produced the territorial community and created the basis for a psychological coherence."
Here Mondlane is describing two things. The first is the difference between nations created out of economic struggles in Europe during the 18th and 19th centuries (and expressed in Webster above) and nation building during the 20th century as a form of resistance in the colonies which Europe exploited and oppressed. Mondlane's second point is the importance of "psychological coherence," or nationalist ideology, as a decisive element in the creation of all nations, but particularly those formed through resistance to others.
American white nationalists encompass all of these contradictory elements: historicist racial and cultural organicism dating their white nation's origin back to the Founding Fathers and beyond, while contemporaneously creating their nation out of resistance to a multi-cultural, internationalist state.
In God Land: Reflections on Religion and Nationalism, lectures Connor Cruise O'Brien gave in 1987, he drew a distinction between nationalism as an ideology and nationalism as an emotional force, the latter being, he said, non-ideological. At that time, he argued, "nationalism-as-ideology is not…particularly potent in the world today. Nationalism-as-ideology is altogether eclipsed, in its intellectual development, in its acknowledged influence over states, and in the number of doctrinal adherents by an internationalist and antinationalist ideology: Marxism-Leninism." (Emphasis in original)
Non-ideological nationalism-as-sentiment was strongest, O'Brien argued, in "precisely the area dominated by the internationalist and antinationalist ideology of Marxism-Leninism."
O'Brien's delineation between these two forms of nationalism is important for the current discussion because of the roots of nationalism-as-sentiment in religion. Nationalism as an ideology is 200 years old, linked to the Enlightenment. On the other hand, nationalism-as-sentiment is far older. Nationalism "as a collective emotional force in our culture…is altogether indistinguishable from religion; the two are one and the same thing." O'Brien found nationalism-as-sentiment as far back as the Hebrew Bible.
A world-wide geopolitical revolution has occurred in the ten years since O'Brien gave his lectures and made this analysis. Marxism-Leninism is no longer the preeminent antinationalist ideology. It is no longer a preeminent anything. It has been swept aside and carted off like the ruins of the Berlin Wall. In this context, O'Brien's distinction between two forms of nationalism no longer makes sense. Nationalism-as-sentiment, rooted in religion, has been incorporated into nationalism-as-ideology. The two have become one, strengthening the power of the far right's organicism. This merger is most visible to the naked eye precisely in the area formerly dominated by the ideology of Marxism-Leninism. Russian nationalism finds its clearest expression in Russian Orthodox Christianity, Chechen nationalism in Islam, Armenian nationalism in its national church, Polish nationalism in Catholicism, ad infinitum.
Close inspection, however, reveals that a similar merger and re-creation (reformulation) of nationalism has also occurred in the United States. Unlike the former Soviet Bloc, however, in this country the official ideology is not nationalism, but a form of free market globalism disguised as democratic universalism. Thus, in the USA, many instances of nationalism are insurgent and subversive.
Free market globalism as an anti-nationalist ideology is, in part, a response by political and intellectual elites to changes in the USA economy, which is itself globalized. It is also a response by these elites to changes in the demographic character of the American people and the necessity to incorporate the legal changes made during the post-war civil rights revolution. It is also a response to the collapse of the elites' pre-existing nationalism, which was rooted in race, religion and "culture."
The variant of American-ness associated with free market globalism is doctrinal. That is, an American is one who believes in the concepts of human freedom, democracy and republicanism enunciated in a particular reading of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence and happens to have citizenship by virtue of living (or having lived at one time) within the territorial borders of the USA. By this account, Americans are exceptional, differing from the French, Germans and others.
Michael Lind, a neoconservative turned self-described "liberal nationalist," quotes journalist Cokie Roberts to this effect: "We have nothing binding us together as a nation–no common ethnicity, history, religion, or even language–except the Constitution and the institutions it created." Lind describes this doctrinal American-ness as "democratic universalism." He argues, correctly in my opinion, that it is an insufficient basis for a compelling American nationalism.
According to Lind: "…the democratic universalists are mistaken in thinking that American national identity can be founded on an idea…The very notion of a country based on an idea is absurd. … A nation may be dedicated to a proposition, but it cannot be a proposition." American white nationalists of all persuasions also agree with Lind's critique.
Lind's purpose is to trace the development of various ideas about American nationalism in order to propose the identification (and consequent cultural elaboration by elites) of an American liberal nationalism for the future. He counterpoises his liberal nationalism to nativist nationalism. The latter being, he admits, far older and more well-established than the former:
"To be American, in the nativist view, is to be white and/or Christian or a member of "the Judeo-Christian tradition" (a euphemism that really means Christian). The racial and religious definitions of Americanness are not always joined; there are secular racists, and there are conservative nativists who envision a multiracial but pan-Christian American national community."
While Lind finds that earlier forms of American nationalism embodied racial and religious elements at the same time, in the present he believes these two are largely separated. He argues that " a pan-Christian but not white supremacist American nativism–is the more or less overt goal of right-wing Christian political activists like Pat Robertson." It is my contention that, while these two variants of nativism–racial and religious–do exist separately in contemporary times, they are also joined at points which escape the notice of Lind and other analysts.
It is important to note that while Lind counterpoises his own version of nationalism to that of the nativists, he does not describe them with the usual epithets–hate mongers, bigots, paranoids, etc. Although he would probably agree that such labels could be accurate, to employ them actually would be counterproductive to his project. For Lind locates racial and religious nativists as the dominant figures in the founding of the American nation. To dismiss them simply as small-minded (or large minded) bigots would be to summarily miss the opening shots of the current battle for American identity.
In fact, by Lind's own account, the differentiation which he makes in contemporary times between religious and racial nationalism did not exist in the first moments of the American nation. For the Founding Fathers, there was no distinction between the religious and racial definitions of an American national, despite the present-day ballyhoo by liberals about the First Amendment and the Constitutional Wall separating church and state.
Liberals and progressives often make two mistakes in this discussion. The first is the common sin of "presentism," that is rendering the past completely through the lens of the present. The second is the failure to recognize the distinctions between nation, state and government. It would be completely possible, for example, to grant rights of citizenship to individuals not considered part of the dominant nation. That is precisely what happened with the Fourteenth Amendment. By this account, it is possible to understand how Jews had rights as individuals in the USA while still not being part of the American nation (as Jews). The militia movement's distinction between "Fourteenth Amendment citizens" and "organic sovereigns, etc." then, is the distinction between those with rights granted by the state apparatus and American nationals; ipso facto, any declaration which asserts the primacy of "organic" status over federal or Fourteenth Amendment status is by definition white nationalist.
The American nation, at its founding, was Protestant and white. "The basic conception of the American people as a branch of the Anglo-Saxon tribe, whose members remained part of a single "race" no matter how many governments they were divided among, was the conception of American identity shared by most of the Founding Fathers of the United States and generations of later American leaders," according to Lind.
By his account, the American nation was founded prior to independence in 1776 or the constitution in 1789. In those times, Lind points out: "Commitment to political principles was an important part of Anglo-American identity, but it was less important, in the minds of most white Americans, than membership in a particular race and a particular religion." He calls this early Americanism "Anglo-American racial nationalism."
Following the war for independence from England, the Anglo-American aspect of racial nationalism changed into a more inclusive form of white racial nationalism. There is a growing literature on the creation and recreation of a white race in the USA out of the mix of English, Scot, Irish, German, French, Italian, Scandinavian, Polish, etc. people-Protestant and Catholic.
It is my argument that, at that point in time, the white race and white American nationality was, in effect, the same thing. After WWII, it could be successfully argued, the ranks of white people–and thus American nationals–grew to include Jews. Despite the existence of citizenship rights for Jews (although religious bars to public office persisted in some states into the 20th century) and for some black people and others of color outside the South, most white people regarded the USA as a white racial nation until World War II. At the same time, paradoxically, a multi-racial American nationality struggled to be officially recognized, even as it existed by dint of a common economy and vernacular culture and language.
Although the country's economic, political and social elites today remain unremittingly white and even white working people have maintained their racial privileges, the civil rights movement and the war against Nazism in Europe combined to finally unravel the quasi-official white racial American nation in the 1960s. This seems a paradox: the maintenance of actual white-skin privilege at the same time that the equation of American nationality with a white race has been overthrown. But the same situation can be clearly seen in the Republic of South Africa, where the materiality of white supremacy persists despite the creation of a new South African nation-state. Nevertheless, Afrikaner nationalists seek to carve their own territorial state out of the larger South African republic. In the USA also, Middle American Nationalists now seek to restore or reinvent a white nationalism.
2. Changes in the Assumed Character of “Whiteness.”
Nationalism is one way of solving the question of individual and collective identity: Who am I? Who are we? It is a cultural identity occurring on a geo-political terrain. Geography or common territory (vis Webster) is the location for the construction of this identity, but it is not the identity itself. (Rudyard Kipling, for example, considered himself an Anglo-Saxon while living his life in India, for example.) In racial and religious nationalism, geography is barely present.
While American white nationalism was self-consciously an ideology which justified conquest, domination and genocide prior to World War II, its current manifestation as Middle American Nationalism finds its justification in protecting white peoples' identities from multi-culturalism. In the period of expansionism and colonialism, white nationalism proudly held the mantle of white supremacy. In the post-war period it held the flag of white victim hood. After 1990, white nationalism mutated again, and became the principal answer to the question "Who am I?" for millions of Americans. It is even embedded in the Christian republic theme of the Pat Robertson-types.
Self-identity as a Christian was a pre-Enlightenment form of nationalism, or in the words of O'Brien nationalism-as-sentiment. This was complex and two-sided. In pre-Napoleonic Europe, there was a specific religious "test" (to use contemporary civil liberties lingo) on the ability to become a member of the body politic. The various monarchies were subdivisions of the Holy Roman Empire and provinces of the Church. The identity of European people went unquestioned until the emergence of (secular) nationalism at the time of the French Revolution. Then English, French, etc. national identities emerged as alternatives to identities as Christians.
In this way, prior to Napoleon, Christian-ness was both transnational or pre-nationalist and (assumed) nationalist at the same time. (The Jewish Kehilla as the principal non-Christian "other" in Europe's midst at that time didn't emerge as a form of nationalism until after Napoleon, when choices began to emerge.)
Some elements of the contemporary situation for white people in the USA are similar to that of Christians in Europe. Prior to World War II, the equivalence of white, Christian and American was largely assumed as the equivalence of Christian and citizen-subject had been in Europe prior to Napoleon. That is the meaning of Lind's definition of the USA as a Anglo-American nation and then European-American nation. After World War II, this assumed equivalence was questioned by a convergence of events, as it had been in Europe after Napoleon. For some, the answer to these questions was various forms of white nationalism.
This historical parallelism illustrates another aspect of this phenomenon. Many historians trace the emergence of German ultra-nationalism and anti-Semitism (and ultimately its most virulent form: Nazism) to the German reaction to Napoleon. Contemporary Aryanism or white nationalism is similarly a delayed response to changes wrought by World War II.
Prior to World War II, nation and state for the USA were largely assumed to be one and the same (although there have been some compelling arguments from the Left that they were never the same). How did the equivalence of white-ness (and Christian) and American-ness become questioned? At least two of the factors at play were, first, the changes at the level of state policy and structure; and second, by cultural changes that both preceded and followed changes at the level of the state. (Remember, the “state” here and throughout this essay means the “state apparatus” rather than political subdivisions such as South Carolina.)
Prior to the 1960s, a distinctively "white" identity didn't exist for most white Americans. For example, I remember a discussion as a child in Sunday school about whether we (the students) were American Jews or Jewish Americans–the difference in nomenclature meant to signify whether our Jewishness or Americaness was the more dominant aspect of our identity. But we never discussed whether or not that school room full of European Jews were white, because "whiteness" in the 1950s was, for the most part, unchallenged. Today "whiteness" is contested and challenged and Jewish students on college campuses often engage in highly politicized debates about whether they are "white" or not. For non-Jewish whites there is a different, although equally charged conflict.
"On the one hand, whites inherit the legacy of white supremacy, from which they continue to benefit. But, on the other hand, they are subject to the moral and political challenges posed to that inheritance by the partial but real successes of the black movement (and affiliated movements)," according to the sociologist Howard Winant.
Outside the sphere of direct state enterprise-economic activity, such as the military, the economic dominance of white people remains almost completely intact (and assumed). Thus, the roll-back of affirmative action and the devolutionary state rights drive against welfare are at one and the same time both an effort to circumscribe the sphere of direct state activity and the threat to white (national) dominance that the federal state has engendered. By contrast, the number of cultural conflicts, where traditional notions of whiteness are no longer assumed, is countless.
3. “Christian Identity” as a form of American white nationalism
During the period between the end of World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall, nationalism within the Soviet Bloc and the American sphere of influence were subordinated to the imperatives of the Cold War. In the USA, white nationalism occupied an increasingly marginal space in American politics, particularly after the Brown decision. This did not preclude the existence of a violent white supremacist movement at the same time, its political expression first as anti-federal states rights or in local and state governments. White nationalism as such, however, only took an embryonic form, more as an ideology than as a material force.
One of the first streams of white nationalism to emerge in the 1950s flowed from a re-invention of white supremacist ideology by Francis Parker Yockey, a 1930s America Firster turned white internationalist. For a moment in post-war history the Yockey movement claimed for itself the mantle of Western Civilization. Its best-known proponent was Liberty Lobby mogul Willis Carto. In the Yockey construction, the West–in both its pagan and Christian incarnations–was a cultural phenomenon. Its character as a white racial group was axiomatic but unstated, and it wasn't Christian as such. However, Yockey and his political descendants always argued that Western civilization was the unique creation of a specific European gene pool. By this account, the civilization was composed of a number of nations and the complex whole was, in the final racially-determined. This was an expression of white cultural nationalism, or more properly: white internationalism. There was little distinctively American in this white (inter)nationalism.
During the 1950s and early 1960s, for Carto's Yockeyism, nations were determined by the cultures that produced them. The cultures, in turn, are biologically determined by the genetic make-up of an elite strata known as culture creators and a middle strata known as culture bearers. Although Yockeyism founded itself on a notion of a cultural "West" it was not territorially defined.
A second, parallel, form of white internationalism has been most clearly articulated by William Pierce. In his formulation there is no intermediary cultural complex between the "white" gene pool and the society it creates. Race and Nation literally are the same thing, whether in the USA, UK, France or Germany. Geo-political states and governments merely reflect the racial group which produces it. For Pierce, white people separated by language, culture and customs officials are like Kurds in Central Asia separated by state borders. Whatever appeals to distinctive American-ness Pierce might make are for marketing purposes only, not because he regards white Americans as fundamentally different from other white peoples.
Both Carto's Yockeyism and Pierce's internationalism are secular variants of white nationalism.
Identity theology also began as an exponent of white internationalism, but has subsequently shaped a distinct American white nationalism.
Christian Identity is a complex belief system in which race is the final, but not exclusive determinant. The shorthand description of Identity has three components: First, that the various nations of Northwestern Europe are the actual physical, non-metaphorical, descendants of the Biblical tribes of Israel. These Northwestern Europeans-Israelites are, in turn, descended from Adam–the first white man. Second, that people of color are pre-Adamic. Some variants hold that these non-Adamites have no soul and are more akin to beasts of the field than white people. Other variants hold that people of color can find salvation through a prescribed relationship to the Anglo-Saxon Israel: submission to white people. The third component is that the Jews are satanic. Seedline (or Two Seed) Identity holds that Jews are the incarnation of the Devil himself, being literally descended from a mating of Eve and Satan. Non-seedline (or One Seed) Identity holds that Jews are mongrel descendants of Esau and thus are a non-personal satanic force. All three components, in each variant, are genetically determinist. Contrary to the assertions of some analysts, there are no versions of Identity which are not racist in the most fundamental non-ideological use of the term.
From these three components has been drawn a complex theology of sin and salvation, good and evil, moral conduct, rituals of observance such as baptism, etc. In addition, there is an eschatology, or theory of an End Times involving the establishment of God's Kingdom.
For some time, Identity was regarded by its opponents as a flag of convenience, that is an ideological cover for pre-existing racism and ill-will. My 1986 monograph on the topic, was intended, in part, to demonstrate that Identity was in the main a theology and should be treated (and opposed) as such. A decade later, however, it is my contention that Identity, while retaining its character as a theology, is now, in the post post-war world, principally a pillar of a house under construction–that is a new white nationalism.
None of the three components of Identity described above lend themselves to a specifically territorial or Americanist nationalism. Instead, they seem to provide an origin myth for a form of white nationalism more like Yockey's or Pierce's.
Myths of origin are a foundation of every society, every nation. "History, geography, comparative religion and ethnography, each shows that every society claims a genealogy, a point of origin," according to Poliakev. "There is no culture, however old, which has not provided itself with a spontaneous anthropology." Poliakev dissects Aryanism and finds in it an origin myth widespread in European cultures, marginalized only after WWII by its association with Hitlerism and genocide. This Aryan myth finds its point of departure in the same spot that Identity does: Adam. In fact, Identity parallels the Aryan etiology, except that the Aryan myth passes through India and Identity passes through ancient Israel.
By this account each of the (white) European nations finds its origin in an Israelite tribe: Judah becomes Germany, Dan becomes Denmark, etc. Identity in this construct is a theological version of Yockey-style secular white racial (inter)nationalism.
The beginnings of a distinctive American-ness can be found in Identity's formulation of the USA as the New Jerusalem or Promised Land. In this millenarian account, a Final Battle of Armageddon is fought as a racial war in the heartland, won finally by Anglo-Saxon Israel. While this End Times scenario propels its adherents into a violent war against the status quo, it also isolates its adherents from others on the far right–particularly Pat Robertson-style fundamentalists who locate their Final Battle scenario in the modern state of Israel.
Identity took a second step (away from British Israelism) toward a distinctive American-ness with the founding of the Posse Comitatus in the 1970s. The Posse blended Identity's End Times-race war with the notion of America as a Christian Republic.
This was closely followed by a third step: tracing a God-given lineage for the "organic" Constitution (the original document plus the first ten amendments) back through the Article of Confederation to the Magna Charta one step further back to the Bible. Aryan-Israel gives birth to (white)) Europe which in turn gives birth to white Americans as a distinctive tribe-nation.
Still, the identity movement found itself separated from other developing strands of Middle American Nationalism until it shifted its focus from the coming Final Battle-race war to resistance to the New World Order. In an ugly perversion of Mondlane's previously cited dictum: Only in the common battle against the multi-cultural masses on the one hand and the internationalist elites on the other, did the various white political tribes become the germ of a new nationalist movement.
4. Middle Americanism
Middle American Nationalism is the post post-war manifestation of middle American radicalism. Middle American Radicals (MARs) were discovered by Michigan sociologist Donald Warren in his 1976 study of Gov. George Wallace's presidential campaigns, The Radical Center. Warren identified MARsians as middle class political radicals who, while they shared some attributes with radicals of both the left and the right, had developed a distinctive radicalism of the center. MARsians believed, Warren noted, that "the rich give in to the demands of the poor, and the middle income people have to pay the bill."
Warren's construction was adapted by Republican theorist Kevin Phillips in his premature prediction of the conservative movement's demise, Post-Conservative America, published in 1982, and by Michael Lind's recent query into American nationalism. And it is the basis of much of the argument in this section.
MARs are militiamen, Tenth Amendment advocates and Southern secessionists and anti-immigrant. "The religious right is itself a Middle American movement," according to Sam Francis, the MARs most enthusiastic exponent. In 1968 and 1972 MARsians supported George Wallace, in the 1980s they were Reagan Democrats and in the 1990s voted for Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan. "What has happened in the Buchanan revolution," Francis wrote back in 1992, "is the emergence of a new political identity…of a particular cultural and political force–Middle America–as the defining core." Francis believes that Middle Americanism is the only line of defense against the elites' surrender of national sovereignty to the multi-cultural invasion.
Most analysis concluded that Buchananism was composed of two distinct constituencies, one economic nationalist and the other right-wing culturalist. Here I am arguing that Buchananism embodied just one constituency–Middle American Nationalism.
A Voters News Service exit poll taken on Super Tuesday in 1996 found that only 12% of Republican primary voters said that abortion was the issue which most influenced their vote. Of those, 54% voted for Buchanan and only 27% voted for Dole. This would supposedly be, then, Buchanan’s social conservative public.
A slightly larger number of primary voters, 17%, said that the economy and jobs were the issue that most influenced their vote. This might conceivably be Buchanan's "second public." Yet, of those voters, 61% voted for Dole and only 18% for Buchanan.
Rather than job training, job creation or an increase in the minimum wage, however, Buchanan focused on immigration and foreign trade. The same Super Tuesday poll found that only 4% of Republican primary voters were most influenced by immigration; another 4% were likewise motivated by foreign trade. Of these votes, Buchanan received a noticeable 46% and 42% respectively–just a few points more than Dole–but more than he received on just jobs alone.
For Buchanan, foreign trade and immigration, like abortion and even jobs, aren't issues with distinct constituencies, but battlegrounds in one single cultural war fought by Middle American Radicals.
"Beyond the financial costs of uncontrolled immigration, as high as they are, America pays even more dearly in the priceless coin of national unity," he wrote in October 1994.
"Today, illegal immigration is helping fuel the cultural breakdown of our nation. That cultural breakdown, which you and I have recognized and sworn to fight, is the single most important factor which has impelled me to run for President."
Buchanan said much the same about other issues highlighted by his campaigns, except that the liquid Culture War of 1992 has transmuted into a solid cultural nationalist ethos in 1996.
"The battle for the future will be as much a battle within the parties as it will be between the parties," he wrote. It is "a battle between the hired men of the Money Power who long ago abandoned as quaint but useless old ideas of nationhood and populists, patriots and nationalists."
5. Create an Alternative to Middle American Nationalism
Our task is not to create a competing form of nationalism a la Michael Lind, but a competing form of internationalism rooted in an alternative notion of American-ness. Internationalism, of course pre-supposes nations. The American nation I propose for our consideration is two-sided. It has its "origin myth" based in the conflict between democracy on the one hand and slavery and genocide on the other; the creation of the first democracy in the Reconstruction era and its subsequent smashing; the period of racist violence that accompanied financial and industrial development, etc. Both sides of this struggle are as American as the other. Our internationalism requires the triumph of the democratic aspect of American-ness over the slavery-genocide aspect.
End.