Hate in Precarious Times

Mobilizing Anxiety from the Alt-Right to Brexit

Neal Curtis

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780755603077
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique comparée

In the age of Brexit and Donald Trump, the radical right has gained significant popularity, characterized by a rhetoric of xenophobia, discrimination and "hate speech". This book examines why the politics of hate and ideologies of the far-right are on the rise and argues that to counter it we must challenge the sense of social and economic precarity this politics feeds off. Hate in Precarious Times examines five distinct types of precarity, covering threats to a particular way of life; fear of apocalyptic terrorism; the insecurity of austerity, and low-waged jobs in the wake of the Financial Crisis; challenges to privilege; and the spread of disinformation in a "post-truth" age. In this book, Neal Curtis seeks the root of what causes ordinary people to identify with far-right ideologies and asks what can be done to counter the conditions underpinning this.

Part 1

Hate

1

The politics of hate

One of the reasons the far-right has become resurgent is because, in true Biedermann style, we cannot accept that what walks like fascism and talks like fascism might actually be fascism or some nascent variety thereof. Although a number of far-right, ethno-nationalists have come to power in recent years, our media still platforms opinion that normalizes such politics because, as Sinclair Lewis put it way back in 1935, we believe it can’t happen here. While we find it almost impossible to countenance what has been taking place, we have the additional problem of believing fascism has always been a marginal political affiliation and will always remain so. However, as Michael Mann (2004) has convincingly argued,

Fascism was not a mere sideshow in the development of modern society. [. . .] Alongside environmentalism, it was the major political doctrine of world-historical significance created during the twentieth century. There is a chance that something quite like it, though almost certainly under another name, will play an important role in the twenty-first century. Fascists have been at the heart of modernity. (1)

This is the first of seven reasons Mann gives for the persistent dangers of fascism. The second is that fascism was not ‘set apart’ as a form of politics, rather it ‘only embraced more fervently than anyone else the central political icon of our time, the nation state, together with its ideologies and pathologies’ (1). This comprised the second feature, namely, the specific development of an exclusionary idea of a nation based on a nativist sense of ‘the people’ against foreigners both domestic and abroad. This is patently happening today in a number of countries. It also involved the development of a state as the ‘bearer of a moral project’ (2). Fascism for Mann was therefore the accentuation and acceleration of the dominant political ideology.

Third, ‘fascists did offer plausible solutions to modern social problems’ (2) and convinced people ‘it could bring about a more harmonious order’ (3). Unfortunately, the leaders of numerous nation states today are offering ‘plausible solutions’ – or at least plausible to their audience – in which a form of ethno-nationalism and its accompanying identity politics are the answer to all our ills. This is possible because of Mann’s fourth reason, namely, that the nation state remains a ‘sacred icon’ and people retain especially ‘close relations’ to it (4). This can be seen when members of the British public wave flags and cheer for their monarch. It is an attitude carefully cultivated and maintained through various rituals including royal weddings, the queen’s Christmas speech, royal attendance at sporting events and media spectacles like the Royal Variety Performance. This is all reinforced in the ubiquity and banality of royal palace tea towels, commemorative plates, celebrity royal stories and enforced pilgrimages to Buckingham Palace as a child. This is what Michael Billig (1995) calls ‘banal nationalism’. However, while it might manifest in the quotidian cushion cover or the kitchen apron, it should not, according to Billig, be thought of as benign or harmless because it is an important element in the functioning of power. For him, it unconsciously readies or primes people (7) to take part in and support the exercise of more violent expressions of power such as war and emerging forms of belligerent nationalism.

For Mann, the fifth and sixth reasons why we should still take fascism seriously is that as hierarchical movements they gave young men a purpose and a sense of position – an especially important issue in our precarious age – which then enabled their ‘capacity to commit evil’ (2004: 3). Mann’s seventh and final point is particularly resonant. Understanding how the supposedly benign processes of capitalist globalization continue practices of dispossession and violence, Mann notes that ‘given time for a supposedly stateless neoliberalism’ to continue to do damage, the ‘rejection of the powerful state will probably fade. Then extreme statist values might be harnessed again to extreme paramilitary nationalism in movements resembling fascism’ (4).¹I doubt Mann was thinking of the United Kingdom, the United States or European nations here, but the language of a culture-destroying globalism is now centre stage in the mainstream politics of many of these countries. In an attempt to understand what is happening, I will first offer a more detailed description of what the Alt-Right stands for, before showing how, despite its antagonism to traditional forms of conservatism, its core beliefs have still managed to find a foothold there.

The Alt-Right and white nationalism

Since their arrival on the scene, the Alt-Right and its members have been the subject of numerous puff pieces in newspapers intrigued by their style and somehow surprised that not all modern-day Nazis wear jackboots or model themselves on the swastika-tattooed skinhead. In May 2018, the Sunday Times in the UK ran a piece on the European version of the Alt-Right known as Generation Identity. In a piece titled ‘Heil Hipsters’, Andrew Gilligan noted how the new brand of the far-right were ‘Middle class and well-spoken, dressed in skinny jeans and New Balance trainers rather than bomber jackets and boots’. This trend was kicked off by the 2016 Mother Jones article on Richard Spencer titled ‘Meet the dapper white nationalist’ (an article that has since lost the word ‘dapper’ from the title).²It was published just one month prior to Spencer’s ‘Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory’ speech, given at the National Policy Institute (NPI) conference at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington. The NPI is a far-right think tank of which Spencer is president and has played an important role coordinating with far-right groups across Europe.

The sharp style, however, masks very dull racism. Central to the movement is the belief in ‘human biodiversity’ (HBD). This sounds like it might lend itself to a rather cosmopolitan outlook but is very much removed from that. According to Mike Wendling, HBD ‘argues that because different people have different traits, and some of these traits are linked to genetics, genes [. . .] are determinative’ (2018: 22). This is little more than the widely discredited race science that deems black people are both physically and cognitively inferior, but it is nevertheless used to support the Alt-Right’s belief in the need for ethnically based nation states and what Spencer calls ‘peaceful ethnic cleansing’ (Wendling 2018: 22). This is modelled on the post-war settlement of 1919 that created new nations out of collapsed empires (23). Ultimately, though, this race science also includes the implicit belief that the biological superiority of white people necessarily produces the better culture. This leads to Spencer’s additional desire to create a ‘bigger civilizational, hegemonic domain’ (25) for white people in which a putative ‘European’ culture, described as Greco-Roman and/or Judeo-Christian might be defended. Again, a version of this rhetoric, albeit diluted, has become readily evident in the policy statements of a range of traditional conservative parties around the globe.

As a result, the Alt-Right has also adopted the ‘one drop’ mantra of the nineteenth-century white supremacists that argues ‘any non-white ancestor fundamentally alters all lineal descendants forevermore’ (Wendling 2018: 44). Despite the near certainty that none of them would pass a DNA test screening for such Aryan purity, they persist with the fantasy. In keeping with their bid to prevent any further contamination to either biology or culture, they also believe ‘diversity is code for white genocide’, a key point that had put them at odds with traditional conservatism. As George Hawley notes, ‘The Alt-Right hates the conservative movement [for their] hesitancy to engage directly with the issue of race. According to the Alt-Right, conservatives obsess over tax cuts, deregulation and other small bourgeois concerns, but they fear tackling demographic questions, which the Alt-Right consider existential’ (Hawley 2019: 164). However, traditional conservatism has become increasingly less reluctant to make race an issue, as can be seen in Trump’s 2016 victory and the rhetoric of the Brexit campaign.

The centrality of race means there is a strong connection between the Alt-Right and the early white power movement, which Kathleen Belew argues was ‘thrown together by tectonic shifts in the cultural and political landscape’ (2018: 1) in the 1970s. Similarly, the Alt-Right also emerged at a time when the economic and political failures of neoliberalism were most pronounced, and the US diversity index had doubled in the period 2000–15 (Neiwert 2017: 323). Although the Alt-Right disparagingly refer to the earlier movement as ‘white Nationalism 1.0’ (Hawley 2019: 31) due to their perceived lack of success, the earlier movement did manage to bring their ideology into the mainstream of US Conservatism when the Tea Party became the ‘conduit for a revival of the Patriot movement and its militias’ (Neiwert 2017: 139). This mainstreaming of the movement was significant given that the various white supremacist groups in the United States that had come together to form the white power movement in 1979 declared revolutionary war on the US Federal Government in 1983, with one particular white power group, The Posse, recognizing no higher authority than the local sheriff (Belew 2018: 119). Given the Tea Party was crucial to the evolution of the Alt-Right, it is possible to argue there is greater continuity between the two movements than some members of the Alt-Right acknowledge and that the seeds of Trumpism were flowering long before Trump descended that escalator and declared his candidacy.

As Belew notes, the declaration of war on the federal government in 1983 was significant because ‘white supremacy undergirded state power throughout US history’ (2018: 106) and the power of the state had traditionally supported white supremacy (Anderson 2017). The key to understanding this is the publication of Louis Beam’s Essays of a Klansman that same year. Having returned from Vietnam he ‘urged activists to continue fighting the Vietnam War on American soil’ (Belew 2018: 3). In step with much of the anti-globalist rhetoric of Trump and the Alt-Right today, Beam and other members of the white power movement felt under threat from what they called the Zionist Occupational Government (ZOG), which later became the New World Order. According to Belew, ‘white power activists believed that the Jewish-led ZOG controlled the United Nations, the US federal government, and the banks, and that ZOG used people of color, communists, liberals, journalists, academics, and other enemies of the movement as puppets in a conspiracy to eradicate the white race and its economic, social, and cultural accomplishments’ (7).

In 1984, Louis Beam set up the bulletin board, Liberty Net, that listed anti-Klan names and targets (Belew 2018: 121). This was a precursor to much of the Alt-Right’s online activity. Echoing the later language of Trump, Belew explains how Beam ‘understood the Vietnam War as the catalyst for American decline’ (30), and in keeping with the language of the Alt-Right who try to play down the genocidal aspects of Nazism by referring to themselves as separatists, they sought a revolution that would deliver ‘a racial utopian nation’ (5). One especially dramatic vision for securing such a nation was Beam’s plan to take advantage of the Cold War and the nuclear conflict he considered inevitable. Believing the US military would be depleted and incapacitated, he argued a white separatist army ‘could take control of the United States – or at least Texas – expelling all non-white people to create a white homeland’ (40).

Some of the other figures and organizations that would support a version of this cause at different times were Robert Shelton and his United Klans of America, which was infamously responsible for directing the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963; an organization called The Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord (CSA), a Christian Identity movement formed in 1971 that provided paramilitary training to other white supremacist groups; Tom Metzger’s Confederate Knights of the Ku Klux Klan that was renamed White Aryan Resistance (WAR) in 1983; Richard Butler’s Aryan Nations that was involved in the harassment of Vietnamese immigrants in 1980 and the short-lived but important group known as The Order founded by Bob Matthews.³It was another member of The Order, David Lane, that coined the ‘Fourteen words’ (Hawley 2019: 44) that became the white supremacist rallying cry: ‘We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.’ This remains an integral part of Alt-Right discourse and can be seen in the use of the number 1488, which adds the numerical value of HH (Heil Hitler) to the fourteen words to produce a shorthand or code of identification. Most disconcertingly, echoes of the fourteen words were found in a US Department of Homeland Security press release from February 2020 that read: ‘We Must Secure The Border And Build The Wall to Make America Safe Again.’⁴

Remaining in the present, aside from Richard Spencer, other key figures in the Alt-Right’s theory of race include Don Black who founded the website Stormfront in 1995, and the earlier bulletin board in 1990, for which Louis Beam’s Liberty Net in 1984 was a precursor. Another major figure is Andrew Anglin, founder of the white nationalist website Daily Stormer. Anglin, in turn, has also commented on the important role played in this area by Jared Taylor who founded the think tank, the New Century Foundation in the 1990s and its influential magazine American Renaissance; Matthew Heimbach, who formed the Traditionalist Youth Network and its political wing the Traditionalist Workers Party in 2015; Brad Griffin, founder of Occidental Dissent; Taki Theodoracopulos, publisher of Taki’s Magazine, a paleoconservative website popular with the radical right and a columnist for The Spectator in the UK censured for racism while Boris Johnson was editor and Peter Brimelow, the British author of Alien Nation and founder of the white nationalist website VDARE in 1998.

This centrality of race for the Alt-Right came to a head when other affiliates to the movement, Milo Yiannopoulos and Allum Bokhari, published an essay in March 2016 for Breitbart called ‘An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right’ that denounced neo-Nazis. Yiannopoulos, for a brief time, cultivated some far-right celebrity, but he was little more than an opportunist who made money from trading in online abuse, especially of women, and has since disappeared into relative obscurity following social media bans. Nevertheless, the essay did provoke a response from Anglin who ‘set out to correct the record’ (Neiwert 2017: 250) with his own take titled ‘A Normie’s Guide to the Alt-Right’ in which he wrote: ‘The core concept of the movement, upon which all else is based, is that Whites are undergoing extermination, via mass immigration into White countries which was enabled by a corrosive liberal ideology of White self-hatred, and that the Jews are at the center of this agenda’ (250).⁵However, as Neiwert notes, Spencer has a shorter name for this, preferring to call it ‘white Zionism’ (238).

Interestingly, though, in November 2019, Yiannopoulos’s ongoing spat with the neo-Nazi branch of the Alt-Right resulted in him leaking a recording of Richard Spencer from a meeting on 13 August 2017, the day after the ‘Unite the Right’ march in Charlottesville where a white supremacist injured nineteen people and killed Heather Heyer by driving a car into a group of anti-fascist protestors.⁶In the recording, the glamour of ‘fashy’ style succumbs to the ugliness of Spencer’s hostility and hate. In a screaming rant, he shouts:

We are coming back here like a hundred fucking times. I am so mad. I am so fucking mad at these people. They don’t do this to fucking me. We are going to fucking ritualistically humiliate them. I am coming back here every fucking weekend if I have to. Like this is never over. I win! They fucking lose! That’s how the world fucking works. Little fucking kikes. They get ruled by people like me. Little fucking octoroons . . . I fucking . . . my ancestors fucking enslaved those little pieces of fucking shit. I rule the fucking world. Those pieces of fucking shit get ruled by people like me. They look up and see a face like mine looking down at them. That’s how the fucking world works. We are going to destroy this fucking town.

While the Alt-Right claims it opposes identity politics – especially those based on race, sexuality or gender – the movement is clearly committed to white identity which they claim multiculturalism undermines. Wendling drew this out in an interview with another very important Alt-Right figure Theodore Beale who is best known by his pen name, Vox Day. Asking about this potential contradiction, Day replied: ‘The alt-right has never railed against identity politics. You are confusing us with conservatives’ (46). A politics of white identity is necessary, he claims, as a bulwark against the ‘oppressive forces of equality forming a dissent-crushing monolith’ (29). Vox Day has also produced one of the earliest Alt-Right manifestos containing his sixteen points detailing ‘What the Alternative Right Is’.⁷In it, he describes its diff...