White Supremacists are Leftists
The right despises white supremacists because they're supremacist. The left hates them because they're white.
Why are we Talking about White Supremacism?
One thing about the Office of the President: It’s an excellent bully pulpit. So when Joe Biden says it’s time to talk about white supremacism, lots of folks comply. Why should I be the exception? Thing is, there’s very little to say about white supremacism that’s new. It’s had a dark and brutal history, but through tremendous hard work and concerted effort, Americans relegated it to a footnote. Yes, there are still some people in our country who espouse it. They’re few and far between but—surprise!—they’re disproportionately disturbed. When disturbed people decide to become violent, they can cause a great deal of pain. Hence, the recent Buffalo shooting.
The important thing to know about today’s white supremacists, however, is that—leftist protestations to the contrary—they are ideologically aligned with today’s left. The entire notion of a racial spoils system is central to leftist thinking, anathema to those of us on the right.
I’ve decided to reprint the relevant parts of an essay I first posted nearly three years ago on precisely this topic. It builds upon themes I published in American Restoration. Some of the terminology matches the language I used throughout that book. Most of the links go to a glossary I was developing around the same time.
If you’ve seen this essay before, it’s a blast from your past. If not, well…it’s a blast from my past.
As long as it’s a blast.
The right condemns white supremacists because they’re supremacist.
The left condemns white supremacists because they’re white.
Even in today’s deeply polarized America, we can all—left and right, progressive and restorationist—stand as one to express our deep distaste for white supremacists. Americans across the political spectrum hate white supremacism so much that no one wants to claim it. Politicians of the left and right systematically distance themselves from white supremacists and repudiate their support. And though still a tiny fringe movement, white supremacism does seem to be on the rise.
Who owns this fringe? Who is most responsible for its rise? The answers are far from obvious. To many, they may seem counterintuitive. In point of fact, however, the symbiosis between progressivism and white supremacism is hard to ignore: both movements rest upon the racist division of humanity into distinct racial categories subject to differentiated standards.
Before plunging into that analysis, however, it is important to emphasize that the terms of agreement about white supremacism go only so far. Though both major political parties, and every sizable faction, movement, and organization within them, have condemned, repudiated, and distanced themselves from white supremacism, the challenges to white supremacism from the two sides of the political divide differ greatly.
The right sees white supremacism as one of many evil ideologies seeking to destabilize and divide America. The left sees white supremacism as a uniquely evil ideology working to entrench an unjust status quo. The leftist attempts to tar the political right with white supremacism represents a masterpiece of projection.
The relationship between progressivism and white supremacism is deeply symbiotic.
That’s precisely why progressives work so hard to tie white supremacism to the “far right.”
The ideology and politics of white supremacists (or at least of those cogent enough to have an ideology) is far closer to today’s left than to today’s right. Anyone willing to slog through the hateful garbage that passes for white supremacist manifestos would notice that the authors are invariably socialists. They advocate a two-step agenda: First, eliminate the ethnically undesirable. Second, adopt socialist economics.
The notion that an individual may be undesirable because of ethnicity—rather than individual action—is meaningful only among progressives. America is colorblind. America, or at least today’s American right, opposes as racist any attempt to divide the country into ethnic categories and apply different treatment to the members of each category. Such divisions, however, are central to progressive identity politics.
The “white” identity had faded from American usage until progressivism reintroduced it. Ideological progressives, mostly in academia, worked hard to create the “white” identity group. They determined that a category called “white people” possessed inherent “privileges,” and that all “white people” attempting to avail themselves of those privileges are complicit in perpetuating a historic injustice.
The relentless progressive agenda of identity politics predictably led some personally unprivileged “white people,” upon believing the progressive tales of “white privilege,” to conclude that it was worth preserving.
This dangerous, racist fabrication is a central tenet of progressivism. Yet to hear the progressives tell it, they never imagined that their obsessive focus on racial categorization, identity grievance politics, and redistributive economics pitting each group against all others, might motivate some “white people” to take them seriously.
What’s really hard to take seriously is the progressive denial . Is it really surprising that some of the folks progressivism assigned to the “white people” category—particularly those who have never felt personally privileged—have rejected the role that progressivism assigned them and decide instead to fend for themselves?
In America today, white identity would not exist without progressivism, and progressivism could not exist without white identity. White supremacism and progressivism enjoy a deeply symbiotic relationship. Progressives may despise white supremacists, but it is they who have created, empowered, and amplified the problem.
Furthermore, progressivism is quite comfortable with both individual supremacists and organizations preaching supremacism, as long as it’s not white supremacism. Supremacist groups like the Nation of Islam and the New Black Panthers count prominent progressives among their admirers and apologists. At the international level, progressivism has allied itself with inherently supremacist Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood (MB); domestically, progressivism shelters the MB’s spokespeople and apologists, like CAIR, safely beneath the intersectional umbrella.
White supremacists are the black sheep of the progressive family.
By attitude and belief, white supremacists exemplify almost everything for which progressivism stands proud—the glaring exception being that the group identifies as “white.” Any “non-white” group professing claims identical to those of the white supremacists would receive a warm welcome beneath the intersectional umbrella of progressivism.
The feigned surprise of progressive leaders about the monster they’d created notwithstanding, America’s tiny white supremacist fringe has been such a godsend to progressives that the progressive media now works overtime to promote it.
How did it all happen? With the American mainstream becoming increasingly colorblind, the progressive leaders who’d built their careers preaching civil rights while practicing racial agitation needed a foil. Unprepared for the reality that the Civil Rights struggle in America had been won, they needed racists to remain relevant. They thus kept up their campaign of slanderous lies until someone volunteered to play the role of villain.
They tried it on Mitt Romney in 2012, with some success. Progressive activists played off anti-Mormon bigotry and Romney’s genteel manner to terrify minorities already predisposed to favor Obama’s reelection into the implausible belief that Romney sought to defeat America’s first black president because he was racist.
They would have liked the 2016 Republican nominee to assume that villainous role, but the GOP nominated a celebrity well known for dealing with people of all races as individuals—and singularly unthreatening to America’s minority communities. Donald Trump became America’s first truly colorblind President; his vision of “America First” extends to all Americans equally. Far from promoting divisiveness among Americans or promoting racist sentiment as properly understood, Trump simply dismisses the progressive agitators as the irrelevant and petty criminals they are. The only distinctions he has ever drawn run between Americans and foreigners. That left the progressives with little to fall back on other than their classic insistence that all criticism of the progressive agenda is inherently racist.
Trump was—and remains—the progressives’ worst nightmare: a political leader whose common sense sees right through their lies, and who treats them with the disdain they deserve. That’s why they subject him to constant defamation and insist against all evidence that he is a racist.
Progressivism is quite comfortable with supremacism, as long as it’s not white supremacism.
White supremacists are merely the ideological progressives that progressivism doesn’t want.
The progressive obsession with fringe white supremacists began in earnest in 2015, when some of them expressed an affinity for candidate Trump. While the support of hatemongers is taken for granted among Democrats—they frequently fete the likes of Al Sharpton, Louis Farrakhan, Linda Sarsour, and Ilhan Omar—hatemongers hugging the GOP seemed like something from an earlier era. Trump and the Republicans repeatedly distanced themselves from their racist fans, but that hardly mattered to the progressive media spreading fake news. Their sole objective was depicting the GOP as the party of white supremacism and Donald Trump as a white supremacist. The sheer absurdity of leveling that claim at a man who’d spent four decades in the celebrity spotlight befriending people from all walks of life, and who’d fought battles to integrate previously segregated facilities, didn’t even slow them down. The progressive story became that identity politics was a problem of the right, and that Trump was its foremost practitioner. It was a remarkable feat, really: Projection at its very finest.
Meanwhile, the more media savvy white supremacists enjoyed their newfound fame. The old reliable David Duke gave way to Richard Spencer, who understood that the mere addition of a few swastikas, a Klan hood, or a “Seig, Heil!” salute would get him the exposure he’d always craved. In July 2019, CNN even gave Spencer air time to help him promote his own brand of identity politics.
That America’s bona fide white supremacists likely number no more than a few thousand is irrelevant. The progressive press insists that the country’s only supremacist movement involves white supremacism, and that it poses a grave threat. For support, they turn to groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center and the ADL—organizations possessing valuable brands for their historic work fighting hate before becoming progressive shills that divert donor money to spread hatred. These progressive organizations reliably exploit and magnify the white supremacist fringe; it provides a great hook for their fundraising.
Progressivism manufactured a white supremacist movement for the sole purpose of hanging it on the GOP.
The relationship between progressivism and the white supremacists is symbiotic.
They match each other in vile intentions and methods, and the tiny numbers and lack of influence of white supremacists all-but-guarantee progressive victory.
Sometimes the progressives are lucky enough to get the white supremacists to play along—though neither President Trump nor the GOP ever respond as progressives wish they would. When, in 2018 and 2019, a couple of disturbed loners who identified as white supremacists, and who hated President Trump, immigrants, and Jews, shot up synagogues in Pittsburgh and outside San Diego, the progressives had to pinch themselves. It was precisely the windfall for which they’d been praying—at least, it would have been if progressives believed in the power of prayer. Though it’s entirely unclear what either of these shooters had to do with any broader group or movement, the progressive press and social media has consistently, and incorrectly, labeled them “far right” and blamed President Trump.
In fact, President Trump responded to the tragedy with tremendous fortitude and compassion for the Jewish victims: “We must stand with our Jewish brothers and sisters to defeat anti-Semitism and vanquish the forces of hate. That’s what it is. Through the centuries, the Jews have endured terrible persecution. . . . Those seeking their destruction, we will seek their destruction.” Four months later, he expanded on that theme in his State of the Union Address, speaking strongly against anti-Semitism and pointing with American pride to an elderly Jewish man who had survived both the Holocaust and the Pittsburgh shooting. In the summer of 2019, following the near-simultaneous shootings in El Paso (by a white supremacist) and Dayton (by a progressive), he made the point clearer in a speech that even the New York Times saw as a call for unity (until complaints from its readers forced it to reconsider): “In one voice, our nation must condemn racism, bigotry, and white supremacy. These sinister ideologies must be defeated. Hate has no place in America.”
Progressives largely preferred ex-President Obama’s take on these shootings. His condolence tweets typically combined condemnation for the specific act with a call for gun control laws. For example, “We grieve for the Americans murdered in Pittsburgh. All of us have to fight the rise of anti-Semitism and hateful rhetoric against those who look, love, or pray differently. And we have to stop making it so easy for those who want to harm the innocent to get their hands on a gun.”
Americans, like President Trump, see annihilationist Jew hatred as Jew hatred, terrorism, pure evil, and an anti-American attack.
Progressives like President Obama sees it as gun violence.
All told, progressivism is a supremacist movement as well as a racist one. The thinking behind white supremacism is identical to the thinking behind black supremacism, Muslim supremacism, LGBT supremacism, and that of the various other groups intent upon imposing their senses of entitlement on America. That ideological progressivism embraces all but one of these supremacist movements is little more than an ironic confirmation of progressivism’s underlying racism.
For more information about Bruce D. Abramson & American Restorationism, visit: www.BruceDAbramson.com
To learn more about how America’s elites destroyed the republic, see: The New Civil War: Exposing Elites, Fighting Utopian Leftism, and Restoring America (RealClear Publishing, 2021).
To learn more about the ideology driving today’s anti-American leftism, see: American Restoration: Winning America’s Second Civil War (Kindle, 2019).