Herrenvolk Democracy: The Rise of the Alt-Right in Trump’s America

Abstract

As Hillary Clinton warned that Donald Trump was aiding the Alt-Right’s movement to take over the Republican Party by making extremism acceptable to mainstream Americans, white nationalists were celebrating it. What does this mean for American democracy? Political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt argue that Trump’s election to the presidency signals a threat to American democracy because (1) he has “no real allegiance to democratic norms” and (2) because the Republican Party failed to maintain those norms by catering to Tea Party extremism which undermined mutual toleration and institutional restraint. This chapter argues that Trump’s successful presidential bid and the 2016 GOP platform stem from an ideology of white racial normalcy and a race-based nationalism that emerges out of Southern Civil Religion, thereby reinventing nineteenth-century Herrenvolk democracy for the twenty-first century. It examines how the rise of the Alt-Right was legitimized through neoconservative appeals to white victimology, the erosion of traditional values, and the crisis of fragmentation allegedly posed by cultural pluralism and liberal democracy, and how its agenda was codified through the 2016 GOP platform.

[Racism] is simply passionate, deep-seated heritage, and as such can be moved by neither argument nor fact. Only faith in humanity will lead the world to rise above its present color prejudice.

—W. E. B. DuBois, Darkwater (1920) (William Edward Burghardt Dubois, Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Howe, 1920), 73. https://web.archive.org/web/20110116164908/http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=DubDark.xml&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=6&division=div1)

But what about the White people that are left behind? What about the White children who, because of school zoning laws, are forced to go to a school that is 90 percent black?… Who is fighting for these White people forced by economic circumstances to live among negroes? No one, but someone has to. We have no skinheads, no real KKK, no one doing anything but talking on the internet. Well someone has to have the bravery to take it to the real world, and I guess that has to be me.

—Dylann Roof, “Manifesto” (2015) (Dylann Roof, “Manifesto,” https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2108059-lastrhodesian-manifesto.html)