Donald Trump, galactic emperor of American racism: How the culture war has transformed in a new age of paranoia
In a universe where the Donald is the GOP frontrunner, not even "Star Wars" is free from right-wing derangement
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Donald Trump(Credit: AP/Rich Schultz)In 1964, the great historian Richard J. Hofstadter published one of his most acclaimed essays, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” Although written as Barry Goldwater and the John Birch Society were rising to prominence, and on the heels of the McCarthyist ’50s, the eponymous style of politics, which tends to embrace conspiracy theories and make use of demographic scapegoats, is now a fixture of America life. Nonetheless, its prominence ebbs and flows, and there do tend to be periods when it becomes especially popular and permeates the mainstream. Today, we appear to be living through such a period.
The paranoid reaction to the new Star Wars movie earlier this week, and the press it has received, reveals how the internet has given a pedestal to people of this tradition — who should be, as Christopher Hitchens once said of Jerry Falwell, “out in the street shouting and hollering with a cardboard sign and selling pencils from a cup.” For those unaware, after the first trailer for the “Star Wars Episode VII” was released on Monday night, a few trolls took to Twitter to denounce the movie as anti-white propaganda, an apparent response to the starring turn of British actor John Boyega, a black man. While legitimate white supremacists were few in number, they nonetheless managed to create a media firestorm, and the hashtag “#BoycottStarWarsVII” was trending globally.
This particular case was clearly the work of a few trolls trying to get attention, but these fringe movements are real, and Star Wars isn’t the first movie, nor John Boyega the first actor, to receive this kind of treatment. Whenever a non-white actor has been cast for a character that was previously white — in recent years, this includes Michael B. Jordon in “The Fantastic Four,” Amanda Stenberg in “The Hunger Games” and Idris Elba, both for his role in the “Thor” franchise and his rumored candidacy to be the next James Bond — racists and trolls have attacked those movies as left-wing propaganda promoting an anti-white agenda.
Now, it may seem like the rational response to this kind of nonsense is to ignore it completely, and let these fringe lunatics have their fun in obscurity. The thing is, these fringe lunatics have there very own presidential candidate, and he is far from being some obscure agitator. He is Donald Trump, of course; the man who has given white supremacists all over the country hope in their cause. Indeed, inveterate racists have already chosen Trump as their candidate. The popular neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer, for example, has endorsed Trump, while the white supremacist organization that inspired Dylann Roof, the Council of Conservative Citizens, is also very supportive. The former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke has also praised Trump as the “best of the lot” (although he has criticized the billionaire for his “deep Jewish connections”).
The Donald’s nativist fear-mongering is obviously catching on with the ugliest fringe groups in America, and he is cynically embracing all of the anxieties of less educated white people who fear the “browning of America.” A group called the “White GeNOcide Project” even filed a petition with the White House to honor Donald Trump for “opposing white genocide.” The petition reads:
