2. American White Nationalism and the Theory of Cultural Defeat
2.2 Lost in the Hurricane of Trauma: Psycho-history and American White Nationalism
Fear and revenge are natural human emotions that permeate white nationalist fiction, however, it is redemption that is its most obvious component; therefore, psychohistory is another pillar on which to build the theory of cultural defeat. Psychohistory has had a long history of examining innumerable forms of white nationalism from various angles, from Kovel’s previously mentioned work, to Robert Jay Lifton’s works on the Nazi doctors to later essays on American white nationalist leaders. Nevertheless, few scholars have delved into the fictional worlds created by white nationalist authors. Currently in the United States, very few so-called experts on the white racialist right mention white nationalist fiction, and if they do, they only seem to concentrate on The Turner Diaries by William L. Pierce and The Clansman by Thomas Dixon.
While those novels might be the most well-known, they are by far not the only ones.
Furthermore, very few scholars have used the tools of psychohistory to examine the novels.
Most scholarly analysis related to various forms of white nationalism, such as those by Michael Kimmel in his 2013 book Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Age and Leonard Zeskind’s monumental 2009 tome Blood and Politics: American White Nationalism from the Margins to the Mainstream, note that certain sectors of the white population feel
‘entitled’ to achieving the same lifestyle as that realized by their parents and/or grandparents and when they fail to attain it, they become disheartened and start lashing out in all directions, looking for ‘scapegoats’ to blame for their misfortune. In actuality, whites are the most heavily invested in what used to be called the American Dream. This myth, while appropriate for various minorities, seems to be out of reach for the average, working class white. Hence, it makes sense that when a white man plays by the rules, works hard and still does not achieve the same lifestyle that his parents enjoyed, he will look for enemies to blame. What this knee jerk analysis fails to mention is the undercurrent of fear and psychological trauma at being denigrated and laughed at for being white, male, heterosexual, traditional, politically conservative (if not right-wing or neo-Nazi in 21st century America. The back blurb of Covington’s novel A Distant Thunder describes the main character, Shane Ryan and this feeling:
Shane Ryan is a wrong guy. Wrong race. Wrong gender. Wrong class. Wrong side of the tracks. Wrong attitude. America in the near future is a cold, cruel place, especially in the hardscrabble rural Pacific Northwest. There’s a war in the Middle East, a revived draft, mass unemployment, an economy permanently on the skids, greed and corruption, incompetence and stupidity at the top. Poor blue-collar kids
from the trailer park are last in line for everything. America has screwed Shane Ryan, and he returns the favor. He joins the Northwest Volunteer Army, a terrorist organization dedicated to overthrowing the United States government and establishing an independent nation. America is about to learn the hard way that what goes around, comes around (Covington 2004, back cover).
While the reins of power appear to be held by the group mentioned above (white, male, heterosexual, conservative) and it is true that many positions of power in the United States are held by these men, the overall feeling among white nationalists is that they have lost the ‘culture wars’ and among more radical white nationalists, the only way for the white race to survive on the North American continent is to separate from the United States and form their own country, as seen in the neo-Confederate movement in the Southern states and the Northwest independence movement in the Pacific Northwest—the states of Idaho, Oregon, Washington and Wyoming, and the western third of Montana.98
The power elites have, in white nationalist rhetoric, ‘sold out’ their own people and have no interest in protecting their race, they only want to protect their wealth. As stated by General Frank Barrow, the lead negotiator in H. A. Covington’s A Mighty Fortress, which concentrates on the Longview Conference, the conference that lead to the independence of the NAR (North American Republic—the white, ethnically pure homeland) in explaining the difference between a Nazi and a conservative:
I don’t define the difference […] Commander Rockwell did. He said that a National Socialist is someone who wants to save his race. A conservative is someone who wants to save his money. I have said that race is the American issue, but the problem is we’ve never actually admitted it and resolved the core dispute, which is to whom does the continent of North America belong? The liberals and Reds have always claimed that America was founded by and for white racists and based on white racism. That’s not true, unfortunately. If it was, if we had admitted de jure as well as de facto from the beginning that the white man was claiming this land for us and us alone, then things would have been a who lot different (Covington 2005, 344).
Furthermore, it is felt that the elites in both parties—Democrat and Republican—support the destruction or at the very least, economic and cultural ‘slavery’ of the remaining white people in the United States, since those people hold most of the private guns and much of the remaining private wealth. The dual victories of the various civil rights movements (African-American,
98 Indeed, it is interesting to note that both of these movements have produced a series of novels that envision the ultimate outcome of their respective movements. For the ‘neo-Confederate’ separatist movement, Gregory Kay’s The Third Revolution series of: The Third Revolution, The Third Revolution: The Long Knives, The Third
Revolution: Black Flag, and The Third Revolution: The Warlord, along with Lloyd Lennard’s The Last Confederate Flag form the basis of modern ‘neo-Confederate’ fiction. From the ‘Northwest Independence’ movement, Harold A.
Covington’s series of novels—The Hill of the Ravens (also known as THOR), A Distant Thunder, A Mighty Fortress, The Brigade, and Freedom’s Sons form the foundation of the Northwest Independence movement as envisioned by Pastor Richard G. Butler of the Aryan Nations and Harold A. Covington, among others.
LGBTQ, Women) and political correctness, along with the foisting of multi-culturalism and diversity, while at the same time denigrating Euro-centric culture has led to a feeling of malaise and confusion among many sectors of the white population. This group feels that their values have been attacked from all sides and that the country that ‘their’ ancestors built no longer represents their values or indeed wants them. It is felt, especially among revolutionary white nationalists, that the power elites (regardless of their color) along both coasts feel, in the words of a Jewish character—Chief of Staff for President Hunter Wallace, Ronald Schiff, in American Nazi H. A. Covington’s 2013 novel Freedom’s Sons, “Who gives a fuck about flyover country?”
(Covington 2013, 344).99 This was spoken in reference to launching a nuclear strike on the fictional Northwest American Republic, the all-white country founded by white revolutionaries in the states of the Pacific Northwest. In many current white nationalist novels, especially those published from 2000 onwards, the worst enemies are not Jews—though Jews are always
“lurking” in the shadows—or blacks or white elites who kill, rape and plunder their white brothers and sisters, or allow blacks to do these things. The white nationalist’s worst enemies are whites who have ‘sold out’ to the Jews for fame and fortune, like President Hunter Wallace cited above.
According to Kovel, the psychohistory of white racism is associated with Freudian concepts about early childhood development, in particular the development of childhood fantasies revolving around dirt and power; however, what is of primary concern is not Kovel’s ideas but psychohistory’s prism regarding fear and trepidation and the development and usage of enemies, since this is what is collectively the most common aspects of white nationalism. The reason for this is that white nationalists believe that their race is under constant physical threat and they fear that it will disappear in the future, that enemies surround them, and, finally, that without fighting their race will disappear from the earth.
Robert Godwin’s 1994 article, “The Function of Enemies” in The Journal of Psychohistory is of particular interest to this project. Godwin’s theories revolve around certain primitive emotions that seem to permeate hate groups, which would include most current white nationalist groups to use Godwin’s nomenclature. In quoting Alford, Godwin helps to expose one of the most overlooked aspects when exploring so-called ‘hate groups’ or various nationalists,
99 For an example of the rhetoric levelled at the elites by cultural conservatives, see Dana Loesch, Flyover Nation:
You Can’t Run a Country You’ve Never Been To (New York: Penguin, 2016). Admittedly, Loesch is a Christian conservative, not a white nationalist; however, the rhetoric is the shared by both groups as regards the elites.
that of primitive emotions of abandonment, fear and the ability of an individual to subsume his ego into that of a collective ‘we’:
One of the reasons people form groups is because they transform private anxieties into shared ones by allowing the individual to “project his anxiety outward, where it may be confronted as an objective threat to the goodness of the group (Godwin 1994, 81).
This aspect is of overriding importance in understanding the ways in which the anxieties of the various authors of white nationalist novels can impact their readers. The ability of the authors to populate their fictional universes with characters, both good and bad, and the actions that those characters take can have impact on a wider scale. For most authors, it seems that the redemptive aspect of American culture is what is most important in confronting these anxieties.
For many whites and white nationalists in particular, it seems that the loss of various attitudes that their fathers and grandfathers held, plus the traumatic shifts within the popular culture, economy and social life of the United States has produced a feeling of anxiety and a search for enemies to blame. Godwin’s analysis of this is that the breakdown of unifying fantasies will eventually lead to a breakdown of reality. He continues:
Among the unifying fantasies that have faded in the last twenty years are the fantasy of upward mobility, the fantasy of a monolithic Communist enemy, the fantasy of job, health, and old-age security in a stable corporate-welfare environment. The collapse of these fantasies has unleashed a wave of fragile enemy-seeking persecutory anxiety, since Americans must now adapt to an economic environment no longer able to contain their deepest fears and insecurities (Godwin 1994, 83–84).
While writing in 1994, Godwin’s analysis is quite contemporary as regards the current psychological malaise felt by many sectors of white society, mostly from the lower to upper middle class. Among white nationalists, the idea that the enemy is not some monolithic evil empire but actually fellow American citizens is omnipresent in their writings. These enemies represent the ultimate ‘Other’ in the sense that they stand for everything that white nationalism opposes. For Christian Identity white nationalist followers, the Other is literally a product of Satan, or a ‘mud person,’ i.e. someone with dirty skin. From a psychohistorical perspective, the process of defecation and its association with dirt and filth is the psychological process by which someone might be influenced to become a racist, which returns the ideas back to Kovel’s analysis of white racism and its avoidance of blacks and the darker races. However, the trauma of defeat and the hope for the future in which the white race is in the ascendency appears to be where most white nationalist authors of fiction draw strength to write their visions of the past, present, and future.