'Blood and Politics' by Leonard Zeskind

Blood and Politics

The History of the White

Nationalist Movement From the Margins to the Mainstream

Leonard Zeskind

Farrar, Straus & Giroux:

622 pp., $35

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This April, when the Department of Homeland Security issued a report titled "Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment," the media world was briefly ablaze debating whether it was true.

"Rightwing extremists," the report maintained, "have capitalized on the election of the first African American president, and are focusing their efforts to recruit new members, mobilize existing supporters, and broaden their scope and appeal through propaganda."

Citing the economic downturn, it drew parallels to the 1990s, a fertile time in the development of militia-style factions. In a footnote, "rightwing extremism" is defined broadly as applying to groups, movements and adherents that are "primarily hate-oriented" toward particular religious, racial or ethnic groups, or "are mainly anti-government, rejecting federal authority," or may be dedicated to single issues such as opposition to abortion.

What favorable timing, then, for Leonard Zeskind's "Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement From the Margins to the Mainstream," which addresses all of these issues, provides a context in which to assess them and offers an extended look inside a little-understood cultural zone that is really a panoply of small groups.

Unless you too resent ZOG (the Zionist Occupation Government), Zeskind's decades-long perspective will help explain why, according to the Southern Poverty Law Council, there were 926 hate groups active in the United States last year -- a 4% increase from the previous year but representing a 50% increase since 2000. Demographically speaking, this involves a tiny slice of the populace: Zeskind estimates that 30,000 men and women constitute the white nationalist hard core, with an additional 250,000-plus forming a periphery of supporters. In a country of more than 300 million people, that is one-tenth of 1%.

Zeskind tracks the white supremacist impulse, as embodied in various groups since the mid-1970s, in chronological fashion. He analyzes every twist, turn and rivalry -- historically, the groups hardly yielded a harmonious or even coherent "movement," although there is more of one today than in the past. (In a prequel section of the book, Zeskind also traces roots stretching back into the mid-1950s.) Much of his narrative is cast around the schism between "mainstreamers" who seek to temper their message in return for broadened public support and potential electoral success, and more militant "vanguardists" who have not and often take a separatist approach.