Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power by Jefferson Cowie (review)

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Last summer, Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville stirred controversy by insist ing that white nationalists were not racists but simply loyal American citizens like any other. In an interview on Alabama public radio about his opposition to the Pentagon’s personnel policies, among them efforts to prevent white supremacists from serving in the armed forces, Tuberville claimed that the people the Biden administration maligned as “white nationalists” were simply “Americans” who “don’t believe in [Biden’s] agenda.” Designating them as unfit for service, he argued, is a form of federal overreach—intruding in matters of identity and conscience over which the federal government has no rightful authority, and sowing weakness and division in the “strong, hard-nosed, killing machine” that is the U.S. military. “We cannot start putting rules in there for one type, one group and make different factions in the military,” he said, “because that is the most important institution in the United States of America.” Despite the efforts of his staff to convey that he had simply been misunderstood, Tuberville doubled down in a later interview: targeting white nationalists was part of a partisan, un-American agenda—an agenda that threatened to drive “most white people in this country out of the military.”