Hillary Clinton recently made the news by pegging the Trump campaign as a vehicle for “Alt-Right” ideology, while pegging the ideology itself as alien or fringe to the wonderful traditions of “American conservatism,” which she applauds.
Cracking open a history book (or in our age, Google) would tell you this was a move out of her old idol Goldwater’s own playbook, who once denounced the John Birch Society as a fringe ideology alien to good old-fashioned American conservatism when the Birchers attempted to paint Eisenhower as a secret “communist agent” bent on destroying America.
Sounds sort of like right-wing’s talk about the secret “Muslim socialist” who has allegedly been destroying America for the past eight years—according to Trump and his underlings. And while Obama has been destroying America (and most of the world) for eight years, it has been due to his open support for the aims of U.S. capitalists—not Islam or socialism.
History has an odd way of slapping you in the face if you let it. One decade we were listening to the mad ravings of Birchers and a few decades later we’re listening to the mad ravings of Birthers. The Birchers, who mobilized an anti-Communist movement during the peak of radical resistance to U.S. capitalism, made a politician like Goldwater seem reasonable. At least until you remember that Goldwater said, “Segregation forever!” during segregation’s last, dying breath.
Today the Birthers (including Trump) and their wide range of cohorts make Clinton—a Goldwater volunteer in the 1960s grown into her warmonger, mass incarcerator, Walmart Board alumni shoes—seem like a reasonable choice.
But despite how much things may seem similar and the cliché “history repeats itself” comes to mind, there has been a significant change in right-wing extremist ideology and tactics. This is why everyone is asking, “What exactly is the Alt-Right?”
Early U.S. fascism
To understand the Alt-Right we have to look back at the “old” right or “regular” right. Fascism has historically come about in a time of great crisis for the existing economic and social order. Fascism takes shape in the form of a mass movement and typically includes some form of organization into semi-legal and illegal bands intended to engage in violence against progressive forces. They aim to implement a form of direct, autocratic rule in order to further exploit poor and working people and preserve the existing economic and social order.
Because the U.S. was founded as a colony, first with slaves and later with a strict apartheid system, the tendency of fascism in the U.S. has veered toward open white supremacy. The ruling class—whether slaveowners or Wall Street—can always count on mobilizing some form of white resistance to Black and Brown liberation in each stage of the struggle.
The vanguard force from the fall of slavery through most of fascist history in the U.S. has been the Ku Klux Klan. Along the way we have seen the German American Bund in the 1930s which mirrored Hitler’s movement during Hitler’s rise, but were liquidated as WWII started; the American Nazi Party that fell apart in internecine struggles in the 1960s; the John Birch Society that utilized absurd conspiracies to mobilize anti-Communists, and so on. All along the way there is a trail of violence and bloodshed carried out by these forces against progressives who struggled for civil rights, women’s equality, and the rights of all workers in the labor movement. The Klan, which was the most “successful” in its mission up to that point had carried out thousands of lynchings of Black people, Mexicans, LGBTQ people and radical activists. They fire bombed churches, broke up organizing meetings and ran people out of all-white towns. They even prided themselves on their nickname, the “invisible empire,” as they managed to take over police departments, local councils, mayoral positions, and even congressional and gubernatorial offices in some cases.
A common thread between these various fascist organizations has been their propensity for open white supremacy, misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia and more. Their words and violence were equally forward in their mission to preserve the white supremacist character of the United States.
November 27, 1982 – A turning point and lesson in anti-fascist resistance
President Richard Nixon had launched an ideological struggle through the 1970s against the mass revolutionary movement led by the Black Panther Party, anti-war activists, women, LGBTQ people, Puerto Ricans, Chicanos and many more. In this struggle, he frequently called out to the “Silent Majority” to speak out more loudly—a euphemism for a section of white “well-to-do’”people who were undoubtedly fearful of the radical movement. This ideological front paired well with the criminalization of activists through propaganda about drugs and terrorism as well as the government assault through COINTELPRO that included the assassination and imprisonment of movement leaders, disruption of organizations and ultimately the forestalling of revolution in the United States.
By 1979, the fascists were so emboldened by the breaking down of the radical movement that they brazenly massacred five anti-fascist marchers in Greensboro, NC. In the 1980 election, Ronald Reagan led these forces in society into a brief fever pitch beginning with his campaign speech supporting states’ rights at the Neshoba County Fair in Louisiana just miles from the site where the KKK and police murdered three civil rights activists in 1964. Reagan had given a clear indication that he supported the continued reign of white supremacy in the South. The Klan began to march anywhere they could as much as they could in the early 1980s.
But on November 27, 1982, the Klan and fascist movement as a whole in the U.S. was dealt a mighty blow. Feeling motivated from a series of violent incidents and successful open rallies, they called for a mass demonstration of white supremacists in Washington, D.C.
They were greeted by thousands from the local Black community supported by radical activists and others. In fact, they were joined by many Palestinians and their supporters, who had converged on the capitol for a protest of their own. Once the protesters came upon the Klan, they began throwing rocks and bottles and initiated a running street battle that left the Klan and cops defeated.
This was an embarrassment to the ruling class and a demonstration that, despite the perceived growing political power of the far right, there was still a viable and strong force against white supremacy that could rise at any time. The defeat of the Klan led to a further break-up of KKK unity and an overall mid-life crisis for fascism in the United States. Gone were the days that white supremacy could be touted loudly in earnest. This sentiment has continued to spread as demonstrated in a new study that shows the majority of people from all racial backgrounds under 30 are in support of the Movement for Black Lives.
Fascist disunity
Fascists began a long period of political divergence and plurality. Some forces in the fascist movement believed in a form of renewed colonization and began organizing conferences around establishing the Northwest and some Midwestern states as a “White Homeland” and giving separate chunks of land to the various ethnic groups in the U.S. with the Southwest going to Mexicans and other Latino people, the South to Black people and some parts of New England to Native people. The concept behind this was to create a base of support logistically to carry on their race war if they couldn’t convince people of the overarching necessity for total segregation. An example of this was seen with the now infamous Craig Cobb, who attempted to take over a small town in North Dakota.
Some believed in a need to “professionalize” the fascist movement. This has been a common, recurring theme since David Duke’s National Association for the Advancement of White People. He ran for office constantly through the 1980s under the guise of representing the interests of “white civil rights.” In the 1990s similar forces made a splash when they formed white Student Unions on campuses across the country to fight against affirmative action on the grounds of “reverse racism.”
Some in the fascist movement dug even deeper into the criminal world, creating a series of fringe, violent neo-Nazi gangs and organizations that have mostly engaged in somewhat random acts of violence in between drug sales and other criminal activities. Transforming these types of neo-Nazis and former Aryan Nation members into activists has been the primary mission of the National Socialist Movement, a group founded by former ANP members. Today, the NSM is the single largest neo-Nazi organization in the country and is responsible for murders on the border of Arizona and a series of high profile racist rallies. The Order, an underground terrorist organization formed by the notorious David Lane, carried out a series of robberies followed by bombings of a synagogue and the eventual assassination of liberal talk show host Alan Berg in 1984.
Others began to focus on single issues. For instance, the Army of God formed to bomb abortion clinics and assassinate abortion providers.
The Posse Comitatus created an elaborate conspiracy theory and engaged in paramilitary training. Some of the Posse concepts later catalyzed into the militia movement after the Ruby Ridge and Waco incidents sparked widespread outrage, leading to the recruitment and formation of militias. The militia movement has largely recruited around conspiracy theories about the U.S. government attempting to eviscerate the 2nd Amendment and take away people’s guns. The 1995 Oklahoma City bombing pushed these fascists out of view due to the scandal that ensued, while simultaneously inspiring their proliferation across the country in a less visible fashion.
Many of these forces have had their biggest presence and backers from within the so-called “Lands States” in an attempt to convert federally protected land into privately exploited mining, logging and cattle grazing resources. The reemergence of this movement was marked by the Bundy Ranch standoff in 2014 and the 2016 Malheur National Wildlife Refuge takeover in Oregon where fascists couched their mission in terms of “fighting tyrannical government” when they were actually doing the bidding of a millionaire, racist rancher named Cliven Bundy.
In 1996, Don Black launched Stormfront, the first and most notable white supremacist and fascist online forum. Many from the various strains of fascism hid away in these online domains arguing over how to proceed.
The overarching objective situation of the fascist movement from the 1980s onward, was disunity, a constant break up into smaller constituent parts and general decline. After the defeat of the Klan in 1982, the fascist movement battled internally over what organization or ideology would become the leading force.
Alt-Right means fascist unity with a new veneer
In 2008-2009, the term “Alt-Right,” short for alternative right, was discussed in a series of speeches and articles by hardcore conservatives to describe some changes taking place since the election of Obama.
By 2010, Richard B. Spencer, the suit-and-tie neo-Nazi leader of the avowed white supremacist think tank National Policy Institute, used the term in its current meaning as a reference to the overarching shared components of various fascist elements and called for unity. The story of fascism in the United States from 2008 to today is a series of alliances and cooperation that have laid the groundwork for the unity of neo-Nazis, KKK, militia movement, gangs and even some of the “respectable” suit-and-tie “academic” fascists.
This call of course went out as the Tea Party was forming across the United States with Koch funding and an all-out assault on the Obama presidency with hardly veiled racist underpinnings, including the ludicrous claim of Obama’s African birth, Islamic faith and socialist politics in reply to Obamacare.
This moment was seized upon by white supremacists of all stripes to begin mass recruitment. The Southern Poverty Law Center acknowledges that the Obama administration has been the period of the largest and fastest growth of fascism in decades.
A major component of the Alt-Right concept was to shed the old prison-tatted, terroristic, conspiracy theory-fueled approach to fascism for a more nuanced recruitment strategy. Many in the fascist movement noted that these elements of fascism had made the movement an alienating force rather than a force that could recruit and unite the average white worker.
Paired with this new approach has been a noticeable change in tactics by moving full force into social media platforms. White supremacists have organized groups and pages on Facebook and were recently found in a study to have a 600 percent increase in their presence on Twitter.
With this new approach in mind, in 2008 the Youth for Western Civilization was formed with chapters at nine universities and was barely noticeable at all as a force besides a few high profile speeches by Robert Spencer and the group’s founder Tom Tancredo, both of whom have attempted to give fascism a more rational appeal.
By 2012, a new White Student Union was formed at Towson University in Maryland by Mathew Heimbach, a former YWC member and a leading youth member of the fascist movement, who used the controversy sparked by such an organization to pull white students into the fold of the Traditionalist Youth Network.
On the West Coast, a united front was formed in southern California between racist Los Angeles-based lawyer William D. Johnson, a leading “academic” anti-Semite, and Kevin MacDonald, psychology professor at California State University Long Beach, along with a small group of Orange County skinheads in what they called the Golden State Party. Gustavo Arellano of the OC Weekly exposed the plot to professionalize the OC skinheads when one of their officers got in trouble over a warrant from his pre-professional days. This party rebranded itself as the American Third Position Party at that time, but since the term “Third Position” is an obvious reference to classical Nazism they were forced again to change their name to the American Freedom Party.
Their mission is to build a palatable fascist electoral party along similar lines as the British National Party or the National Front in France. AFP has absorbed a series of small white supremacist organizations across the country and won several notable racists to their leadership board. They have openly used the Trump campaign as a mode of recruitment and have gone as far as paying for robocalls in support of Trump with their overarching slogan of “Diversity = White Genocide.” The above referenced Twitter study found the number one hashtag among fascists to be #WhiteGenocide. The concept of “white identity” being destroyed by multiculturalism, miscegenation and immigration is central to the Alt-Right perspective.
The Alt-Right has also rallied around disgusting figures like George Zimmerman and Dylann Roof. The explosion of the Movement for Black Lives was replied to with a heightening of fascist tactics. Dozens of Black churches have been burned in every region of the U.S., five protesters were shot in Minneapolis and threats continue to mount against the brave activists. As the struggle against racism has intensified so has recruitment to white supremacist groups.
In an even more recent coalition building effort in April of this year in Georgia, the National Socialist Movement, White Aryan Resistance, Loyal White Knights, White Lives Matter, Traditionalist Workers Party, Aryan Nations, Nordic Front, United Society of Aryan Skinheads and a dozen more KKK chapters and neo-Nazi groups formed the Aryan Nationalist Alliance.
The broad spectrum of the slowly coalescing Alt-Right has latched on to the Trump campaign as a vehicle for recruitment and taken advantage of the new acceptability of open, militant racist discourse unleashed by Trump’s demagoguery. The Twitter study found hashtags around Trump were the second most used by white supremacist accounts. Klan recruitment flyers are popping up in communities across the country; white supremacists have been caught carrying out violence and making fascist salutes at Trump events; high profile neo-Nazi and KKK rallies have taken place across California, New York, and the South.
Where does the Alt-Right come from?
The history of fascist organizations in the United States only accounts for one part of the story of how the Alt-Right came to exist. The truth is fascist movements and their growth are indispensably linked to the decline and general crisis of capitalism.
The political groups with the greatest culpability for the resurgence of fascism in the United States are the Democrats and Republicans.
Both parties have shared for more than three decades a commitment to neoliberalism marked by expanding free trade agreements, deindustrialization of the United States, rolling back social and economic rights, financialization of the economy, privatization of schools, prisons and other public institutions, elimination of welfare and attacks on unions.
Conservative estimates put job loss from NAFTA and CAFTA at more than one million jobs and the recent KORUS agreement with South Korea at half a million in the first couple years. In the last decade alone, more than 4 million jobs have been lost in manufacturing and industry.
Both mainstream capitalist parties have shared the Wolfowitz Doctrine since the fall of the Soviet Union, utilizing sanctions, mass bombing campaigns, coups, proxy wars, and full scale invasions to pacify and disrupt any independent nation that threatens the U.S. government’s precarious position as the single world superpower.
To maintain U.S. hegemony across the world both parties have spent trillions of dollars in wealth produced by the working class on weapons, bases and nuclear technology. To maintain that position they have killed millions.
Neoliberalism and imperialist intervention are the two biggest contributors to unprecedented immigration and the refugee crisis. If the United States, under the leadership of Democrats and Republicans, had not destroyed the economies and entire cities in foreign countries, the people of those nations would have no interest in coming to the United States or Europe. And what’s the number one issue used by the Alt-Right at this moment across the United States and Europe to galvanize recruits? Immigrants in general and refugees from Muslim majority nations specifically. The biggest contributor to the irrational fear of “white genocide” has been the unilateral, shared policies of Democrats and Republicans committing actual genocide against Arab nations.
Both parties have contributed to the deregulation of banking and eventually the economic collapse of 2008 that led to millions of foreclosures and mass unemployment. Both parties then handed over trillions to the same banks that wrecked the economy.
These objective conditions matter. For fascism to gain adherents there needs to be a mass of people in the country who feel the brunt of cyclical capitalist crisis. Small business owners and professionals ruined by economic downturn and perpetually unemployed youth become Alt-Right recruits not because they have a natural propensity for white supremacy or violence but because their lives are molded by their experiences of suffering under capitalism. They desperately want the system to work for them and the system continually pushes them further into the margins because concentrating wealth into fewer hands and misery among wider numbers of people is the natural tendency of capitalism.
The Alt-Right attacks on the government strike a chord with the anger felt among these forces in society. The Alt-Right provides a total worldview that promises a return to previous prosperity on the basis of attacking immigrants and Black people, eliminating protection for the environment, destroying unions and so on. They present the effects of capitalism, such as large scale immigration or Black rebellions against police or growth of Islamic terror, as the cause of the crisis to intentionally obfuscate the real enemy of capitalism.
So when Hillary Clinton blames Trump’s demagoguery in the 2016 electoral cycle for the rise of the Alt-Right, she is not telling the whole story.
The Alt-Right is like the mold that grows on the pasta you forgot in the back of the fridge. It can’t grow without the rotting food itself. That rotting food is capitalism as we know it and its managers are the Democrats and Republicans. So long as capitalism exists, the crisis of poverty and unemployment cannot be solved and so long as these crises persist the Alt-Right will have a place to grow. Their system of capitalism, the one that Hillary Clinton champions, is responsible for the return of fascist organizing. We need to put capitalism in the trash along with its festering mold—the Alt-Right.
Make fascists afraid again
The government has never lifted a finger to stop domestic fascism.
The military eventually abandoned the South to Klan terrorism in the 19th century allowing the overturn of gains made by freed Blacks during Reconstruction. The government did nothing to stop lynching throughout the 20th century either. The Communist-led Sharecroppers Union had to arm its members to fight off the Klan themselves in the 1930s just to organize an integrated union. In the Civil Rights era the Deacons for Defense and leaders like Robert F. Williams took up arms to defend the movement from KKK terror. During that time, the FBI had infiltrated the Klan and knew about countless crimes, but never destroyed the organization. That same FBI saw fit to destroy the Black Panther Party, the American Indian Movement, and the Brown Berets though.
These examples are the norm. The U.S. government and police forces have continued the long standing practice of using velvet gloves to handle fascism.
In Anaheim, Calif., Klansman Will Quigg, who was a jubilant attendee of the Aryan Nationalist Alliance meeting in Georgia, went on a stabbing spree and walked away without charges in February of this year.
Several months later, the Traditionalist Workers Party, a fledgling spin-off of Heimbach’s Traditionalist Youth Network, joined with local skinhead gang members in an attempt to hold a rally in Sacramento. They arrived armed with helmets, shields, two by fours, sticks and knives. One skinhead, later identified as Derrick Punneo, stabbed seven anti-fascist counter protesters and was later featured on local news volunteering for a pro-cop campaign. Despite clear evidence gathered by anti-fascists themselves, the police have done nothing to Punneo.
The responsibility to defeat fascism, including the Alt-Right, ultimately rests on the people. No politician will legislate them out of existence and no racist cop will arrest a racist.
Although nearly a dozen people were stabbed in the effort, the attempted fascist rallies in Anaheim and Sacramento were ultimately defeated by the militancy of anti-fascists who chased them off in both instances. Like the youth of D.C. in 1982, their example must be followed by all people who wish to defeat the growing white supremacist movement.
Clinton’s sly remark about the Alt-Right is intended to ride a wave of fearful votes into office. She is banking on the fact that some people will be so scared of fascism and the breeding ground that Trumps campaign has become that they’ll overlook her own role in supporting mass incarceration, free trade, war, and all the ills that strengthened the Alt-Right in the first place.
Even some on the Left have advocated for a vote for Clinton as a means to stave off a complete fascist takeover by Trump. Some earnest folks are understandably afraid of such a prospect and will vote for Clinton for that very reason.
This position eschews the reality of the threat though, presenting a strategy that actually disarms the people as one that saves them.
Trump is not the Alt-Right. Trump played no role in the formation of the Alt-Right movement. The Alt-Right leaders are using Trump’s campaign as a vessel in the hopes it will accelerate them to their destination. If elected, Trump may embolden these forces similarly to Reagan’s initial impact on the fascist movement in 1980, but Trump’s election would not bring to fruition a fascist takeover of the government.
Voting for Clinton is the most passive form of resistance. It would defeat Trump electorally, but do nothing to defeat the Alt-Right movement. Promoting the delusion that a Clinton presidency can undo the damage of the Trump candidacy gives people the false impression that all they need to do is vote and this is the disarming aspect of such an argument.
Empowering Clinton ensures that the Alt-Right will continue to have avenues to grow because it ensures the continuation of the misery that is capitalism, a misery that the false prophet of Alt-Right politics banks on to spread its gospel of hate. They grew powerful enough to become a noticeable force inside the Trump campaign during the Obama administration. There is no logical reason to believe that electing Clinton will stop what’s been started.
Only organizing the masses and equipping them to fight the fascists directly can lead to the defeat of fascism. The strategy must be to always outnumber them and always fight them without mercy.
If the general decline of capitalism continues—and there is no sign it will stop—then we will eventually be forced to fight this resurgent fascist movement whether we are prepared for it or not. And if we want to leave no room for them to regenerate, as they have done repeatedly through history in times of crisis, then we must break up the dictatorship of the Democrats and Republicans and overturn capitalism. When working people have the power, we will never allow fascism to grow.
