Chapter review: The New Right and Racism

The New Right and Racism is chapter 6 of Sarah Posner's 2020 book, Unholy: Why White Evangelicals Worship at the Altar of Donald Trump. This chapter summarizes the recent, frightening history of the intense racism, racist propaganda and revisionist history that is a major driver of the modern New Right political movement, now sometimes called the alt-right. The movement is firmly grounded in lies and sophisticated emotional manipulation that is arguably second to none in human history. In large part, this chapter is about the stunning power of dark free speech and its ability to create faux realities in people’s minds based on lies, emotional appeals to base instincts (especially racism) and crackpot conspiracies.

At the end of the chapter, Posner briefly touches on the influence of the ex-president. She argues that he and his rhetoric saved the alt-right from a slow march into oblivion. He did that by normalizing white nationalism and making its alleged but false grievances appear to be real and, importantly, applicable to tens of millions of average Americans:

“From Bob Whitaker to Sam Francis to William Lind to Donald Trump, the mythic ‘middle American radical’ was honed not only as a political mascot, but as a locus for voter resentment, a rallying cry for cultivating voters who believed that liberalism, pluralism  and civil rights had ripped their heritage and culture right out from under them. The history of the New Right--and its deep and pervasive opposition to civil rights, desegregation and other efforts at ending race discrimination--has been largely forgotten or erased. .... Over the years, the [pro-Trump] coalition yielded to societal pressure to reel in its overt racism and opposition to civil rights advances for black Americans. 

But once Trump brought white nationalism out of the closet, the opposition to civil rights and multiculturalism as elitist ideas tyrannically imposed on white Americans were familiar not only to the hard core white supremacists of the alt-right but to conservatives and paleoconservatives steeped in the same grievances. These voters still harbored resentments that their rights and standing in American society had been somehow diminished by the civil rights movement--and that the ‘mainstream’ conservatism of the two Bush presidencies had not represented their interests, either. Trump didn’t make an entirely new movement out of whole cloth. With his own televangelist gloss, he reactivated the fundamental driving force of the conservative movement of the second half of the twentieth century.”

The propaganda on this point is superb. Before Trump, the alt-right movement had already learned to shift its rhetoric from overt racism to grievance about lost white status and privilege at the hands of hostile outsiders and foreigners. Based on the history, the core New Right grievance was and still is racist. Probably no more than about 2-3% of people who supported the ex-president are aware of most of the real history, instead relying on the deceit, lies and revisionism that the New Right movement routinely relied on in its messaging. Nearly all of those people sincerely believe that they are not racist and that the people they support are not racist. The con job here is breathtaking.

The elites of this movement, reasonably called Christian nationalism, are all aware of what they are doing and why. They are intractably racist but they know how to make it appear that they are not. They work quietly and persistently. In the federal government, they constitute a group of people who can accurately be called the deep state.

Although racism is the focus of this chapter, the Christian nationalist movement is fundamentally a decentralized political movement. The core agenda is accumulation of wealth and power for white elite Christians and elimination of secular government, public education and civil liberties. The vehicle used to gain public support is ruthless dark free speech designed to polarize, divide and foment distrust in society. The tactics are always the same, i.e., heavy reliance on lies, deceit, irrational emotional manipulation and partisan motivated reasoning. Playing on racism is a core element in the New Right propaganda toolbox.

Some of the racist history 

For the most part, the modern timeline goes back to the 1950s and Supreme Court decisions in Brown v. Board of Education that ordered public school desegregation. Those decisions, later lower court rulings and government implementation of means to desegregate schools and reduce discrimination fueled the New Right movement starting from the 1950s, and it still does in 2021. In particular, school busing and attempts to make school textbooks less white Christian centric and revisionist were powerful drivers of support for the New Right. Fights over public school textbooks are still important to the alt-right. A core idea of the Brown decision is that separate but equal is unconstitutional. The New Right elites reject that reasoning. The rank and file may mostly support it, but the people in power do not.

The New Right led the attacks on all federal efforts to desegregate public schools. Federal actions were portrayed as subverting parental authority, anti-American, anti-Christian and, as Posner puts it, “subversive to the natural order of things.” At least since the 1970s, the New Right quietly exerted significant power through its presence in the federal government: 

“.... people associated with the alt-right [earlier the New Right] have always been a seamless part of official Washington .... Often their presence, and their impact on policy, has gone unnoticed. .... they represented a potent and enduring strand of the American right, one that seethed with resentment over its exile from mainstream conservatism--making it primed to be activated when Trump came on the scene. .... [Despite occasional purges by conservative Republicans] they, and their odious ideas, never went away.”

One federal employee, Robert Whitaker, played a modest role in the rise of the New Right in the 1970s and 1980s. After the 1980s he was publicly quiet until 2006 when he resurfaced as a white supremacist, writing for the neo-Nazi website National Vanguard that immigration was a horror and white people were the victims: “But if I tell that obvious truth about the ongoing program of  genocide against my race, the white race, .... Liberals and respectable conservatives agree that I am a naziwhowantstokillsixmillionjews. They say they are anti-racist. What they are is anti-white.” In 2015, Whitaker ran for president for the white supremacist American Freedom Party, but he dropped off the ticket after the AFP endorsed the ex-president in 2016. 

A key New Right propaganda goal was to foment distrust in the federal government and public schools. One New Right propagandist, James McKenna, a lawyer working  at the Heritage Foundation, wrote in a New York Times opinion piece in 1975: “Parents are worried that the schools are turning into big impersonal bureaucracies that do not respond to pressure from the grassroots. People no longer automatically trust the government to know what’s best.”

In congressional testimony in 1974, another New Right propagandist, M. Stanton Evans, chairman of the American Conservative Union, attacked school busing and the core reasoning in the 1954 Brown decision. Evans argued that for school segregation, separate was equal and black children were better off in segregated schools. The Brown holding was that separate was not equal. Evans’ reasoning was cynical and ice-cold. He argued that the liberal education establishment “became convinced and apparently convinced some of our federal judges that Negro children must be taken out of their homes and neighborhoods and placed in an ‘artificial environment’ created by the government, where they will be immersed as fully as possible in an altogether different culture.” Evans complained that liberals believed they had “a commission to tinker around with psychic makeup of the human species.” This line of reasoning, fake concern for black children, was a brilliant bit of propaganda that conflicted with the reasoning in Brown.

A related line of propaganda in New Right opposition to public school desegregation was that it was needed to protect white students. Protect them from what? To protect them from the trauma of personally experiencing the truths in all the white racist myths and lies about black people, including their affinity for crime, their lower IQ and their inherent immoral personal character. New Right propagandist Robert Whitaker wrote: “The proposition that busing promotes brotherhood would be hilarious if it were not so cruel. .... In many  schools children raised in the ghetto are a terror. Hence, for impressionable young white minds, the black beast of the most virulent racist literature seems observed reality.” Now that is real racism. 

The New Right is open to getting its way by violence and dictatorship. An influential New Right propagandist, Sam Francis (1923-1994), wrote about white grievance being rooted “in perceived injustices, unrelieved exploitation by anonymous powers that be, a threatened future, and an insulted past. [It is] therefore understandable that some of its adherents sometimes fantasize that the cartridge box is a not unsatisfactory substitute for the ballot box.” Posner describes Francis as the patron saint of the modern alt-right. On dictatorship, or an imperial presidency Francis wrote : “the adoption of Caesarist tactics [would] reflect the historical pattern by which rising classes ally with an executive power to displace the oligarchy that is entrenched in the intermediate bodies. .... only the Presidency has the power and the resources to begin the process and mobilize popular support for it.” 

No wonder Posner calls Francis the patron saint of the modern alt-right. These people are not just racist. They are also fascist and anti-democratic. Just like Francis was. He clearly foresaw the possibility of a monster like Trump rising to power to save the white race from the alleged oppression of religion, civil liberties and a pluralist society. Posner comments on the Francis legacy: “Francis’s books are regularly read and celebrated by the alt-right and paleoconservatives like Pat Buchanan.”

Questions: 

1. It is reasonable to believe that most rank and file Republicans are not themselves racist, but nonetheless support an arguably racist movement that they sincerely believe is fighting against oppression of the white race and/or to preserve or advance white social status, e.g., by attacking civil liberties? 

2. It is reasonable to believe that the New Right and now the alt-right has deceived most Christian evangelicals into strong support for a fascist, racist agenda, regardless of how they view the movement?