The Fringe
A Force Upon the Plain: The American Militia Movement and the Politics of Hate
by Kenneth S. Stern
Simon & Schuster. 303 pp. $24.00
On the morning of April 19, 1995, a powerful bomb was detonated next to the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City, taking the lives of 168 people including nineteen children. In the immediate aftermath of the blast, as hundreds of FBI agents and investigators were still converging on the scene, a number of political commentators expressed fears that international terrorists had once again, two years after the World Trade Center bombing, succeeded in striking a deadly blow at the United States.
Several days later, however, the authorities stumbled upon Timothy McVeigh, sitting in jail in Perry, Oklahoma for driving a vehicle without a license plate. Far from being a member of an international conspiracy, the chief suspect in this horrific crime turned out to be an ex-Marine from a small town near Buffalo, New York, a homegrown fanatic, born and bred in the heartland. No sooner was this shocking fact released than analysts and politicians alike began to pose a new set of theories. The Oklahoma terrorists, it was now argued, were part of a rising tide of right-wing extremism sweeping the country, a tide that received its energy from the successes of conservatism over the previous two decades and that had reached a crest, just five months before the blast, in the November 1994 congressional elections.
Thus, according to Jonathan Alter, a senior editor of Newsweek, “the bombers took mainstream conservative ideas . . . and made them extreme-right views.” To Lewis H. Lapham, the editor of Harper’s, “it was conceivable that he [McVeigh] had read some of the material circulated by the Christian Coalition.” Robert Wright, a senior editor of the New Republic, opined that if elements of the “militia milieu” had drafted the Republican Contract With America, it “would look in many ways as it now looks, if with rather more oomph.” In the judgment of Michael Kramer, chief political correspondent of Time, Newt Gingrich and right-wing talk-radio hosts were to blame: “The gulf between hyperbolic words and last week’s despicable treachery is not all that great.” Even President Clinton joined in the chorus:
We hear so many loud and angry voices in America today whose sole goal seems to be to try to keep some people as paranoid as possible and the rest of us all torn up and upset with each other. They spread hate, they leave the impression, by their very words, that violence is acceptable.
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A year has now passed since the bombing. Timothy McVeigh and one of his accomplices, Terry Nichols, are on trial. Others may still be at large. With more information about the various groupings that compose the radical Right fringe, we are in a better position to make some knowledgeable judgments about its nature.
In A Force Upon the Plain, Kenneth S. Stern, a researcher at the American Jewish Committee, points to several factors underlying the heightened visibility of the extreme Right. One such factor is the end of the cold war; energies once devoted by right-wing extremists to mobilizing sentiment against worldwide Communism are now, writes Stern, being directed elsewhere—and primarily against the U.S. federal government. But the government has in fact contributed to the fears of these groups, and even fueled them. The FBI’s botched assault against the white separatist Randy Weaver and his family at Ruby Ridge, Idaho in August 1992; the 1993 siege and destruction of the compound housing David Koresh’s Branch Davidian sect by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms; and the passage in the same year of the Brady gun-control bill are all cited by Stern as landmarks in the growth of violent anti-government sentiment on the far Right.
As for who is drawn to these movements, one Montana-based observer interviewed by Stern invokes the image of a funnel “moving through space”:
At the front end, it’s picking up lots and lots of people by hitting on issues that have wide appeal, like gun control and environmental restrictions, which enrage many people here out West. Then you go a little bit further into the funnel, and it’s about ideology, about the oppressiveness or the federal government. Then, further in, you get into the belief systems. The conspiracy. The Illuminati. The Freemasons. Then, it’s about the anti-Semitic conspiracy. Finally, at the narrowest end of the funnel, you’ve drawn in the hard core, where you get someone like Tim McVeigh popping out.
In chapter after chapter tracing these strands, Stern draws a picture of the various conspiratorial groups ranging from the Aryan Nations to the Militia of Montana to the Posse Comitatus, each exploiting hot-button issues to expand its ranks.
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All this sounds like a potent, and scary, brew. Nevertheless, the evidence gathered by Stern and other researchers suggests that, in terms of both numbers and political appeal, the extremist movements are nowhere near so strong as we have been led to imagine.
Because groupings on the far Right tend to be secretive, obtaining estimates of membership figures is a problematic endeavor. “When you’re at war, you don’t give the enemy the number of your troops,” a John Birch Society official said in an interview last October, and his organization is less surreptitious than most. But an advantage of secrecy is that it can mask low membership rolls. According to one monitoring group, the Center for Democratic Renewal, total militia membership lies in the range of 50,000 to 100,000. These figures may well be on the high end of the scale, however. A June 1995 report from the Anti-Defamation League offers a national total of 15,000 militia members spread across 40 states.
In the political arena, moreover, the fringe Right on its own is decidedly weak. In 1988, the white supremacist David Duke, running for the presidency on the neo-Nazi Populist party slate, received all of 150,000 votes out of a total of 90 million ballots cast nationwide. Four years later, Bo Gritz, a chief organizer of the various militia movements, sought the presidency on the same line and garnered fewer than 100,000 votes—approximately one-tenth of 1 percent of the total number of ballots cast. At the state level, Duke, who managed to win a seat in the Louisiana state legislature in 1989, failed in his bid for the governorship in 1991 against a scandal-tarred incumbent in a state mired in economic distress. Duke is now running for the U.S. Senate in Louisiana but is far more likely to attract a nice dollop of publicity than a winning share of votes.
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Finally, it is simply not the case that the radical Right is part of a continuum that merges seamlessly into the broader fabric of American conservatism. On this point, Stern goes only so far as to suggest that Republican victories in 1994 “brought with them people who were able to stake out the fringes of their party” and that “when the center shifts, the margins move, too.”
While that may be true, the evidence Stern presents also makes it clear that militia leaders and others on the fringe Right, when they are not raving about federal agents descending from black helicopters and “concentration camps” run by the Internal Revenue Service, are often as likely to direct their rhetorical fire at mainstream Republicans and conservatives as at Democrats. Bo Gritz, for example, once warned of a “satanic” and “Zionist” plot designed to turn the United States “into USA, Incorporated, with King George [President Bush] as chairman of the board”; Newt Gingrich is known in militia circles as “Newt World Order Gingrich”; and Rush Limbaugh is seen as part of the “liberal establishment,” a traitor to the cause who, in the words of John Schloser, the commander of the Colorado Free Militia, is “a Judas Priest.”
To be sure, there is today one prominent politician, Patrick J. Buchanan, who has planted one foot in the conservative movement and edged the other into the extreme Right camp. Though Buchanan no longer serves up the blatantly anti-Semitic fare of four and five years ago, he has also never repudiated his earlier statements; in the meantime, his nativism and his denunciations of the “new world order,” among other themes touched upon in his fiery speeches, have been enough to attract elements of the far Right into the organizational ranks of his presidential campaign (not to mention discombobulating many otherwise sensible conservatives).
It is instructive, however, that throughout the primary season Buchanan’s ties to the far Right were regularly cited by other Republicans as among the factors rendering him unfit for public office, and that Buchanan, to stay afloat politically, had to distance himself from the radicals around him. Indeed, it could be said that Republicans have on the whole been more vigilant about these matters than Democrats. As Eric Breindel pointed out in the New York Post, mainstream conservative disapprobation of Buchanan, both for his statements and for his associations, made a strange contrast with the spectacle of President Clinton’s attendance at the swearing-in ceremony of former U.S. Congressman Kweisi Mfume as president of the NAACP in February; Mfume, as head of the congressional black caucus, had entered into a “sacred covenant” with the racist Louis Farrakhan and his Nation of Islam, and has yet to renounce this association. The double standard on extremism is still, it seems, very much alive.
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More than 40 years ago, the historian Richard Hofstadter characterized extremist right-wing movements as a phenomenon distinctive to our country’s history, a reflection of “the rootlessness and heterogeneity of American life, and above all, of its peculiar scramble for status and its peculiar search for secure identity.”1 The anxieties feeding fringe movements today have changed little since Hofstadter wrote. Notwithstanding the handful of radicals who surfaced in (and were then discharged from) the apparatus of the Buchanan campaign, an argument could be made that these groups are, if anything, more marginal than at any point in this century.
After all, as Stern reminds us, the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920’s enjoyed a membership that may have numbered in the millions, and its influence could be detected on Capitol Hill in the passage of restrictive immigration laws. Today, the Klan is a shadow of itself. Membership declined to approximately 42,000 by 1965, and has fallen steadily since then to under 6,000. No other group has come close to stepping into the Klan’s place, though many smaller ones are on the scene. Indeed, the very marginality of these grouplets may help explain the descent into violence of the kind we saw in Oklahoma City a year ago.
Hofstadter himself was not unduly alarmed about the political prospects of the fringe Right. “I do not share,” he wrote, “the widespread foreboding among liberals that this form of dissent will grow until it overwhelms our liberties altogether and plunges us into a totalitarian nightmare.” Today, types like Timothy McVeigh and militia members drilling with heavy weaponry in armed bands in the woods deserve (as Stern urges) the closest possible scrutiny by law-enforcement authorities. But much of the handwringing about the influence of the radical Right on contemporary conservatism smacks, itself, of demagoguery, being a little too complacent to be wholly sincere, and constituting yet further evidence that a paranoid streak is hardly limited to one quadrant of American politics.
1 “The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt,” in The Radical Right, edited by Daniel Bell (1964).