Conservative Historical Subjectivity from the Tea Party to Trump
A.J. Bauer
America is at a crossroads and this is the point of choice. You must choose whether we wallow in our scars. Countries make mistakes — we have made more than our fair share — but it is what you do with those mistakes. We choose to wallow in them, or we choose to learn from our past and ask for redemption.
Great historical changes are imminent when people are forced into a binary choice — fight or flee, join or die, resist or cuck. That is the position of white people, right now.
Not long after Republican Donald J. Trump defeated Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton in the 2016 US presidential election, self-styled ‘white nationalist’ Richard Spencer was taking a victory lap of his own. As the national press searched for explanations for Trump’s unexpected win, Spencer—long an obscure figure toiling at the political fringe—became the poster boy of a new white supremacist movement, which Spencer termed the ‘Alt-Right’. Eschewing the cosplay aesthetics of traditional neo-Nazis, Spencer and his ilk repackaged old racist ideology to make it more palatable to a generation of white people shaped by broader trends towards racial colorblindness.1 The press attributed these Alt-Right efforts as having provided the intellectual basis for Trump’s campaign rhetoric and policy proposals. His immigration demagoguery—from demanding a wall on the US/Mexico border, to advocating for a ‘total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the country’—was both firmly rooted in Alt-Right ideology, and created space for Alt-Right activists like Spencer to propagate their ideas more widely among the conservative grassroots. While early appraisals of Spencer and his Alt-Right forces have rightly fixated on their roots in Internet trolling culture, their appropriation of long-standing white supremacist and neo-Nazi rhetoric and agendas, and their role in the election of President Donald J. Trump,2 this chapter focuses on how Spencer and his ilk think of themselves as historical actors, with an eye towards how we, as historians, ought to consider their emergence in light of the historiography of the modern conservative movement in the United States.
Early profiles of Spencer focused on his boy-next-door demeanour, but his penchant for fascist flair was never far below the surface.3 Indeed, in late November 2016, Spencer made news for throwing a Nazi salute and shouting ‘Hail Trump!’ to punctuate his speech at the annual conference of the National Policy Institute, a white supremacist think tank that Spencer directs. Spencer’s anachronistic hand gesture has been the subject of intense scrutiny, but the speech that preceded the salute offers greater insight into the historical subjectivity of both Spencer and the Alt-Right. That is to say: Spencer was not merely engaging in a form of historical reenactment as he thrust his hand into the air, he was inviting his audience, comprised of 200-odd Alt-Right activists, to consider themselves as historical actors of a certain sort. Consider, for example, the words Spencer used to set up his salute:
As Europeans, we are uniquely at the center of history. We are, as Hegel recognized, the embodiment of world history itself. No one will honor us for losing gracefully. No one mourns the great crimes committed against us. For us, it is conquer or die. This is a unique burden for the white man, that our fate is entirely in our hands. And it is appropriate because within us, within the very blood in our veins, as children of the sun, lies the potential for greatness. That is the great struggle we are called to. We are not meant to live in shame and weakness and disgrace. We were not meant to beg for moral validation from some of the most despicable creatures to ever populate the planet. We were meant to overcome, overcome all of it. Because that is natural and normal for us! Because, for us as Europeans, it is only normal again when we are great again. Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail victory!4
Here, Spencer not only advocates for the interests of white people in the United States, he does so in world historical terms. Name-dropping Hegel, Spencer draws on the German philosopher’s theories of historical progress, seemingly replacing Hegel’s geist with the white race and equating that race’s self-consciousness with historical subjectivity itself. Spencer’s concern with the necessary historical productivity of ‘binary choices’ nods to a sort of dialectical thinking that has typically, at least in the United States, been more common on the left than right. That speech was no outlier. Speaking to a gathering of about 75 young white nationalists on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in the summer of 2017, nominally a ‘free speech’ rally, Spencer argued that the Alt-Right’s greatest enemy was neither Antifa nor Hillary Clinton, but rather the ‘end of history’. Spencer told his followers, borrowing liberally from the work of right-Hegelian Francis Fukuyama:
As the Cold War ended, liberalism and Americanism lost its enemy. It lost its boogeyman. And it began to feel that history was over. Now you could see that as some sort of ‘America, Fuck yeah!’ triumphalism. But that would be to misunderstand it. The end of history means the end of meaning. It means there is nothing else outside of consumer products, there’s nothing else outside of individualism.
Spencer continued:
Our greatest enemies will tell us there is nothing to fight for, that it’s all over. All you have to do is go to the voting booth or go purchase some cute new product or watch some cute new video. We are going to fight for meaning. We are going to start history all over again.5
According to Spencer, and his Alt-Right acolytes, recent history is best characterised by a declension narrative. In their telling, the once-proud white race, and the ‘Western Civilization’ it purportedly authored, has been losing world historical ground to consumer capitalism, liberal multiculturalism and egalitarian socio-cultural projects that have destabilised traditional race, gender and sexual hierarchies. The crisis of ‘meaning’ decried by Spencer is in fact a coming to terms with an always extant, if often repressed, social and cultural pluralism, and the proliferation of meanings that such pluralism entails. But to Spencer, whose idealised conception of ‘meaning’ is unitary and domineering, anything less than absolute white heteropatriarchal sovereignty is felt as ‘atomization, hopelessness and weakness’. Spencer’s gripe here is not only with leftist proponents of egalitarian social policy, it’s also with neoconservatives and neoliberal conservatives who he sees as colluding in the interest of a capitalist elite that lacks sufficient white racial consciousness. When Spencer says ‘We are going to start history all over again’, or indeed Trump says ‘Make America Great Again’, they are explicitly appealing to white conservatives who feel that history has left them behind. They are not merely calling for a renewal of white supremacist policies; they are calling for a return to white history.
Needless to say, Spencer’s is a supremely over-simple and heterodox interpretation of American history. Few mainstream scholars would dispute that white supremacy and the vexed racial and gendered legacies of Western Civilisation remain firmly entrenched in American politics and culture. Indeed, we need look no further than Donald Trump’s election in 2016. But Trump’s election also suggests that this interpretation of history—however inaccurate our archives and current events reveal it to be—is nevertheless remarkably salient among an electorally significant segment of the general population. As this chapter will show, Spencer and Trump did not author the predominant historical subjectivity of contemporary conservatives. Its origins are clearly evident in the rhetoric and tactics of the Tea Party movement, which played a crucial role in priming the conservative grassroots to think of their political activism in world historical terms. Before turning to the origins of the particular historical subjectivities that animate the Alt-Right and Tea Party, respectively, it is worth briefly exploring how the dominant historiography of American conservatism fails to account for it.
Inspired in part by an influential 1994 American Historical Review essay by Alan Brinkley, in which he called American conservatism an ‘orphan in historical scholarship’, the past 20-plus years have seen the development of a robust sub-field specialising in the history of the modern conservative movement in the United States.6 While conservatism is a complicated object of historical analysis—consisting of variegated, contingent and at times openly contradictory arrays of ideologies and social constituencies—the sub-field of scholars studying it has tacitly agreed on some basic parameters. As Kim Phillips-Fein noted in her 2011 Journal of American History state-of-the-field essay,
Generally, scholars of the Right have understood conservatism as a social and political movement that gained momentum during the post-World War II period. It began among a small number of committed activists and intellectuals, and ultimately managed to win a mass following and a great deal of influence over the Republican Party.7
Key, here, is the notion of ‘gaining momentum’. While the arguments of individual works may vary somewhat, the overall tendency of the sub-field is towards narrating American conservatism as a historically ascendant phenomenon. This tendency reflects the presentist imperatives that have long driven the boom in the history of conservatism literature. After all, Brinkley’s 1994 call to take conservatism seriously—as opposed to treating it as marginal feature of American political culture—occurred after the Reagan Revolution made it impossible to ignore the movement’s outsized influence. The sub-field flourished in the late 1990s and early aughts, just as conservatives finalised their capture of the Republican Party and, by 2000, all branches of the federal government—this conservative-dominant political climate influenced the questions historians have asked about the movement.
The sub-field’s presentist framing of conservative history continues to this day. Take, for example, historian Rick Perlstein’s confessional essay published in April 2017 in New York Times Magazine titled, ‘I thought I understood the American Right. Trump proved me wrong’. Perlstein’s trilogy of books chronicling the long rise of American conservatism from Goldwater to Nixon to Reagan has proven to be highly influential in cementing the dominant ascension narrative through which we have come to understand the movement’s history. That narrative follows a dogged and relatively tight-knit group of activists, largely in the orbit of William F. Buckley’s National Review, as they promoted a fusionist conservatism (using anti-communism to mix neoliberal economic theories with traditionalist ideologies concerning race, gender and religion) that ultimately commandeered the Republican Party. Perlstein sees in the election of Donald Trump a fundamental rupture from this historical narrative, which his books canonised.8 Explaining the ‘foundations for Trumpism’, Perlstein contends, will require historians’ increased attention to ‘conservative history’s political surrealists and intellectual embarrassments, its con artists and tribunes of white rage’.9
Foregrounding the conservative movement’s efforts at respectability politics, historians have retroactively bestowed upon modern conservatism an undue sense of coherence, stability and propriety. As Phillips-Fein noted in her 2011 state-of-the-field, ‘conflicts within the conservative movement have yet received relatively little attention from historians’.10 The ideas, personalities and organisations jettisoned by the conservative movement in the interest of attaining respectability and national electoral success have been too often marginalised within academic historiography. This is not to stay that historians have refrained from studying so-called ‘fringe’ groups like the John Birch Society, or more avowed white supremacist groups from Citizens Councils in the South, to the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) and White Power movement more nationally.11 Indeed, scholars of racial conservatism have compellingly demonstrated the integral role of racial demagoguery and organising in the conservative movement’s ultimate capture of the Republican Party.12 But in emphasising party-based national electoral ascendency while narrating the history of a diverse and tumultuous political movement, historians have tended to privilege the accounts of winners in internal movement conflicts, instead of carefully tracking the continuation of nominally failed projects, actors and ideas. That is to say, academic historians have played an unwitting role in reifying the tactical exclusions of modern conservative activists themselves.
Towards remedying this historiographical oversight, it is worth considering conservative history from the perspective of marginal movement figures, or figures who have otherwise been on the losing end of internecine conflicts.13 Perhaps the most central of these conflicts, at least judging by the concerns of the present, is the long-standing dispute between so-called ‘paleo-conservatives’, who emphasise Western chauvinism and nationalism, and neoconservatives, who emphasise laissez-faire economic policies and the imperialist promotion of neoliberal democracy abroad. In contemporary parlance, this feud loosely tracks the ongoing ‘nationalist vs. globalist’ conflict within the Trump administration. Among the paleo-conservatives (indeed, he coined the term) is none other than Richard Spencer’s mentor, the conservative intellectual historian Paul Gottfried.14 In three books, as well as several essays and speeches, Gottfried articulates an alternative narrative to that of the academic historiography of the modern conservative movement—one told from simultaneously within and without that movement.
According to Gottfried’s interpretation, post-war American conservatism was initially rooted in mostly unacknowledged, ‘Hegelian assumptions about the dialectical nature of reality, the unique Western heritage of freedom, and the legitimacy of political power’.15 These assumptions resulted in a ‘rejection of abstract universalism’, which Gottfried contends served as an intellectual common ground for the fusion conservatism promoted by the National Review in the 1950s and 1960s, and which he argues served as the principle basis for the movement’s virulent opposition to egalitarian policies (at home in the form of social welfare and desegregation; abroad in the form of the Soviet Union). The rise of the New Right in the 1970s, a moment which most academic historians (myself included) describe as a vital step towards Reagan’s electoral victory in 1980, is for Gottfried the beginning of the conservative movement’s decline.16 According to Gottfried, the New Right’s investment in infrastructure—most notably think tanks like the Heritage Foundation—exhibited an ‘anti-theoretical bias’ that boosted neoconservative and neoliberal thinkers at the expense of paleo-conservatives like him. In Gottfried’s telling, the conservative movement’s increasing support for neoliberal imperialism and anti-nationalist free trade policies (from the 1980s until recently) is the result of a more fundamental dispute between ‘historical conservatives and antihistorical conservatives’.17 The former, right-Hegelians like Gottfried who have been marginalised within the conservative movement see political struggle as historically contingent. The latter, neoconservatives and neo-liberal conservatives, subscribe to a ‘theologically or metaphysically based’ conception of political struggle.
Where the latter framed politics as an eternal struggle between good and evil (or liberty and tyranny), with America as a divinely inspired attempt at implementing such abstract and historically transcendent Enlightenment principles as liberty and human rights, Gottfried and his right-Hegelians view the American project as rooted in the successful historical synthesis of Enlightenment values with earlier more hierarchical values, promoted by a ‘Western Civilization’ that overlaps considerably with modern conceptions of the white race. In Gottfried’s telling, then, the conservative movement’s emphasis on promoting the abstract universalist values of neoliberalism at home and abroad has resulted in its forfeiture of the particular hierarchical values of Western Civilisation. For Gottfried, this is not merely a policy dispute but a rejection of history itself.
While Gottfried’s framing of the conservative movement’s primary internal conflict is reductive and self-serving, his focus on the duelling historical subjectivities contained within modern conservatism is nevertheless interesting. If, as Gottfried suggests, modern conservatism can be partly characterised as a struggle between historical and ahistorical political subjectivities (and the divergent policy proposals resultant therefrom), the emergence of the Tea Party movement would seem to be just the sort of synthesis a right-Hegelian like Gottfried could appreciate. From its outset in 2009 scholars have noted the Tea Party’s curious mixture of abstract idealism and historicity. Historian Jill Lepore has productively framed the Tea Party’s historical subjectivity as paradoxical, characterised by both ‘antihistorical’ and ‘historical fundamentalist’ tendencies.18 There are stark ideological differences between the Tea Party and Alt-Right, no doubt. The former includes a staunch defence of free market capitalism, of which the latter is quite critical. The former is nominally ambivalent about whiteness, hewing to more colorblind modes of racial politics, while the latter is avowedly white supremacist.19 But if we consider the two movements for their historical claims, unforeseen continuities come into focus. By unpacking the Tea Party movement’s historical subjectivity, we begin to see the conditions of possibility for Alt-Right appropriation. Indeed, the historical subjectivity fostered by the Tea Party movement primed the conservative grassroots to readily assent to that of the Alt-Right.
In The Whites of Their Eyes, Jill Lepore juxtaposes her first-hand experiences attending gatherings of the Greater Boston Tea Party in 2009 with detailed accounts of daily life in the eighteenth century, amidst the tumult of displacement, slavery and revolution no less. In doing so, she ‘measures the distance’ between the two eras through subtly revealing the stark differences, down to quotidian detail, between them.20 This desire to correct the Tea Party’s over-simple version of American history by providing relevant context, thereby revealing the shallow historical resonance of the movement’s rhetoric, is certainly laudable. But her use of a distance metaphor to describe her work begs an unpacking of the diagnosis that suggests measurement as its cure. Lepore correctly identifies the Tea Party movement as engaging in a peculiar form of historical ‘reenactment’, and her discussion of the use of Founding Fathers rhetoric during the 1970s astutely demonstrates that the contemporary movement is by no means the first to engage in such reenactment. However, she argues that the Tea Party movement has taken an additional step: ‘the statement at the core of the far right’s version of American history went just a bit further. It was more literal than an analogy. It wasn’t “our struggle is like theirs”. It was “we are there” or “they are here”’. Most odious to Lepore as a professional historian, and importantly in light of her concern with distance, is the Tea Party movement’s apparent defiance of ‘chronology, the logic of time’—‘time moves forward, not backward’, she writes, ‘Chronology is like gravity. Nothing falls up’.21
Lepore’s critique of the Tea Party conception of historical time doubles as a defence of chronology in general, but also of an implicitly linear time (which moves in only one direction, forward). And who could blame her? Linear time is a hallmark of modern historiography—indeed, the linear graphical representation of time dates back to the late eighteenth century, fittingly, the very period Lepore studies and whose history she sets out to defend.22 But such a critique fails to differentiate between ‘time’ and ‘history’—a slight of hand common in what Walter Benjamin called ‘historicism’. Historicism, Benjamin wrote in his theses on history, results in a ‘Universal history [which] has no theoretical armature. Its method is additive; it musters a mass of data to fill the homogeneous, empty time’. Of course, Benjamin advocates for historical materialism, which, while also primarily linear, allows for the existence of ‘Messianic time’, referring to a non-linear connectivity between present and past.23 Benjamin’s positing of historical materialism suggests that linear chronology is not the logic of time, but merely a logic of time—and apparently a logic of time that does not fully resonate with members of the Tea Party movement.24
Lepore’s historicist critique of the Tea Party’s approach to history centres on the movement’s putative sense of historical simultaneity, especially with those of the nation’s Founding period. However, in-depth interviews with Tea Partiers—including some Lepore herself no doubt rubbed elbows with in Boston—reveal a far more complicated notion of historical connectivity. Perhaps wary from constant media caricature by the summer of 2010, some of my Tea Party informants downplayed the importance of Founding Fathers tropes in the movement.25 For example, Greater Boston Tea Party steering-committee members Peter Laird and Christine Morabito were each reluctant to compare the contemporary movement to the eighteenth century. When asked about the movement’s relationship to the colonial period, Laird suggested that the connection was mostly in name only. ‘I think it’s clever’, Laird said, referring to the ‘Tea Party’ name.
I think it’s clever because it gives you a tie back to the Founding Fathers — and one of the things that I was struck with, the first meetings that I went to, was how many people made reference to the Constitution and how they thought Washington [D.C.] was just running roughshod over the Constitution.26
Morabito had a similar response. Asked why she supposed the Tea Party movement attempted to draw connections to the Founding period, Morabito said, ‘I guess it’s the bravery of those men and knowing what they had to lose… I mean, so anything that I do pales in comparison’.27 While neither Laird nor Morabito seemed literally to believe that ‘American history has been repeated’, both still saw themselves as heirs to a long struggle against overbearing government, a struggle they believed to be shared by the Founding Fathers and enshrined in the US Constitution.28
As the responses of Laird and Morabito show, while Tea Partiers did generally see themselves as engaged in the same meta-historical struggle of the Founding Fathers, they also acknowledge and embrace the exceptionality of the present moment. Furthermore, media and scholarly emphasis on Tea Party historical connectivity to the eighteenth century overlooks the movement’s indebtedness to the historical logic of the Cold War, during which most Tea Partiers were born and raised.29 In what became a recurring theme over the course of my fieldwork and interviews, most Tea Partiers do not view progressivism as the same as monarchy, but rather see the former as a slow march to the totalitarianism they equate with monarchy—less akin to King George than to The Road to Serfdom.30 It is, thus, through the logic of moral and political equivalence that Tea Partiers achieve a sense of historical simultaneity and come to view themselves as coeval not only with the Founding Fathers but also with Cold Warriors.
Perhaps no figure played a more central role in fostering the Tea Party movement’s historical subjectivity than did then-Fox News host and current conservative Internet media mogul Glenn Beck. On 28 August 2010—the 47th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom—Beck staged a massive historical reenactment he called ‘Restoring Honor’, where thousands of supporters recreated the iconic protest, as if substituting their own New Right prose over a Civil Rights palimpsest. While not formally sanctioned by the Tea Party movement, Beck choreographed the rally to highlight the values held by many of its more socially conservative members. Indeed, during the spring and summer months of 2010 Beck had assumed a role as the movement’s unofficial historian, achieving a ratings bonanza for his Fox News show by hosting a weekly series of historical programs known as ‘Founders’ Fridays’.31 He began the series with hagiographic profiles of such Tea Party-beloved figures as Samuel Adams and George Washington, but quickly turned to a provocative re-narration of the history of race and racism in the United States. Lamenting the erasure of free and freed African Americans in popular depictions of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century US history, Beck devoted several highly rated episodes to extolling forgotten black heroes (mostly soldiers, entrepreneurs and ministers) and highlighting the racism of white progressives in the early twentieth century. Viewers learned, for example, that freedman Peter Salem had fought valiantly on behalf of the Continental Army at Bunker Hill. They were treated to a biography of Frederick Douglass that emphasised his ascension from slave to presidential adviser. They learned of President Woodrow Wilson’s racism and extension of Jim Crow segregation in federal agencies and policy. The sum of Beck’s narrative was that a long history of black heroics and empowerment was stifled and erased by the racism of the progressive movement. By the time Beck stood in King’s footsteps at the base of the Lincoln Memorial, his audience was primed to view Beck’s conservatism as historically aligned with King against the racist legacies of progressive social policy.
After hours of rallying around the troops, rallying around the flag and rallying around God, ‘Restoring Honor’ culminated with Beck’s much-anticipated keynote address—one in which, arguing in favour of ‘faith, hope and charity’, Beck clearly articulated the Tea Party movement’s conception of ‘American exceptionalism’, which doubles as its conception of history itself. Surrounded as much by monuments to the past as by the people of the present, Beck traced a particular version of American history, one that emphasised the individual contributions of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and King. But Beck’s was a historical argument for ahistoricism. As the speech drew to an end, Beck finally proclaimed what he had been suggesting throughout:
America is at a crossroads and this is the point of choice. You must choose whether we wallow in our scars. Countries make mistakes — we have made more than our fair share — but it is what you do with those mistakes. We choose to wallow in them, or we choose to learn from our past and ask for redemption.
At that point, his emotions on the verge of overtaking him, Beck stumbled over his words and stopped to dab his teary eyes. His composure regained, Beck continued, ‘It matters not where we are right now, it matters not where we have been, it’s what we’re doing today that makes a difference’.32
What they were doing that day, what Beck called ‘Restoring Honor’, was by no means limited to that day or that iconic place—throughout the summer of 2010 similar, albeit smaller spectacular reenactments were taking place in communities across the United States.33 For his part, Andrew Breitbart chose Independence Hall in Philadelphia for his backdrop, staging a ‘UNI-TEA rally’ aimed at erasing the Tea Party’s reputation for racism.34 ‘If this country does not recognize that the future is in the re-founding of this country based on its original principles then we will fail’, Breitbart intoned.35 As Beck’s and Breitbart’s 2010 keynotes reveal, the Tea Party movement not only made a conservative political claim, it did so through encouraging a common mode of feeling historical. Tea Partiers revered history because their political claim depended upon it—the movement’s producer nationalist appeal sought to circumvent the Obama administration’s claim to represent ‘the people’, staging a countersubversive claim on behalf of the sovereignty of a particular people, whose legitimacy is derived from the past, as opposed to the present.36
However, as Beck’s speech shows, the historical argument needed to support such a claim requires some fancy footwork, a two-step of worship and disavowal. Beck’s dichotomy, that Americans can either focus on the nation’s ‘scars’ or on building its future, implies a two-pronged historical approach—‘good’ history, that is to say the inspirational stories often memorialised in monuments, is eternal, occurring in the past but also transcendent, occupying the present and determining the future as, to use Beck’s term, ‘American scripture’; meanwhile ‘bad’ history, including ‘mistakes’ such as slavery and discrimination, is rendered static, calcified into discrete ‘scars’ that require no more treatment and, thus, can be forgiven and forgotten. If we take Beck at his word that his goal was antiracist, that he sought to redeem the souls of white folks so that they could lead the way into the post-racial future, then a funny thing happened along Beck’s arch of History. By universalising black suffering and protest, thereby rendering it palatable to and performable by white conservatives, he unwittingly set the historical stage for the overtly white supremacist politics he putatively sought to overcome. Indeed, two months after Donald Trump descended the golden escalator to announce his presidential candidacy using the rhetorical tools of the Alt-Right, Beck was in Birmingham and back on his bullshit.
On the morning of 29 August 2015, arms linked with black pastor Jim Lowe and former Woolworth lunch counter protestor Clarence Henderson, Beck led a 20,000-person march from Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church to a local arena for a rally aimed at ‘Restoring Unity’. In September 1963, the church had been the site of an infamous KKK bombing, which took the lives of four black girls, and subsequently served as a catalytic event of the Civil Rights campaigns of the 1960s. Some 52-years later, in the face of a resurgent black freedom struggle revitalising in opposition to police brutality under the hashtag and rallying cry Black Lives Matter, Beck and his overwhelmingly white followers marched under a blimp adorned with a banner reading ‘#ALL LIVES MATTER’ (a slogan which had gained purchase among proponents of racial colorblindness and opponents of structural analyses of racism) all while carrying posters of Frederick Douglas and Abraham Lincoln labelled with the words ‘Courage’ and ‘Justice’, respectively.
In addition to chanting ‘All Lives Matter’, the crowd also chanted ‘Never Again Is Now’, a quintessentially Beckian aphorism meant to historically link the persecution of Coptic Christians by the Islamic State to the Nazi holocaust of Jews and other perceived subversives. ‘After the second world war we as a people promised “Never Again”’, Beck said in his announcement of the August march, ‘May I suggest that Never again is NOW’.37 What, one might reasonably ask, does the white supremacist murder of black girls in an Alabama church in 1963 have in common with the murder of Coptic Christians in Syria by the Islamic State in 2015? Further, how is it possible for thousands of middle-aged white Americans to recognise themselves in both sets of victims, so much so as to provoke them to take to the streets of Birmingham in protest? Such is the nimble power of the Tea Party historical subjectivity to universalise and appropriate human suffering, and to lay historical claim to movements that their antecedents, indeed quite likely many of their parents, once attempted to brutally suppress.
As is common in Beck productions, he and his followers’ call for ‘unity’ was more ironic than they likely realised. Perhaps the most famous historical precedent for white Christians calling for the restoration of ‘unity’ in Birmingham was a Good Friday statement released by eight white clergymen, published in the local papers on 12 April 1963. That letter, known as ‘A Call for Unity’, labelled Dr Martin Luther King, Jr and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference as outside agitators, opposed civil disobedience and culminated with the plea: ‘We further strongly urge our own negro community to withdraw support from these demonstrations, and to unite locally in working peacefully for a better Birmingham’.38 By 2015, however, it was the opponents of the black freedom struggle who were the outside agitators in Birmingham, at least judging by the demographics of Beck’s march. Even according to a friendly news source, approximately 90% of the marchers were white (this in a city where 73% of the population identified as black or African American in the 2010 census) leading one of the march’s few black attendees to lament to a reporter for the New Yorker magazine, ‘I wish there were more black people here’.39 This lack of diversity, and thematic resonance (despite tactical dissonance) with outspoken opponents of the Civil Rights movement, did not stop Beck from framing his march as belonging to the same ‘arc of History’ conceptualised by Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. Beck explicitly acknowledged his indebtedness to King in his call to march, and even invited King’s niece, conservative activist Alveda King, to march alongside him in the leading line.
Birmingham was a rejoinder of sorts to Beck’s more famous attempt to place himself in King’s shoes back in 2010. Both rallies involved thousands of white people reenacting iconic scenes from the black freedom struggle of the 1960s; both occurred at the end of summers whose news cycles foregrounded simmering racial tensions within the United States; both involved Beck figuratively embodying the King legacy for his own political ends. More importantly, both involved obscuring the racial particularity of the black freedom struggle, while romanticising its actions, with the aim of transforming a struggle for the defence of black lives into something more relatable to white conservatives. While Beck refrained from appealing directly to white racial consciousness, instead rooting his historical moral equivalence in the win-win colorblind language of ‘all lives’, Richard Spencer and his Alt-Right sought to reframe racial struggle in more zero-sum terms. If the Tea Party and Beck helped white conservatives identify with the historical struggle for racial justice, Spencer and the Alt-Right seek to re-particularise that struggle in the service of white racial consciousness.
To conclude, I’d like to briefly return to Richard Spencer. In his ‘End of History’ speech, discussed at this chapter’s outset, Spencer broached the topic of the Magna Carta. Rejecting the Whig historical interpretation of the document as declaring the universal rights of citizens, Spencer instead argued that the document was the expression of ‘rebellious barons who, through unity, achieved power and took their rights from King John’. Spencer continued,
In this way, our right to speak is intrinsically linked with our ability to be powerful. With our ability to stand for ourselves, and not stand for others. No free speech is ever guaranteed by a deity. Free speech is guaranteed by our willingness to be powerful and our willingness to stand strong.
Spencer’s articulation of rights with a particular group’s ability to seize and maintain power, with all its authoritarian political implications, is rooted in his right-Hegelian historical subjectivity—his belief in historical contingency and the dialectical struggle to achieve a white supremacist historical agency. As this chapter has shown, that view of history articulates easily with the more popular forms of historical subjectivity nurtured during the Obama administration by the Tea Party movement and Glenn Beck. The Trump slogan ‘Make America Great Again’ perfectly straddles these two historical subjectivities, further illuminating both their proximity and distinction. For Tea Partiers, à la Beck, making America great again means achieving the ideal that never was—a ‘return’ to what was great about America when the white heteropatriarchy ruled unchallenged, having safely forgiven and forgotten, but by no means remedied, the particular racial and gendered hierarchies that underwrote those ‘great’ times. For the Alt-Right, too, making America great again involves a return to white heteropatriarchal rule, but this time with no regrets. I highlight this by way of saying: as historians of the present, we must not only be attendant to which narratives are usable (or open to appropriation) by far-right groups, but must also account for how the sense of being a historical actor shapes different and competing right-wing political mobilisations in the United States, as well as the historical conditions necessary to embolden such historical subjects.
1 For a helpful exegesis on racial formation in the United States, and the rise of colorblind racial ideology, see Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 3rd edition (New York: Routledge, 2015).
2 See Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right (Washington, DC: Zero Books, 2017) and Matthew N. Lyons, CTRL-ALT-DELETE: The Origins and Ideology of the Alternative Right (Cambridge, MA: Political Research Associates, 2017).
3 John Woodrow Cox, ‘“Let’s Party like It’s 1933”: Inside the Alt-Right World of Richard Spencer’, The Washington Post, 22 November 2016.
4 Transcribed, with original emphasis, by author. See Red Ice TV, ‘Richard Spencer – NPI 2016, Full Speech’, YouTube, 21 November 2016. Archived 30 December 2018. https://web.archive.org/watch?v=Xq-LnO2DOGE.
5 Richard Spencer, ‘End of History’, 25 June 2017. Archived 30 December 2018. https://web.archive.org/watch?v=wFn2B00Pka4.
6 Alan Brinkley, ‘The Problem of American Conservatism’, American Historical Review (April 1994), 409–29.
7 Kim Phillips-Fein, ‘Conservatism: A State of the Field’, The Journal of American History (December 2011), 727.
8 See Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (New York: Hill & Wang, 2001); Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (New York: Scribner, 2008); The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014).
9 Rick Perlstein, ‘I Thought I Understood the American Right. Trump Proved Me Wrong’, New York Times Magazine, 11 April 2017.
10 Phillips-Fein, 741.
11 For superlative works examining the John Birch Society, Citizens Councils, the Ku Klux Klan and the White Power movement, see, respectively, D.J. Mulloy, The World of the John Birch Society: Conspiracy, Conservatism and the Cold War (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2014); Joseph Crespino, In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007); Linda Gordon, The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition (New York: W.W. Norton, 2017); Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018).
12 See especially Joseph E. Lowndes, From the New Deal to the New Right: Race and the Southern Origins of Modern Conservatism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008); Matthew D. Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007); and Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).
13 Geoffrey Kabaservice, a historian of modern conservatism with moderate Republican sympathies, employs a similar approach in Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party from Eisenhower to the Tea Party (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
14 Jacob Siegel, ‘The Alt-Right’s Jewish Godfather’, Tablet, 29 November 2016. Archived 30 December 2018. https://web.archive.org/web/20181230232642/https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/218712/spencer-gottfried-alt-right.
15 Paul Edward Gottfried, The Search for Historical Meaning: Hegel and the Postwar American Right (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1986).
16 It is worth noting that moderate Republicans, like historian Geoffrey Kabaservice, also see the rise of the New Right as contributing to a decline in their preferred iteration of conservative activism and thought. Modern conservative hegemony, thus, involved displacement not only of ‘moderate’ Republicans, from Nelson Rockefeller to George Romney, but also more radical conservative thinkers like Gottfried.
17 Ibid., xiv, xv.
18 Jill Lepore, The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle over American History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 15–16.
19 For a thorough study of the variegated yet consistent political beliefs of Tea Partiers, see Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). For a helpful explication of the Tea Party movement’s colorblind racial politics, see Meghan A. Burke, Race, Gender, and Class in the Tea Party: What the Movement Reflects about Mainstream Ideologies (New York: Lexington Books, 2015).
20 Lepore, Whites of their Eyes, 19.
21 Ibid., 7; 15–16.
22 See Daniel Rosenberg, ‘Joseph Priestley and the Graphic Invention of Modern Time’, in Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture, vol. 36 (2007), 55–103.
23 Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Hannah Arendt, ed., Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (New York: Schocken Books, 2007 [1950]), 262–3. Benjamin describes the role of the historical materialist as, ‘grasp[ing] the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one. Thus he establishes a conception of the present as the “time of the now” which is shot through with chips of Messianic time’.
24 Lest it seem that I am taking Lepore more literally than she takes herself, she further describes her method thusly: ‘It measures that distance by taking soundings in the ocean of time. Here, now, we float on a surface of yesterdays. Below swirls the blue-green of childhood. Deeper still is the obscurity of long ago. But the eighteenth century, oh, the eighteenth century lies fathoms down’. (19).
‘Floating on the surface of yesterdays’ sounds a lot like the additive historical approach, and if the eighteenth century is ‘fathoms down’ it is quite literally buried, implicitly beyond the conceptual grasp of lay activists, untrained in the nuances of eighteenth-century historiography.
25 The findings reported here stem from two months of participant observation by the author of the Tea Party movement in the summer of 2010, including 23 formal interviews conducted with participants in Texas and Massachusetts and dozens of more informal conversations along the way.
26 Peter Laird, in conversation with author, 14 June 2010, Boston, Massachusetts.
27 Christine Morabito, in conversation with author, 17 June 2010, Medford, Massachusetts.
28 To quote a leaflet I received at a North Texas Tea Party Constitutional Education Class, McKinney, Texas, 17 July 2010.
29 According to a 2010 ‘New York Times/CBS News Poll of Tea Party Supporters’, some 74% of Tea Partiers were born in 1965 or earlier. Only 7% reported being born after 1980. See Kate Zernike, Boiling Mad: Inside Tea Party America (New York: Times Books, 2010), 226.
30 Notably, three of my informants reported Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom as among their favourite books and five listed Hayek among their favourite authors. Hayek’s name was also broached repeatedly at Tea Party events.
31 The topics of Beck’s ‘Founders’ Fridays’ episodes were common fodder for conversation at the many Tea Party events I attended in the summer of 2010, and his May 28 episode, which specifically highlighted the contributions of ‘black founders’, a group of free and freed African Americans who proved instrumental in the revolutionary war and early struggles against slavery, earned Beck a top rating among cable news shows. Archived 30 December 2018. https://web.archive.org/web/20181230232900/https://www.mediaite.com/tv/glenn-becks-african-american-founders-special-1-on-cable-news-friday/.
32 For full video of Beck’s keynote, see Archived 30 December 2018. https://web.archive.org/web/20181230233219/https://www.glennbeck.com/content/articles/article/198/45013/.
33 For my part, I witnessed 23 such events during my field research in the summer of 2010, including meetings and rallies in Massachusetts, New York, Texas, Pennsylvania and Washington, DC.
34 A regular speaker on the Tea Party rally circuit, conservative commentator Andrew Breitbart was the founder and namesake of Breitbart.com. After Breitbart’s untimely death in 2012, Steve Bannon helped steer the site in a more paleo-conservative direction—the site thus played a crucial role in championing both the Tea Party and the Alt-Right.
35 Speech transcribed from audio recording by author. Andrew Breitbart, addressing UNI-TEA rally, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 31 July 2010.
36 For a helpful accounting of the mutual roles of ‘producerism’ and ‘nationalism’ in the formation of right-wing populist movements, see Chip Berlet and Matthew Lyons, Right-Wing Populism in America (New York: The Guilford Press, 2000), 6. See also, 348–50.
37 Glenn Beck, ‘‘Never Again Is Now’: Glenn announces relief campaign for Middle East, ‘Restoring Honor’ anniversary event in Birmingham, and much more’, 8 June 2015. Archived 30 December 2018. https://web.archive.org/web/20181230233333/https://www.glennbeck.com/2015/06/08/never-again-is-now-glenn-announces-relief-campaign-for-middle-east-restoring-honor-anniversary-event-in-birmingham-and-much-more/. Emphasis in original.
38 The Good Friday statement famously served as an inspiration for King’s ‘A Letter from Birmingham Jail’. See S. Jonathan Bass, Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Martin Luther King Jr., Eight White Religious Leaders, and the ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001).
39 Lee Stranahan, ‘Glenn Beck Draws 20,000 to Unity Rally and Media Ignores’, Brietbart.com, 1 September 2015. Archived 30 December 2018. https://web.archive.org/web/20181230233509/https://www.breitbart.com/the-media/2015/09/01/glenn-beck-draws-20000-to-unity-rally-and-media-ignores/; Brian Barrett, ‘A Day Inside Glenn Beck’s America’, The New Yorker, 1 September 2015. Archived 30 December 2018. https://web.archive.org/web/20181230233615/https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/a-day-inside-glenn-becks-america.