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Connecting the Dots: Michael Moore, White Nationalism & the Multiracial Left
By Kenyon Farrow & Kil Ja Kim
Posted 6/16/04
In a little more than a decade, filmmaker and writer Michael Moore has become one of the bad boys of the left. Some may question our inclusion of Moore in the left given that few will garner the credentials Moore has amassed in the past ten years, which include two books on the New York Times bestseller list as well as the 2003 Best Documentary Oscar for a movie that confronts the gun industry and the highest honors at this year's Cannes Film Festival for Fahrenheit 9/11 , which critiques GW Bush's handling of 9-11. That film companies fell over themselves to distribute Fahrenheit 9/11 after Disney CEO Michael Eisner blocked its release is another reason why Moore will probably never get credentials as a "progressive," let alone a "radical." Overall, that he has entered with a burst of applause (at Cannes, twenty minutes worth) into the mainstream media world and become its bad boy darling is enough to discredit Moore in the eyes of many leftists whose ideas are marginalized within mainstream political discourse.
We don't connect Moore to leftist politics to expand the parameters of what it means to be "left." Rather, we seek to problematize a troubling undercurrent of many sectors of the left that are embedded in Moore's approach. Simply, we think Michael Moore is a white nationalist. And his white nationalist approach is what connects the self-professed liberal to the institutionalized left regardless if the latter takes Moore seriously or not.
Some will be confused by our use of white nationalism since it's a term usually reserved for "extremist" organizations. To the contrary, we consider white nationalism to be normalized in US social relations since by white nationalism we mean the project of nation building that is driven by the experiences and history of white people. White nationalism, however, is more than just being white-centric, per se. Rather, white nationalism is the project of maintaining or expanding the white nation--whether established along state lines or as socially created communities or both--in ways that reflect the anxieties, fears, dread and aspirations of white people. As such, in a white nationalist discourse, whiteness and US civil society as well as the racialized and sexualized project of citizenship that maintains both are not confronted. Instead the point of departure for a white nationalist approach is: what stands in white people's way of being able to claim the nation as rightfully theirs? A white nationalist project therefore is fixated with what government forces, "subversiveness" from below or shifts in the global economy threaten the rights of the white citizenry.
