American Völkisch

The Crisis of American Ideology

Christian Identity propaganda, reproduced in The Politics of Righteousness: Idaho Christian Patriotism, James A. Aho,

The chapter of my book I’m currently writing deals with the Ruby Ridge incident, where Randy Weaver, a survivalist, and his family, faced off against the federal government in a siege of his Idaho cabin. As you may remember, the result was tragedy: the Weaver clan killed a Federal marshal, and the feds killed Weaver’s wife and son. The stand off at Ruby Ridge was perhaps the key moment in the creation of the modern militia movement. But what interests me at the moment is what the Weavers believed and how they came to believe it. The Weavers were followers of a Christian Identity, which stipulates that White Anglo-Saxons are the true Israelites of the Bible and that those known as Jews today were actually Satan’s spawn. They thought the U.S. government was dominated by a Satanic conspiracy and were prepared to kill and die for their beliefs.

This Weavers began as a very conventional Midwestern family in Iowa, brought up in the oldest traditions of American Protestantism: Congregationalism and Presbyterianism. Vicki Weaver’s father was a member of the RDLS, a softer version of Mormonism, itself perhaps the most American religion. So how did they find themselves on the very edges of country, both geographically and ideologically? You’ll have to wait for the book for the whole story, which involves their getting deeper and deeper into apocalyptic and conspiratorial thought, but very roughly speaking Christian Identity, which was actually developed by American Nazis in the 1930s, easily plugged into the religious traditions the Weavers grew up in. It contained millennialism, the idea of an elect, Biblical prophecy, and it organized people into local congregations: it was not a far cry from evangelical, Reformed, and fundamentalist Protestantism they grew up with, so it did not appear all that alien. But it twisted one tenet of Calvinism: instead of believers thinking of themselves as metaphorical Israelites, a community of believers in covenant with God, it taught that they were the literal bloodline descendants of the tribes, which also were actually the Aryans of Europe, not the Semites of the Middle East. In short, it replaced the concept of community with that of race.

Many of the doctrines cooked up by the extreme right do similar variations on fundamental American myths. There’s a consistent effort to appropriate Americana. For instance, Posse Comitatus, which I wrote about recently, is related to Christian Identity teaching and plays on Old West themes of sheriffs and vigilantes; The Militia Movement tries to appropriate the language of the Constitution; Willis Carto, at one time the head of organized Holocaust denial in the U.S., wrote a book called Profiles in Populism and called his political organization the Populist Party, after the 19th century agrarian radicals. It makes sense that Nazis and fascists would meld their beliefs onto things that looked all-American, rather than coming right out with the swastikas and goose stepping, which we’re all taught to associate with a foreign evil. Granted, it is quite thorny to disentangle how much of this is self-conscious distortions wrought by political actors and how much of this is organic development of American ideology: after all, we have our own tradition of white supremacy: slavery, settler colonialism, the Confederacy, and the Ku Klux Klan are unfortunately as American as apple pie. (Nazis would happily agree and say that this is, in fact, the essence of America.)

It occurred to me one thing that might help us to understand this phenomenon was George L. Mosse’s work, namely his book The Crisis of German Ideology: The Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich. Mosse’s argument is basically that Nazism didn’t come out of nowhere, but that there was a fertile cultural context that dated back to the 19th century: the völkisch movement. “Völkisch” is a bit difficult to translate, on the one hand it can be as anodyne as “popular” and “populist,” but in this context it is redolent of bood-and-soil nationalism and mysticism. Völkisch ideology had its roots in a romantic revolt against modernity: its adherents took a deep interest in the natural, “going back to the land,” in old Germanic folklore, mythology, and traditions. It often had a racial and anti-semitic component, opposing the earthy, practical German people to the abstract, alien Jew. The Nazis both sprang out of this subculture and took advantage of its penetration into the national imagination. In Mosse’s telling, Nazism was an ingenious combination of völkisch anti-modernism and modern mass political techniques.

One way to conceive of this far right Americana as a kind of American völkism: an ideological imaginary that is a reaction to the modern situation but presents itself as rooted in the soil, in the country’s oldest traditions and lore. Instead of Norse gods and roaming Gothic tribes, we have the myths of Puritans, cowboys and pioneers. This völkism provides a shared ideological substrate, a common currency of images and tropes, that allows for recruitment, and the formation of organizations and movements. All the better that has some organic basis in American culture: for example, Confederate Lost Cause mythos, although it probably always contains a high-degree nostalgia for white supremacy, is far more widespread than the hard-core of the self-conscious extreme right.

It’s been argued by critics of the “fascism thesis,” including Adam Tooze, that the unique circumstances of the interwar years—namely, the traumatizing experience of total war in World War I and the fear of proletarian revolution—are absent in the contemporary context, making the analogy inappropriate. I’d just point out again that there was a cultural pre-history of these movements that dates back to the 19th century: in Germany, there was the Völkish movement, in France, Boulangism and anti-Dreyfusism, in Italy, the aestheticized ultranationalism of D’Annunzio, and so forth. It took the radically unsettled circumstances of 20th century to make their solutions appear appealing and to provide the appropriate organizational forms, but the ideas were around for a while.