America’s Far Right Has Global Roots
Blending neo-Confederate and Nazi ideology, our white nationalist movement is part of a frightening international phenomenon
By Jonah Shepp
The white supremacists who terrorized Charlottesville, Virginia, this weekend were in one sense a manifestation of the ghosts of the Confederacy, but they also borrowed heavily from another, more recent philosophy of racial superiority: national socialism. In its blending of neo-Confederate and Nazi rhetoric and ideology, our contemporary white-nationalist movement is both distinctly American and part of a frightening international phenomenon.
In its neo-Confederate garb, the alt-right reflects the specific history of racism in the U.S., steeped in the history of slavery, the Civil War, the failure of Reconstruction, the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow, segregation, and the Civil Rights Movement and the reaction thereto. In other words, it is a direct consequence of long-simmering tensions in American race relations and our national unwillingness to state unequivocally that the Confederacy was the villain of the Civil War, enabling revisionist histories that cast it as the victim. For all our protestations that this is not the America we know, this brand of racism and white supremacism is in our country’s very DNA.
