Right-wing Populism in the United States

In this paper, I want to introduce a(n digital) ethnographic approach to populism that understands populism as a (digitally) mediatized chronotopic communicative and discursive relation. Populism, I argue, is not only constructed in a (mediatized) communicative relation between journalists, politicians and academics, but also in the relation to citizens, activists and computational agency. Attention to all these actors, and the media they use, is of crucial importance if we want to understand populism. Digital media are not just new media that populists use, their algorithms and affordances reshape their populism. In times of digitalization, we cannot understand populism by only looking at ‘the input’, the frame that actors prepare for uptake, it is about the uptake as well. More concretely, I will argue that digital media have given birth to a new form of populism: algorithmic populism. Understanding and focusing on populism as a ‘communicative relation’ between all these human and non-human actors allows use to analyze ‘populism’ more precisely.

This article proposes that the advent of Trumpism was an historical moment of danger that compels us to analyze the micropolitics of the present. In the first part, I describe the constellation that gave rise to Trumpism. In the second part, I recall Goffman’s concept of face-work and discuss how it remains relevant for describing Trump’s aggressive face-work. In the third part, I take Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of faciality as a point of departure for understanding micro-fascism. As an abstract machine, Trump’s faciality engendered and diffused fascisizing micropolitics around a messenger/disrupter in chief. It worked in connection with a landscape and relative to a collective assemblage of enunciation that extracted a territory of perception and affect. In the micropolitics of the present, the defining feature of Trumpism was how the corrupt abuse of power and the counterforces limiting his potency collided on an ominous, convulsive political reality TV show that threatened US democracy.

Keywords: Trumpism, face-work, faciality, assemblage, micropolitics, impeachment, coronavirus pandemic

Consider chapters 1 through 6 to be Version 1.0. Chapters 2 through 6 have Information Cutoff Dates ranging between March 4, 2012 (Ch 2) and November 28, 2014 (Ch 3). I completely stand by the results of these chapters. They are published in current form to get the information out into the public domain. In Version 2.0, each chapter will be reduced in size, like Ch 1a, 1b, 1c, etc., revised and updated with more current information. The theoretical focus, while staying on Fourth Generation Warfare will expand to explain the underlying epistemological warfare of John Boyd,, with its sophisticated and complex Observe-Orient-Decide-Act Loop, Russia’s hybrid warfare, and the new Weaponized Narrative Initiative. The inclusion of the latter three ideas are necessary to explain the very real threat the United States is under—from the Christian Right, the Trumpichy regime, and Russia’s hybrid warfare which appeals to the Christian Right (anti-gay, anti-abortion, traditional values), while attempting to exploit and amplify racial, ethnic, gender, and ideological differences in American society. The main focus remains the Christian Right. However, given the close and strong support given by the Christian Right to Trump, additional chapters on Trump and Fourth Generation Warfare will be included in Version 2.0. At this stage, it is more important to put these chapters into the public domain for use by other researchers than to wait for them to be revised and updated.

This paper situates neoliberalism and authoritarian populism within the longue durée of modernity. I define modernity as the set of processes unfolding in the wake of European expansion, including colonialism, settler colonialism, the Atlantic slave system, capitalism, the Enlightenment, the nation-state (and nationalism), and imperialism. How does our current crisis of global neoliberalism (and American politics) have roots in the deep history leading to the present?

Reviews of and praise for “Die USA unter Obama”:

“Solty’s studies are indispensable when it comes to understanding the United States in the early 21st century and Obama’s turn from critic to renovator of neoliberalism as well as the U.S.’s imperial politics (…) – materialist social and political analysis on the basis of Marx, Gramsci and neo-Gramscianism at the highest level of excellence (…).” – Frank Deppe

“The chapters in this volume stretch across the Great Crisis, which is now already entering its sixth year and which coincides with the first Obama presidency and Obama’s two electoral campaigns. Tightly connected to the historical material and with theoretical breath, they deal with national and international conflict fronts and relationships of forces, actors and perspectives of U.S. politics. The result is a formidable, critical, yes skeptical depiction. At the same time, they show an author who has relentlessly logged and analyzed U.S. politics on many levels. A citizen of two worlds, the German and the Canadian one where the latter rests culturally halfway between the United States, his object of study, and Europe, Ingar Solty makes a name for himself as one of the most productive, young representatives of critical research on the United States (…). Solty’s analyses boil down to the thesis that Obama ‘who (…) most observers took to be a president of transformation will be categorized by future historians as the president who, instead of overcoming neoliberalism, which had led the world’s capitalist societies into the biggest crisis since the 1930s, restored it by means of the state.’ It is irrelevant whether or not one shares this assessment, which Solty himself relativizes by inserting ‘at the current moment,’ measured by the sheer weight of abundantly gathered evidence and analyses.” – From the preface by Wolfgang Fritz Haug

“Although still at an early stage in his career, Ingar Solty has already contributed significantly to critical social research and intellectual life on both sides of the Atlantic. On that basis, and given my basic precondition for any scholarly collaboration (namely that I could learn from my co-author) I began ongoing scholarly work with Solty and I continue to learn a great deal from him: here in the form of his new book on the United States under the charismatic leadership of Barack Obama. It contains novel arguments concerning the changing world order and new forces in the USA, including Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party. It details precisely how the first Obama administration responded to the post-2007 global economic crisis, partly to reconstruct neoliberalism via state interventionism. In sum, this wide-ranging volume is an essential read for our understanding of the nature of dominant power – and its internal and external limits and contradictions – in the crisis-ridden period since the start of the 21st century.” – Stephen Gill

“It is always a daunting task to assess a political trend in mid-flight and whether Ingar Solty’s assessment of the Obama presidency in the United States has put its finger on the key issues will therefore have to be answered later. But as it stands, this incisive analysis succeeds in identifying the deeper structural causes why any change in the US political system is almost impossible to begin with. To answer the question whether Obama in his second term will be able (or even attempt at all) to wrest free from the stranglehold of the multiple layers of opposition to change, we need four more years. Solty’s careful study is a most useful companion as we follow this second installment of a presidency caught in what he calls the dialectic of internal and external blockages.” – Kees van der Pijl

“Ingar Solty takes us on a journey into a land of politics which all of us think we know: Obamaland. Just as back in the day the communist Gorbachev, today, around 150 years after the abolition of slavery, the African American Barack Obama is one of the most persistent favorites of Western Europeans. Solty, however, prefers the “cool way of thinking” (Friedrich Engels). With critical theory and political precision he navigates through already forgotten landscapes. We are reminded of memorable inhabitants: the fantasy worlds of hope & change, the risings of the tea party right-wing populists and the headspinning high plateaus of the billionaires of Richistan, the island Occupy and the sinking of the reform of capitalism, finally the new deserts of austerity in the entire American Empire and its outposts. Solty examines the changes in political leadership under Obama, social movements in the global crisis, the American Empire and the second crisis presidency. His interim balance: the declamation of a bold and swift presidency has turned into the hard slog of a long neoliberal crisis regime. His perspective: the pretty much unnoticed return of class-based electoral behavior and subjectivity is opening up new perspectives. Currently the best analysis of the Obama era.” – Rainer Rilling

"Solty is an intelligent observer of the American landscape (...). He shows with many examples that there is also much to criticize in Obama's United States (...). Solty's main thesis is that Obama has reconstructed neoliberalism in the crisis and is now about to deepen it together with the Republicans. To a Marxist, this apparently sounds like a horrific idea (...)." - Rolf Steininger (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 24 June 2013, p. 8)

"With his book Ingar Solty attempts to capture 'snapshots in time' (12) which contribute to 'a better understanding of the social relationships of forces in the United States' (11) under President Obama. Revealing its political orientation, the book opens with the thesis that 'a president, who came into office as - or was at least considered by many observers to be - a president of transformation will, as affairs stand, be interpreted by  future historians as that particular president who did not transform the kind of neoliberalism which led the capitalist societies of the world into their greatest crisis since the 1930 but instead reconstructed and deepened it.' (12f) Solty's analysis thus is a critique of Obama in particular and the (capitalist) USA in general. However, it is by no means a superficial and broad-brush analysis. Instead, it contains multiple statistical evidence and recapitulates the recent historical developments and political events interpreting them from a Marxist perspective." - Ines Weber (Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft [Online], pw-portal.de, 26 June 2013)

"This book was long overdue. While the attentive reader is already familiar with Solty's texts (...), only being able to read them alongside the 70-page introduction and in the shape of a book provides a comprehensive depiction of the 'USA under Obama' from a critical-materialist perspective (...). The reader of this book is asked to put in some 'work'. Yet, he or she is widely remunerated with many recognitions and inspiring thoughts - something which cannot be said to the same degree of the rest of the publications out there devoted to the same topic." - Fabian Westhoven (Z. Zeitschrift Marxistische Erneuerung, No. 94, June 2013, pp. 215-6)

"Ingar Solty, political scientist and renowned USA expert, takes Obama's reelection (...) as an opportunity for a critical balance-sheet of Obama's [first] presidency (...); and he collects a vast amount of data and empirical facts which - in this concentrated form - are hard to find anywhere else." - Gerd Bedszent (junge Welt, 15 July 2013, p. 15)



Inhaltsverzeichnis

Geleitwort von Wolfgang Fritz Haug
Vorwort und Danksagung
Einleitung: Die Innen-Außen-Dialektik des American Empire in der globalen Krise

Teil I: Aufstieg einer charismatischen Führungsgestalt in der globalen Krise
1. Das Obama-Projekt: Krise und charismatische Herrschaft
2. Neoliberalismus und Evangelikalismus in den USA: Desintegration der Christlichen Rechten, Aufstieg einer evangelikalen Linken?
3. Barack Obama: Neuer Roosevelt oder neuer Clinton?
4. Obamas Gesundheitsreform: Ein Lehrstück in Zentrismus

Teil II: Die sozialen Bewegungen in der globalen Krise
5. Die Tea Party und der hilflose Antifaschismus des Blocks an der Macht
6. Die Tea-Party-Quittung: Das Scheitern des Obama-Projekts und die Zwischenwahlen 2010
7. Arbeiterbewegung Reloaded?: Der Anti-Austeritäts-Aufstand von Wisconsin
8. Sieg der Tea-Party-Bewegung über die Gewerkschaften im öffentlichen Dienst?: Wasserstandsmeldung aus Wisconsin, September 2011
9. Occupy Wall Street
10. Interregnum sozialer Protestbewegung: Thesen zur politischen Artikulation der Krise vom neuen Rechtspopulismus zur Occupy-Bewegung

Teil III: Obamas Empire
11. »Krieg gegen den Terror«, Islamfeindlichkeit und Bürgerrechte zehn Jahre nach 9/11
12. Krieg gegen einen Integrationsunwilligen? Die politische Ökonomie des libyschen Bürgerkriegs und der westlichen Intervention im Kontext der Großen Krise
13. Die US-China-Politik zwischen Einbindung und Eindämmung

Teil IV: Die Wiederwahl des Krisenpräsidenten und die zweite Amtszeit im Zeichen des globalen Austeritätszeitalters
14. Fear and Loathing statt Hope and Change: Die Genealogie der republikanischen Vorwahlen und des Präsidentschaftswahlkampfes 2012
15. Die politische Soziologie der Wiederwahl von Obama und die Perspektiven der zweiten Amtszeit

Recently, there has been much debate about the rise of an Evangelical Left in the United States. This debate has focused on the emergence of influential evangelical leaders breaking away from the Republican Party, such as Rick Warren. This debate mistakes a hegemonic crisis of (neo-)conservatism with a hegemonic crisis of neoliberalism. Instead, the evangelical movement in the United States needs to be analyzed in the context of neoliberalism and the decline of class-based forms of solidarity, which it replaced. Throughout their ascent, the evangelical institutions have inscribed themselves into and become a part of the neoliberal state. At the same time, the depth of the economic crisis, the remaining class character of the evangelical movement, the importance of evangelical churches as arenas of hegemonic struggles and, finally, the existing shift in national discourse in terms of the ecological question, the social question and the rehabilitation of the state vis-à-vis the market mark an opening of the political situation in the US that may eventually lead to a replacement of the current evangelical centrism by the actual Evangelical Left as part of a counter-hegemonic post-neoliberal historic bloc.

At 9:02 on the morning of April 19th, 1995, a bomb went off at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. The bomb not only killed over 160 people and injured more than 650, but it also shook the illusion held by many Americans of a nation safe from the political unrest and terrorism outside its borders (an illusion that would be shattered for good on 9/11). In the hours and days following the bombing, the media and law enforcement authorities focused on the Muslim terrorists they believed were responsible, including a Muslim Oklahoma City resident detained at Heathrow Airport in London. On April 20th, one day after bombing, another Oklahoma City resident, Iraqi refugee Suhair al-Mosawi, was attacked in his home as retaliation for the bombing. When Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols – two white, Christian, home-grown anti-government activists – were arrested, what became evident was that these were ‘American’ terrorists. In spite of the initial shock of the bombing and focus on Muslims, this was far from a new phenomenon. For many experts who had been researching and monitoring the extreme right, the bombing was the culmination of a fifteen-year trajectory of violence. In response to the bombing, hearings were held, anti-terror legislation was passed, arrests were made and numerous books written and films made about the phenomenon. Yet, following the events of 9/11, Oklahoma City and the domestic extreme right were pushed to the margins of history and memory, as terrorism and terrorists were redefined as Islamic or Islamist, and Christianity and patriotism were evoked in America’s defense.

Throughout American history, both terrorism and extremism have been constructed, evoked or ignored strategically by the state, media and public at different points, in order to disown and demonize political movements whenever their ideologies and objectives become problematic or inconvenient – because they overlap with, and thus compromise, the legitimacy of the dominant ideology and democratic credentials of the state, because they conflict with the dominant ideology or hegemonic order, because they offend the general (voting) public, or because they expose the fallacies of national unity and bi-polar opposition in the face of foreign enemies or international conflicts, such as the war on terror. This chapter looks at how domestic extreme right terrorism has been constructed, represented, evoked or ignored in the American political imagination in the post-civil rights era, with a particular focus on its changing status following the Oklahoma City bombing and 9/11.""

El documento, fue escrito para su difusión en XEMC-TV la televisora chetumaleña que narra 200 años de lucha ininterrumpida del pueblo mexicano, para tener un gobierno nacional mexicano libre del poder omnímodo de oligarquía local y plutocracia mundial.  Específicamente se refiere a la lucha de una fracción de la oligarquía regiomontana, formalmente orientada a parar en seco la acción del lopezmateismo por llevar libros de texto gratuitos a la niñez neoleonesa y mexicana toda.  Realmente, fue una parte de la embestida contra un titular del poder ejecutivo que "tascaba el freno" y se negaba a obedecer ciegamente los designios de las fracciones hegemónicas del capital privado.

In this paper, I want to introduce a(n digital) ethnographic approach to populism that understands populism as a (digitally) mediatized chronotopic communicative and discursive relation. Populism, I argue, is not only constructed in a (mediatized) communicative relation between journalists, politicians and academics, but also in the relation to citizens, activists and computational agency. Attention to all these actors, and the media they use, is of crucial importance if we want to understand populism. Digital media are not just new media that populists use, their algorithms and affordances reshape their populism. In times of digitalization, we cannot understand populism by only looking at ‘the input’, the frame that actors prepare for uptake, it is about the uptake as well. More concretely, I will argue that digital media have given birth to a new form of populism: algorithmic populism. Understanding and focusing on populism as a ‘communicative relation’ between all these human and...

Thomas Frank’s new book on the tea party marks a step forward in his theorization of right-wing populism (RWP) in the United States. While previous books explained RWP’s rise resorting to problematic explanations such as 'deception' and 'betrayal', Pity the Billionaire identifies the old petty bourgeoisie (OPB) – those most heavily affected by "Obamacare" – as RWP’s class base. Frank’s identification of two kinds of neoliberal deregulation for big and small businesses is crucial for a theoretical understanding of middle-class right-wing libertarianism. Yet his account of the crisis of RWP is empirically problematic, since the OPB directly affected by the new health-care regulations amounts to less than ten thousand 'small' businesses. In the 2010 elections four out of ten voters declared themselves tea party sympathizers, showing RWP’s hegemonic appeal. In order to identify the tea party as merely an agent of big business and finance and due to the lack of a deeper understanding of neoliberal transnationalization and financialization, Frank denies the oppositional character of RWP and relapses into old notions of false consciousness.

According to the standard framing of racial appeals in political speech, politicians generally rely on coded language to communicate racial messages. Yet recent years have demonstrated that politicians often express quite explicit forms of racism in mainstream political discourse. The standard framing can explain neither why these appeals work politically nor how they work semantically. This paper moves beyond the standard framing, focusing on the politics and semantics of one type of explicit appeal, candid racial communication (CRC). The linguistic vehicles of CRC are neither true code words, nor slurs, but a conventionally defined class of "racialized terms."

In 2013, the world is entering the sixth year of the global crisis. In those six years, sparked by the unfolding events, there has developed a burgeoning literature regarding the origins, conjunctures and regional manifestations of the crisis. In many ways, this debate evolved from long-term disputes regarding the nature of the current phase of capitalism and its periodization (monopoly-finance capitalism, post-Fordism, finance driven accumulation regime, financial-market capitalism, neoliberalism, high-tech capitalism etc.) and has brought to light the epistemological and political differences between the various approaches. However, as Magnus Ryner (2012) has pointed out, with a few notable exceptions, the debate has shed insufficient light on the political articulation of the crisis and the interrelations between the political and the economic sphere. With regard to not only the origins of the crisis but also and particularly the viability of exit strategies from it, the struggles over hegemony occurring during the crisis are essential. Hence, complementing the Marxist and Marxian crisis debate, it is the goal of this paper to shed some light on the political articulations of the global crisis and assess the interrelations between global leadership efforts seeking exit strategies from the crisis and the hegemonic struggles underlying their agencies. While in looking at the struggle between left and right projects of leadership references will be made to numerous core and non-core capitalist countries, the main focus will be on the two dominant actors in NAFTA and the EU, the United States and Germany, which have shaped the politics of exit strategies from the crisis in North America and the Eurozone.

Our article proposes a theoretical interpretation of women‘s broad participation in the coronavirus protests. For this purpose, we consider two central themes of their protest: vaccination and caring for their loved ones. From a sociological perspective, we show how their protest affirms the gendered division between the private and the public spheres that is constitutive of bourgeois capitalist society, and what role romantic thought plays in this. The women accept the social role assigned to them as caring women and creatures of nature. From a philosophical perspective, we illuminate how this affirmation is accompanied by a threat to society. That threat is based, as we point out with Hegel, on a contradiction of woman and society. Their protest reveals paradigmatically the dialectical movement of affirmation and endangerment of the bourgeois capitalist order.

Keywords: corona-virus protest, women, gender relations, vaccination, romanticism, Hegel

Unser Artikel unterbreitet einen theoriegeleiteten Deutungsvorschlag zur Frage, wie die breite Beteiligung von Frauen an den Corona-Protesten verstanden werden kann. Dafür betrachten wir zwei zentrale Themen ihres Protestes: Impfen und Sorge um ihre Angehörigen. Aus einer soziologischen Perspektive zeigen wir auf, inwiefern ihr Protest die für die bürgerlich-kapitalistische Gesellschaft konstitutive vergeschlechtlichte Trennung zwischen privater und öffentlicher Sphäre affirmiert und welche Rolle romantisches Denken darin einnimmt. Die Frauen nehmen die ihnen zugewiesene gesellschaftliche Rolle der sorgenden Frau und des Naturwesens an. Aus einer philosophischen Perspektive beleuchten wir, wie diese Affirmation mit einer Gefährdung der Gesellschaft einhergeht. Diese gründet, wie wir mit Hegel offenlegen, in einem Widerspruch von Frau und Gesellschaft. In ihrem Protest zeigt sich paradigmatisch die dialektische Bewegung von Affirmation und Gefährdung der bürgerlich-kapitalistischen Ordnung.

Keywords: Corona-Protest, Frauen, Geschlechterverhältnisse, Impfung, Romantik, Hegel

Abstract: While anthropologists continue to advance a rich and important body of social movement scholarship, researchers overwhelmingly focus on movements with which they sympathize—left-identified and related mobilizations. This essay highlights a burgeoning field of research focused on U.S. conservative movements. Drawing on examples of recent anthropological work on these fronts as well as on 32 months of ethnographic fieldwork on the resurgence of libertarianism, I discuss how anthropological attention to these typically understudied formations uniquely illuminates crucial developments across U.S. cultural and political landscapes. Revealing both opportunities and dangers presented by conservative movements, the essay explores three interrelated contributions of the emergent field of studies focused on conservative movements: helping to understand these movements’ complexity and heterogeneity; highlighting the importance of taking seriously the grievances of many participants in such mobilization; and facilitating nuanced critique.

Although public responses to national and international crises are never without contestations and conflicting truth claims, the COVID-19 pandemic draws attention to the stark political and cultural divisions presented by conservative populism in the age of the Tea Party Movement and Donald Trump. Beginning with research among Tea Party activists in 2010 and continuing through the Trump Administration and "reopen" protests, I have documented a shifting cultural world of right-wing populism. The vivid and symbolically elaborate performance of patriotism and indignation by the Tea Party Movement declined in 2012, being replaced by a more belligerent and less colorful form of populism with Donald Trump. As Trump-inspired protests opposing COVID-19 mitigation policies emerged in 2020, however, Tea Party themes and symbols reemerged as frames for resistance to government restrictions. Yet, despite the shifting styles, there was a constant theme of what I term "fundamentalist populism." This style illustrates political identities characterized by vilification of opponents, distrust of existing political and social institutions, ideological rigidity, and a rededication to individualism and personal freedom. Ethnographic and documentary research shows how these themes animate a small yet vocal resistance to the science-based and cooperative guidelines prescribed by public health experts

My response to The Onion video called 'Trump Supporter Feels Betrayed by President after Reading 800 Pages of Queer Feminist Theory'.  free access on The Disorder of Things Blog at https://thedisorderofthings.com/2017/07/06/right-wing-populism-anti-genderism-and-real-us-americans-in-the-age-of-trump/

This paper, first, provides an analysis of contemporary anti-immigration activism in the United States, situating it historically and theoretically through an examination of nativism and vigilantism. Second, it merges insights from political process theory and structured ignorance theory to develop an historical account of three key preconditions that set the stage for and accelerated contemporary anti- immigration activism. In so doing this paper addresses fundamental empirical and theoretical gaps in political process theory and demonstrates how structured ignorance theory can help us better understand how shifting structural conditions promoted contemporary anti-immigration mobilization by generating perceptions conducive to conservative activism.

I develop a theory of the type of citizens who become candidates and then elected officials. The theory makes predictions about three features of an election winner: her ideological platform, her office experience and her populist charisma. The initial set up follows Adams, Merrill, Simas and Stone (2011) in postulating three dimensions: policy, competence valence, and campaigning valence. The model finds two major trade-offs that are unfortunate for voters, whereby candidates with high charisma will have low experience and high extremism. The model also finds that popular discontent, coming from an economic or political crisis, makes a populist outsider more likely to enter an election and win, which helps explain the recent "rise of newcomer politicians" identified by Carreras (2016). Another contribution is explaining, within a unified theory, numerous findings from the empirical literature. I make special reference to four prominent outsiders: Donald Trump, Hugo Chávez, Alberto Fujimori and Jean-Marie Le Pen.

Keine Kategorie – weder Alter noch Geschlecht noch Zustimmung zum DREAM-Act – sagt das Wahlverhalten der Latinos 2012 stärker voraus als die im Haushaltseinkommen und einem niedrigen Bildungsstatus gemessene soziale Lage. Die Tatsache, daß die meisten Wahlbeobachter das Wahlverhalten nicht in bezug zur sozialen Lage der Wählergruppen gesetzt haben, spricht für eine bemerkenswerte Klassenblindheit der bürgerlichen Öffentlichkeit.

There has been much written about the white male backlash or ‘angry white male’ phenomenon of the 1980s and 1990s, much of it concerning mainstream conservative political and cultural manifestations. What is rarely considered within this literature are the ways in which the extreme right itself transformed during the period, particularly as they have traditionally been the most vocal about, and mobilised around, perceived threats to white supremacy, from abolition to civil rights. For the extreme right, the passing of the Civil Rights Act did not lead to a conventional backlash or a reassertion of white supremacy and white nationalism. Instead, corresponding to the perceived loss of white supremacy that the Act represented to them, such identities and ideologies were effectively rejected. In their place, what emerged were forms of racial and national identity and ideology that represented the white man as a racial and political other, displaced as an effect of the developments of the civil rights era.

In this paper, I will examine this transformation of traditional hegemonic white supremacy and white nationalism and the development of counter-hegemonic forms of white otherness and white separatism. The focus of this analysis will be the Christian Patriot Movement (including Aryan Nations, Posse Comitatus and The Order), which emerged from the KKK, John Birch Society and Christian Identity movement in the 1970s and came to dominate the extreme right in the 1980s and 1990s. More specifically, I will examine the ways in which the Christian Patriot movement employed mythology, theology, producerist populism and republicanism, as well as discourses appropriated from Jews, African-Americans and anti-imperialist movements in order to represent the white race as an oppressed and persecuted racial other within post-civil rights America, and inform their white separatist programme.