{"id":77707,"date":"2025-12-02T11:44:53","date_gmt":"2025-12-02T19:44:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=77707"},"modified":"2025-12-02T11:44:53","modified_gmt":"2025-12-02T19:44:53","slug":"how-white-nationalism-is-entering-mainstream-u-s-politics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=77707","title":{"rendered":"How White Nationalism is Entering Mainstream U.S. Politics"},"content":{"rendered":"
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By<\/span>Selen Ozturk<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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White nationalist ideas once at the margins of U.S. society are increasingly shaping mainstream political debates and legislation.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Image via Canva.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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White nationalist ideas once at the margins of U.S. society are increasingly shaping mainstream political debates and legislation.<\/p>\n

How are these ideologies rooted in Christian nationalism becoming normalized in public discourse, and what does their spread mean for American democracy?<\/p>\n

\u201cThe immediate cause was the election of the first nonwhite president in U.S. history, Barack Obama, but white nationalism had been gaining prominence in mainstream politics before that,\u201d with roots in Christian nationalism, explained Sanford F. Schram, lecturer in political science at Stony Brook University. \u201cA lot of people in this group embrace the idea that white identity is threatened.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Sanford F. Schram, Adjunct Lecturer in Political Science, Stony Brook University (SUNY) and co-author of \u201cHard White: The Mainstreaming of Racism in American Politics,\u201d discusses white identity politics and its role in shaping the current Republican party.<\/em><\/p>\n

Schram explained that decades before Barack Obama\u2019s election catalyzed white nationalist backlash, however, Reagan-era figures like Pat Buchanan were already introducing \u201ca sanitized version\u201d of Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke\u2019s rhetoric into GOP politics: \u201cEventually, you get the Tea Party rising up in reaction to Obama, and Trump taking it all the way to the White House in a rising tide of white resentment politics, especially regarding immigration.\u201d<\/p>\n

Christian nationalism has been driving this acceleration, particularly over the last decade since President Trump\u2019s first winning campaign.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you\u2019re a Christian nationalist, it means you want a theocracy in America in some way, shape or form,\u201d explained Heath Druzin, journalist and host of the podcast \u201cExtremely American,\u201d covering the mainstreaming of extremist movements. \u201cYou don\u2019t simply want to be free to practice your religion \u2026 You want the government to be based explicitly on Christianity.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe rise of social media has made things happen in months rather than years,\u201d he added. \u201cPeople get echo chambers and say things that you might not say if you\u2019re talking to somebody face to face \u2026 you can be anonymous, and you don\u2019t have to deal with face-to-face backlash.\u201d<\/p>\n

Until the early 1990s,\u00a0about 90%<\/a>\u00a0of U.S. adults identified as Christian. Today, about two-thirds of U.S. adults identify as Christian.<\/p>\n

A 2020\u00a0Gallup report<\/a>\u00a0found that U.S. church memberships had dropped below 50% for the first time in the 83 years since measuring began.<\/p>\n

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Heath Druzin, journalist and host of the \u201cExtremely American podcast,\u201d covering the mainstreaming of extremist and militia movements as well as Christian nationalism, discusses patriarchal and misogynistic beliefs within the Christian nationalist movement.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cWhen the religious right in the 1980s and 1990s said \u2018We\u2019re the moral majority, and if we can just get Christians voting the way that we want them to vote, we can take over American politics,\u2019 that wasn\u2019t a crazy thought,\u201d said Dr. Matthew D. Taylor, a senior scholar of Christianity at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies (ICJS).<\/p>\n

\u201cThe people who are still identifying as Christian, especially the ones who want to hold on to notions of Christian nationalism and some essential Christian character to the United States \u2026 They\u2019re feeling more and more like a minority,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

A 2023 Pew\u00a0poll<\/a>\u00a0found that 35% of U.S. adults don\u2019t identify with the religion in which they were raised.<\/p>\n

\u201cMAGA is that intersection of the white majority and the Christian majority saying \u2018We don\u2019t want to become minorities, and we\u2019re going to do everything we can to claw back our cultural dominance,\u2019\u201d said Taylor.<\/p>\n

Since 2015, he continued, the MAGA movement has drawn upon a Calvinist form of Christianity promoted by Evangelical pastor Douglas Wilson, a self-described Christian nationalist based in Moscow, Idaho.<\/p>\n

Trump-appointed U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has particularly close ties to Wilson \u2014 who has voiced opposition to same-sex marriage and women\u2019s suffrage \u2014 as part of a church that the latter cofounded.<\/p>\n

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Devin Burghart, Executive Director of the Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights (IREHR) and co-author of \u201cBreaching the Mainstream: A National Survey of Far-Right Membership in State Legislatures,\u201d explains why fringe, far-right ideas have been embraced by many in mainstream politics.<\/em><\/p>\n

A\u00a02022 report<\/a>\u00a0published by the Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights (IREHR) documented 875 state legislators serving in 2021 who joined \u201cat least one of 789 far-right Facebook groups\u201d including militia organizations, COVID-19 conspiracists, QAnon theorists, white nationalist groups and antisemitic groups.<\/p>\n

These lawmakers represent 11.85% of all state legislators in the U.S., and all 50 states.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you have state legislators providing that stamp of approval to these groups \u2026 it provides a pipeline for those ideas once confined to the margins to be directly pumped into the mainstream and now to become public policy,\u201d said Devin Burghart, executive director of IREHR.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor instance, when I started doing this work, I used to hear (about politicians) out in a backwoods militia meeting talking about chemtrails,\u201d he continued. \u201cNow, two states have adopted laws against geoengineering using the same conspiracy theories that were once considered laughable at best.\u201d<\/p>\n

Alongside\u00a0Tennessee<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Florida<\/a>, at least six other states have introduced chemtrail-coded legislation to prohibit geoengineering.<\/p>\n

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Matthew D. Taylor, Ph.D., Senior Christian Scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies (ICJS) and author of \u201cThe Violent Take It By Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy,\u201d describes the three dominant forms of Christian nationalism that guide the far-right, including the Trump administration.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cThe larger ideological underpinning that provides so much glue to so much of this\u00a0is middle-American nationalism,\u201d Burghart explained. \u201cIt\u2019s the idea that white middle Americans are being squeezed from above by elites and from below by the multicultural hordes, and out of that comes the grounding for the conspiracism that we hear today, as well as the pushes for massive militarized crackdowns on undocumented immigrants, or pushes for legislation attacking the LGBTQ community \u2026 and the larger civil rights struggle.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOf instances where far-right populist movements wedded to religious nationalist movements are overturning democracy, the U.S. is just one outpost of a broader global trend. We\u2019re seeing this in India, in Turkey, in Russia,\u201d added Taylor.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat works to defeat those things is the biggest tent coalition you can build of people who want to protect democracy and protect the equality of everyone, and that coalition needs to not have any purity tests or shibboleths,\u201d he added. \u201cIf we don\u2019t have a democracy, all those other disagreements are basically moot, because no one on our side will like what the far right does when they are in power.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BySelen Ozturk Dec 1, 2025 White...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-77707","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion","category-u-s-a"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77707","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=77707"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77707\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":77708,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77707\/revisions\/77708"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=77707"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=77707"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=77707"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}