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The power of ethnonationalism lies in its ability to easily activate the most primitive and powerful human impulses. People do not need to follow politics closely to grasp elemental concepts like which ethnic group enjoys the support of a party or of a government. The stream of images of the president surrounded entirely by white men communicates a potent message. So, too, do the messages Trump sends
when he condemns the University of California at Berkeley on free-speech grounds for failing to adequately protect a flamboyantly racist speaker, then refuses to condemn the NFL for blacklisting Colin Kaepernick,
who has silently protested the national anthem. (Trump even boasted that he is enforcing the blacklist: Owners won’t sign the quarterback to a contract, he said at a rally in Kentucky, for fear that Trump will attack them on Twitter.) Everybody understands which group is in and which groups are out in Trump’s America.
That is a dangerous formula. Race has unique power to tear apart the bonds that hold together even an apparently harmonious society. In democratic India in 2002, Hindu nationalists slaughtered more than 2,000 Muslims, and Narendra Modi, the nationalist political figure linked to the murders, was elected prime minister in 2014. Serbian nationalists turned once-peaceful, multiethnic Sarajevo into a tribal bloodbath. If these comparisons sounds inconceivably dark, you may not fully appreciate the darkness of the vision animating the minds surrounding the president.
Trump’s racial obsession has likewise drawn his party closer to various strands of right-wing politics that, not long ago, had no connection to the GOP at all. The first is outright Nazism. Trump’s emergence on the national stage has activated Nazis in a way no other mainstream party leader ever has. During the campaign, Trump retweeted white-supremacist memes hyperbolically blaming African-Americans for murdering white people and using a Jewish star to illustrate the notion that Hillary Clinton was controlled by Jewish wealth.
The generous interpretation of these actions, that Trump approvingly amplified supportive messages without understanding their full nature, is probably the correct one. But this same explanation implicitly concedes that Nazis thrilled to Trump because they detected recognizable themes in his rhetoric. Trump has depicted inner cities as crime-riddled wastelands unfit for normal human existence and reflexively invoked this image as a stand-in for the African-American condition as a whole. (When criticized by Representative John Lewis, for instance,
Trump charged that the former civil-rights hero should instead look after his “crime-infested” district.) His denunciations of “global special interests” that have purposely immiserated the American people closely echo anti-Semitic paranoia about international Jewish control of the economy. Voices of unapologetically white-supremacist thought, like Richard Spencer, former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, and the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer treat Trump like a hero. Trump is not a Nazi, but by closing the ideological chasm between mainstream conservatism and white supremacy, he has encouraged their engagement in partisan politics.
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Trump Is Failing at Policy, But Winning His Race Wars
