The topline numbers in the recent report from the Southern Poverty Law Center are not good. There are now more hard-right, antigovernment “Patriot” groups than there were at the movement’s previous heyday in the mid-1990s. The number of hate groups identified by the SPLC has been on a steady climb over the past dozen years.

Among other factors, the election and reelection of America’s first black president has fueled the growth of extremist groups. From the report:

“Since Obama’s first term, our numbers have doubled and now we’re headed to a second term, it’s going to triple,” one Virginia Klansman told WTVR-TV in Richmond. Daniel Miller, president of the secessionist Texas National Movement, said that his membership shot up 400% after Obama’s re-election. White News Now, a website run by white supremacist Jamie Kelso, said that it had had “an incredible year” in the run-up to the vote, reaching more people than ever.

Meanwhile, the paranoid ideas of these extremist groups have gained traction in recent years — what the SPLC has called the “mainstreaming of formerly marginal conspiracy theories.” One such theory centers on Agenda 21, a plan put forth by the U.N. and signed by President George H.W. Bush. The plan — in reality, a statement of goals lacking any enforcement mechanism — promotes sustainable development through, for example, environmental protection, altering patterns of consumption, and population control. The John Birch Society (yes, the group that accused President Eisenhower of being a communist and traitor) and others have pushed the idea that one day the federal government will use Agenda 21 for legal authority to ignore individual liberty and property rights and impose a collectivist system on the United States. To see how far this idea has been mainstreamed, just look at the official 2012 Republican Party platform, which declares: “We strongly reject the U.N. Agenda 21 as erosive of American sovereignty.”

In a previous post, I explored some of the delusional, racist paranoia coming from the extreme right on the gun issue. For some people it’s not easy to adjust to demographic changes, and unfortunately some media personalities and political figures are willing to exploit anxiety about them to advance their own causes and careers. Some people don’t like the idea of a black president, or the fact that white Americans may not be a majority of the population in a couple of generations.

To be clear, one need not be a bigot to express concerns about how best to integrate large numbers of immigrants. But racial and cultural anxieties do underlie those concerns for a segment of the white population. The most extreme identify as white nationalists. The adherents of this cause, historian Leonard Zeskind explains, are “dedicated to the proposition that those they deem to be ‘white’ own special rights: the right to dominate political institutions, the economy, and culture. They believe that a ‘whites-only’ nation exists in fact, if not in name. And they swear to a duty to create a whites-only nation-state on soil that was once the United States of America.”

In a recent article, I discussed these white nationalists, and what I see as their potential to weaken or even break the bonds that tie together Americans of different ethnic backgrounds:

[They] cling to an imagined definition of what America once was — an America that valued them because of the one thing no one can take from them: their whiteness. They fear that if America is not “white” then they will be second-class citizens.… These extremists need not turn us into a racialist, genocidal totalitarian state in order to cause serious damage to the fabric of our society. Just think of what a few more Timothy McVeigh-type attacks might do. We ignore their alienation at our peril.

Ian Reifowitz Ian Reifowitz is the author of Obama’s America: A Transformative Vision of Our National Identity. Twitter: @IanReifowitz

What are they afraid of? Apparently, when it comes to the issue of gun control, some activists in the gun rights movement are really afraid of a race war. Take a listen to a recent conversation on the Talk to Solomon Show. On the air with host Stan Solomon were Greg W. Howard, a conservative blogger with just under 100,000 Twitter followers, and Larry Pratt, an advocate of gun rights and “English only” laws who famously clashed with CNN’s Piers Morgan in an interview after the Sandy Hook shooting.

The discussion that transpired was like a dramatic reading of The Turner Diaries, that influential (and fictional) book about violent revolution and racial war in America. Pratt argued that President Obama is building his own private army and will send his agents “door to door” to “confiscate guns” — all to provoke a “violent confrontation” with gun owners. Solomon went further, claiming that Obama’s real goal is to create a black army and start a race war. Howard condemned Obama for “sowing the seeds of racial hatred,” adding that the president is “not American” because he was “not raised in American culture.”

It is worth noting that Gun Owners of America, of which Pratt is executive director, has 300,000 members. (Ron Paul, the Texas congressman and former Republican presidential candidate, once called it “the only no-compromise gun lobby in Washington” — take that, National Rifle Association!) Yet even a national figure like Pratt can entertain the paranoid fantasy of a race war, telling his colleagues on the air that Obama “would definitely be capable of something as evil as you were suggesting.” In the past, Pratt has gotten in trouble for his ties to white supremacist and anti-Semitic organizations, but his popularity has only grown in recent years. After Morgan called Pratt “an unbelievably stupid man” for arguing that gun bans don’t reduce violent crime, tens of thousands of people flooded a White House petition site calling for the British television host’s deportation.

The fear of a race war is clearly delusional, but it draws strength from the half-truths and outlandish comments that reverberate in the partisan media’s echo chamber. For example, black nationalist leader Louis Farrakhan said in a recent interview that the film Django Unchained — a fictional account of a freed slave seeking retribution — is “preparation for a race war.” Conservative media — from Rush Limbaugh to Fox News to Breitbart.com — breathlessly spread word of Farrakhan’s remarks. With pundits so willing to piece together high-level conspiracies out of random shouts and murmurs, it’s no wonder our politics have become so toxic.

Today, the most prominent voice on behalf of gun rights is Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s executive vice president. LaPierre doesn’t talk about race wars, but racial anxiety underlies many of his public comments. In a recent essay attacking gun control in the Daily Caller, he referred to post-Hurricane Sandy “looters” who “ran wild in South Brooklyn” and “Latin American drug gangs” who have “invaded” every major city. “Good Americans” must arm themselves, he wrote, “to withstand the siege that is coming.”

LaPierre and the NRA don’t have to say “race war” because Larry Pratt has. But their crusade against gun control benefits from the hysteria and paranoia that such reckless, inflammatory rhetoric incites. By exploiting racial fears, these demagogues may be helping their narrow cause, but they are poisoning the very idea of America — a pluralistic society that is built on trust and responsibility.

Ian Reifowitz Ian Reifowitz is the author of Obama’s America: A Transformative Vision of Our National Identity. Twitter: @IanReifowitz

Abraham Lincoln’s 204th birthday is upon us. Although the sixteenth President has never receded from our public consciousness, Steven Spielberg’s recent movie Lincoln has brought him to the front of our minds perhaps more than at any point in recent decades. Most Americans celebrate the man — certainly Spielberg does. But there are some who do not. I’d like to explore some dissenting views in a serious way and offer my own assessment of Lincoln and his historical legacy.

Clearly, the positive view of Lincoln as “The Great Emancipator” predominates in our society and culture, for reasons that are quite well known even to those who know relatively little about American history. There are some, however, who condemn Lincoln’s “tyrannical behavior in trashing the Constitution and waging war on civilians in violation of international law and codes of morality.” While one can seriously debate the constitutionality of Lincoln’s actions on, say, the suspension of habeas corpus, the “Lincoln as Tyrant” viewpoint, typically associated with neo-Confederate sympathies, does not offer well-substantiated analyses of his political career. These partisans worship the Old South and see Lincoln as the man who destroyed it.

But there is another perspective on Lincoln I want to explore in more depth, namely one that criticizes his views on race, which, by today’s standards, certainly reflect real bigotry toward blacks. Understanding Lincoln completely means understanding that he did, for example, publicly support a plan to send freed slaves back to Africa or elsewhere. There are numerous examples demonstrating that he did not view blacks and whites as equals. For more on this view, one can examine Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream by Lerone Bennett Jr. (Interestingly, many neo-Confederate types such as Thomas DiLorenzo often cite Bennett to highlight these criticisms as well, even though their most righteous anger derives from Lincoln’s supposed tyranny. I won’t speculate as to how much they actually care about Lincoln’s racial prejudices.) Reviews of the book by Eric Foner and James McPherson, arguably the two leading scholars of the Civil War/Reconstruction era over the past fifty years, point out significant problems with Bennett’s interpretation as well as some factual errors. Foner’s own balanced take on Lincoln appears in his book The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery.

Although Foner and other scholars have noted Lincoln’s use of the word “deportation” in his 1862 State of the Union address, that address also made clear that any such plan required the “consent of the people to be deported.” Such a statement suggests the word meant something different in those days than it does today (irrespective of Mitt Romney’s notion of undocumented immigrants “self-deporting“). Additionally, in a cabinet meeting that September Lincoln stated clearly that any colonization plan had to be “voluntary and without expense to themselves.”

Nevertheless, the views expressed in Bennett’s work also resonate among those who are skeptical of Lincoln’s legacy for other reasons, including some African Americans. Bennett was an editor at Ebony for decades and published countless articles — including the 1968 essay “Was Abe Lincoln a White Supremacist?” — that laid out some of the themes that later became Forced Into Glory. A friend of mine, a scholar and activist whom I respect greatly, told me essentially that because of the connection she feels toward her ancestors, whom Lincoln viewed as inferior, she cannot honor him as a historical figure. This got me thinking about my own view of Lincoln.

Ultimately, I would argue that the ways Lincoln went against the bigotry of most whites in his day should matter more than the ways he reflected it. More broadly, few major historical figures have done or said nothing that deserves criticism, certainly not any historical figure who has exercised governmental authority. But in Lincoln’s case, surely the good of what he did outweighs the bad. In addition to the actions he took to help end slavery as president, the words he uttered at Gettysburg placed equality at the center of American ideals in a way no other speech has, as historian Garry Wills has argued in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Lincoln at Gettysburg. Did the sixteenth president mean equality the way most of us do in the present? No. Today, his attitudes would be retrograde. But he didn’t live today. For lack of a better term, when looking at history we should give “credit” to those — especially those leaders — who were more egalitarian than the norm in their own time and, more importantly, acted on their (relative) egalitarianism to make things better for people. We should not expect them to be egalitarian in 2013 terms and mark them down where they fall short.

Still, the matter of my friend’s ancestors bothered me. Could I honor someone who viewed my ancestors as less than equal, even if that person had done great things, even for them directly? I had to go outside my own box to grapple with this. I came to the question of Martin Luther King Jr. and gay rights. It’s not exactly the same thing as Lincoln and his view of African Americans, but it offers some reasonable parallels. I did a bit of research and found this:

The only time King publicly mentions homosexuality was in 1958 while answering a question in his advice column in Ebony magazine in which a boy asked:

“I am a boy. But I feel about boys the way I ought to feel about girls. I don’t want my parents to know about me. What can I do?”

King answered: “Your problem is not at all an uncommon one. However, it does require careful attention. The type of feeling that you have toward boys is probably not an innate tendency, but something that has been culturally acquired. You are already on the right road toward a solution, since you honestly recognize the problem and have a desire to solve it.”

Rev. King did not condemn homosexuality in terms anywhere near as harsh as many contemporary religious leaders. Nevertheless, he clearly identified homosexuality as a “problem” that needed to be solved, as well as one that results from culture rather than something innate to a person. From a policy perspective, it is virtually impossible that he would have, at that time or at any point before his assassination in 1968, embraced gay marriage. One could thus make an argument that because of Rev. King’s views on homosexuality, one cannot view him positively as a historical figure. I could not accept such an argument. It does not make sense to judge his views based on today’s standards, and such a view ignores the larger importance of what he did for equality, as well as how those actions ultimately benefited the LGBT community. We also don’t know how Rev. King’s views on this issue might have evolved over time, had he been given the chance.

The same points apply to Lincoln and his views on race. His views did evolve over time, and he even called for a limited voting franchise for black males in his final public speech before his own assassination. In response to that final speech, John Wilkes Booth declared to a friend: “That means n—— citizenship. Now, by God, I’ll put him through. That is the last speech he will ever make.” Who knows how much further Lincoln would have evolved after 1865? For example, it seems impossible that Lincoln would have opposed the Fifteenth Amendment, passed in 1870, that banned any race-based restrictions on voting rights.

Yes, it is important to know the full picture of Lincoln. That’s what history is about, not hero worship. Nevertheless, I would argue that it’s unfair to look at history solely from the perspective of one’s own ancestors because doing so implies that what a historical figure does or believes regarding one’s own ancestors (broadly defined) matters more than what that person has done or thought regarding all human beings. Additionally, judging people solely on how their views compare to those of the present is equally unhelpful. Who knows how people in 200 years will judge even our most egalitarian ideas today? Whether we are talking about Martin Luther King Jr., Abraham Lincoln, or any historical figure, a person need not be perfect in order to be great.

Ian Reifowitz Ian Reifowitz is the author of Obama’s America: A Transformative Vision of Our National Identity. Twitter: @IanReifowitz