Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America

The period from the end of the Vietnam War in 1975 to the Oklahoma City bombing in April 1995 marked a decisive shift in the white power movement. Once divided into various factions such as neo-Nazis, Klansmen, and neo-Confederates, they coalesced into a unified front that shared the goal of waging war on an American state they believed had betrayed them. The white power movement connected people from all regions of the country and walks of life, who were traumatized by defeat in Vietnam, disillusioned by political scandals, and anxious over rapid social changes. The experience of Vietnam helped shape the movement’s self-conception as an army at war, which they would fight in both foreign battlefields like Nicaragua and El Salvador as well as at home against communists and other threats to a white-dominated political order. Even the election of the ultra-conservative Ronald Reagan failed to quell what Time magazine called “thunder on the right” (3), and the white power movement broke with the state entirely, undertaking a literal war against the US government. While not a mainstream movement, the militias it spawned claimed upwards of five million members in the mid-1990s, drawing on the most extreme tendencies of both conservative politics and evangelical Christianity.

Despite members’ many differences, the movement coalesced around “the need for a white homeland” and the perpetuation of the white race (7), fanatical anti-communism, and the need for an ethic of strong masculinity to protect white people against communists and other threats. This movement paralleled a new phase of the Ku Klux Klan—a public-facing approach epitomized by David Duke—but is not limited to this better-known example. This was a genuine social movement that emerged from economic dislocations, perceived attacks on traditional morality, and the apparent weakening of American power in the face of a global communist menace. It became a genuine social movement through “the contiguous activity of an inner circle over two decades, frequent public displays, and developments of a wide-reaching social network” (10). Vietnam was their shared trauma, and The Turner Diaries (1978), a novel by neo-Nazi William Pierce, became their sacred script. Much of the existing research has failed to capture the movement quality of white power, in part due to difficulties in accessing archival materials, and so Kathleen Belew undertakes a comprehensive approach—drawing from white power literature, FBI files, news reports and more—to try and capture the full scope of the movement. Among the many lessons of this period, one of the most important is the inability to keep the effects of war beyond American shores: “It comes home in ways bloody and unexpected” (16).