Neo-Confederate group numbers declined between 2019 and 2020, when the largest neo-Confederate hate group, the League of the South, lost several chapters. Long the central organization within this branch of white nationalism, the League of the South has not rebounded from fallout from its attendance at the deadly riot in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017. This has continued to impede recruiting. Neo-Confederate group Identity Dixie also faltered in 2020, still reeling from revelations about the group’s leaders that the SPLC exposed in 2019. Today, Identity Dixie is down to one chapter. In 2021, SPLC’s analysts documented a significant decrease with the Neo-Confederate category. Analysts documented 31 groups in 2020, with a steep drop to 16 groups in 2021. The decrease occurred, in part, from the financial challenges facing neo-Confederate groups in the wake of a civil lawsuit brought against group leaders by Integrity First for America. In addition, without significant protests from the Left to rally against, the neo-Confederate groups that newly appeared in 2020 have been sidelined. A dedicated and loyal following of neo-Confederate extremists continue to plot online and will use efforts to remove Confederate monuments, rename parks, schools and other public spaces as a way to rally other extremists to their ideology, recruit new members and fundraise from the larger radical right movement. [my emphasis]The bad news is: with explicit insurrectionist ideas and practices (the storming of the Capitol on 01/06/2021) and white supremacist ideology and attitude having been so mainstreamed by the Republican Party itself, the spirit of John Calhoun is alive and well.
The Republican embrace of the crackpot moral-panic campaign over "critical race theory," whose anti-CRT rhetoric draws from what began as a hard-right, anti-Semitic theory about what they called "Cultural Marxism," is a sign of how deeply neo-Confederate-type pseudohistory has made inroads into the national Republican Party.
The SPLC page notes:
In this regard, neo-Confederacy is best viewed as a spectrum, an umbrella term with roots dating back as early as the 1890s. It applies to groups including the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) of the 1920s and those resisting racial integration in the 1950s and 1960s. In its most recent iteration, the term “neo-Confederacy” is used by both proponents and critics to describe a belief system that has emerged since the early 1980s in such publications as Southern Partisan, Chronicles and Southern Mercury, and in organizations including the League of the South (LOS), the Council of Conservative Citizens and the Sons of Confederate Veterans.The SPLC also calls attention to the role that "Christian dominionism" plays in neo-Confederate thinking.
The soul of John Calhoun goes marching on:
No comments:
Post a Comment