Steve Bannon didn't exactly create white nationalism.
John Calhoun, on the other hand, would have a better claim to the title. Hofstadter's Calhoun/Dixiecrat analogy is this:
In the 1830's a cleavage between North and South became acute during a time of general social ferment in the North, and also of widespread criticism of the slave system. In the recent past, great social changes have again been telescoped within a relatively brief period. Simultaneously the Negro has again gained friends and allies outside the South, numerous enough to give him powerful leverage in changing his racial position. Again the South has reacted militantly.Hofstadter focuses on Calhoun's doctrine of the "concurrent majority," which is the cornerstone of the claim made by Calhoun's admirers for the traitor's status as a great political theorist:
At various times in his life he was identified with efforts to achieve coalition between the South and the agrarian West, and also between the South and northern capital, but he feared that inevitably the major parties would become sectional instruments. If this were to happen, he believed that in order to stay in the Union the South would first have to manifest total solidarity and then insist upon a formal, constitutional check to uphold her interests. He arrived at this conclusion during the controversy over the tariff that led to the nullification crisis of the 183o's. It was at this time that he worked out his familiar doctrine of the concurrent majority, insisting that government must be carried on not by a mere preponderance of individuals, a numerical majority, but by a concurrent majority, a concert of major economic interests, each of which would have the right to veto acts of the federal government. Nullification, the refusal of a state or combination of states to enforce a federal law deemed by the people in nullifying conventions to be intolerable violations of their interests, was one attempt to establish this principle. It was defeated by Andrew Jackson, but Calhoun did not cease to believe in the central notion of the concurrent majority. [my emphasis]This wasn't some Burkean stroke of brilliance in political thought. It was a transparent device to give the slave states absolute veto power against any attempt to abolish the system of ownership of human beings.
As Hofstadter goes on to note, the club of secession was always at the core of what passed for Calhounian political theory: "Actually, the South had little recourse except to the threat of leaving the Union in order to gain a formal constitutional guarantee of the concurrent majority. Calhoun's final version of this device was a dual executive; each section was to elect one member, each member was to have veto power."
It wasn't ultimately about Contitutional purity, "states rights", limited government, etc. It was about slavery. The conflict took on a theoretical appearance of an argument about states rights for the very reason that Hofstadter notes. The national Consitution protected slavery but did not guarantee it. So slave states had to use secession as an ultimate threat to preserve their Peculiar Institution so along as it it couldn't be written into the basic Constitutional law.
In the immediate run-up to the Civil War after Lincoln's election in 1860, Kentucky Sen. John Crittendon (1787-1863), a Whig turned American Party (aka, the Know-Nothings) turned Constitutional Union Party, introduced what became known as the Crittendon Compromise, which would have meant Republicans and Northern Democrats agreeing to a vast formal extension of slavery. In their standard history text, A Concise History of the American Republic (1977), historian Samuel Eliot Morison, Henr Steele Commager, and William Leuchtenburg described it this way:
... when Senator John J. Crittenden of Kentucky proposed to extend the old 36° 30' line between free and slave territories to the California boundary, the Republicans were willing to go so far as to admit New Mexico as a slave state if the people there chose slavery. A Peace Convention summoned by the Virginia legislature also broke on the rocks of Southern intransigency. Even the adoption of a 'never-never' proposition to the effect that neither by law nor constitutional amendment could Congress ever interfere with slavery in the states or the District of Columbia proved unavailing. All formal compromises failed to bring back the 'wayward sisters .' The repeal by several Northern states of personal liberty laws, and the breaking up of an abolition meeting in Boston to commemorate John Brown, seemed insufficient [to the pro-slavery secessionists as] evidence of a change of heart. [my emphasis]During the war, one of Crittendon's sons served as an officer in the Union Army, another in the Confederate Army. It really was a civil war, not just a sectional one.
In understanding the problems of the Lost Cause narrative of the Civil War, though, in which the war was about the abstract question of states' rights and not about slavery, it's important to remember that in the various major controversies over the extension of slavery between the Nullifiction Crisis of 1832-33, which did involve states rights, and the secession crisis after Lincoln's election as President in 1860, they all involved the South using the power of the federal government which they controlled to impose pro-slavery measures against free states asserting their states' rights not to cooperate with slavery in measures such as the Fugitive Slave Acts. Just as the "states' rights" of Strom Thurmond in 1848 and Trent Lott in 2002 were about segregation and racial discrimination, so was John Calhoun's "states' rights" advocacy of 1832 and thereafter about slavery and white supremacy.
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