The Politics of Attention: The Case of White Nationalism in the U.S. South, 1980-2008

I examine how white nationalist organizations in the U.S. South distributed their attention across grievances and other organizations in their field between 1980 and 2008. I ask two main research questions. First, why do organizations focus their attention on one set of grievances at the expense of others? I refer to this as grievance-based attention-focusing. Second, why are some organizations more likely to be taken as a point of reference by other organizations in their field? I refer to this as peer attention-getting. I use a combination of archival data, natural language processing, network analysis, and statistical modeling to address these questions. In the case of grievance-based attention-focusing, I put forth a theory outlining the conditions under a white nationalist organization is more likely to shift attention to immigration-related issues. I find that these organizations were more likely to shift attention to immigration when there was a high number of domestic non-right-wing terror events relative to the size of the organization’s non-Hispanic/Latino community size, but only when the organization was disposed toward a cognitive style emphasizing the perception of threats and opportunities for action as proximate. In the case of peer attention-getting, I posit that any given organization has a higher capacity for garnering internal peer attention when they also have leaders that are high status enough to warrant external countermovement attention—but that the peer attention-getting capacity for these groups is positively moderated to the extent that the organization presents itself discursively with fearful language. I find support for this theory, and also find that attention-rich organizations are most inclined to divvy out attention to their peers that communicate with fearful language because of their own proclivity for using fear as an attention-getting mechanism. I conclude with implications for culture and cognition studies, computational social science, and broader discussions of organized racism in the contemporary United States.