An undertow of hate

Recent months have borne witness to the persistence of these dolorous fantasies. Throughout the spring, reports of hate group activity were alarmingly frequent, culminating with the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI releasing a report on increased recruitment levels for these groups. The numbers of enlistees as well as the number of groups in existence have reached levels unseen since the early 1990s. This is not a provincial matter: On April 11 a Boston VFW nearly hosted a “Patriot Action 2009’’ rally co-organized by the relatively young groups Volksfront and East Coast White Unity. As the Globe reported, after the VFW canceled the event, the groups relocated to New Hampshire.

“Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream,’’ Leonard Zeskind’s staggering, painstakingly researched report on the last three decades of American bigotry, dramatizes the back story to the recent upsurge in this septic politics.

According to Zeskind, white nationalism inspires a hard-core following of roughly 30,000, with 200,000 casual fans. That said, his subtitle misleads somewhat. Zeskind employs the blanket term “white nationalist’’ to denote any group that uses “their skin color [as] a badge of a distinct national identity,’’ but as he amply demonstrates, there isn’t a movement so much as a loathsome mishmash of corrosive pseudo-science, feckless theology, and cynical opportunism. The ballot or the bullet provides “Blood and Politics’’ with its major taxonomic categories. Zeskind terms these groups, respectively, “mainstreamers’’ and “vanguardists.’’

“Mainstreamers,’’ Zeskind writes in a passage of typical clarity, “believe that a majority (or near majority) of white people can be won over to support their cause, and they try to influence the existing structures of American life. Vanguardists think that they will never find more than a slim majority of white people to support their aims voluntarily, and they build smaller organizations of highly dedicated cadres with the intention of forcefully dragging the rest of society with them.’’

One can often find mainstreamers on talk shows asking: “What is wrong with being proud to be white?’’ Their next sentence often opens the door to white “separatism,’’ a euphemism for “supremacy.’’ Notable mainstreamers, according to Zeskind, include former KKK grand wizard and perennial political candidate David Duke, political pundit Patrick Buchanan, and any number of lesser knowns who have attained recognition through local or national elections. With few extreme exceptions, such as Timothy McVeigh, vanguardists remain obscure, speaking through actions - bombings, lynchings - and shrill websites.

There are hundreds of names, dates, and incidents in “Blood and Politics.’’ The book sometimes reads as if Zeskind attended every koffee klatch since the Nixon administration and met every one-act wonder who has donned a robe or published a pamphlet. This rich embroidery of specifics falls, to some extent, beside the point. When it comes to white nationalism, the devil is most decidedly not in the details.

The genius of “Blood and Politics’’ resides in analysis of the resilient ideas that have informed white nationalist paranoia. “White dispossession’’ is the specter haunting their America, and most any development testifies to white power’s deterioration. The fall of the Berlin Wall? Yes. Stagnant economy? Yes. Immigration reform? Yes. All events conspire against white cultural and political hegemony, and from this siege mentality Zeskind locates a unity amid the factionalism.

“Blood and Politics’’ concludes its narrative in 2004. Things have since changed. As the FBI report mentioned above illustrates, Barack Obama verifies nationalists’ terror of dispossession - and the nation’s first black president has become an unwitting addition to the current resurgence of American hate. Histories that so closely abut the present often feel incomplete, but that Obama’s name only appears once in “Blood and Politics’’ does not diminish the book’s relevance. It’s a given that without studying the historical antecedents of Obama’s election one can’t fully understand the current state of race relations in America.

Likewise, Zeskind’s encyclopedic book reveals the shadow history contemporaneous with the march of civil rights and is essential to the understanding of our present moment. Obama’s presidency heralds a new stage in America’s engagement with the color line, but as both “Blood and Politics’’ and the recent enlistment in the armies of racial purity attest, nothing in the world is single.

Michael Washburn is the assistant director of the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center, City University of New York.