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A question has been posed in a puzzled whisper in many of the nation’s living rooms and newsrooms ever since Donald J. Trump’s triumph in this month’s presidential election: What, exactly, is white nationalism?
Self-proclaimed white nationalists have happily embraced Mr. Trump’s victory and, particularly, his choice of Stephen K. Bannon as chief strategist, as a win for their agenda. A barrage of groups that fight discrimination and hate speech have, in turn, criticized Mr. Bannon’s appointment, warning that his embrace of the “alt-right” movement was little more than an attempt to rebrand racism and white nationalism into something palatable enough for mass consumption.
And much of the rest of the country has been left to wonder what this unfamiliar term actually means.
While white nationalism certainly overlaps with white supremacy and racism, many political scientists say it is a distinct phenomenon — one that was a powerful but often-unseen force during the presidential election and will most likely remain a potent factor in American and European politics in coming years.
Eric Kaufmann, a professor of politics at Birkbeck University in London, has spent years studying the ways that ethnicity intersects with politics. While most researchers in that field focus on ethnic minorities, Professor Kaufmann does the opposite: He studies the behavior of ethnic majorities, particularly whites in the United States and Britain.
White nationalism, he said, is the belief that national identity should be built around white ethnicity, and that white people should therefore maintain both a demographic majority and dominance of the nation’s culture and public life.
So, like white supremacy, white nationalism places the interests of white people over those of other racial groups. White supremacists and white nationalists both believe that racial discrimination should be incorporated into law and policy.
Some will see the distinction between white nationalism and white supremacy as a semantic sleight of hand. But although many white supremacists are also white nationalists, and vice versa, Professor Kaufmann says the terms are not synonyms: White supremacy is based on a racist belief that white people are innately superior to people of other races; white nationalism is about maintaining political and economic dominance, not just a numerical majority or cultural hegemony.
For a long time, he said, white nationalism was less an ideology than the default presumption of American life. Until quite recently, white Americans could easily see the nation as essentially an extension of their own ethnic group.
But the country’s changing demographics, the civil rights movement and a push for multiculturalism in many quarters mean that white Americans are now confronting the prospect of a nation that is no longer built solely around their own identity.
For many white people, of course, the growing diversity is something to celebrate. But for others it is a source of stress. The white nationalist movement has drawn support from that latter group. Its supporters argue that the United States should protect its white majority by sharply limiting immigration, and perhaps even by compelling nonwhite citizens to leave.
Mr. Trump’s appointment of Mr. Bannon as his senior counselor and chief West Wing strategist has, more than anything, brought white nationalism to the forefront of conversation. He is the former editor of Breitbart News, a site he described in August to Mother Jones as “the platform of the alt-right.”
Although the alt-right is ideologically broader than white nationalism — it also includes neoreactionaries, monarchists, and meme-loving internet trolls — white nationalism makes up a significant part of its appeal.
For instance, Richard Spencer, who runs the website AlternativeRight.com, is also the director of the National Policy Institute, an organization that says it is devoted to protecting the “heritage, identity, and future of people of European descent in the United States, and around the world.”
Mr. Spencer argues that immigration and multiculturalism are threats to America’s white population, and has said his ideal is a white “ethno-state.”
He has avoided discussing the details of how this might be achieved, saying it is still just a “dream,” but has called for “peaceful ethnic cleansing” to remove nonwhite people from American soil.
Mr. Bannon, the Trump adviser, told The Times upon his appointment that he does not share those ethno-nationalist views. But under his leadership, Breitbart News has gone to considerable lengths to cater to an audience that does. And in a 2015 radio interview that was resurfaced this week by The Washington Post, Mr. Bannon opposed even highly skilled immigration, implying he believed it was a threat to American culture.
“When two-thirds or three-quarters of the C.E.O.s in Silicon Valley are from South Asia or from Asia, I think...” he said, trailing off midsentence before continuing a moment later, “a country is more than an economy. We’re a civic society.”
White nationalists, including Mr. Spencer, have rejoiced at Mr. Bannon’s appointment to such a senior position in the Trump White House. But focusing on high-profile figures like Mr. Bannon may obscure the more significant way that white nationalist ideas are affecting politics — and fueling the rise of politicians like Mr. Trump in the United States as well as anti-immigrant populist movements in Britain and continental Europe.
Several studies of other countries have found that a desire to protect traditional values and culture is the strongest predictor of support for the sort of populism that propelled Mr. Trump to power in the United States.
Many of those voters would not think of themselves as white nationalists, and the cultural values and traditions they seek to protect are not necessarily explicitly racial. However, those traditions formed when national identity and culture were essentially synonymous with whiteness. So the impulse to protect them from social and demographic change is essentially an attempt to turn back the clock to a less-diverse time.
A recent working paper by Pippa Norris, a political scientist at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and Ronald Inglehart, a political scientist at the University of Michigan, concluded, based on an analysis of wide-ranging survey data, that populists have succeeded by appealing to the cultural anxiety of groups like older white men, who once formed the cultural majority in Western societies, “but have recently seen their predominance and privilege eroded.”
Elisabeth Ivarsflaten, a professor of politics at the University of Bergen in Norway, came to a similar conclusion after studying anti-immigrant policies in Europe. Their supporters, she found, were motivated by a desire to protect their national culture — suggesting they believed that immigrants posed a threat to it.
Mr. Trump’s criticism of immigrants and promise to “make America great again” may have tapped into those same cultural anxieties, fueling his success with older and less-educated white voters. (Over all, he won white voters by 21 percentage points.
Professor Kaufmann argues that anxiety over white identity and anti-immigrant populist politicians can have a symbiotic relationship, each strengthening the other. When populist politicians gain mainstream success, that can make white nationalist ideas more socially acceptable.
“It’s not just a question of ethnic change and people being alarmed over it,” he said. “It’s also a question of what people see as the boundaries of acceptable opposition. It’s about what counts as racism, and whether it’s racist to vote for a far-right party.”
“This is all about the anti-racist norm,” Professor Kaufmann continued. “If it’s weakening or eroding because people think the boundaries have shifted.”
