How White Nationalists Use Greece
and Rome to Justify Hate
"Curtis Dozier's (Yale University Press, 2026) explores how white nationalist thought leaders use ancient Greece and Rome to claim historical precedent for their violent and oppressive politics.
It is difficult to ignore the resurgence of white nationalist movements in the United States, many of which employ symbols and slogans from Greco-Roman antiquity. A long-established neo-Nazi website incorporates an image of the Parthenon into its logo, and rioters wore Spartan helmets in the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
These juxtapositions may appear incongruous to people who associate the ancient world with enlightened political ideals and sophisticated philosophical inquiry. But, as Dozier points out in this thought-provoking book, it’s hard to imagine a historical period better suited to rhetorical use by white nationalists.
Indeed, some of the most widely admired voices from ancient literature and philosophy endorsed ideas that modern white supremacists promote, and the social and political realities of the ancient world provide models for political systems that white supremacists would like to establish today.
Part introduction to contemporary white nationalist thought, part exploration of ancient racism and xenophobia, and part intellectual history of the political entanglements of academic study of the past, this book reveals that contemporary white nationalist intellectuals know much more about history than many people assume—and they deploy this knowledge with disturbing success.
Curtis Dozier is associate professor of Greek and Roman studies at Vassar College. He is the director of the internationally recognized website Pharos: Doing Justice to the Classics, which documents appropriations of Greco-Roman antiquity by hate groups. He lives in Poughkeepsie, NY.
Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature."
It is difficult to ignore the resurgence of white nationalist movements in the United States, many of which employ symbols and slogans from Greco-Roman antiquity. A long-established neo-Nazi website incorporates an image of the Parthenon into its logo, and rioters wore Spartan helmets in the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
These juxtapositions may appear incongruous to people who associate the ancient world with enlightened political ideals and sophisticated philosophical inquiry. But, as Dozier points out in this thought-provoking book, it’s hard to imagine a historical period better suited to rhetorical use by white nationalists.
Indeed, some of the most widely admired voices from ancient literature and philosophy endorsed ideas that modern white supremacists promote, and the social and political realities of the ancient world provide models for political systems that white supremacists would like to establish today.
Part introduction to contemporary white nationalist thought, part exploration of ancient racism and xenophobia, and part intellectual history of the political entanglements of academic study of the past, this book reveals that contemporary white nationalist intellectuals know much more about history than many people assume—and they deploy this knowledge with disturbing success.
Curtis Dozier is associate professor of Greek and Roman studies at Vassar College. He is the director of the internationally recognized website Pharos: Doing Justice to the Classics, which documents appropriations of Greco-Roman antiquity by hate groups. He lives in Poughkeepsie, NY.
Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature."
Interview with the Author
Selected Reviews
The Dark Side of Plato
- Curtis Dozier
As I argue in my new book, The White Pedestal: How White Nationalists Use Ancient Greece and Rome to Justify Hate (Yale), Plato is indeed foundational to Western thought, but not in a way we should celebrate. Most people associate Plato with sophisticated ideas and an insistence on truth, but many of his ideas have a much darker legacy than that. The ideal city described in the Republic, probably Plato’s most influential work,practices infanticide on deformed children and seeks to control human reproduction so that the “best” people only reproduce with each other, a passage beloved by early 20th century eugenicists. Plato’s Socrates argues that when Greeks are at war with Greeks they should treat each other like human beings but that when Greeks are at war with “barbarians” they should think nothing of destroying their homes and enslaving them, a distinction chillingly reminiscent of the ideologies that dehumanized Africans to legitimize their enslavement.
And Plato’s dialogues advocate for societies organized around allegedly natural hierarchies, of the old over the young, strong over the weak, and the wise over the foolish. Sure, it might sound appealing to live in a society ruled by the wisest people, but when Plato’s Socrates compares women with civic rights to livestock that have been allowed to wander out of their pens, we do well to remember that aristocracies like those Plato celebrates always establish themselves in power through violence and then declare their members to be wise. Even the allegory of the cave — so often regarded as a parable of liberation from superstition — is better understood as a political myth intended to justify the ruling class’s self-serving contempt for those who they claim are incapable of full participation in the governance of the state. It’s great to be one of the few who escape the cave, but Plato makes very clear that most people have to stay there.
I’m not suggesting we cancel Plato from the left: far from it. Students should absolutely be studying Plato. But they should be studying him as a case-study in how brilliant thinkers cloak anti-democratic ideologies in impressive-sounding ideals and in how powerful people throughout history have used the prestige of such thinkers to legitimize their regimes.
- Curtis Dozier, Pittsburgh Review of Books
Footnotes to Plato?
I mean that if we had to render Plato’s general point of view with the least changes made necessary by the intervening two thousand years of human experience in social organization, in aesthetic attainments, in science, and in religion, we should have to set about the construction of a philosophy of organism. In such a philosophy the actualities constituting the process of the world are conceived as exemplifying the ingression (or ‘participation’) of other things which constitute the potentialities of definiteness for any actual existence. The things which are temporal arise by their participation in the things which are eternal.
-Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality
Like the great philosopher Whitehead, i am a metaphysical Platonist I believe there is a realm of timeless ideas in which the world participates, including mathematical forms, possibilities for feeling, and perhaps also ideals such as truth, goodness, beauty, peace, and adventure. Unlike Plato, I do not think these ideas are more real than the world itself; rather, they are realized within it. Yet, like Plato, I believe we can be inwardly inspired by them, learn to recognize their ingressions into the world, and understand the divine reality as the living habitat of these eternal possibilities. Whitehead is well-known for saying that the history of Western philosophy is but a series of footnotes to Plato. I am indebted to many of this footnotes. Still, there is a problem.
The intellectual currents of the contemporary far right, including white nationalism, often appeal to ancient Greece and Rome as models for how society ought to be organized. They celebrate what they regard as classical ideals: manliness, military strength, secure borders, social hierarchy, ethnic homogeneity, respect for tradition, obedience to authority, resistance to immigration, and honor. They then interpret the fall of Rome as a cautionary tale about what happens when such norms are abandoned, comparing Rome's decline to what they regard as the moral and cultural decline of the modern West. Their hope is for a future that resembles their vision of Greece and Rome, often supplemented by a militant and "unfeminized" form of Christianity.
Many critics respond by dismissing this portrait of the ancient world as a caricature. But doing so can underestimate its historical complexity and rhetorical power. Curtis Dozier's The White Pedestal: How White Nationalists Use Ancient Greece and Rome to Justify Hate (Yale University Press, 2026) is an important corrective. It is an eye-opener for anyone who associates the ancient world primarily with democratic ideals, philosophical sophistication, and humanistic learning. As Dozier shows, it is difficult to imagine a historical period more readily appropriable by white nationalists. Ancient Greece and Rome provide a rich reservoir of images, myths, symbols, and selectively interpreted historical narratives that can be mobilized to support racial hierarchy, exclusionary nationalism, anti-immigration politics, and hypermasculine ideals.
Dozier is careful to distinguish the ethnic prejudice, xenophobia, and practices of domination found in the ancient world from the modern concept of race. Even so, modern white nationalists routinely project contemporary racial categories onto Greece and Rome, portraying them as the cradle of an imagined white civilization that must be defended against outsiders. In doing so, they transform the ancient world into a symbolic weapon in contemporary ideological struggles.
Appeals to the classical world are now employed across much of the far-right spectrum. Dozier describes this strategy as "meta-politics": an effort to reshape cultural assumptions, historical imagination, and public discourse so that increasingly repressive social and political policies come to seem natural, legitimate, and even desirable. The struggle over the meaning of the ancient world is therefore not simply about history. It is part of a broader contest over the moral and political future.
I encourage readers to listen to Dozier's interview on the New Books Network for concrete examples. The larger philosophical point, however, reaches beyond the history of white nationalism. The past is never simply a fixed reality to which our minds conform. We always receive it through dispositions, assumptions, hopes, and fears that are already shaping our imagination. In that very act of reception, we participate in world-building. We interpret the past in light of the futures we hope to bring into being. White nationalists do this, and so do those (like me) who criticize them.
The subjective aims of modern white nationalism are not simply wealth or political power. White nationalists seek what imagine to be a stable society grounded in ethnic purity, cultural homogeneity, patriarchal authority, and exclusion. The selective appropriation of Greece and Rome becomes one means of advancing that vision. The battle over the classics is therefore not only about antiquity; it is about the kind of future people hope to create.
The subje ctive aims of most process-relational thinkers is different. We seek a stable society, true. But we value communities that are creative, compassionate, participatory, diverse, inclusive, and good for the earth, with no one left behind. Many of us who are Christian see the very ministry of Jesus as pointing to just this kind of beauty. If white nationalists critique diversity, equity, and inclusion as woke, we see these very values as what Christ was about.
A process-relational response to white nationalism does not reject the study of ancient Greece and Rome, nor does it counter white nationalist mythology by portraying the ancient world as nothing but oppression and evil. It recognizes instead that Greece and Rome, like every civilization, embodied remarkable achievements alongside profound moral failures. It also affirms that history is capable of genuine progress. The future is not imprisoned by the past. Fresh possibilities continually emerge, inviting humanity toward wider circles of justice, compassion, and mutual belonging. The task is neither to idolize the past nor to erase it, but to receive it critically, transform it creatively, and allow it to become part of a more humane future.
Plato was our brother, not our god. The same is true of Homer, Sophocles, Herodotus, Plato, Aristotle, Virgil, Livy, Seneca, Plutarch, and Marcus Aurelius, along with the many other voices of the ancient world. They belong to our human family: capable of wisdom and blindness, generosity and prejudice, beauty and cruelty. We honor them best not by placing them on pedestals, but by entering into conversation with them as fellow travelers in humanity's unfinished journey. Our hope is that the journey is guided by the ideal of love, not manliness.