Appendix: Why Is White Supremacist Violence Classified as “Right-Wing”?
This is a companion appendix to “Who Actually Inspires Political Violence?” — a reanalysis of the CATO Institute’s data on domestic political violence.
On a straightforward application of the framework used throughout this analysis, the analysis of white supremacist violence would end with the determination that no elected official on the right promotes any part of the white supremacist worldview that motivated these killers. This topic receives more exhaustive consideration only because, contrary to that evidence-based assessment, every major tally of left-right political violence — CATO’s, the ADL’s, CSIS’s — hinges on associating white supremacist violence with the political right. Because it is by far the largest category in their datasets and does virtually all the analytical work, we must consider more carefully whether the categorization has any merit.
The Historical Record
The terms “left” and “right” entered American political usage in the 1920s and by the mid-1930s had acquired their current meaning: “right” described the Republican position favoring limited government, free markets, and individual liberty; “left” described the Democratic position favoring a more expansive role for the state. So why do researchers, media outlets, and databases like CATO’s routinely classify racist violence as “right-wing” — associating it with an ideology defined by limited government and individual liberty?
The question is worth pressing because the Republican Party was founded specifically to oppose slavery. Republicans passed the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. The Democratic Party was the institutional home of white supremacy for over a century — the party of the Solid South, of segregationist governors, of senators who filibustered civil rights legislation.
The association between the political right and racism in the minds of some Americans dates to the civil rights era, when — according to one popular narrative — Republicans absorbed the South’s racists. But this claim has been thoroughly challenged by political scientists and historians. The actual evidence shows something quite different.
The South’s shift toward the Republican Party began with Eisenhower in 1952 — before Brown v. Board of Education, before the Civil Rights Act, before any racial controversy at the national level. The GOP’s first breakthroughs came in the Peripheral South — Florida, Texas, Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina — in the suburban, urban, growing, and least racially polarized areas. The Deep South, where racial politics were most intense, was the last to come around, not the first. Younger Southerners — who were far less likely to hold racist views than their parents and grandparents — and transplants from the North identified as Republican at higher rates than older native Southerners. This is the opposite of what you’d expect if racial resentment were driving the shift.
When the Civil Rights Act of 1964 finally passed, a greater percentage of Republicans than Democrats voted for it in both chambers of Congress. One commonly cited piece of evidence for a racial realignment is Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign. Goldwater was deeply opposed to racism — he had voted for the 1957 and 1960 Civil Rights Acts, personally desegregated his family’s department store and the Arizona National Guard, and was a member of the NAACP. His vote against the 1964 Civil Rights Act was a principled libertarian objection to federal regulation of private business, not an expression of racial sympathy — but it won him five Deep South states, four of which hadn’t voted Republican since Reconstruction. Those wins, however, were a dead end, not a realignment. Goldwater lost 44 states. Most of those Deep South states did not stay Republican — they went to segregationist Democrat George Wallace in 1968, then to Jimmy Carter in 1976.
The narrative that Republicans then consolidated a racial realignment through Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” fares no better under scrutiny. Nixon himself had an excellent record on civil rights. As Vice President, he was a strong advocate for civil rights legislation and presided over the Senate during passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957. As President, he championed school desegregation so aggressively that the New York Times’ Tom Wicker wrote that “the Nixon administration accomplished more in 1970 to desegregate Southern school systems than had been done in the 16 previous years.” He implemented America’s first affirmative action program, the Philadelphia Plan, imposing racial goals and timetables on building trade unions. This is not the profile of a man building a coalition of white supremacists.
And the supposed “party switch” of racist Democrats to the Republican Party? It barely happened. Virtually every Dixiecrat senator, congressman, governor, and high elected official stayed in the Democratic Party. Strom Thurmond was the sole Dixiecrat senator to switch; one House member followed. The rest — almost all segregationist elected officials — remained Democrats.
What actually drove the South’s gradual shift was economics, not race. As political scientists Richard Johnston and Byron Shafer showed, the voters who moved to the GOP were disproportionately wealthy, suburban, and upwardly mobile, while working-class whites — even in areas with large black populations — stayed loyal to Democrats well into the 1990s. As Shafer put it: “when folks went to the polling booths, they didn’t shoot off their own toes. They voted by their economic preferences, not racial preferences.” The South’s transformation was driven by economic growth, suburbanization, religious conservatism, and the Democratic Party’s leftward movement on cultural issues — not by racial appeals.
The evidence is consistent on nearly every dimension — who switched, when they switched, where they switched, and why they switched. The mainstream account, in which a cynical GOP deliberately built its majority on white racial resentment, is contradicted by all of it. The GOP became the South’s dominant party in the least racist phase of the region’s entire history, attracting voters from its most dynamic and forward-looking communities, not its most fearful and backward-looking ones.
Overlapping Complaints, Incompatible Worldviews
That said, we must acknowledge that there is a real connection between white supremacists and the political right — but it is not the ideological kinship the conventional classification implies. The connection has two parts. First, white supremacists share policy positions with both parties. With Democrats, they overlap on economic populism, trade protectionism, environmental regulation, and — in the case of the Christchurch and Buffalo shooters — explicit support for socialist economics. With Republicans, they overlap on opposition to illegal immigration, opposition to affirmative action, skepticism of extreme elements of feminist ideology, and support for gun rights. These overlaps — particularly illegal immigration and opposition to affirmative action — are much closer to the core defining features of white supremacism than the overlaps with the left, and so white supremacists naturally see themselves as more aligned with the right. Second, because of this policy overlap, white supremacists actively recruit from the same pool of people the political right draws from — Americans with legitimate, non-racist grievances about affirmative action, mass immigration, or the excesses of progressive ideology.
But these two connections obscure a categorical difference in reasons. Republicans oppose affirmative action because they believe in colorblind meritocracy — the principle that people should be judged as individuals, not sorted by race. White supremacists oppose it because they believe in racial hierarchy. Overlapping policy preferences lead white supremacists to have greater affinity for Republicans and to recruit from the same pool of people with legitimate concerns about those preferences, but the worldviews behind the positions are exact opposites. The core of the political right’s ideology — individualism, colorblind meritocracy, limited government, constitutional liberty — is a categorical rejection of the racial collectivism that defines white supremacism. No Republican elected official holds the white supremacist view, and the party’s intellectual tradition, from its abolitionist founding through the colorblind constitutionalism of the political right, is built on its explicit rejection.
In other words, on the defining issue of white supremacy — racial hierarchy — the political right does not sit at the far end of the spectrum next to white supremacists. It sits in the center. White supremacists want to structure society for the benefit of whites. The left wants to racially engineer society to achieve so-called “equity.” The right wants neither. It holds that individuals should be judged on their own merits, not sorted by race — and it competes for the allegiance of non-race-essentialist moderates from both directions. Classifying white supremacist violence as “right-wing” makes no more sense than classifying left-wing racial violence as “right-wing.” The right is in the middle, between two forms of racial collectivism.
Nevertheless, white supremacists have repeatedly tried to claim the right’s legitimacy and audience by colonizing its institutions rather than building an independent movement. Richard Spencer coined the term “alt-right” specifically to sound like a branch of the political right rather than what it was: white nationalism. The 2017 Charlottesville rally was deliberately branded “Unite the Right.” Nick Fuentes and his “groyper” followers systematically targeted conservative events — Turning Point USA gatherings, CPAC — attempting to infiltrate and co-opt. David Duke has repeatedly endorsed Republican candidates and run for office under the Republican banner. In every case, the response has been rejection: Spencer was banned from CPAC, Fuentes was banned from conservative events and condemned by Trump’s own team, Duke’s endorsements were repudiated, and the party universally condemned the Charlottesville rally. The pattern is not one of tolerance but of persistent attempted infiltration met with persistent rejection.
The reason the association nonetheless persists is that it is politically useful to everyone except the right itself. White supremacists benefit from the perceived legitimacy. The left benefits enormously from being able to tar an entire political movement with the sins of a tiny, despised fringe — gaining an almost inexhaustible weapon against their political opponents. The only party with an interest in maintaining the distinction is the right, and the right’s voice is precisely what the conventional framing erases.
The framing itself encodes the confusion. By calling racists the “far right,” the left asserts a racism spectrum on which the right is a little racist and the “far right” is very racist — as if racism were simply what you get by intensifying conservatism. But nothing on the actual right points toward white supremacism as its endpoint. Colorblind meritocracy does not become racial hierarchy when taken to its extreme; it becomes more colorblind meritocracy. Limited government does not become ethnostate when taken to its extreme; it becomes more limited government. You cannot get to white supremacism by moving further along any axis the political right is actually on. The “far right” label is not a description of where the political right leads. It is a redefinition of white supremacism as an extension of conservatism — which is precisely the error this analysis is documenting.
Indeed, far from being a waystation toward white supremacism, the right is the primary ideological and institutional barrier against it. Someone who feels passed over for a job because of affirmative action, or vilified by mainstream culture for holding traditional views, sits in a space where two movements are competing for their allegiance: the political right, which channels that discontent into principled opposition to discrimination and defense of individual rights, and white supremacism, which channels it into racial resentment and hatred. Concern about mass illegal immigration is not xenophobia — it is a reasonable response to the erosion of rule of law and the economic pressures that fall disproportionately on working-class communities. Skepticism of extreme elements of feminist ideology is not misogyny — it is a defense of biological reality and institutional fairness. Without a political home that channels these concerns into principled opposition, more of those people would find their way to the only other movement that takes their grievances seriously.
But What About Trump?
The argument above will be met with a series of objections centering on Donald Trump. These deserve direct engagement rather than avoidance, because the specific claims are widely believed and — on examination — do not survive contact with the primary sources.
“Very fine people on both sides.” The notion that Trump “praised Nazis” by saying there were “very fine people on both sides” is probably the single most cited piece of evidence that Trump has supported white supremacists. However, from the start this was a deliberate fabrication by Trump’s enemies. In the same August 2017 press conference, in the very next sentences, Trump said explicitly: “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally.” In that same press conference, he reiterated: “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence. It has no place in America.” He called the driver of the car that killed Heather Heyer “a disgrace to himself, his family and this country,” adding: “The driver of the car is a murderer, and what he did was a horrible, horrible, inexcusable thing.”
As discussed above, white supremacists routinely attempt to colonize the political right. The Charlottesville rally was a textbook case: organizers deliberately branded it “Unite the Right“ and framed it around the removal of a Confederate statue — a cause that attracted participants who had no idea they were marching alongside neo-Nazis. Trump was drawing a distinction between those people and the white supremacists whom he condemned.
He was also making a point about political violence that his critics have refused to engage with. Counter-protesters, some affiliated with Antifa, came armed with bats, clubs, chemical sprays, and improvised flamethrowers, and engaged in physical confrontations with the marchers. Whatever one thinks of white supremacists — and Trump made clear he found them contemptible — they had a legal right to march. The Supreme Court established exactly this principle in National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie (1977), ruling that neo-Nazis could not be prohibited from marching peacefully through a predominantly Jewish community — home to thousands of Holocaust survivors — because of the content of their message. The ACLU, then led by a Jewish attorney, defended the Nazis’ right to march. The principle is foundational: if the government can suppress speech because it is abhorrent, then no speech is safe. Meeting abhorrent views with physical violence rather than counter-speech is a repudiation of that principle — and it is the government’s obligation to protect the right to peaceable assembly even when the assemblers’ views are despicable. A president who failed to make that distinction would not have been doing his job.
Far from demonstrating sympathy for white supremacists, Trump’s response was a textbook application of democratic principle: condemn the ideology while defending the constitutional right to express it without being physically attacked. This is the position the ACLU itself took in Skokie. It is the position every serious civil libertarian has held for decades. The fabrication of the “very fine people” hoax — stripping Trump’s explicit condemnation from the record and presenting four words as proof of Nazi sympathies — is itself an example of the very pattern this analysis has documented throughout: the use of extreme, demonstrably false rhetoric to cast political opponents as existential threats. For Trump’s critics, a defense of foundational First Amendment principles, accompanied by repeated and unambiguous condemnation of white supremacism, was not enough to avoid being branded a Nazi sympathizer. If that standard were applied consistently, every ACLU attorney who has defended the speech rights of hateful groups — and every Supreme Court justice who voted to protect them — would stand equally condemned.
“Stand back and stand by.” During the September 2020 presidential debate, moderator Chris Wallace asked Trump to condemn white supremacists. Trump asked “who do you want me to condemn?” Biden interjected “Proud Boys.” Trump said: “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by.” The phrase “stand by” was reasonably interpreted as falling short of condemnation, and Trump was widely criticized for it. But the next day, Trump told reporters: “I condemn all white supremacists. I condemn the Proud Boys.” And the broader record is unambiguous: Trump has condemned white supremacism dozens of times over his career, including after Charlottesville, after El Paso, and after the Proud Boys exchange. The debate moment was a fumble, not a revelation of hidden sympathy.
It is also worth noting that the premise of Biden’s interjection was itself misleading. The Proud Boys are not a white supremacist organization. They describe themselves as “Western chauvinists” and their leadership has explicitly and repeatedly denounced racism. Their former chairman, Enrique Tarrio, is Afro-Cuban and has stated: “I denounce white supremacy. I denounce anti-Semitism. I denounce racism. I denounce fascism. I denounce communism and any other -ism that is prejudiced toward people because of their race, religion, culture, tone of skin.” The group has a multiracial membership and has expelled members who made explicitly racist statements. The Proud Boys are confrontational, provocative, and have a well-documented history of political violence — but labeling them “white supremacist” conflates nationalism and combativeness with racial ideology. Telling the Proud Boys to “stand by” was unwise — and reflects the same problematic tendency toward reckless rhetoric that this analysis identifies in Trump’s stolen-election claims — but it is not an example of supporting white supremacism.
The Nick Fuentes dinner. In November 2022, Trump hosted Kanye West at Mar-a-Lago, and West brought Nick Fuentes — a white nationalist and Holocaust denier — as an unannounced guest. The irony is instructive: the dinner was part of Trump’s effort to build relationships with prominent Black figures, the opposite of courting white supremacists. Trump’s team said he did not know who Fuentes was beforehand. Trump was condemned by Republicans across the party — McConnell, Pence, and others called the meeting unacceptable. Trump did not defend Fuentes or endorse his views. This is a case where Trump’s carelessness about who enters his orbit created a legitimate controversy, and the Republican Party’s response was condemnation — which is exactly what the framework used in this analysis looks for.
It would be impractical to address every accusation that Trump has promoted white supremacism — the volume of such claims is itself part of the strategy. But the three episodes examined above are the highest-profile, most commonly cited examples, and are presumably the most damning ones available. In every case, the accusation was not merely mistaken but overtly dishonest: Trump’s explicit condemnations were stripped from the record, telling a non-white-supremacist organization to stand down was treated as an endorsement of white supremacism, and associations he did not seek were treated as endorsements he did not make. None of these episodes hint, in any way, at Trump lending rhetorical support to racism. If these are the best examples, and they are fabrications, the lesser examples do not warrant systematic rebuttal. They can be left to speak for themselves.
The contrast with the left-wing examples documented in the main body of the essay — where the extreme rhetoric is the leadership position, where it escalates over time, and where the party’s response is adoption rather than condemnation — could not be sharper.