American Fascism and the color line
As a place/event, the United States continues to be shaped by the contradiction between a civic and universal construction of nationality and a blood and soil ethnic construction. In the United States, the racial binary structures social life; the struggle for social justice and racial equality is the central question at the intersection of race, class and gender. A historical overview reveals waves; the advances achieved in the aftermath of the civil war were followed by the slow roll back of radical Reconstruction into the early years of the 20th century.
An examination of census data over the last century illustrates the process of displacement of rural black populations from the land, a dimension of the forcible removal of a physical threat to white supremacy (Aiken 1990; Jaspin 2007). The 1906 race riots in Atlanta effectively removed Black populations from the city center through the use of terrorist methods of extra-judicial killings in parts of a city formerly integrated (Crowe1969).
Vigilante actions were passively supported by police, with the exception of police measures to disarm African Americans. One could view the great migration in the context of push pull factors, driving African Americans out of the South and into the urban industrialized cores of the Northeast, Midwest, and California (Tolnay, Beck 1992) regions where civic rather than “blood and soil” constructions of national identity are prevalent (Pettegrew 1996).
During the Freedom struggle, massive resistance to desegregation was a failure, but anti-busing campaigns exposed class divisions within the white electorate (Lassiter 2006) both north and south. The mobilization of the silent majority submerged regional differences and reframed racial discourse into the politics of middle class entitlement, the “Silent Majority”. A color blind ideology of racialized class exclusion prevails in continuity with historical patterns of overt repression in the Deep South, but also in continuity with covert patterns of white supremacy across the suburbs both North and South.
The ascendance of Republican Party political fortunes in the South is less a result of a Southern strategy than it is a reflection of the convergence of regional and national trends (Lassiter 2006).The silent majority rejects the outright politics of Jim Crow, but it is the color blind ideology of race which has been the foundation for nationwide Republican Party political dominance since the civil rights era. Republican Party rule has been a hallmark of the post civil rights era, with only 12 years of Democratic Party control of the executive branch between 1968 and 2008. During short periods of Democratic Party dominance in the executive branch, social justice reforms at the national level were blocked or checked by action at the local levels, often accompanied with extralegal violence, particularly in the area of reproductive freedom (Juergensmeyer 1998; van Dyke 2002; McVeigh 2004).
Racist coding and patriot militia rhetoric have been mainstreamed within the Republican Party and are a naturalized feature of the radio talk show circuit (Vertigans 2007) even as successive Republican administrations have failed to deliver action, creating an opening for extremist groupings espousing explicit white supremist ideology and solutions. The silent majority is the social base for fascism, but both the Democratic and Republican Parties have a liberal conception of the state, defined in the classical terms of Jeremy Bentham and Adam Smith (Hackworth 2007).
If a fascist state is non-existent at this historical moment it is nevertheless clear that fascist groupings do exist. Notable examples are neo-Nazi and Ku Klux Klan, and Patriot militias. Common features include a commitment to white supremacist ideology, espousal of vigilante violence in the pursuit of identity claims, anti-Semitism, and a rejection of liberal democratic principles. White supremacist organizations find common ground in the tenets of Christian identity (Durham 2008) but the ebbs and flows of recruitment are connected to economic dislocation. Perceived demographic change in a given unit of analysis—either state or locality—is a statistically significant causal factor in the emergence of white supremacist groups (McVeigh 2004; van Dyke 2002). Anti-immigrant mobilization, anti-abortion action, and other hot buttons serve as transmission belt into the more mainstream conservative movement integral to the Republican Party (Juergensmeyer 1998).
We can see in the traces and marking left by Nazis, Klansmen, and other white supremacists the outlines of an extralegal front of violence determined to forestall and prevent the advancement of social and economic justice. While curtailments of civil liberties and implementation of intrusive surveillance do represent a threat to representative democratic forms; it is important not to over estimate the threat of state repression to the extent it impedes agency.
Actually existing fascists must be understood in relation to neoliberalization and the changing nature of the nation state. In the current configuration, non-state actors, global governance and states coexist in unstable asymmetry, constrained by the limits imposed through neoliberal restructuring at the global level, contributing to the appeal of anti-rational, identity politics and xenophobia in a fearful new world.
References:
Aiken, Charles S. (1990) "A New Type of Black Ghetto in the Plantation South," Annals of the Association of the American Geographers, 80 ( 2) 223-46.
Crowe, Charles (1969) “Racial Massacre in Atlanta September 22, 1906” The Journal of Negro History 54(2) 150-173
Durham, Martin (2008) “Christian Identity and the Politics of Religion” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 9(1) 79 - 91
Hackworth, Jason (2007) “The Neoliberal City: Governance, Ideology, and Development in American Urbanism” Ithaca: Cornell Press
Jaspin, Eliot (2007) “Buried in the Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America”. http://hnn.us/articles/35847.html
Juergensmeyer, Mark( 1998) “Christian Violence in America” Annals of the
American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 558, Americans and Religions in the Twenty First Century. pp 88-100
Lassiter, Mathew D. (2006) “The Silent Majority: suburban politics in the Sunbelt South” Princeton: Princeton University Press.
McVeigh, Rory (2004) “Structured Ignorance and Organized Racism in the United States” Social Forces 82(3) 995-936
Pettegrew, John (1996) “Soldier’s Faith: Turn of the Century Memory of the Civil War and the Emergence of Modern American Nationalism” Journal of Contemporary American History 31(1) 49-73
Vertigans, Stephen (2007) “Beyond the Fringe? Radicalization within the American Far-Right” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 8(3)
641 – 659
van Dyke, Nell; Soule, Sarah (2002) “Structural Change and the Mobilizing Effect of Threat: Explaining Levels of Patriot and Militia Organizing in the United States”. Social Problems 49(4) 497-520
Stewart E.; Tolnay; E. M. Beck. (1992) “Racial Violence and Black Migration in the American South, 1910 to 1930” American Sociological Review.57 (1) 103-116.