When white nationalism becomes a political ideology.

The following essay was written over a year ago for Slate online by Jamelle Bouie. 

I believe that given all that has been going on of late, it is a good time to post it.

"Before the election, when Donald Trump was still just an unlikely presidential nominee, a conservative under the pseudonym “Publius Decius Mus,” wrote a remarkable essay in support of Trump. The pseudonym alone gave a glimpse into the writer’s thinking. The real-life Decius was a Roman consul who sacrificed himself to the gods for the sake of his embattled army. And in the same way, our internet Decius called on conservatives to embrace Trump—to back the vulgarian who mocked their ideals—for the sake of saving the country as they knew it. “The ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for, or experience in liberty means that the electorate grows more left, more Democratic, less Republican, less republican, and less traditionally American with every cycle,” he wrote, hailing the real estate mogul as the only figure who understood the stakes, who would beat back these “foreigners” and preserve America’s democratic tradition as Decius saw it. Not a tradition of pluralism, but one of exclusion, in which white Americans stand as the only legitimate players in political life. A dictatorship of the herrenvolk.

“Decius”—since revealed as Michael Anton, a former George W. Bush administration speechwriter—now works for President Trump. And he isn’t the only figure in the Trump circle who holds these views. Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, his former aide Stephen Miller, and right-wing media mogul Stephen Bannon occupy prominent positions in the present administration. Like Anton, they hold deep antagonism to immigrants and immigration, opposition to their equality within American society, and nostalgia for a time when prosperity was the province of the native-born and a select few “assimilated” immigrants. But these aren’t just ideologues with jobs in a friendly administration. They are the architects of Trump’s policy, the executors of a frighteningly coherent political ideology.

What is that ideology? Most Americans think of “racism” in individualized terms. To call someone a “racist,” then, is to pass judgment on his or her character—a declaration that this person doesn’t belong in polite society. It’s why, when faced with the accusation, Americans often rush to deny any prejudice. I don’t have a racist bone in my body, goes the cliché. But individualized prejudice is just one way to think of racism. There’s also institutional bias or systemic outcomes—the things that lead critics to deem the criminal justice system as “racist.” And beyond the material, there’s racism as ideology—a structured worldview defined by support for race hierarchy and racial caste.

Racist ideology ebbs and flows through our history, changing with the shape of American society and the contours of American life. When the South was a vast archipelago of human bondage and labor camps, racist ideology took the form of a widespread belief in black inferiority and underlay the forceful defenses of slavery. When segregation was law and legislators defended lynching on the Senate floor—even though anti-racism had claimed a small foothold in the national consciousness—racist ideology was a virulent and violent “white supremacy.” America still has white supremacists, and they still terrorize nonwhites with harassment and violence. But now that most Americans share a nominal commitment to racial equality—such that the country celebrated at the election of its first black president, more than eight years ago—explicitly racist ideology has cloaked itself in a kind of “nationalism,” outside the mainstream, but not far from its borders.

This nationalism, white nationalism, was the ideology of Anton’s essay, driven by contempt for immigrants and foreigners of all stripes. A century ago, in the preface to Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race, a then-popular work of scientific racism, American eugenicist Henry Fairfield Osborn ably summed up this worldview, which now holds the White House.

Thus conservation of that race which has given us the true spirit of Americanism is not a matter either of racial pride or of racial prejudice; it is a matter of love of country, of a true sentiment which is based upon knowledge and the lessons of history rather than upon the sentimentalism which is fostered by ignorance. If I were asked: What is the greatest danger which threatens the American republic to-day? I would certainly reply: The gradual dying out among our people of those hereditary traits through which the principles of our religious, political and social foundations were laid down and their insidious replacement by traits of less noble.

 This is Decius’ view. It was essentially the ideology behind Trump's campaign, defined by its hostility toward Muslims, marked by its reliance on racist stereotypes of Hispanic immigrants, and not so subtly contemptuous of black Americans. Now, it all but drives Trump’s administration, voiced by key figures and expressed through policy.

The ideological leader of the Trump movement is Sessions, hailed by Bannon for “developing populist nation-state policies” from his somewhat isolated perch in the Senate. Bannon, who avoids the spotlight, gives away the game in his praise of Sessions. “In America and Europe, working people are reasserting their right to control their own destinies,” he wrote in a recent statement to the Washington Post, blasting the “cosmopolitan elites in the media that live in a handful of our larger cities.” Given the demographics of Trump’s support—given the demographics of Europe—this definition of “working people” can mean only one thing: white people. And “cosmopolitan elites” has a long history as a euphemism for Jews and other minorities.

Sessions at least does us the service of being clear about his ideas and priorities. “In seven years we’ll have the highest percentage of Americans, non-native born, since the founding of the republic,” he said in a 2015 interview with Bannon. He continued:

Some people think we’ve always had these numbers, and it’s not so; it’s very unusual; it’s a radical change. When the numbers reached about this high in 1924, the president and Congress changed the policy, and it slowed down immigration significantly. We then assimilated through 1965 and created really the solid middle class of America, with assimilated immigrants, and it was good for America.

In 1924, Congress passed the Johnson–Reed Act, which placed strict limits on immigration. But these weren’t neutral limits, broadly applicable to migrants from all parts of the globe. They were national limits—racial limits. The stakes, for proponents of the law, were nothing less than the survival of an Anglo-Saxon America. In Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925, the late historian John Higham notes how lawmakers and legislators conceived of the project of immigration restriction. “Its champions now largely ignored the economic arguments they had advanced in behalf of the first quota law three years before,” he writes. “Instead, they talked about preserving a ‘distinct American type,’ about keeping America for Americans, or about saving the Nordic race from being swamped.”

To that end, the Johnson–Reed Act placed tight quotas on Southern and Eastern Europeans, particularly Italians and Jews, Africans, and Middle Easterners. It barred Asian immigration entirely. “Without offense, but with regard to the salvation of our own, let us shut the door and assimilate what we have, and let us breed pure American citizens and develop our own American resources,” declared South Carolina Sen. Ellison DuRant Smith during debates over the law. This, for Sessions, is the right approach. Or, as White House counselor Kellyanne Conway said to the Post, “Sen. Sessions laid a bit of groundwork ... on matters like trade and illegal immigration. It was candidate Trump then who was able to elevate those twin pillars in a way that cast it through the lens of what’s good for the American worker.”[More]

Tonight the trump administration is scrambling to find the person who leaked to the world what we all suspected: That the White House (and the person who occupies it) is a dysfunctional mess.