The Comment Factory

Aside from Republicans, you might expect the American community most piqued by the election of Barack Obama would be white supremacists. There is surely no harsher blow to a single-issue political program of racism than the ascension of a black man to the highest office of the land. It’s like a hardened Communist watching Milton Friedman elected Dear Leader in the Soviet Union, or Ariel Sharon taking over the Palestinian Liberation Organization. There is surely no way back for a movement so harshly served; it’s merely time to pack up, accept its over and move on.

Or so you would think. In the increasingly surreal U.S. political landscape white supremacists have actually greeted the election of the first black president not as the death knell of their cause, but a historic leap forward. “I don’t see anything but very positive things coming out of it,” says Tom Metzger, the former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan who now runs an outfit called White Aryan Resistance (or W.A.R, for short). “We don’t have to do much, everything is going sour; the economy is getting worse and worse. I don’t think we have to do much more than sit in and be aware of what is going on and train because the government is eating itself.”

And not only is the American Nazi happy about his first black president, but he believes it occasions the way for dialogue with, of all things, the Left. “We are becoming more like leftists, and leftists are coming more into agreement with us on race,” he says. “I actually agree with Ralph Nader on economics. Though he’s not a racist, I think politics is going to change a lot over the next few years, dumping of old left and old right.”

But for unbridled joy at Obama’s win you can’t beat August Kreis III, the fiery leader of the Aryan Nations, a Hitler-worshipping outfit out of South Carolina. “I can actually tell you it was the best thing that happened to our movement in the Unite States ever,” he says breathlessly. In fact he even wants this new wave of pinko tolerance to spread overseas. “I’d like to see happen in the UK, but in your case, a Muslim should be elected, because that will do something to get people off their fat asses.”

But it’s not just getting people off their fat asses (less of those in the UK) that has emboldened the American neo-Nazi movement; now white supremacists finally feel that one of their own is the President. “Obama is a racist down deep and his wife is even more,” says Metzger. “It would be better for him if he now said, ‘Hey guys! Fooled you! I’m a racist!’ and I would respect that.”

Erich Gliebe, who runs the biggest neo-Nazi group in the U.S., National Alliance, agrees. “As far I know John McCain is not a racist,” he says. “But Obama, he is an outright racist, he was part of a racist church, he had a racist pastor. At least he has that.”

Whether Obama is a racist or not, doesn’t this election render white supremacists in the U.S. irrelevant? I prod. “No, actually it shakes people out of their slumber,” says Gliebe. “I think a majority of Americans still want racial segregation, there are tens of millions of people who would prefer only to marry other whites, and to send their kids to white-only schools.”

I have to remind myself that the first black president has just been elected with a large percentage of white voters. Gliebe pauses when I remind him too. “Well, people voted for Obama because of white guilt,” he says after an awkward hiatus. “They were made to feel guilty! People were afraid of voting for McCain because they feared being called a racist!”

I refrain from mentioning that the U.S. has a secret ballot because by now appeals to logic are futile. Barack Obama, first black president, the toast of the white supremacists. Unlikely, but true. Only in America.