With Washington sowing its discredited brand of democracy worldwide, tensions are rising within the US between the descendants of the white settlers on the one side and Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and unwelcome migrants from all parts of the world on the other. Additionally energized by social ills like unemployment, competition between the communities proves to be a fertile ground for the whites' patriotic groups along with those of white supremacists, racists, and downright fascists. The process may eventually erode the country which, in today's world, attempts to play a role of the global democracy instructor.

The ethnic and racial composition of the US population is evolving at a breakneck pace. The descendants of white Europeans accounted for 83.4% of the US total in 1970, but the share shrank to 65% by 2010 [1]. Estimates show that closer to 2050 the whites will no longer be the majority in the US, a country which inertially continues to uphold its European legacy. The trend is clearly irreversible as illustrated by the diagram below, which reflects the contribution of the US non-whites to the country's population growth in various decades from the middle of the XX century on [2]. 

Exhibit 1.

The contribution of the US non-whites to the country's population growth in 1950-2000 (92%).

The racial and ethnic compositions of various age groups within the US population changed accordingly (the exhibit below shows the 2010 data) [3].

Exhibit 2.

The geographic patterns associated with the birth rate – the numbers of non-white children under one year of age in 2010 – gives a good idea of the contours of the US demography some 25 years from now, when the present-day children grow up and start their own families [4].

Exhibit 3.

Non-white children born in 2010

Non-white immigrants reaching the US predominantly settle down in the western part of the US and in the area south of New York, and the non-white majority zone gradually expands north and east. As a result, by the end of the XXI century white Americans will essentially inhabit remote north-western territories and, moreover, since non-whites in the US mostly reside in suburban areas, the whites will find themselves locked in a kind of besieged reservations, while still being overrepresented in the US administrative machine and thus seeming to be responsible for the hardships endured by other population groups. 

On the eve of B. Obama's presidency, the disparity of educational levels among the US racial and ethnic groups, which predictably recurred in every generation, led to socioeconomic imbalances which the country of nominally equal opportunities was unable to eliminate. In 2009, the whites were seriously overrepresented in best-paid and top-prestigious employment segments [5]:

For Obama's Administration, the persistent correlation between race and social status – a phenomenon which did not evade the society's attention – was a compelling reason to coerce employers into offering preferential treatment to non-white applicants. In Augusts, 2011, Obama distributed to federal agencies and institutions Executive Order 13583 [6] titled “A Coordinated Government-wide Initiative to Promote Diversity and Inclusion in the Federal Workforce”, plus a plan for its implementation in 2011 [7]. One of the focal points of the document was to boost the employment of native Spanish-speakers [8]. Federal bodies became accountable to a special Office of Diversity and Inclusion over the matter. The democratic Party's staples such as calls for equal employment opportunities for women and sexual minorities were also written into the Directive, largely to divert the public attention from the ethnic and racial imbalances in question.

The initiative, it must be noted, creates considerable future risks. Normally, equality should mean that employers screen applicants for their professional and personal skills which can be acquired and cultivated, and disregard the factors of ethnicity and race. In other words, the presidential Directive supposed to improve compliance with the constitutional principles actually overturns them. Curiously, in the above case  the threat of discrimination confronts the group which founded the US and presented the world with an exemplary model of democracy supposedly incompatible with ethnic or racial discrimination. The group to be disadvantaged most in the process of putting the Directive into practice are of course the white males whose reaction followed imminently.

According to a human rights watchdog labeled Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the numbers of right-radical groups connected to the Patriot Movement – and also of various supremacist and neo-fascist formations – has been climbing steadily since 2008. It is well-known that part of the process is the proliferation of militias. SPLC estimates that the number of militias across the US has been doubling annually and has grown tenfold over the time of Obama's stay in office [9]. 

Exhibit 4.

Numbers of active Patriot Movement groups (red) and their militias (gray) 

Far from being a single tightly knit organization, the militias share the core belief in the rights of citizens — isolated communities and the American nation as a whole – to self-defense. Indeed, the US Constitution, its 2nd Amendment, and the US Code allow the self-organization of citizens with their private firearms in the form of militias which the US Congress can entrain with the aims of maintaining law on a particular territory, suppressing insurrections, or resisting an invasion of the US. Moreover, the Code contains references to both organized militias (National Guards and Naval Militia) and unorganized militias  which consist “of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and … under 45 years of age who are, or who have made a declaration of intention…” [10]. 

The Patriot Movement's militias thus being generally legitimate does not yet mean that the same is true of all the things they do. So far, their members are preoccupied with training citizens to handle firearms and to assist the authorities in emergencies, while also struggling to build barriers in the way of illegal migration, especially at the US-Mexican border. Suspicion occasionally creeps in that the militias secretly intercept and kill off migrants on their key routes, and that the official media shelve reports concerning the incidents.  

The “unorganized” militias came into the FBI and Department of Home Security spotlight in 2009 when the agencies supplied to the governments a classified report titled “Rightwing Extremism: Current

 Economic and Political Climate Fueling

 Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment

”. In contrast to the findings the law-enforcement agencies dished out in the 1990ies, this time the inquiry carried no allegations of a brewing coup, but its authors warned the US government that the protracted period of living standards decline and employment squeeze made it easier to draw novices into fringe-right groups. Critical perceptions of the current Administration's immigration and citizenship  policies or minority-oriented programs are widespread, while the right oftentimes blame the recent crisis on “the Jewish financial elite”, all of the above feeding prejudice among Americans and occasionally attracting them to extremist groups.

The Administration's push for tighter gun control further fuels mistrust of the government among a part of the white population in the US. For many, the plans read as indications that the US elite continues to curb civil liberties and seeks to disarm Americans who are ready to oppose the “world government's” seizure of power in the US. 

The point made in the report is that the alarming tendencies will escalate unless the socioeconomic climate rebounds. Discontent US servicemen returning from Iraq, Afghanistan, and other conflict zones who routinely have difficulty adapting to normal conditions but have combat experience and are used to risk and kill already join en masse the ranks of the right-wing extremists. Some of the veterans are receptive to the Patriot Movement's propaganda and, without becoming members of the collective body, may consider acting solo “as shadow wolves“. For the law-enforcement agencies, this type of an adversary is harder to deal with as identifying individual terrorists is a tougher challenge than monitoring established groups. 

The report contains an important admission that Washington's tactic of propping up overseas opposition groups, inciting unrest, and organizing revolts in other countries is beginning to backfire. The approach is being adopted by the US right who increasingly rely on social media to enlist supporters and deliberately maintain an evasive and loosely structured opposition movement. 

The recommendations issued to the Administration by the law enforcement agencies remained under wraps. It is an open question at the moment what shape the Patriot Movement will take and how far it will drift towards fascism if the right-wing radicalism in the US is to gain momentum. Guesswork on the theme should proceed from an assessment of the ideological foundations  of the US rights and of the similarities and contrasts between them and the US variety of proponents of national socialism.

To be continued

1. U.S.Census Bureau, Cumulated Estimates of the Components of Resident Population Change by Race and Hispanic Origin for the United States: April 1,2000 to July 1,2009 (NC-EST2009-05), June 2010 /http://www.census.gov.

2. http://www.brookings.edu/opinions/2011/1220_census_demographics.aspx

3. http://www.brookings.edu/opinions/2011/0826_census_race_frey.aspx

4. Там же.

5. http://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/statistics/employment/jobpat-eeo4/2009/

6. http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/08/18/executive-order-establishing-coordinated-government-wide-initiative-prom

7. http://www.opm.gov/diversityandinclusion/reports/GovernmentwideDIStrategicPlan.pdf.

8. http://chcoc.gov/transmittals/TransmittalDetails.aspx?TransmittalID=4266#A1

9. http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2012/spring/the-year-in-hate-and-extremism

10. http://uscode.house.gov/ (параграф 10, секция 311, статья 13).

11. http://www.wnd.com/images/dhs-rightwing-extremism.pdf