The Racial Resentment of the White Caliban

President Lyndon B. Johnson signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on July 2, 1964. Photograph Cecil Stoughton, White House Press Office. Public Domain

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As wicked dew as e’er my mother brush’d
With raven’s feather from unwholesome fen
Drop on you both! a south-west blow on ye
And blister you all o’er!

Caliban, The Tempest

by Dustin Pickering

Speaking to far-right French politicians in 2018, the former senior adviser to Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, said:

Let them call you racists. Let them call you xenophobes. Let them call you nativists. Wear it as a badge of honor. Because every day, we get stronger and they get weaker. The scarlet letter here is racial purity.

A garden variety of fascism is reoccurring on our side of the Atlantic. Steve Bannon tells The Economist in a roundtable discussion that the right must seize control of institutions in order to navigate the current civil conflict and crisis. This strategy is not an antidote to the political tension we feel in the United States, it reeks of opportunism and sociopathy. The Trumpian right is no longer the old guard conservatism we recognise, it represents the emergence of unreconciled underground fears and uncertainties.

As far back as 2006, Pat Buchanan expressed scepticism about multiculturalism. Nowhere on this earth can one find a multicultural, multi-ethnic, multilingual nation that is not at risk. Democracy is not enough. Equality is not enough. Buchanan crouches within the tradition of the Christian right.

David Duke, former grand wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan writes for The Racialist in 1970:

Racial idealism, or racialism, is the idea that a nation’s greatest resource is the quality of its people. It means examining all questions of government on the basis of whether the proposed measure is good or bad for our race. … Neither Communism, Capitalism, nor any other materialistic doctrine can save our race; our only racial salvation lies in a White racial alliance uniting our people with the common cause of racial idealism.

Racial supremacism is an intrinsic part of fascism. The fascist opposes multiculturalism. Adolph Hitler writes in Mein Kampf,

…The Jewish doctrine of Marxism rejects the aristocratic principle of Nature and replaces the eternal privilege of power and strength by the mass of numbers and their dead weight. Thus it denies the value of personality in man, contests the significance of nationality and race, and thereby withdraws from humanity the premise of its existence and its culture.

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The despicable and paranoid imagination of George Lincoln Rockwell expresses these hideous feelings of superiority, fear and loathing,

You’re a slave in your own country, White Man. Each year you get to keep less of the fruits of your labor; each year it gets more difficult to carry the burden the aliens have placed upon you; each year the cheap labor of aliens makes your future less secure; each year you retreat a few steps more into the world of slavery. Where will it all end? I’LL TELL YOU –­ it will end with the complete and total annihilation of ‘Whitey.

Why do these feelings of resentment enflame the fascist imagination? Rockwell’s words are set against the backdrop of 1966. 1966 is a mere two years following President Lyndon B. Johnson’s introduction of his programme of the Great Society. This platform of the Democratic Party addressed problems of racial injustice and poverty through federal programs.

Whites, according to the fascists of the time, were resentful of the Great Society because they were the main taxpayers who funded it. Rockwell’s turbulent thoughts were accentuated by fears of racial mixing. Civil Rights and poverty alleviation were an intolerable imposition of the democratic majority. This is an echo of the arguments put forwards to justify slave ownership and southern succession. Implementing social justice through federal intervention, according to Rockwell and the right wing conservatives, would also create a bloated bureaucracy.

Nevertheless, the increasing momentum of Civil Rights from the time of Kennedy carried forward reforms. This meant Lyndon Johnson’s initiatives would not be halted. Speaking in 1965 at the Remarks in the Capitol Rotunda at the Signing of the Voting Rights Act, President Johnson told Americans: Today the Negro story and the American story fuse and blend.

With enormous gravitas, President Johnson was announcing that the problem of racial injustice was being resolved. But if this were actually to be the case, why then has all this racism and intolerance survived? Why, in some quarters, does the question of race still stir such deep feelings? Were the white voters intimidated and temporarily silenced? Were they harbouring long held grudges across generations against the power of representative democracy itself? We see now the evidence that they were.

To the surprise of many, long concealed, hidden tensions in sections of the white conservative community emerged again. The ongoing discussions in those communities about the desirability of civil rights reform were held out of view. The meanest racial rhetoric and worst sloganeering had been pushed underground. That is where MAGA emerged from. That is when we discovered our intolerant authoritarians were hiding and had not gone away.

In 2026, the fight for free speech and racial equality and social justice is a dog whistle for these sections of the white community. How else can you explain their visceral reactions?

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Stories about the suppression of conservative views in universities, the downgrading of Western icons such as Beethoven, the destruction of the statues of Southern generals, all added fuel to the fire. Attacks on the character of great men like George Washington (who turned out to be slave owners) and the high-horsed embrace of critical race theory, helped galvanize opposition in the right wing voter base.

These tactics were successful, Trump was voted in and an authoritarian sat on the throne. After pardoning the January 6^th insurrectionists, the justice system was trammelled. Steve Bannon celebrated, insisting that the right could not be defeated because it would never give up. Right-wing antagonism to social liberalism permeated Trump’s second term and he and his administration were at pains to curtail the somewhat swaggering, cancelling overreach of left wing academics and liberal society.

Though previous conservative leadership had kept racialist instincts in check, Trump now embraced anti immigrant slogans and racial antagonism unconditionally. Racism and anti-migrant feeling has now been mainstreamed in the USA. What exactly animates this hostility? The simple answer is that Fascism requires an out-group to scapegoat and demean in order to consolidate its power. Carl Schmitt, the National Socialist jurist wrote:

The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.

Clearly, Carl Schmitt’s views now influence the outlook of techno-fascists like Elon Musk and Peter Theil who empowered Trump’s accession with money and propaganda. Trump is the mask of resentment his voter base wears. He gives them the freedom they need to express their hostility and resentment and intolerance. We return to the problem: the fear of democratic institutions and their power to impose civil liberties. Democratic institutions which are guaranteed by the constitution. Democratic institutions are supposed to allow society to engage freely in debate without intimidation. Democratic institutions are there to create a shared political commons. The anti-constitutional, anti-democratic hard right today is overpowering the institutional foundation of the USA. The hard right is usurping and sabotaging US democracy.

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Elon Musk, The South African American, laments the decline of ‘whiteness’. He claims that whites are facing extreme hostility and threat from other demographics, and supports the notorious British fascist and racialist Tommy Robinson in the UK. Elon Musk described his grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, arrested and convicted for his sympathies with Nazi Germany as “a pretty cool guy” and credited him with inspiring his own rebellious streak. After the war Joshua Haldeman relocated his family to South Africa in 1950, where he became an enthusiastic supporter of the newly established apartheid regime, viewing it as a bastion for ‘white civilization’.

Imperialism and colonialism has shuffled and confused the pages of American and world history. In addition to colonial and imperial instincts, there is a bootstrapping pathology of whiteness in the MAGA revival. Edward Said writes:

Orientalism is more particularly valuable as a sign of European-Atlantic power over the Orient that was permanent, lasting, and self-renewing.

The othering of the foreigner is the distinct pattern, a tattoo, a mark of Cain that clearly identifies a fascist. On the surface, this scapegoating consolidates power within the sovereign by directing antagonistic impulses towards designated enemies while distracting from the real causes of poverty and inequality which are the fault of the rotten Epstein capitalist class.

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However, emotions and psychological characteristics also motivate the scapegoating process and inform it at heart. Are there feelings of out of control guilt or fear embedded into the conscience of the descendants of the slave owners and overseers? The guilt and fear of the heirs of the genocidal killers of native Americans? We can only speculate.

By extolling cliches of small town white Americana over the complicated identities of the migrant, the self-described white group communalises cultishly, and empowers itself. The resistance to multiculturalism, in theory and in reality, becomes a cruel and narcissistic spectacle of bullying and persecution.

One reading of Caliban is to say that he represented the figure of the colonised and oppressed. And then there is the fascist colonial Caliban; the horned figure breaking into the sanctum of American democracy on January 6th. Caliban was driven by force to return to his forest and nurse his grudges, but he harbours the violent impulse to dominate the world he feels should belong to him?

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DUSTIN PICKERING is founder of Transcendent Zero Press. He has contributed writing to Huffington Post, Los Angeles Review, The Statesman (India), Journal of Liberty and International Affairs, The Colorado Review, World Literature Today, Asymptote Journal, and others. He is the author of numerous poetry collections and books including Salt and Sorrow. He placed in the top 100 for the erbacce prize in 2021 and 2023, and was a finalist in Adelaide Literary Journal’s first short fiction contest. He was longlisted for the Rahim Karim World Prize in 2022 and given the honour of Knight of World Peace by the World Institute for Peace that same year. He hosts the popular interview series ‘World Inkers Network’ on YouTube, and co-founded World Inkers Printing and Publishing.