David Cunningham is Professor of Sociology at Washington University in St. Louis. His research focuses on the causes, consequences, and legacies of violent racist movements.
The main takeaway here should properly not center on aspects that might be extended by adjacent work, but rather on the fact that, with Bring the War Home, we have been graced with a new go-to account of the contemporary white power movement.
Hawley’s book predates the events in Charlottesville, which means that its value resides not in interpreting that watershed incident but rather in its ability to tell the story of how a movement characterized as leaderless and “almost exclusively an online phenomenon” developed the capacity to organize significant numbers of supporters in physical space.