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Blood Red Lines: How Nativism Fuels the Right
A journalistic inquiry into immigration, capitalism, and the far right in the 21st century United States.
The book begins with the stories of migrant workers and organizers fighting against Donald Trump's immigration regime, many of whom have themselves been targeted for deportation, likely as a result of their efforts to build a better world.
The book then investigates the recent history and political economy of U.S. nativism, from the dark money-funded think tanks and nonprofits that have provided policy and personnel for the Trump administration to the militant reactionaries doing battle with antifascists in the streets and online.
Ultimately, as longstanding American traditions of white supremacy and nationalism respond to the ongoing crises of neoliberal capitalism and climate change, The book argues that a new ideological formation, border fascism, is emerging--one that any internationalist movement for working class liberation will have to reckon with in the struggles to come.
The book begins with the stories of migrant workers and organizers fighting against Donald Trump's immigration regime, many of whom have themselves been targeted for deportation, likely as a result of their efforts to build a better world.
The book then investigates the recent history and political economy of U.S. nativism, from the dark money-funded think tanks and nonprofits that have provided policy and personnel for the Trump administration to the militant reactionaries doing battle with antifascists in the streets and online.
Ultimately, as longstanding American traditions of white supremacy and nationalism respond to the ongoing crises of neoliberal capitalism and climate change, The book argues that a new ideological formation, border fascism, is emerging--one that any internationalist movement for working class liberation will have to reckon with in the struggles to come.
350 pages, Kindle Edition
Published January 19, 2021
15 people are currently reading
643 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
February 26, 2021
Boston DSA has the good fortune (and connections) to be hosting a talk with Brendan O’Connor on March 5, so I figured that was close enough to a book club to get me to read Blood Red Lines: How Nativism Fuels the Right, which is about fascism and anti-immigration politics. There’s a lot of stuff packed into those two topics and O’Connor covers quite a lot of ground, from the policies and politics of the Trump administration and the several administrations before it, to shitty alt-right microcelebrities and the grassroots antifascists who show up to yell at them. It’s heavily researched and heavily cited, but also features exciting on-the-ground reporting of things like Brendan going to watch a crowd yell at Richard Spencer and Brendan going to the Border Security Expo and getting put in a high-tech cage. There is also a lot of following the money, detailing the far-right billionaires and shady foundations that develop and sell nativist policies to conservative, and sometimes liberal, Americans. In addition to the reporting it also offers a solidly left-wing analysis of the economic and social conditions--and the contradictions thereof--that fuel nativist politics. The theoretical stuff is pretty readable, although it might help to already be at least a little bit familiar with leftist thinking and values.
The book is also shorter than it seems, because there’s nearly 100 pages of back matter out of the 250 pages total. I appreciated this because the book is very meaty and information-dense, and in addition the subject matter is emotionally exhausting, so by chapter 6 I was starting to wonder if it might take me forever and a half to actually read the thing because I was making sort of slow progress, and then surprise, I thought I had 100 pages left but I was actually done! If I had been reading a normal paper book I might have realized this in advance and also read faster, but I was reading an ebook on my iPad, which is also a good part of why I got through it so damn slowly.
Overall I recommend this book enormously, if you want a better review than mine you can also check out my comrade Peter’s review in Dissent, and if you’re around on Friday, March 5th you should call into our talk with Brendan!
Originally posted at On border fascism
The book is also shorter than it seems, because there’s nearly 100 pages of back matter out of the 250 pages total. I appreciated this because the book is very meaty and information-dense, and in addition the subject matter is emotionally exhausting, so by chapter 6 I was starting to wonder if it might take me forever and a half to actually read the thing because I was making sort of slow progress, and then surprise, I thought I had 100 pages left but I was actually done! If I had been reading a normal paper book I might have realized this in advance and also read faster, but I was reading an ebook on my iPad, which is also a good part of why I got through it so damn slowly.
Overall I recommend this book enormously, if you want a better review than mine you can also check out my comrade Peter’s review in Dissent, and if you’re around on Friday, March 5th you should call into our talk with Brendan!
Originally posted at On border fascism
July 20, 2022
really good genealogy of fascist ideas — and the conservative patrons who fund them — and their mainstreaming. spoiler alert: it’s eugenics
December 17, 2024
Even though this was written towards the tail end of Trump’s presidency in 2019, a particularly poignant, good read considering the ~ circumstances ~
February 10, 2021
3.5 stars - a very well researched and reported book that underpins the web of dark money - and nativist, eugenics origins - behind the current debate about immigration from the right, or, rather, the right's obsession with depicting immigrants as evil for various "policy" reasons all pretextual.
I personally loved reading the details about the dark money and nativist underpinnings, but wanted to see a bit more original reporting from Brendan from present day and also more solutions/actions we can take today in the US. Also, Brendan is very well read and has lots of great connect the dot moments and cites widely, but for people who have been activists in this field for decades or longer the citations were a bit too academic.
The highlight was how fascism has adapted currently to try and encompass people of color in the Trump era, but there was no historical connection to many decades ago when the Italian refugees (fleeing Mussolini) and Irish immigrants fleeing starvation were the demonized other & are now considered white, civilized Western European. And of course at the time of the US founding, Ben Franklin himself hated German immigrants for not learning the language and not assimilating well.
Of course, this undercuts any claim to single a monolithic "white civilized culture" that should be idealized/put on a pedestal/worthy of imitation.
I personally loved reading the details about the dark money and nativist underpinnings, but wanted to see a bit more original reporting from Brendan from present day and also more solutions/actions we can take today in the US. Also, Brendan is very well read and has lots of great connect the dot moments and cites widely, but for people who have been activists in this field for decades or longer the citations were a bit too academic.
The highlight was how fascism has adapted currently to try and encompass people of color in the Trump era, but there was no historical connection to many decades ago when the Italian refugees (fleeing Mussolini) and Irish immigrants fleeing starvation were the demonized other & are now considered white, civilized Western European. And of course at the time of the US founding, Ben Franklin himself hated German immigrants for not learning the language and not assimilating well.
Of course, this undercuts any claim to single a monolithic "white civilized culture" that should be idealized/put on a pedestal/worthy of imitation.
August 14, 2023
This was not an easy book for me to read; this had nothing to do with the author's writing skill but, rather, because of the subject matter: the growing number of our fellow citizens who are increasingly willing to embrace violence as a means of halting what they see as the steady growth of an unsympathetic and alien culture perpetrated by elites in this country and the alleged "flood" of immigrants into our nation who embody cultures and ideas "not of those of the real people of the US."
CONTEXT:
While Mr. O'Connor does provide quite a bit of context on his own, the phenomenon he describes cannot be understood apart from other developments in the United States -- and, indeed, in a great deal of Europe as well -- over the past 50 years.
Clearly, the abandonment of the middle class -- and of the many among it who were non-college educated males -- that has clearly taken place in politics and culture since the Reagan years (something, by the way, of which both parties are guilty) has discombobulated everything.
Many people who once felt a "part of something" and like "they were making positive contributions" to their families and communities have been emptied out, just like so many of their communities were emptied out when the old labor union intensive manufacturing and industrial jobs once the source of middle class solidity and promise shut down and fled overseas leaving behind... only deserted plants, waste products, and an absence of good-paying jobs.
As we see when we look around us, the consequences have been many: a politics of rage, resentment, and fury directed at those whom the rich orchestrate skillfully as the villains: namely, "the elites," "liberals," and those "woke idiots" who welcome into our midst "outsiders" who do not represent nor respect the "old-fashioned ways and values that made this country great."
Obviously, a great deal of spin and outright deceit is at play here as well. But, while acknowledging that and calling out all those who knowingly continue to deceive and lie through social-media and so-called "news" sources, at the core there is the truth that these people were abandoned, have been often dismissed and made fun of, and who feel that their future -- and that of their children -- is one of hopelessness and despair.
All of this has created a fertile field for nationalist populists, demagogues, and evil players of every sort.
What Mr. O'Connor delves into here are the many movements and groups -- somewhat organized within themselves but careful to avoid the kind of tracking that coordination between different groups would allow -- that have bought into the idea that the only way to "save" this country is to "return" to those values that "we, the pure, hold to be true." And that, increasingly, the likely onOly way to secure the return to these values is in the willingness to use violence to achieve them, to target those persons and institutions that stand in the way.
As he relates in this book, O'Connor took the time to get to know many of the figures involved -- some of them known to us already, others unknown, to attend their meetings and rallies, and to listen to, read, and watch their propaganda in order to better understand what they believed and what they thought necessary to do to "right things."
In his preface, he notes that as he did so "it became clear to me that these people were fascists: not just edgy internet trolls trying to get a rise out of people, but deeply, terrifyingly sincere political actors trying to make their way toward a world where anyone who did not first into their vision of strength, beauty, or worth was eliminated." (P. xiii)
O'Connor reminds us that this "ethnonationalism" that is such a prominent feature shared by these groups is not a recent development. Rather, he charges, "the United States is an explicitly and foundational white supremacist country." And he supports this by noting that from the beginning a large section of the new nation employed chattel slavery which, even after the Civil War, white supremacists attempted to effectively reinvent through Jim Crow laws, segregation, immigration restrictions aimed at keeping out those who had other than white skin, including Asians and Hispanics. He notes the great interest Nazi leaders placed in the eugenics movement in the US in the early 20th century as well as their view that "the 1920s US immigration laws were the best (and only) example of 'volkish' citizenship legislation in the world -- that is, legislation that would secure the racial character of the United States." (Pp. 8-9)
He argues that the obsession on the Right with "the border crisis" must be understood as a most useful tool in helping to maintain the distinction between citizen and noncitizen since it requires "an ever-expanding security apparatus, which itself becomes a source of profit. The border constantly generates fresh crises on which the immigration-industrial complex feeds. There is not a crisis at the border; the border IS the crisis.....
"The true threat to Western democracies is not from without, but within -- not mass immigration, but mass inequality." (P. 21)
And so the emphasis on the Right -- and it is a central tenet of those willing to use violence -- is that "we, the real people, are threatened with our way of life, our culture, our values, and if we do not act NOW our children will be aliens in their own land." O'Connor comments: "What is confounding about groups like the Proud Boys is also what gives them their potency: using extrajudicial means -- brawling with antifascists, beating up passersby, harassing non-violent civilians, and calling for undocumented people's heads to be smashed on concrete -- toward manifestly counterrevolutionary ends." (P. 105)
This is the intended future of the "culture wars." As O'Connor writes: "Pursued by hordes of disaffected white men who spend their lives consuming media that assure them that the world is still theirs (or, more precisely, that it will be again), we are witnessing the development of a kind of digital 'squadrismo' -- a twenty-first-century version of the semi-autonomous fascist bands that roamed the Italian countryside in the late 1910s and early 1920s, not directly under Mussolini's control but united in their identification with him. [Such] aggression and viciousness is fed by neoliberal valorization of libertarian freedom, by wounded, angry white maleness, and by nihilism's radical depression of conscience and social obligation." (P. 111)
"Successful fascist movements have historically taken power not in coups dentate, but in coalitions -- namely, historian Robert Paxton has shown, in coalition with center-right liberals whose influence is waning and conservatives seeking gales against the left.
"The emerging reaction of the twenty-first century, whether it is upheld by elites or in the street, is best understood as preemptively counterrevolutionary -- that is to say, anticipating the political instability of the coming decades and laying the groundwork to maintain existing property relations, power dynamics, and systems of social control." (P. 124)
"...fascistic rhetoric and ideas have continued to spread through mass media, both online and on television.... what has emerged is a recursive, screen-mediated fascism that orchestrates -- with the aid of bots and trolls -- the ways of thinking, feeling, and experiencing of shadow publics networked in cyberspace. In the end, violence is the ultimate expression of the fascist way of thinking, feeling, and experiencing." (P. 125)
One of the strategies that is a major inspiration for such groups are "autonomous terror attacks by individuals as a way to bring about the fragmentation and eventual destruction of American society. The goal is to spark a civil war that will allow for he violent realization of white nationalist/neo-Nazi goals." (P. 135)
What the news media, especially on the Right, likes to call "lone-wolf operations" -- such as mass shootings that occur throughout the country each year -- give a mistaken assurance that however horrific these events are they are but the work of highly troubled and/or mentally ill individuals. What this ignores, however, is how they SHARE the same white nationalist ideology.
I'm currently reading a book about the "Crisis of Democratic Capitalism" and I think O'Connor's book supports the central theme(s) I'm finding there.
All of this nationalistic and racist fury and nonsense is because of how so many of our citizens have been left behind. Unless the rest of us demand that we once again gain control over our politics and our economy -- that is, by ending the flow of money that conveys power to the billionaires on the Right and redirecting resources to our people -- the future of this increasingly dis-united republic does not look promising at all.
We will end up fulfilling Benjamin Franklin's doubts when he said that what the Constitutional Convention had given the people was "A Republic -- if you can keep it."
CONTEXT:
While Mr. O'Connor does provide quite a bit of context on his own, the phenomenon he describes cannot be understood apart from other developments in the United States -- and, indeed, in a great deal of Europe as well -- over the past 50 years.
Clearly, the abandonment of the middle class -- and of the many among it who were non-college educated males -- that has clearly taken place in politics and culture since the Reagan years (something, by the way, of which both parties are guilty) has discombobulated everything.
Many people who once felt a "part of something" and like "they were making positive contributions" to their families and communities have been emptied out, just like so many of their communities were emptied out when the old labor union intensive manufacturing and industrial jobs once the source of middle class solidity and promise shut down and fled overseas leaving behind... only deserted plants, waste products, and an absence of good-paying jobs.
As we see when we look around us, the consequences have been many: a politics of rage, resentment, and fury directed at those whom the rich orchestrate skillfully as the villains: namely, "the elites," "liberals," and those "woke idiots" who welcome into our midst "outsiders" who do not represent nor respect the "old-fashioned ways and values that made this country great."
Obviously, a great deal of spin and outright deceit is at play here as well. But, while acknowledging that and calling out all those who knowingly continue to deceive and lie through social-media and so-called "news" sources, at the core there is the truth that these people were abandoned, have been often dismissed and made fun of, and who feel that their future -- and that of their children -- is one of hopelessness and despair.
All of this has created a fertile field for nationalist populists, demagogues, and evil players of every sort.
What Mr. O'Connor delves into here are the many movements and groups -- somewhat organized within themselves but careful to avoid the kind of tracking that coordination between different groups would allow -- that have bought into the idea that the only way to "save" this country is to "return" to those values that "we, the pure, hold to be true." And that, increasingly, the likely onOly way to secure the return to these values is in the willingness to use violence to achieve them, to target those persons and institutions that stand in the way.
As he relates in this book, O'Connor took the time to get to know many of the figures involved -- some of them known to us already, others unknown, to attend their meetings and rallies, and to listen to, read, and watch their propaganda in order to better understand what they believed and what they thought necessary to do to "right things."
In his preface, he notes that as he did so "it became clear to me that these people were fascists: not just edgy internet trolls trying to get a rise out of people, but deeply, terrifyingly sincere political actors trying to make their way toward a world where anyone who did not first into their vision of strength, beauty, or worth was eliminated." (P. xiii)
O'Connor reminds us that this "ethnonationalism" that is such a prominent feature shared by these groups is not a recent development. Rather, he charges, "the United States is an explicitly and foundational white supremacist country." And he supports this by noting that from the beginning a large section of the new nation employed chattel slavery which, even after the Civil War, white supremacists attempted to effectively reinvent through Jim Crow laws, segregation, immigration restrictions aimed at keeping out those who had other than white skin, including Asians and Hispanics. He notes the great interest Nazi leaders placed in the eugenics movement in the US in the early 20th century as well as their view that "the 1920s US immigration laws were the best (and only) example of 'volkish' citizenship legislation in the world -- that is, legislation that would secure the racial character of the United States." (Pp. 8-9)
He argues that the obsession on the Right with "the border crisis" must be understood as a most useful tool in helping to maintain the distinction between citizen and noncitizen since it requires "an ever-expanding security apparatus, which itself becomes a source of profit. The border constantly generates fresh crises on which the immigration-industrial complex feeds. There is not a crisis at the border; the border IS the crisis.....
"The true threat to Western democracies is not from without, but within -- not mass immigration, but mass inequality." (P. 21)
And so the emphasis on the Right -- and it is a central tenet of those willing to use violence -- is that "we, the real people, are threatened with our way of life, our culture, our values, and if we do not act NOW our children will be aliens in their own land." O'Connor comments: "What is confounding about groups like the Proud Boys is also what gives them their potency: using extrajudicial means -- brawling with antifascists, beating up passersby, harassing non-violent civilians, and calling for undocumented people's heads to be smashed on concrete -- toward manifestly counterrevolutionary ends." (P. 105)
This is the intended future of the "culture wars." As O'Connor writes: "Pursued by hordes of disaffected white men who spend their lives consuming media that assure them that the world is still theirs (or, more precisely, that it will be again), we are witnessing the development of a kind of digital 'squadrismo' -- a twenty-first-century version of the semi-autonomous fascist bands that roamed the Italian countryside in the late 1910s and early 1920s, not directly under Mussolini's control but united in their identification with him. [Such] aggression and viciousness is fed by neoliberal valorization of libertarian freedom, by wounded, angry white maleness, and by nihilism's radical depression of conscience and social obligation." (P. 111)
"Successful fascist movements have historically taken power not in coups dentate, but in coalitions -- namely, historian Robert Paxton has shown, in coalition with center-right liberals whose influence is waning and conservatives seeking gales against the left.
"The emerging reaction of the twenty-first century, whether it is upheld by elites or in the street, is best understood as preemptively counterrevolutionary -- that is to say, anticipating the political instability of the coming decades and laying the groundwork to maintain existing property relations, power dynamics, and systems of social control." (P. 124)
"...fascistic rhetoric and ideas have continued to spread through mass media, both online and on television.... what has emerged is a recursive, screen-mediated fascism that orchestrates -- with the aid of bots and trolls -- the ways of thinking, feeling, and experiencing of shadow publics networked in cyberspace. In the end, violence is the ultimate expression of the fascist way of thinking, feeling, and experiencing." (P. 125)
One of the strategies that is a major inspiration for such groups are "autonomous terror attacks by individuals as a way to bring about the fragmentation and eventual destruction of American society. The goal is to spark a civil war that will allow for he violent realization of white nationalist/neo-Nazi goals." (P. 135)
What the news media, especially on the Right, likes to call "lone-wolf operations" -- such as mass shootings that occur throughout the country each year -- give a mistaken assurance that however horrific these events are they are but the work of highly troubled and/or mentally ill individuals. What this ignores, however, is how they SHARE the same white nationalist ideology.
I'm currently reading a book about the "Crisis of Democratic Capitalism" and I think O'Connor's book supports the central theme(s) I'm finding there.
All of this nationalistic and racist fury and nonsense is because of how so many of our citizens have been left behind. Unless the rest of us demand that we once again gain control over our politics and our economy -- that is, by ending the flow of money that conveys power to the billionaires on the Right and redirecting resources to our people -- the future of this increasingly dis-united republic does not look promising at all.
We will end up fulfilling Benjamin Franklin's doubts when he said that what the Constitutional Convention had given the people was "A Republic -- if you can keep it."
September 28, 2021
This book combines years of reporting with scholarly research to describe how political leaders are interconnected with and led by the nativist and anti-immigrant fringes of the far-right
Although it is difficult to penetrate this fog, the author presents a clear, chronological investigation of the white nationalist origins regarding immigration policy, and how it is directly connected to the machinery of exploitation and oppression of non-white people.
While there is a popular sentiment that anti-immigration only targets those who enter America illegally, the book demonstrates that these draconian and racist measures are utilized to ensure that even legal immigrants become fearful as they too can be targeted by the state
The author points out how think-tanks and far-right white nationalist organizations were funded for years by very wealthy Republican donors, as they realized they could pursue a profit-driven corporate agenda by playing to the fears and racism of American citizens
This tremendous book highlights how the American border has become militarized in both the literal sense and also figuratively in the minds of voters. While the horizon looks grim, the author concludes that pro-labour and anti-racist policies can be enacted to liberate all people
Although it is difficult to penetrate this fog, the author presents a clear, chronological investigation of the white nationalist origins regarding immigration policy, and how it is directly connected to the machinery of exploitation and oppression of non-white people.
While there is a popular sentiment that anti-immigration only targets those who enter America illegally, the book demonstrates that these draconian and racist measures are utilized to ensure that even legal immigrants become fearful as they too can be targeted by the state
The author points out how think-tanks and far-right white nationalist organizations were funded for years by very wealthy Republican donors, as they realized they could pursue a profit-driven corporate agenda by playing to the fears and racism of American citizens
This tremendous book highlights how the American border has become militarized in both the literal sense and also figuratively in the minds of voters. While the horizon looks grim, the author concludes that pro-labour and anti-racist policies can be enacted to liberate all people
February 4, 2021
Excellent reporting and eye-opening!
July 12, 2021
Deeply incoherent, just tangent after tangent. It’s not just that it’s completely nonlinear from chapter to chapter—it’s also that O’Connor can never finish one thought without jumping to the next.
January 18, 2022
really interesting and handles upsetting subjects well. some background on the alt right and the US eugenics movement is helpful to have going in
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews