The Politics of the Personal: Over the Edge

Part 3 of a five-part series. Parts 1 [1] and 2. [1]

One of the other things about growing up in a place like Idaho is that, yes Virginia, there are racists. Neo-Nazis. White supremacists. Conspiracy-mongering survivalists. Militiamen.

You name it, we’ve got ‘em. Not very many of ‘em, mind you. Their numbers are really quite small, but they’ve been coming in numbers (mostly from California and Arizona) large enough to shift the political demographics in the state. And they come because the nearly all-white cultural landscape is a comfortable one.

Whatever name you want to give them, they all fit the description of being genuine American proto-fascists. Some of them -- the Aryan Nations folks in particular -- are quite unapologetic about it. Others, like the militiamen, are specifically geared, strategically speaking, to make inroads into the mainstream, and so they do their utmost to disguise it -- but inevitably it emerges, when you probe just a little into the belief systems they promote.

Idaho’s national image has taken a real beating as a haven for racists because of these folks, and for the most part the image is a gross distortion of the reality. Most Idahoans are deeply embarrassed by them and will find nearly anything else to talk about – as I say, they really are only a tiny faction, and most people think it’s unfair to judge the rest of the state by them, which is fair enough as far as it goes. What they seem slow to acknowledge is that the presence of such people poses special challenges that can’t be dealt with by running away from them.

I’ve had some personal experience with this. When I was the editor the Daily Bee up in Sandpoint in the late 1970s, we were faced with the tough decision of how to handle the increasing visibility of Richard Butler’s neo-Nazi Church of Jesus Christ Christian, based at the Aryan Nations compound some 30 miles down the road in Hayden Lake. After much hand-wringing, we decided it was best not to give them any coverage, since publicity was what they craved, and it would only encourage their radicalism.

What we didn’t understand was that the silence was (as it always is with hyper-nationalistic hate groups) interpreted as consent. And so, over the next several years, the Idaho Panhandle was inundated with a spate of hate crimes -- enough so that Idaho became one of the first states [1] to pass a bias-crime law -- as well as a flood of extraordinary violence, ranging from the multi-state rampage of murder and robbery by the neo-Nazi sect called The Order [1] to the pipe-bombing campaigns [1] planned by their successors. All of these acts emanated from the Aryan Nations.

By then I had moved on to other papers, but the Bee changed its policies vis a vis the Aryan Nations in fairly short order, as did most other newsrooms in the area that had taken similar approaches. I certainly never forgot the mistake.

In the ensuing years, I had various occasions to deal with these extremists as a journalist, especially in the 1990s when I began writing about the “Christian Patriot” movement, better known in the media as the “militia movement.” During that time, I had the chance to meet and talk with a substantial number of these far-right True Believers, and it was eye-opening.

Most of what you think you know about these people isn’t true. Most of them aren’t angry skinheads festooned with swastika tattoos. They aren’t uneducated backwood hicks, and they don’t have horns growing out of their heads. They are, on average, better educated than the average American; they often have business, engineering, or other technical degrees. Most of them are quiet, taxpaying (begrudgingly) citizens who have barbecues with their neighbors and take part in local bake sales for the football team. It’s only when you start digging a little beneath the surface that you discover that they’re, well, different.

There was a continuum, of course, with the political landscape in Idaho that was already present. A large portion of the Patriots I met and interviewed, interestingly, started out as members of the John Birch Society, which clearly acted as a launching pad on the path to radicalism for many future extremists; perhaps the most notorious instance of this was Robert Mathews, the leader of “The Order,” who was radicalized as a teenage Bircher and gradually became a racist assassin, overseeing the killing of Denver radio talk-show host Alan Berg and masterminding a series of bank and armored-car robberies.

You could find a Bircher background among the leadership of the movement (both John Trochmann of the Militia of Montana and militia leader Col. James “Bo” Gritz began as Birchers. And you could find it among rank-and-file followers. One Patriot I interviewed, a man who had engaged in an armed standoff with authorities in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley for several weeks, said he grew up with it in his school. “That was going in this valley when I was in school,” he told me. “My sixth-grade teacher, as a matter of fact, was a John Bircher. And she’s the one that started me on the path of teaching me the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. John Birchers were strong then. Underground, but strong.”

The conspiracist element often commingled with deeply religious beliefs of an apocalyptic nature, a paranoid belief that secular society was intent on destroying Christianity and people like themselves. It made for a toxic combination. Randy and Vicki Weaver, the objects of the notorious Ruby Ridge standoff, moved to Idaho from Iowa after being radicalized by a combination of apocalyptic fundamentalism and far-right conspiracy theories.

In general, most of these people prefer to fly under the radar, blending in. If they’re not off in the woods secluding themselves from society, as the Weavers were, then they typically just have normal homes in normal neighborhoods. Many of them have difficulty maintaining normal sustained friendships – in large part due to their innate paranoia and snap judgmentalism – but they still do their best to keep up normal appearances, if a low profile, in most other regards.

Probably the definitive examination of “Christian Patriots” was James Aho’s landmark sociological study, The Politics of Righteousness: Idaho Christian Patriotism, which should have permanently laid to rest a lot of the myths about such extremists. Built on his extended interviews with several hundred subjects, he came away with some fascinating data, to wit (pp. 160-161):

There is no evidence that Idaho Christian patriots have less formal education than their less radical peers. Indeed, the subjects studied here have on the average spent more years in school than their more conventional neighbors. This is not to say that they have achieved a better education or that they are more intelligent. But there is nothing to support the popularly held reverse contention, that Idaho Christian patriotism can be accounted for by the lack of education of its proponents.

… Apart from these differences and similarities between Identity Christians and Christian Constitutionalists, Idaho’s patriots in general do not seem more socially alienated from their communities than cross-sections of Americans or Idahoans.

And what are the defining characteristics of these True Believers, psychologically and politically? It’s a complex mix, but Aho breaks it down (p. 220):

First and preeminently, dualism. Relative to the doctrine of divine transcendence, of a perfected, spiritualized (male) Creator residing in distant heavens, the material (that is, feminine) world is profanity, unconsciousness, and death. Among the images of this fallen world are the “curse” of matriarchy, “bull-dyke” women and ladylike men; actions alleged to be associated with them – sex education, birth control, sloth, drunkenness, pornography, drug addiction, raucous music, gluttony, revelry, dance, and provocative dress; policies that presumably promote these – passivity, pacifism, communalism, and moral “dissolution” as expressed in the practices of profit without productivity, pay without work, crime without punishment, seizure without compensation, purchase without cash, and its inexorable accessory, usury; knee-jerk tolerance; the promiscuous mixing of “distinct” things – creeds, nations, species, races, classes, and roles; philosophies of hazed vision, blurred edges, and relativity; games of chance, ouija boards, the I Ching, astrology, and other New Age “satanic” technologies; and promoters of these policies – secular human educators, the liberal media, “politicians” (by which is meant those aggrandize themselves by compromising with all of the above), the “Soviet controlled” National Council of Churches, “socialist” bureaucrats, and chief conspirator himself, the archetypal “Jew.”

… A second element in the projections of those called to Christian patriotism is conspiratorialism – the psychologizing of history and the reduction of historical events to the conscious intentions of omniscient and all-powerful Benefactors and Malefactors. The search for the ultimate causes of social decline invariably ends in the quest for whom to blame and whom to eliminate.

Third and finally, there is a pervading conviction of cosmic exigency, that the world and thus life itself is in dire emergency, and that the Second Coming is imminent. This is the criterion definiedum of fundamentalism, dispensationalism and its never-ending search for signs of the Apocalypse and the Last Dispensation.

Most of these characteristics, taken by themselves, seem relatively unremarkable. It’s when they come together, congealing in a constellation of traits that produces a particular syndrome, that they become a genuine pathological influence in their communities and on society at large.

For most of my life, even into the 1990s, it was still very much possible to distinguish between these people, generally considered the fringe element of the far right, and mainstream conservatives. The mainstream right welcomed the advances of science and education, was generally civil in its dealings with its political opponents, shunned conspiracism and outrageous paranoia, and was not constantly sounding the alarm about the impending end of civilization. Religious beliefs always played a role, of course, but the old consensus – that religious freedom meant the freedom of every citizen to choose their creed without coercion – still held, for the most part.

That began to change, though, in the mid-1990s. And by the 21st century, the differences between the mainstream right and its fanatical fringe began to vanish almost altogether.

The similarities only begin with the transformation of much of the religious dialogue emanating from the religious and even mainstream conservative right in America, particularly in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Most strikingly, the apocalypticism already inherent in fundamentalist beliefs came leaping to the fore; a wellspring of preachers assuring their flocks they were living in the “End Times” came rushing forth, some even forming alliances with Israel under the assumption that Armageddon was forthcoming in the Middle East.

The inherent dualism in these beliefs took on even sharper edges, becoming more like the “exemplary dualism” of the Christian Patriots, and spreading beyond merely the religious zealots: blaming liberal decadence for the terrorist attacks (conservative pundit Dinesh D’Souza devoted an entire text to this subject – titled, fittingly, The Enemy at Home); fearful about the shifting racial admixture of the American populace, heard most loudly in the debate over immigration, where the arrival of Latino immigrants is often characterized as an “invasion”; an animus towards pacifism (treated in such national venues as Bill O’Reilly’s Fox News program as tantamount to surrender and “hating America”) and feminism (Rush Limbaugh’s infamous reference to “feminazis” being only the most famous of the sneers).

Likewise, the right-wing propensity for conspiracy theories took on a new life of its own after 9/11. The immigration debate provided a venue for many of these: It became possible for millions of Americans to learn from right-wing pundits ranging from Michelle Malkin to Lou Dobbs about the “invasion” of America being planned by Mexican radicals under a planned “Reconquista” of the Southwest – a groundless conspiracy theory that actually was concocted in the 1990s by a white-supremacist group called American Border Patrol.

But most of the paranoia has been directed at Muslims, beginning with a number of right-wing websites, most prominently Little Green Footballs and Malkin’s blog, and gradually moving into the more rarefied heights of the Beltway elite. The bloggers were prone to finding a “jihadist” conspiracy behind every unturned rock, Malkin especially. She reported looming “jihadi” cabals everywhere conceivable, from a memorial for the victims of one of the 9/11 hijackings to a suicide bombing in Oklahoma to a small clutch of Muslim clerics aboard an airline flight to Minnesota. But then we began hearing similar theories from supposedly elite right-wing thinkers like Mark Steyn and Norman Podhoretz, the latter of whom, in his book World War IV, envisioned a decades-long struggle with the forces of a radical “Islamofascism” that evidently poses an existential threat surpassing that of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany combined.

Finally, you could find the right-wing paranoid mindset turning against not just readily identifiable Others like Latinos and Muslims, but against their fellow American citizens – that is, the “treasonous” liberals who wanted to see America fail. Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly concocted a supposed “war on Christmas” being waged against American Christians by atheists and “secular humanists,” and a number of religious-right figures began inveighing against a similar “war” against Christianity in the form of the “gay agenda”. (O’Reilly even went so far as to tout, for a couple of days on his national broadcast, a theory about a growing cabal of pink-pistol-slinging lesbian thugs who beat up hapless men in various locales around the country.)

Most of all, the Enemy was increasingly identified as liberals. Building on years of radio-talk demonization of all things left, it became increasingly common for right-wing pundits to talk about liberals as being the “Enemy at Home,” as D’Souza’s book put it. This ranged from Ann Coulter’s treatise on liberals titled Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terror to Michael Savage’s The Enemy Within: Saving America from the Liberal Assault on Our Schools, Faith, and Military; from Jerry Falwell’s suggestion, immediately after the 9/11 attacks, that liberals were to blame -- "I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say ‘you helped this happen.’ ” – to D’Souza’s similar insistence five years later: “There is no way to restore the culture without winning the war on terror. Conversely, the only way to win the war on terror is to win the culture war. Thus we arrive at a sobering truth. In order to crush the Islamic radicals abroad, we must defeat the enemy at home.”

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