I talked to Leonard Zeskind for the first time on the phone in 1991. My path to meeting Leonard began in 1990 when I met Jonathan Mozzochi of the Coalition for Human Dignity (CHD), who showed me, but didn’t give me a copy, of a report CHD had just published on Organized White Supremacy in Oregon. The report was on the cutting edge of this work, updating the history of racist groups in the region to its current forms; and it jumped me into the world of still-existing Klan groups, neo-Nazis skinheads and, things I had never heard of, Christian Patriots and Christian Identity adherents.
I was curious and began reading, including The Monitor, the publication of the Center for Democratic Renewal, where Leonard was research director. I worked on hate crimes hearings in Seattle, events spurred by an increase in racist skinhead activity in the city’s University District. There, I worked alongside CDRs Deni Yamauchi and the late Dr. Rudolph C. Ryser of the Center for World Indigenous Studies. I would learn from both, as generally happened when you met the people in Leonard Zeskind’s circles. A lot of good, smart people.
In the summer of 1991, while trying to earn a living as a house painter, my co-painter and I caught wind of an Aryan Nations member active in another crew. In setting out to track them down and pester them, I reached out to Deni Yamauchi. Deni put me in touch with Leonard Zeskind.
Then everything changed.
Suddenly, I was doing volunteer field investigations in the Pacific Northwest and beyond, working with Leonard, tumbling head first into researching a netherworld of Christian Identity churches and “Bible camps,” sieg-heiling neo-Nazi skinheads, robed Klansmen lighting big crosses, and kindly-grandmother-types who threw Hitler birthday parties – not to mention more than a few how-the-hell-did-I-end-up-here moments.
Working with Leonard Zeskind on these efforts changed how I looked at the world of racism and politics. And though not my most important lesson from Leonard, it is worth repeating again, and again…We need to know this stuff.
Leonard Zeskind’s insights into the far right and organized white supremacy stood out – in part because he combined them with thinking from political science, economics, sociology, anthropology, philosophy… – and that mattered – but mainly because he studied them from the inside-out, diving into the meetings, networks, writings, painfully dull and frightening recordings and distorted minds of white supremacists and their bigoted kin in other movements.
Long before the term “white nationalism” was bandied in the national press, or among activists, Leonard talked about the transformation across the 1980s and 1990s of a system-defending white supremacy and into a system-overturning white nationalism – racist movement leaders re-casting whites as a people “dispossessed,” and holding the overturn of the existing government necessary to “save” them from “oppression” and “genocide.”
Leonard drew this insight from studying the rise of neo-Nazi David Duke alongside the development of the white supremacist underground, exemplified by William Pierce’s National Alliance – both dedicated to re-fashioning a state for their whit-ist project – one through garnering a mass base and mainstreaming the cause, the other by building a violent vanguard to overthrow the government by force. And Leonard delineated the distinct nature of white nationalist antisemitism in creating a racialized “ruling class” behind the fantasized white plight. You can dive deeply into this in Leonard’s 2009 book, Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream.
Leonard broke ground on the study of white nationalism, but he always stressed that it developed in tension, overlap and cross-pollination with other far right and anti-democratic tendencies – e.g., the Christian Right, libertarianism, anti-Indian activists and paleoconservatism, etc.
Influenced by this approach, that necessitated understanding how fascists and their kin understood the world, at CHD we agonized over the best way to characterize the far rights’ various factions; and we were among the most persisting at saying, “The Christian Right is not the same as the white supremacist movement, is not libertarianism, is not the Wise Use Movement…but here are things they share in common…And here’s a meeting where they both showed up.”
And Leonard saw, and taught us, how the collapse of the Soviet Union remade the American political landscape, how the decline of anti-communism as a pan-U.S. ideological glue created space for, but did not determine, the growing prominence of various racialized and religiously-constructed nationalisms – something reflected in the rise of anti-immigrant politics across the far right and the transformation of Reagan-style reactionary attacks on affirmative action into fodder for white nationalist revolution in the hands of Duke-style mainstreamers and violent vanguardists.
Leonard never talked about these phenomenon as disconnected social artifacts. Rather, building on what had come before (something else he stressed), he took the insights of Donald Warren’s book, The Radical Center, to highlight the development of a middle American nationalism that spanned the far right. Warren had documented a distinct ideology in the American public, middle American radicalism, behind support for George Wallace’s 1968 campaign – a mostly white segment of the public who deemed themselves squeezed between elites above them and people of the color and poor people below them.
From this, Leonard delineated a middle American nationalism that could be seen across the spectrum of organized far right; it also provided a terrain for connecting the movement to a mass base in the American public – again, a key link Leonard also stressed. While still confused in some academic circles as the “weak ideology” of “populism,” Leonard demonstrated that this framework undergirded common far right themes as the oft-spewed, and simultaneous, attack on “globalists” on the one hand, and immigrants on the other.
Middle American nationalism’s contours are today seen among white and Christian nationalists; so-called “constitutionalists” and paramilitary groups; paleoconservatives and paleolibertarians; Proud Boys; anti-Indian, anti-Muslim, antisemitic, anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ groups; and even in the world of techno-fascists and their national conservative kin.
And, something I will always appreciate, Leonard was one among few anti-fascist and fight-the-right leaders whose understanding of the far right encompassed that branch specifically dedicated to overturning the treaty rights and political sovereignty of Indigenous Nations. His work in the Northwest brought this issue front and center to groups like the Coalition for Human Dignity, the Montana Human Rights Network, the Northwest Coalition Against Malicious Harassment and Borderlands Research and Education, a project started by Leah Henry-Tanner and myself.
Leonard Zeskind was thanked for his “substantive contributions” to Dr. Rudolph C Ryser’s The Anti-Indian Movement on the Tribal Frontier, the seminal work on this movement. CDR’s 1992 how-to-fight-back book, When Hate Groups Come to Town included a section on “Indian Issues and Anti-Indian Organizing” and contributions from Zoltan Grossman, who with Debi McNutt was leading efforts to counter anti-Indian groups through the Midwest Treaty Network. Attacks on the unique nature of tribal nationhood have to be included in the struggle for justice.
And Leonard always stressed that, though rooted in various brands of nationalism, these phenomena were international in nature and had to be fought as such. Ideas of whiteness and the “defense” of a supposedly-being-dispossessed “Western Civilization” jumped the pond, connecting homegrown American racists to the progeny of interwar European fascisms. Through decades of work with the British anti-fascist publication Searchlight, Leonard built an alliance dedicated to fighting this, tracking Europe’s fascists when they appeared stateside and finding comrades who tracked American fascists when they landed in Europe.
My most important lesson from Leonard Zeskind and this work, however, isn’t this knowledge. It was the lesson that Leonard always had your back. And he stressed that we all have to do that. He was a fundamentally decent person who would do all in his power to protect those involved with him in the struggle against white supremacy and fascism. He looked out for us, his kids, on a personal level – a sometimes pushy uncle wanting to know if we were really alright.
This decency shaped his commitment to translating the realities of organized racism to the community level – not “down to” the community level, just “to” the community level. To people in the direct path of racism, bigotry, and violence, and to those being targeted for recruitment into the white supremacist movement.
Leonard could talk over my head on many matters philosophical and historical, but what mattered to him was helping workers, community members, young people, and all decent people understand the threats posed by this movement, and the importance of standing up to turn back its attack on human decency. His years working on auto assembly lines and defending workers were his training ground, teaching him, I think, that an injury to one really is an injury to all.
I didn’t want to write this. I don’t want to finish it, as it is one more step in never seeing Leonard again. I will carry his love, wisdom, and commitment to making a better world with me for the rest of my days.
