Outbreaks of this sort of thing often happen when conservatives are out of power. With Republicans in office, the right wing doesn’t generally mind expanding government. During the Bush years, the dominant movements on the right were neoconservatism and a nationalist evangelical Christianity that was more interested in merging with the government than overthrowing it. Now, with the Obama administration, we’re seeing the emergence of an older, perennial style of American reaction that often accompanies periods of liberal ascendancy. It is isolationist and defensive, paranoid about government, and prone to conspiracy theories about subversive global elites.
“It helps to step back and see the militias as a particular manifestation of a form of right-wing populism known as the Patriot movement,” says Chip Berlet, a senior analyst at Political Research Associates, a think tank that studies the right wing. “The Patriot movement has been around a long time. Probably the best-known precursor in recent times was the John Birch Society, which was big in the '60s. They made pretty much all of the claims you’re hearing now—tyranny, income tax as socialism, the United Nations, gun control. There’s nothing new in any of this except the Obama birth-certificate stuff.”
And even that has precedents. With FDR, Berlet points out, there were rumors that his name was really Franklin Delano Rosenfeld. “The idea that aliens are secretly taking over—it’s the same narrative writ much larger {now} because of white fear.”
Race adds a particularly combustible element to the mix. “A key difference this time is that the federal government—the en y that almost the entire radical right views as its primary enemy—is headed by a black man,” says the Southern Poverty Law Center report. “That, coupled with high levels of non-white immigration and a decline in the percentage of whites overall in America, has helped to racialize the Patriot movement, which in the past was not primarily motivated by race hate.”
Essentially the anti-immigrant movement, the Patriot movement, and old-fashioned Dixiecrat racism are all merging. “The fast growth of the militias is troubling, but it’s in the context of something that’s more broad, and that’s in some ways more troubling,” says Levin. “This underlying stuff—whether it’s manifested at town halls, manifested on talk radio, manifested by lone wolves, it’s all part of a spectrum of the same phenomenon.”
In the past, the combination of fury, dispossession, wild su ion, and weaponry has led to serious violence, and few who study the right wing expect things to be different this time around. “I’m not sure we’re at the same point we were right before the Oklahoma City bombing, but certainly things are continuing to heat up and could really become explosive,” says Potok.
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