Years of Rage: White Supremacy in the United States from the Klan to the Alt-Right by D. J. Mulloy (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Years of Rage: White Supremacy in the United States from the Klan to the Alt-Right by D. J. Mulloy Elizabeth Theiss-Morse Years of Rage: White Supremacy in the United States from the Klan to the Alt-Right. By D. J. Mulloy. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2021. ix + 253 pp. Notes on sources, index. $35.00 cloth. White supremacy is not just hateful speech, it is also hateful actions. Simply look at the recent murders of nine people at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in 2015, one person [End Page 249] at the "Unite the Right" rally in 2017, and eleven people at the Tree of Life synagogue in 2018. The bombing of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City in 1995 killed 168 people, including nineteen children. There is no region of the United States that is immune from white supremacist activities, including the Great Plains. Why have we not moved past such racial and religious hatred? D. J. Mulloy helps us understand what is going on in the US today by tracing the ideas, people, and organizations promoting white supremacy, from the rise of the second Ku Klux Klan in 1915 to the rise of the alt-right in the 2010s. What society will put up with at any given time—the context within which white supremacy exists—changes. Across the past one hundred years, white supremacists have adapted to these changing political and social contexts, and there is little evidence to suggest they will be going away any time soon. White supremacists are not, now or one hundred years ago, a unified, cohesive group marching lockstep as they try to create a white nation. White supremacist beliefs—including the genetic inferiority of people of color, the superiority of European whites, and the role of religion—are contested even among white supremacists. Preferred strategies are contested as well. Mulloy discusses three strategies used in recent times, although they have been used across US history. One strategy is to use violence to bring attention to the goals of white supremacists in the hopes of starting a race war. A second strategy is to withdraw from society by creating separatist enclaves, and these militias and survivalists allow white supremacists to pursue their goals away from the public eye. The third approach that emerged from an emergency meeting convened in 1992 by Pastor Pete Peters, a native Nebraskan, in Estes Park, Colorado, was the mainstreaming of white supremacy views. While explicit racism and anti-Semitism were commonplace in American society in 1915, by the late 1900s the flagrant expression of white supremacist beliefs was no longer socially acceptable. Rather than being explicitly racist, white supremacists could gain traction in mainstream America by focusing on gun rights, religious freedom, and opposition to "government tyranny." The most recent era, the 2010s, highlights this third strategy and the rise of the alt-right. Mulloy is careful not to equate the alt-right with the Republican Party, and he points out that not all alt-right adherents are white supremacists. I would like to have seen more caution, though, in his connection of the election of Barack Obama, the first African American president, and the subsequent election of Donald Trump to the mainstreaming of white supremacist views within the Republican Party. As he points out, a good estimate is that 11 million Americans are white supremacists or their sympathizers. Donald Trump received 74 million votes in 2020 (to Joe Biden's 81 million votes). It is also the case that about 12 percent of Obama voters in 2012 voted for Trump in 2016, and Hispanics increased their vote for Trump by 10 percentage points from 2016 to 2020. Even so, Mulloy's book is essential reading for Americans interested in safeguarding democratic equality, and that should be all of us. [End Page 250] Elizabeth Theiss-Morse Department of Political Science University of Nebraska–Lincoln Copyright © 2023 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln