Just as Barack Obama's election infused the floundering Democratic party with energy, it breathed new life into the bleaker precincts of the American polity. Obama's political progress, coupled with the faltering economy, has stoked the anxious racial panic of the country's most myopic, hateful citizens. As the Southern Poverty Law Centre, the department for homeland security [PDF] and the FBI, have noted, the last 12 months has seen the largest rise in hate group enrollment since the early 1990s: in all its forms – white supremacist, anti-Semitic, anti-government, and more – racist demagoguery is experiencing a vile renaissance.
These groups reveal themselves, upon examination, not as aberrations, antithetical to our nation's formal democratic ideals. Rather, the multifaceted chaos of American hate is the stunted, through-the-looking-glass perversion of American pluralism. Though these groups are fueled by bigotry and hatred, their community conforms to models of co-operation and, well, tolerance that are hallmarks of our broader American liberalism.
In a word, these lodestars of American paranoia and violence share the anxiety of white dispossession, an anxiety that trumps doctrinal differences. As I've written elsewhere elsewhere in a discussion of historian Leonard Zeskind's work on white nationalism, these groups inhabit a panicked, racialised nightmare of imperiled entitlement in chilling contrast to the American dream of struggle and accomplishment.
A variety of dispatches from this realm of the feckless and absurd: Over the summer in Arizona, affiliates of the White Aryan Resistance were indicted for a mail-bombing a diversity office, and the leader the Minuteman American Defense was charged with the murder of a Latino man and his nine-year-old daughter. Currently playing on Youtube screens across the country, Pale Horse, a masked member of the Ohio State Militia, exhorts viewers to stockpile food and purchase assault rifles – like the one he cradles in the video – in preparation for the inevitable, imminent Nazification of the US (the preoccupation that quasi-fascist militias have with a creeping Nazism within the US government is a related, fascinating issue). In Brockton, Massachusetts, on the day after Obama's inauguration, a recently radicalized man perpetrated two race-motivated murders.
The list would be endless if one could stomach an accounting of the innumerable meetings by the KKK and similar groups, the political campaigns motivated by anti-semitism, and "POW" events, where groups of likeminded white-nationalists throw a party to raise money for their incarcerated colleagues, considered casualties of an ongoing race war.
It will be argued that the pluralism of American hate can be more precisely described as factionalism. Insofar as this is true it is one of the fortunate outcomes of hate's strident nature. Internecine squabbles over the most imminent of the imminent threats to "real" Americans – are the Jews or blacks or gays or immigrants running the country into the ground? Or is it the guilt-driven progressives that love them who are responsible? – hinder any cooperation between groups. This creates a civilizing discord, at least at the organisational level. The groups rarely form lasting recruitment or programmatic alliances.
But this inability to form lasting partnerships does not diminish the efficacy of their ideas. As the Southern Poverty Law Centre has noted, one of the disturbing hallmarks of this recent surge in hate group activity is the "extent to which it has gained support form elected officials and mainstream media outlets." The names are familiar – Glenn Beck, Rick Perry, David Duke, Pat Buchanan, and, until his unexpected departure from CNN, Lou Dobbs are but a few of the mainstream politicians and pundits ensorcelled by this noxious politics. The conspiracy theories and sophistical arguments endorsed by these men display alarming fidelity with those circulated by multiple hate groups. Beck, in particular, spews an anti-government, anti-minority rhetoric that members of the "patriot" movement, one of the loose signifiers attached to some of these groups, must find refreshingly familiar. Lest we forget, Beck's loyal Fox News audience numbers in the millions.
And so goes the content of our national political debate. Corrosive beliefs travel from the Klavern to the suburbs via our national political media. This fact reveals as naïve my earlier assertion about hate groups being a perversion of American pluralism.
Even as Obama's election has made good on long-delayed promises of equality, the undeniable rise of hate groups and enthusiasm with which their ideas have been adopted by mainstream political pundits proves that these group are a contemptible fulfillment of American pluralism, one more element of the pluralistic society they so ravenously seek to destroy.