American Fascist Leaders

Closing out Rockwell month.

For those joining this week, George Lincoln Rockwell was the first real neo-nazi. He invented the mold and was the figurehead for the movement in the United States. This week, I want to look at the figureheads that have followed and how and why they failed.

The figureheads, I should say, are seldom the most meaningful to the movement. We’ll be looking at three figures, but during all three of those periods, others created a more lasting legacy on the White Power movement, but were not as prominent. Let’s get into it, shall we?

David Duke

Longevity comes to mind when I think about David Duke. He was never the most important figure, but he did outlast generations of most important figures. Pierce and Carto matter more in early Duke. Metzger and Beam matter more in late Duke. The Duke abides through all that. Part of his success is that he flits between spheres. Like Rockwell, he started out a uniformed Nazi, goose-stepping around in his gear. He moves from there to the Klan, taking members and influence from the Nazi sphere to the Ku Klux Klan. He then spends some time in the far right of the Republican Party, taking members and influences to and from there as well. During all this, he cleans up nice, the original Dapper Young Nazi, gets in on the booming talk show scene that thrives on conflict and controversy, and who is more controversial? More likely to raise conflict?

Duke was smart and he was damned good at what he did. He had an eye for the stunt that the media couldn’t resist, like his Klan Border Watch stunt, where he invited the media to a press conference about how the KKK were doing border control now. Klan driving along the border, ready to do violence? That is newsworthy. That might sell some copies, get some eyes on your screen. More at eleven. Duke proves how effective the quarantine strategy of denying Rockwell publicity was. Because no-one quarantined Duke and he got as close as any open fascist has yet. We can have exhausting conversations about whether this or that or the other Republican President counts as a fascist, the fact is that even if they were, they had to pretend otherwise. Duke didn’t and, when he ran for Governor of Louisiana, he

a) beat the Republican candidate from a third party position
b) forced a run-off
c) took 38% of the vote in that run off
d) took 55% of the white vote

He did that with everyone very aware of exactly who he was. So what did him in? Appetite, in a few meanings of the word. I think he found the limit of America’s appetite for fascism (in the late 70s to early 90s, at least). Republican control of the presidency, especially the exalted Ronald Reagan, through most of his career also, y’know, gave racist Americans minimal cause to find an alternative.

If he found the limit of American appetite, it must also be said that he does not appear ever to have found a limit to his own. He alienated a lot of followers and backers by being the tall handsome famous fascist on the TV and then using that status to be on their wives and girlfriends. Also a desperate grifter, vacuuming up as much wealth as possible. Legally speaking, the man is a fraudster. That shit erodes trust. I also find it extremely unlikely he wasn’t pocketing campaign donations to pad his personal wealth. Finally, the appetite for his own goddamned voice, his gratuitous pleasure in himself. My favourite book, Blood and Politics, describes Duke at one far right conference as “a candidate without a campaign, telling whoever will listen of his plans to write a book.”

Whenever I dive into Stormfront’s stagnant waters, the turd eternally floating atop that pool is the pinned thread “Hundreds of thousands of new SF readers, tens of thousands of new SF Members — You MUST read My Awakening!”. My Awakening is the name of that book Duke told everyone he was writing. The thread on Stormfront? David Duke started it, and started it with a 571 word ad pitch. The rule of thumb for translating wordcount to pagecount in a book is 250 a page, for reference. Duke’s ad pitch for his autobiography is two book pages and change. This entire section on Duke is longer than that ad pitch, but barely. (670 words)

Likeability counts and even if you share his politics and he’s never stolen your money or fucked your wife, Duke does not precisely exude it.

Richard Spencer

Man, Spencer really fizzled out, huh? What a dissapointing fascist. Again, he was never the biggest influence on the movement (Enoch, Fuentes, Heimbach, Mason (through his writing) all mean more). Spencer was Rockwell and Duke: the tall handsome man willing to be open about his beliefs. His talking points of Peaceful Ethnic Cleansing and Separatism, Not Supremacy, are children of Rockwell’s alliance with the Nation of Islam for separate white and black homelands. Why did he fail so quickly? We’re going to get to the main reason last for reasons of satisfying writing structure.

Speaking of structure, structure has a lot to do with his failure. His famous moment where he inspires the Roman Salute (that fascist arm gesture, you know the one) in an audience. They’re Heiling Trump, not Spencer. That’s who he’s leading the charge for. He’s a figurehead who was voluntarily subsumed by a larger one. While the structure above him was firm, the structure below disintegrated. Division on the right was rife after Unite The Right and the lawsuit (Sines v Kessler) that followed further atomised the waffens.

Spencer also just never really fit. He’s an aristocrat from staggering generational wealth, steeped before his brief leadership of the American fascist movement, in the worlds of academia and conservative/libertarian think-tanks. There’s a role for aristocrats in the movement. Sam Dickson, a very wealthy lawyer in Atlanta, contributes money, allows far right paramilitaries to conduct training drills on his vast estate and defended fascists in court. He was never the leader. It’s not his place, he can’t truly connect.

Aside from the blue blood problem, while he learned the language of the internet, he never developed the native fluency of his base. Most likely, he considered it (like most things and people) beneath him.

But let’s get to the big one. Remember how Rockwell was defeated through Quarantine – a tactic of denying him either press attention or protest, starving him out of power? Spencer is a lesson in not considering the success of that to be a universal, eternal truth. His erudite demeanour shattered in the wake of Unite The Right. Leaked audio from that day shows him having a fucking temper tantrum, audibly on the edge of tears. He did not handle violent resistance in the street well. What’s that other Richard Spencer quote people remember from post UTR again? Oh yeah, “Antifa is winning“. He tried to go the Rockwell route, use university speaking engagements to garner money and support and he met so much resistance that he quit because “When they [speeches and rallies] become violent clashes and pitched battles, they aren’t fun “.

Richard Spencer slinked to the shadows because his campaign for ethnic cleansing wasn’t fun anymore. We all took him so seriously once.

Nick Fuentes

He’s not there yet, but I think he’s going to be. Fuentes has a significant advantage that the others didn’t. Where Spencer, Rockwell and to a large extent Duke arrived flashily and noisily upon the scene, Fuentes grew organically out of the soil they stood upon. He is of his followers to an extent that we cannot say of the others. He’s also driven. He’s wanted this since his literal childhood, hosting a right wing TV show in high school. He dropped out of university to make this his career and he’s been patient.

He’s a canny player too, attaching himself to bigger figures. Within the fringe of Republican Party Politics, he’s gained co-signs from Michelle Malkin, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar. Within the fringe of fringes, he’s insinuated himself within Info Wars from a position of power. They…sort of need him and he’s used that to snatch and convert from their audience. At the time I’m writing this, he’s very successfully used Kanye West’s antisemitic campaign to insert himself into the mainstream, garnering a meeting with Trump that was significant on its own, but also forced mainstream media to talk about him. When Kanye goes on a platform to give an interview, more often than not, Nick’s sat next to him.

What do I think will hold him back? The shallowness of the American people is a source of solace. I hate saying this, but Rockwell, Duke and Spencer were all kinda hotties. Fuentes emerged from the dank political basement of the internet and he looks like something you might find growing on the wall of that basement. Plus, the name Fuentes gives away that, among those who consider Racial Purity a thing, his Racial is less Purity. I am, to a not insignificant extent, gambling on shallowness and racism.

Hooray. Next week’ll be a music review. Thanks for coming on this miserable ride with me. Stay safe.