Who are the founding fathers and do they still matter?
It was only after the end of World War II, when McCarthyism reigned strong and the world became sharply divided between the capitalist and communist camps, that the founders of the American white supremacist movement of the second half of the 20th century came into their own, among whom we may count the following luminaries.
Francis Parker Yockey, who worked as an attorney at the Nuremberg war crimes trials, grew disenchanted with American attitudes toward Europe, and wrote what supremacists to this day consider a magisterial tome. He wrote "Imperium: The Philosophy of History and Politics," a 600-plus page Spenglerian analysis of race decline as caused by the "culture-disrupters" (the Jews), in 1947 in Ireland, allegedly in six months. Yockey committed suicide when he was arrested for passport violations in 1960, but not before meeting Willis Carto , founder of the Liberty Lobby (terminated 2001), in jail, and authorizing Carto to publish "Imperium."
Carto was a central intellectual figure in the white supremacist movement, publishing the influential journal Right and then Spotlight, and also founding the Institute for Historical Review , which until 2002 published the Journal of Historical Review , the leading journal of Holocaust revisionism.
Carto was inspired by George Lincoln Rockwell , the founder of the American Nazi Party and a strong presence in the early 1960s, who was mysteriously assassinated in 1967. He was seen as the next Fuhrer, and articulated as much in his book "White Power ." Also in the early 1960s, the Minutemen , a forerunner of the 1990s militia movement, had their heyday under Robert Bolivar dePugh . Meanwhile, the John Birch Society (JBS) remained strong, although it had an increasingly antagonistic relationship with mainstream conservatism, with William F. Buckley of National Review excommunicating Robert Welch, the JBS's founder, on charges of anti-Semitism. Unlike, say, the American Nazi Party , the JBS did not seem invested in overt anti-Semitism, but Buckley and other conservatives found it too unsavory nonetheless.
Certainly, for establishment conservatives someone like Richard Butler , founder of Aryan Nations , was entirely outside the pale, with a message of unabashed anti-Semitism and a strong desire to reclaim the American homeland for whites, with either repatriation or extermination awaiting nonwhites. The headquarters of Aryan Nations, the fabled Hayden, Idaho, compound, was a nexus for many strains of white supremacy during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. Often at conclaves scattered around the Mountain West, different supremacist groups would come together to discuss strategy, particularly in the wake of government action leading to arrest or death. It was at one of these conferences that the idea of "leaderless resistance" took hold in the early 1990s, because it was felt that any central organization would be easily infiltrated and neutralized by government, as indeed was the case.
Finally, if anyone can be considered an imaginative inspiration to white supremacists, it would have to be William L. Pierce , whose 1978 novel "The Turner Diaries" (and his later book "Hunter"), inspired many militants, such as Timothy McVeigh, to commit acts of violence against what they considered the illegitimate government. Not surprisingly, when the leading Black Metal record label was in trouble, because of government action, it was Pierce who took it over as Resistance Records , which continues to this day despite Pierce's death in 2002.
The social status of the founders and the followers
A number of these founders were well-educated, and worked in the industries associated with the rising military-industrial complex -- Richard Butler was an aerospace engineer and Ben Klassen, founder of Church of the Creator, was an electrical engineer -- and there was always a love-hate relationship with the conservative establishment. As mentioned, Buckley's National Review took issue with the JBS, and with others as well when particular groups were seen to have crossed the line.
Yet we may conceive of white supremacy, as it has always been practiced in this country, as merely the exaggerated form of our official creed, and think of all the meanings this implies for social status. Obviously the libertarian dimension is highly pronounced in the Posse Comitatus and Patriot movements, but this draws on the suspicion of government in all its larger manifestations, from the Federal Reserve Bank to the IRS, that is a staple of more acceptable conservative thinking. The John Birch movement arose in response to McCarthyism (calling Eisenhower himself a tool of the communists), just as the Patriot movement of the 1990s arose in a dynamic relationship with post-Cold War globalization and the new forms of war that went with it.
If war inspired by illegitimate government was a collective endeavor, then how was the patriotic American to preserve individual liberty? How could the true American patriot's existing social status be leveraged? It is not always a question of perceived inferiority, or status anxiety, and it would be a mistake to reduce white supremacy to those terms.
The social status of white supremacists has always been subject to interpretation. The same has recently been asked of Trump's supporters: Were they dispossessed voters trying to reclaim lost economic and social rights, or were they privileged voters seeking to disbar others from gaining equality?
What we learn from history is that no easy generalizations are possible; white supremacism is pervasive to the extent that it can't be isolated as a phenomenon. Some of the most intellectually respectable among our founding fathers were supremacists, as were many establishment scientists and philosophers in the 19th century. The second-era Ku Klux Klan, which at its peak in the 1920s could boast millions of adherents and real control over policy, had legions of followers in the middle and even aristocratic classes. The JBS attracted solid bourgeois citizens, with the stage set by McCarthyism, while the third-era KKK of the 1970s easily transformed, for the most part, into respectable White Citizens' Councils (now the Council of Conservative Citizens) which bridged the gap with establishment Republicans in the wake of the George Wallace candidacy.
More recently, the Posse Comitatus, which believes in government at the county level and nothing beyond that, and which provoked great irritation during the farm crisis of the Reagan years by filing fictitious liens against IRS agents and other officials, drew sympathy from tax resisters and dissidents of every class. Even the Patriot movement of the 1990s drew from a wide mix of the population, from alienated veterans (such as Timothy McVeigh) to dispossessed workers in the industrial and agricultural heartland (the Michigan and Montana militias were among the strongest) to those with exaggerated fears of globalization. The differences in social status between followers of Pat Buchanan, Pat Robertson, William Pierce and now Donald Trump are simply not as clear-cut as we would like to believe.
Are they all Christians?
White supremacy is naturally attracted to versions of Christianity that reinforce the race narrative. The most extreme manifestation of this is the religion known as Christian Identity, which was popular among the different strains of extremists in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. Likewise, various Nordic religions -- going by the names of Odinism , Asatru and Wotansvolk in America -- put the Aryan race at the center of the world, though they may often just be separatist and not inclined to violence.
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