White Nationalism’s New ClothesDressing down the so-called “alt-right”No, this is not a call to punch or pants our nation’s egghead-wannabe eugenicists. There are better options.
Some of them I’ve tried. Like many left-wing academics, journalists, and researchers before me, the far right’s efforts to re-imagine American ethnonationalism drew me to their private conferences, conventions, and symposia, whether they wanted me in attendance or not. These are their “safe spaces”—although they loathe the term—and they don’t take kindly to interlopers. Inside these spaces, I’ve gotten a clearer picture of what the so-called “alt-right” is up to than I’ve seen anywhere else. And this includes a first-hand look at how they mimic the conventions of academic culture to shore up their program of exclusion.
Conferences are notoriously boring; it’s part of what Spencer and his colleagues like about them. Although the notion of an “intellectual” racism geared toward educated, middle-class partisans has been around for centuries, the roots of the current generation’s normalization effort goes back to the late 1980s. The year 1988 brought us Louisiana state representative David Duke—the former Ku Klux Klan Imperial Wizard gone politician and pundit. Four years later, Yale/Sciences Po-educated Jared Taylor founded American Renaissance (AmRen)—a Virginia-based “think tank” and (now online) journal that bills itself as the premier destination for “race realist” content.
In contrast to the militia movements sprouting up throughout the American West in the early 1990s, AmRen was once (and arguably still is) a standard-bearer for “sophisticated” racism. Later in the decade, it began holding conferences modeled after those organized by the usual D.C. policy shops. One early report from The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education observed that “for the most part, civility reigned at the conference.” Indeed, “the entire weekend passed without one speaker using the word ‘nigger’ though in their private moments not all were so genteel—and these attendees tout advanced degrees, not prison tattoos.”
The goal behind these gatherings was obvious. To ensure its survival, the ethnonationalist movement needed to work against the received idea of racists as hilljack psychopaths and to appeal to the ever more disgruntled ranks of the white middle class. Years before Richard Spencer could’ve dreamed of capturing the attention of the mainstream media, academic Carol Swain observed in her 2002 book, The New White Nationalism in America, that “unlike the Klan and Nazi movements, white nationalism is aggressively seeking a mainstream audience, and in going mainstream it has found it necessary to abandon most of the tactics, postures, and regalia of the older racist right, which no longer resonates with America.” As one pseudonymous blogger observed in Radix Journal in 2015:
When I use the words, “White Nationalism,” what comes to mind? Probably skinheads, swastika tattoos, and jackboots. Maybe some heavy metal, if you are into that kind of music. Oh, and Klan rallies. . . . Only a tiny, tiny minority of White Nationalists actually wear those kind of clothes or associate with those kind of people. In fact, of that minority, probably half of them are FBI plants. I stay as far as possible from those types as I can. They are kooks.
Today’s intellectually minded white nationalists may throw up the occasional festive “Sieg Heil”—or even call to “party like it’s 1933.” But they do so after making a conscientious effort to trade in their white hoods for suits, violent screeds for polite conversations about postmodern political theory, and rural cross burnings for cocktail-sipping networking events. America’s white nationalist elite had, as Swain noted more than a decade before many of its current figures became household names, remodeled itself to become “preeminently a movement of discourse, persuasion, and ideas.” Its “idea-centric” approach mirrored that of European nativist groups abroad, including the European ideological predecessor to America’s alt-right: France’s Bloc Identitaire. The radical far-right organization, which was inspired by the French New Right (Nouvelle Droite) school of political thought, has given rise to spinoff groups in a number of European nations. As Fabrice Roberts, Bloc Identitaire’s founder and the occasional white nationalist conference speaker, explained in an interview, the right’s “struggle for the cultural hegemony must be total and therefore take different modes of action: agitprop operations, community network development, creation of alternative media, development of our presence on of the Internet, etc.”
What is it like inside one of these elaborate and often secretive events? Incredibly white, but you knew that already. Some of them offer press passes—such as the NPI conference in November, which was overrun with journalists—but others have required me to go incognito, which I can manage only because my skin is every bit as pasty as Spencer’s. I had the unfortunate honor of covering (and nearly being chased out of) the now-infamous NPI dinner with Tila Tequila just weeks after Trump’s electoral win in November. For people who claim to have ideas they want the whole country to hear and obey, they sure have a lot to whisper about. Earlier in May, the far-right publishing house Counter Currents held a strictly vetted conference in New York City that was barred to “outside agitators.”
One thing I’ve learned from my research is how thoroughly these pseudo-academic babblers have managed to conceal the ferocity of their hatred with academic culture’s bad habits: exclusivity, insularity, self-congratulation, tweed. Their conference programs look like any number of others proceeding in snazzy convention centers and faded hotel ballrooms across the country. Meet and greets and keynotes, hors d’oeuvres and panels, name tags and networking—who would have pegged these as the weapons of a resurgent far right dreaming of genocide?
