The New White Nationalism in America

By Carol Swain (Cambridge Press, $30, 416 pp.)

The late neo-Nazi William Pierce and his white power brethren are the ultimate sound-bite bogeymen: They come equipped with photogenic robes and rituals, deny one holocaust while issuing invites to another, and hurl invectives incendiary enough to make Pat Buchanan look like a squeaky centrist. But what happens when those formerly known as white supremacists stop calling for racial holy war? What does it mean when their rhetoric is closer in style to a Rainbow Coalition press release than a gun show plenary session?

Take the spiffy crackers of American Renaissance, whose annual conference attracts a cornucopia of far right intellectuals and activists. Founder Jared Taylor is a Yale alum, author of an acclaimed book on Japanese culture and difficult to dismiss as a mere crank. Ditto that for his comrade Sam Francis, a Washington Times writer who was fired after Dinesh D’Souza reported in his book, The End of Racism, a speech that Francis made at a 1994 American Renaissance conference. “What we as whites must do,” Francis said, “is reassert our identity and our solidarity, and we must do so in explicitly racial terms through the articulation of a racial consciousness as whites.”

With the racialist right using the idiom of multiculturalism like a child’s toy, it seems that the chickens of identity politics have come home to roost. As Vanderbilt University professor Carol Swain explains in her latest tome, The New White Nationalism in America: Its Challenge to Integration, “Some ordinary white Americans are making a case for increased white solidarity and white consciousness by employing the same brand of identity politics that minorities have successfully used in the past to further their own group interests and group identities.”

Swain originally set out to write about affirmative action when intuition led her to investigate how that issue was being used by white supremacists. The result is this new volume, which ends up tackling both of these issues and a few more to boot. The New White Nationalism is at times fascinating, and maddeningly dull: Even if you don’t agree with Swain’s starkly conservative views, she conveys her arguments effectively, while at other times, her conclusions sound more like assumptions than well-reasoned arguments. Even if her prose reeks of an interoffice memo, the ideas she unearths and the assumptions she takes on are well worth engaging with.

In conducting interviews with leading members of the far right, Swain found a movement bearing little resemblance to the media-induced image of foaming skinheads and Klansmen. Today’s new, improved “white nationalists” understand that the Klan’s mysticism and George Lincoln Rockwell’s neo-Nazi posturing are both meaningless and counterproductive, and Swain argues that they are set for an insurgency. They have traded cross-burning tactics for fancy Web sites and media-savvy Ivy League front men in an effort to win an ideological war for white hearts and minds.

These “new” white nationalists, of course, are not new; many are disrobed Klansmen who have refined their spin. Their organizations have innocuous names like David Duke’s National Organization for European American Rights, or the holocaust-denying Institute for Historical Review. While many will argue that the Klan by any other name is still the Klan, Swain disagrees. In her exhaustive study, she argues that a confluence of factors will soon provide white nationalists with an unprecedented opportunity to reach into mainstream political discourse. These include the waning majority status of white Americans, increased non-white immigration, continued racial preferences in higher education and job selection, a disproportionately high rate of black-on-white violent crime and the decrease in well-paid blue-collar jobs due to globalization. As whites become a minority, Swain contends, they will behave like other minority groups and assert a collective interest. All this paves the path for what she believes to be an American future of “unprecedented racial conflict.”

Given the alacrity with which racial and ethnic genocide has taken off in well-known global flash points, it’s hard to fault Swain for being too vigilant against perceived racial Balkanization. While she does an excellent job of providing context to the issues around which white nationalists are organizing, she never explains how they might gain power. That the cultural transformation of the civil rights movement will be undone by an inchoate and historically precarious “white” identity politics seems a bit of a stretch. Without articulating how such a disaster might happen, her book’s urgency seems too much like a bookseller’s marketing ploy.

White nationalists may exploit issues like affirmative action and immigration, but Swain exploits them right back by using the alleged white nationalist threat to trumpet her own conservative agenda. Her approach is simple: co-opt the people most likely to fall prey to white nationalists arguing her own conservative social policies—such as the dismantling of affirmative action. A born-again Christian from a working class background, and an African American with bona fide academic credentials, she’s the type of black intellectual that white conservatives soil themselves over. But the book reeks of a scam when the reader realizes that it is equally devoted to affirmative action and conservative polemics as its purported subject.

Swain does argue effectively for an end to affirmative action as we know it. The policy of racial preferences, she maintains, was never part of the civil rights movement’s demand for equality. Rather, it was instituted top-down by policymakers in the Johnson administration in the wake of the urban riots of the late ’60s. Ultimately, she claims, affirmative action has failed working-class blacks, and it should be based on need rather than race.

Perhaps the newest and sharpest ideas in The New White Nationalism concern double standards of racial identity. “Many proponents of multiculturalism allow and encourage the expression of group pride by cultural groups deemed worthy of such expression, but any group (e.g., a college white pride group) whose ideas are viewed as outside of the mainstream or at odds with what the multiculturalists themselves believe is denied both resources and forums that are generally open to other, more acceptable cultural groups.” However flawed the construct of a white identity, it’s hard to dismiss the contradiction.

Her attacks on immigration are less convincing. Though she cites statistical evidence arguing that the influx of foreign workers has reduced wages for working-class Americans, it doesn’t follow that the plight of the country’s blue-collar population is due more to immigration policy than to the shift away from a domestic industrial base. It’s not as though the corporate migration to the global south could have been stemmed by a steadfast native workforce. Similarly, her paternalistic “love the sinner, hate the sin” cheap shot at gays is an aberration from an otherwise reasoned intellectual effort.

When Proposition 209 ended affirmative action at the University of California, it was not because white nationalists were taking to the streets, but because a black conservative, Ward Connerly, framed the argument in the rhetoric of civil rights. Connerly’s campaign simultaneously appealed to the better and worse angels of white Californians: They could oppose racism and affirmative action at the same time. Such a political phenomenon mitigates against a white nationalist juggernaut. But as Swain is speculating on a radically different demographic 50 years down the road, the jury on America’s racial future is still out.