On the Right is an academic blog that provides critical analysis and insight into contemporary right-wing politics and ideologies around the globe.
Kathleen Blee is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and the Bailey Dean of the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences and the College of General Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. A highly productive scholar, Kathleen has published 7 books and over 100 journal articles and book chapters. Much of her scholarship is based on analysis of her up-close ethnographic observations and interviews with white supremacists in the United States, including her books Women in the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s (University of California Press, 1991), Inside Organized Racism (University of California Press, 2002) and Understanding Racist Activism: Theory, Methods and Research (Routledge, 2017)...read more.
Robert Futrell specializes in social movements and social change, environmental sociology, urban sustainability, and science and technology. His environmental scholarship focuses on sustainability, climate change, and urban life in the United States' desert Southwest. His current social movement scholarship focuses on the cultural and organizational dynamics of social movement persistence and political extremism. His co-authored book, American Swastika: Inside the White Power Movement's Hidden Spaces of Hate (2015, Rowman & Littlefield) explains white supremacy in the US. His research has been published in outlets such as Social Problems, Sociological Quarterly, Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, Science, Technology, & Human Values, and the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, among others.
Pete Simi is a Professor of Sociology at Chapman University. He has studied extremist groups and violence for more than 25 years, conducting interviews and observation with a range of violent gangs and political extremists. Dr. Simi is a member of the NCITE at the University of Nebraska, Omaha, which is the newest university-based research center funded by the Department of Homeland Security and committed to the scientific study of the causes and consequences of terrorism in the United States and around the world. Simi is co-author of two books, American Swastika: Inside the White Power Movement’s Hidden Spaces of Hate and Out of Hiding: Extremist White Supremacy and How It Can be Stopped, and frequently serves as an expert legal consultant on criminal and civil cases related to political extremism.
A Constellation Approach to Identifying Extremism in US Conservative Movements
January 4, 2024
Kathleen Blee, Robert Futrell, and Pete Simi1
Conservative movements in the contemporary US generally advance individualistic, nostalgic, nationalist, and reactionary logics to support existing social hierarchies and systems of privilege. As compared to right-wing extremism, movements considered conservative operate within mainstream politics and do not openly advocate overthrowing democratic governance or use violent and intimidating tactics to achieve their goals. At least in public, conservative movements do not explicitly present themselves as racist or antisemitic and claim to have no animus toward minoritized and marginalized social groups.
At various points in time, including in recent years, seemingly conservative movements have exhibited characteristics associated with right-wing extremism. A high-profile example is Moms for Liberty (MFL), a group founded in 2021 in Florida by two former school board members to “stand up for parental rights at all levels of government” (Moms for Liberty 2023). MFL grew quickly. Within two years it claimed 250 chapters with more than 100,000 members, perhaps due in part to reported financial support from the Heritage Foundation as well as the well-known speakers, such as Dr. Ben Carson and Betsy DeVos, who headlined its events. MFL chapters engaged in various efforts that captured significant media attention, including combatting school mask and vaccine mandates intended to reduce the spread of COVID-19. MFL members also tried to prevent schools from using educational materials that referenced ideas with which its members disagree, such as the Oklahoma chapter’s attack on the Scholastic Book Fair as “largely focused on indoctrinating youth with radical viewpoints and sexual ideologies.” MFL has been in the news for pictures of its members posing with members of the Proud Boys (Heuvel 2023; Southern Poverty Law Center, n.d.).
Both the nationally organized Moms for Liberty and quickly assembled local movements have pushed campaigns with agendas that integrate conservative and extremist politics.2 Some have focused on limiting the rights of, or even criminalizing, trans persons, especially trans children, by building alliances with right-wing state legislators. As of June 2023, anti-trans legislation had been introduced in nearly every state, and multiple schools had been attacked and threatened with lawsuits for failing to identify trans students to their parents, for allowing students to access restrooms or join sports teams consistent with their gender identity, or even for using a student’s chosen name (Stiverson, Yates, and Wilson 2023). Local movements also have worked to restrict school discussion of racial inequities, including slavery, again with a shocking degree of success. Under pressure, schools have removed excerpts from the journals of Christopher Columbus that describe his brutality toward Indigenous people and restricted materials that portrayed slavery as wrong and racism as a systematic part of US history (Natanson 2023). Given such developments, it is important to ask: What defines when a conservative movement becomes extremist?
Identifying Extremism in Conservative Movements
Deciding when conservative movements become extremist is surprisingly challenging, in part because scholars traditionally use a “bucket approach” that emphasizes major points of distinction between conservative and right-wing extremist movements. A bucket approach defines conservative movements as including agendas (such as anti-feminist, anti-abortion, pro-police, and anti-tax) and adherents (such as evangelical Christians, traditionalists, and right-wing libertarians). Bucket thinking, in turn, also categorizes right-wing extremist movements according to specific subtypes (e.g., “white supremacist,” “anti-government,” and “anti-immigrant”), which suggests that they are distinct movements. And, in an even further specifying way, the bucket approach separates white supremacists into narrower descriptive buckets like “neo-Nazi,” “Christian Identity,” “Ku Klux Klan,” “racist skinhead,” and most recently “alt-right.”
To be fair, the bucket approach has been a productive framework for studies of right-wing movements because it draws attention to the various persons, groups, organizations, and networks that constitute a movement. In a bucket approach, for instance, an anti-abortion bucket would cluster together groups and activists involved in a range of activities, from picketing abortion centers or establishing pregnancy “counseling centers” to dissuading pregnant persons from having abortions, lobbying legislators to pass abortion restrictions, and establishing ways to influence the selection of judges. A bucket approach thus makes evident the range of efforts that constitute a movement and the value of understanding the coordination, communication, and shared resources among these efforts. In so doing, the bucket framework can draw attention to the breadth and size of the overall movement and encourage within-movement comparison of the dynamics of recruiting, framing issues, selecting tactics, and forging collective identity.
At the same time, the bucket approach has limitations. As we discuss in our new book, Out of Hiding: Extremist White Supremacism and How It Can Be Stopped (2024), a bucket approach focuses on classification, which tends to overstate exclusivity among categories. For instance, a bucket of misogynist movements might include anti-feminism, men’s rights, and the virtual “manosphere,” but in lumping together these groups it might also obscure the misogynist core in anti-immigration or Christian nationalist movements that are categorized into other buckets. The bucket approach also assumes a measure of internal consistency in movements, even though close-up ethnographic studies of right-wing movements find a considerable range among activists, groups, networks, and organizations that, from a distance, seem quite similar (see, for example, Yates 2018; Simi and Futrell 2015; Blee 2002). Also, the categorizing nature of “buckets” focuses attention on the most stable movement characteristics while interpreting more unstable features that do not easily fit the category as exceptions or temporary deviations from the “norm.” And, returning to our initial question, by compartmentalizing movements in categories, the bucket approach makes it difficult to understand if and how some seemingly conservative movements are extremist.
Some buckets used to depict right-wing movements are particularly confounding. Consider the distinction by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) between the segments of the far-right they call “racially motivated violent extremists” and those they term “anti-government / anti-authority violent extremists,” a distinction that suggests substantial differences between groups like the KKK and the Oath Keepers (FBI/DHS 2023). Various scholars and nongovernmental organizations that monitor extremism also suggest the same. Such hard and fast distinctions are a mistake. While we agree that substantial variability characterizes far-right extremism, there are many underlying similarities in its practices, ideas, and emotions. And these similarities are crucial for understanding that white supremacy is the defining feature of the far right in the United States.
Similarly, a recent scholarly effort argues that two distinct movements characterize the far right: one fears the loss of racial supremacy while the second fears the loss of cultural supremacy (McCauley 2021). According to Thomas McCauley, the second movement—which focuses on retaining cultural power—inspired the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. The problem with this schema is not so much that it is wrong as that it is too simplistic. A sense of cultural loss is a defining feature of white supremacy, and race has long been framed in cultural terms (Balibar 1991). In short, McCauley creates two buckets that are so deeply intertwined that the distinction he relies on to explain the attack on the Capitol does more to confuse than clarify; what’s more, it minimizes the role of white supremacy in the attack. The confusions created by such a bucket approach are far too common among researchers and authorities.
An Alternative Approach
We propose a new framework for analyzing right-wing movements that encourages scholars to discern the degree to which extremism penetrates conservative movements, as well as mainstream society more broadly. It moves away from a bucket approach that conceptualizes these movements as a collection of sporadically organized people, groups, organizations, and networks. Instead, it analogizes these movements—and the practices, ideas, and emotions that make up their core characteristics—to astronomical constellations. It assumes that these practices, ideas, and emotions are dynamic and relational, that they are systems much like constellations. And, like astronomical constellations, which though always in motion retain a fundamental shape from the perspective of Earth-bound viewers, the constellation of right-wing movements has an underlying stability even as its constituent elements take different forms and adopt different labels. Through a constellation framework, scholars can trace how a movement persists over time with a relatively stable set of characteristics while its members, its organizations, and the names of its groups change. This framework can be used to trace movements not only when they are visible in public life but also when they are in abeyance or have subtly, and often covertly, burrowed into spaces such as online communities, families, and media ecosystems (Taylor 1989; Taylor and Crossley 2013; Simi and Futrell 2020).
Our constellation approach aligns with Charles Tilly’s (e.g., 2005; see also Emirbayer 1997; Abbott 1997) emphasis on relational explanations that focus on processes that characterize populations wider than those discernible when narrowly identifying specific people or groups and their specific dispositions. Our focus on practices, ideas, and emotions is agnostic about what a movement’s people or groups look like. It moves beyond the visible characteristics of right-wing movements—such as dressing in white robes and hoods, sporting shaved heads, displaying a swastika, or chanting support for the Confederacy—that seem to fit a movement into a particular category. Instead, a constellation approach focuses on underlying core characteristics that persist even when movements strategically alter their appearances to hide from authorities or recruit members who eschew the standard markers of racism and antisemitism. Unlike buckets, which tend to predetermine the lens we use to analyze a right-wing movement, a constellation approach attends to a movement’s underlying social characteristics and relationships among a range of actors.
To illustrate how the constellation approach can be used to identify the growing overlap between right-wing extremist and mainstream conservative movements we pinpoint the relatively stable array of practices, ideas, and emotions that constitute extremism on the political right in the US today. Our focus is extremist white supremacism in the US, a broad political field that encompasses what other scholars describe as the far right, right-wing extremism, racist extremism, white power, and right-wing populism, and that its participants term the alt-right, white nationalism, and white pride, along with other labels meant to obscure its core focus on ensuring that White, Western men retain power and dominate others. This movement has long been described by scholars—including us—in terms of buckets of activists, groups, organizations, and networks. Typically, these buckets are identified with the legacies of the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazism, and Christian Identity, as well as with, for some scholars, segments of the anti-government militia/patriot sector such as the Oath Keepers, sovereign citizens, and Three Percenters (Futrell and Simi 2004; Blee, Futrell, and Simi 2024). Our recent work, however, shifts away from buckets and toward describing extremist white supremacism as a constellation of practices, ideas, and emotions that support an agenda of White, male, and Western supremacy that has persisted in the US since the birth of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1870s and whose unity of purpose extends from Southern supremacist neo-Confederates to global Aryan-focused neo-Nazis, from loosely organized white power skinheads to highly coordinated militias, and from online communities to small in-person groups plotting how to launch a violent race war (Blee, Futrell, and Simi 2024; Simi and Futrell 2015; Blee 2002).
We identify as core practices in the constellation of extremist white supremacism those actions that are strategically aimed to support White, Western, and misogynist domination. Acts of violence, terrorism, intimidation, and force against perceived enemies are central, always regarded as a feasible option and periodically employed. Extremist white supremacist practices also are generally supportive of authoritarianism and resistant to democratic governance, although in specific historical periods, such as the 1920s US, extremist white supremacist candidates have run for electoral office to further embed agendas of white superiority into the operations of the government.
We identify extremist white supremacism’s core ideas as those that center on the superiority of the White race. Persons they define as “nonwhite”—and thus as inferior to White persons—are those with ancestry outside North America or Europe, as well as Jewish persons. Their core ideas also include an extensive list of racial enemies, from white “race traitors” who do not support their racist agendas and White women who do not accept their racial obligation to bear White babies, to personnel of the federal government (often termed “ZOG” for Zionist Occupied Government), Muslims, and LGBTQ+ persons. Despite this strict racial hierarchy, its implementation can be surprisingly flexible, as not all white supremacist activists fit the movement’s racial ideals. Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio is the son of Cuban immigrants, and Nick Fuentes, who broadcasts virulent racist and antisemitic messages, is Hispanic. In some cases, allegiance to the white supremacist movement can essentially confer whiteness (Blee 2002). Extremist white supremacism’s flexibility regarding racial boundaries mirrors the dynamic ways in which constructions of race and ethnicity change over time (Omi and Winant 2014).
Finally, we identify a core set of emotions that extremist white supremacism promotes, especially negative emotions such as rage, anger, fear, resentment, and indignation (Jasper 2011; Knops and Petit 2022), although white supremacists also embrace positive emotions such as pride, loyalty, kinship, and love (Futrell, Simi, and Gottschalk 2006). While they may preach more than practice these positive emotions (Simi et al. 2019), emphasizing their importance helps them appeal to potential adherents and sustain those already committed. In online communities and in-person gatherings, as well as in internally directed messaging and externally directed propaganda, white supremacist extremists display these core emotions in dramatic, highly exaggerated form, often through displays of hypermasculine thuggery that invoke aggression and even violence to counter perceived threats to the rightful privileges of White, Western men.
Determining When Conservative Movements Have Become Extreme
If the traditional “buckets” approach makes it difficult to pinpoint areas of overlap between movements, the constellation approach provides a way to do so. Through a constellation approach, we can discern when conservative movements become extremist. Let us return to the example of Moms for Liberty and related efforts. On the one hand, the actions of these movements seem to fit the general characteristics of conservative movements—reactionary logics, support for existing gender/racial/sexual hierarchies and privileges, and no overt advocacy for overthrowing democratic governance or using violence to achieve their goals. But a closer look shows that they also make use of the practices, ideas, and emotions of extremist white supremacism. Although not physically violent (as yet), they engage in intimidation, threats, and bullying to impose the will of a vocal, aggressive minority. They display overt animus toward trans people and argue for a racial privilege that would shield White children from knowledge about white racial violence. They attack as radical those who oppose their agenda in the same way extremist white supremacism describes its enemies as “antifa” and “commies,” categories so amorphous that they could include nearly anyone (Blee and Simi 2020). And they engage emotions of fear, rage, and indignation to advance their thuggish approach.
That conservative movements are adopting practices, ideas, and emotions of extremist white supremacism—and that Moms for Liberty chose to pose with the violent Proud Boys—indicates the expanding reach of the extremist constellation into conservative politics. Extremist white supremacism has become more visible since Barack Obama was first elected president in 2008, but its move into the mainstream has gained even more traction in recent years. Discontent over vaccine and closure mandates prompted by the COVID-19 crisis in early spring 2020 led to multiple large protests, often at state or local government buildings, in which conservatives mixed with extremists. In such spaces (as well as similar spaces online), conservatives had ready access to extremist white supremacy’s well of practices, ideas, and emotions, which transformed concerns over health restrictions into conspiratorial attacks on global elites (often a code word for Jews) who were alleged to be profiting from COVID-19 prevention and treatment. Extremist white supremacists also spewed vicious hatred toward immigrants and racial/ethnic minorities who were said to spread the virus (Blee, Futrell, and Simi 2024; Hoffman and Ware 2020; Knops and Petit 2022; Graham 2016).
That same year, Donald Trump’s presidential reelection campaign brought extremism to viewers of mainstream television, to followers of his social media accounts, and to audiences at his MAGA rallies. Trump echoed the practices of extremist white supremacists as he called for violence against counterdemonstrators and other enemies. He spread (and thus normalized) once obscure racist ideas such as the Great Replacement Theory, which asserts that elites (generally taken to mean Jews) are conspiring to bring large numbers of nonwhite immigrants into the US and Europe to destroy the privileges of White people. And Trump parlayed extremist emotions of rage and fear into blustering accusations and performances of fury, which titillated and energized his followers. The virtual communities that spread on mainstream and niche social media and Internet platforms gave further openings for extremist white supremacism to spread its practices, ideas, and emotions to people who considered themselves mainstream conservatives.
Conclusion
Although specific links among conservative and extremist movements have been documented by researchers, journalists, and authorities, such direct connections do not capture the extent to which extremism has expanded into conservative movements in recent years. Our constellation approach offers the advantage of identifying how extremism can find a footing in mainstream conservative movements by strategically connecting conservatives to extremism’s expansive—yet characteristic and relatively stable—array of practices, ideas, and emotions. The constellation approach also allows scholars to be more attuned to the adaptive nature of right-wing extremism—its shifts and changes—than is possible with traditional categorization approaches. By focusing on core practices, ideas, and emotions across time and space, the constellation approach minimizes attention to shifting individuals and groups and highlights the consistent cultural foundations that integrate people and coordinate their actions to enable right-wing extremism to persist over time. We hope that this approach will also increase our ability to oppose and dismantle right-wing extremism.
[1] The authors contributed equally to this piece. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2023 American Sociological Association meeting.
[2] MFL is currently embroiled in crisis due to a highly publicized sexual scandal involving one of its national cofounders, a familiar pattern in US right-wing movements. For example, the precipitous collapse of the massive 1920s Ku Klux Klan was due not only to its financial and legal troubles but also to a highly publicized scandal involving its powerful Indiana leader, D. C.Stephenson, who kidnapped and brutally raped a twenty-eight-year-old White female social worker(Lerer and Mazzei 2023; Blee 1991).
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