The Rise Of The Right

Books reviewed in this essay: Roads to Dominion: Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States by Sara Diamond The Guilford Press, 1 995 445 pages, $19.95 softcover White Lies, White Power: The Fkjht Against White Supremacy and Reactionary Violence by Michael Novick Common Courage Press, 1 995 350 pages, $1 6.95 softcover Warrior Dreams: Violence and Manhood in Post-Vietnam America by James William Gibson Hilland Wang, 1994 357 pages, $1 2 softcover The April 1995 explosión at the Oklahoma City federal building has long vanished from the headlines, having made way first for the O.J. trial, then the Bosnian conflict, and more recently , the Presidential primaries. Once the trial of accused bombers Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols begins, the tragedy, its causes and consequences, will again compel attention. But the silence now surrounding the event - an event of epochal historie importance, given the number of people murdered and the political climate that engendered it - suggests that a strong degree of denial may now be overtaking our political life. The media' s attention span is, of course, shorter than any crack fiend's. And violent acts like the Oklahoma City bombing tend to be viewed as madness- connected only by degree of shock value - through the media lens. But the 11 months since the bombing have, at least, made clear what questions the media hasn't asked - particularly how Oklahoma City fits in with other less-violent conservative attacks on government, and with the surge in right-wing power nationwide. Progressives may cheer at present Republican bumbling, but the American right is, despite it, more powerful now than at any time since the 1920s. A historie realignment of the South toward the G.O.P. is only hitting stride. The Christian Coaliüon dominates can politics in 30 states. Democrats from both House and Senate and many state legislatures have chosen not to defend seats in droves this year, and most are likely to be replaced by Republicans. Despite the polldriven President Clinton' s resurrected standing among those asked, it isn't easy to see the electoral votes adding up to a November win for him. Beyond such measures of the nation's political pulse, an economically threatened electorale has come to accept the notion that government is their enemy, rather than what its citizens make of it. Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Pat B uchanan have fanned this unpatriotic notion to hatred, while cowardly DemocraLs pay lip service to it. Such antagonism lies at the core of recent extremist violence and attempted violence - including the Oklahoma bombing - against what the far-right and militia groups often cali the "Zionist Occupational Government." How did the right wing grow to its present power? Though various histories of leftwing movements have been written over the past three decades, no exhaustive scholarly history of the right existed until now. Sara Diamond 's Roads to Dominion, however, rectifies the situation almost single-handedly , describing the development of right-wing thought from the 1940s to today, and the groups - many toiling in obscurity on America' s political fringes - that laid the groundwork for the right' s recent growtli. It's Diamond's dispassionate approach to her subject that makes her book powerful, and chilling. Instead of dismissing the irrationality of right-wing ideology, as scholars and the media have done, Diamond insists right-wing political activism is "part and parcel of. . .routine politics" in America. She finds consistency in its underlying tenets and intellectual confidence among its adherents. And she shows how conservative ideas- put forlh by religious and corporate interesls and, more recently. their "(hink tanks"- have found their way to the mainstream. Diamond makes clear that the right's animosity toward government has always been half sham. Conservatives oppose govemment as a distributor of wealth, but support it (and spending on it) to enforce an order conducive to their business and moral concerns. She identifies three strands of 20th-centuryright-wingthought - libertan - anism, militarism and traditionalism - and shows how these have struggled, via competing blocks of Cold War conservatives, and neoconservatives, the Christian Right and racists, for right-wing primacy. Diamond provides histories of dozens of groups, from the John Birch Society and Liberty Lobby (whose anti-Semitic newsletter, "Spotlight," Timothy Mc Veigh often read), to Operation Rescue, the Moral Majority and Christian Coalition. And she demonstrates how, with Soviet Communism's collapse, their emphasis has shifted from policing the world to moral issues (including homosexuality and abortion) and domestic control. Important stories, many overlooked by mainstream sources. turn up in Diamond' s book; some deserve still more investigation. Most striking is her demonstration of how Christian right organizations became a tier of government in the mid80s, carrying out Reagan administration policy in support of right-wing torces in Central America, South África and the Philippines. (This included White Housecoordinated efforts by Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell to aid Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios Montt.) Such groups, Diamond shows, saw those countries' left-right struggles as a holy war, and left-wing guerrillas as Satan's instruments, deserving of torture or death. Diamond's is a political and organizational history of the right. In White Lies, Instead of dismissing the irrationality of right-wing ideology, as scholars and the media have done, Diamond insists right-wing political activism is "part and parcel of... routine politics" in America. MA TTKOPKA is Senior Editor and Project Director at Ellipsis Arts, a Long Island, NY-based record and book publisher. White Power, Michael Novick investigates violence, both by organizations like the Ku Klux Klan and Torn Metzger' s Aryan Resistance, and - too of ten - pólice and government organizations whose ostensible purpose it is to protect us. Novick' s book covers more ground than it adequately can. A rambling introduction argües for socialism, and the first chapter ("Racism 101") offers a broad-brush primer on racism. But White Lies, White Power contains information you won't find anywhere else. And Novick' s insights into the historie and economie bases of right-wing violence are put to better use in the book's body. There Novick shows (for example) how American pólice departments were created during post-Civil War immigration, largely to protect middle and upper-middle class property and ensure order. This emphasis - clearly - has remained. Novick also shows how groups like the Klan, rooted in the Establishment, held a status like the Masons or Elks in many American towns during the first part of the century (Harry Truman and Supreme Court Justice Edward White were members as young men) and with pólice "broke strikes, hunted draft dodgers, harassed pacifists and other opponents of the war effort." Turning to the present, Novick documents recent violence against minorities, gays and progressives by right-wing groups, including David Duke's National Association for the Advancement of White People and militia groups supporting Pat Buchanan's presidential campaign, placing such acts in a framework of those groups' local andnational development. He offersenough evidence of pólice involvement with and membership in such groups - in San Diego, Houston, Indianapolis and other cities - to arouse fear. His background on events leading to the 1992 Los Angeles riots, forinstance,creates a clear picture of how L.A.'s Hispanic and AfricanAmericancommu- nitieshavebeenterrorized by the L.A.P.D., many of whose members have flirtedwith the ultra-righL Transcripts of pólice radio broadcasts taken from a commission that studied L.A.P.D. racismafterRodney King's beating-full of racist slurs and violent claims-make one's hair stand on end. Novick details both neo-Nazi and pólice involvement in anti-abortion violence, and reports on legal and financial backing given by conservatives like minister Pat Robertson to extremists - ircludingKlanmembers - accused of such violence. A particulariy troubling cliapter shows how the Klan and otlier groups, availing themselves of First Ainendment rights that mayormaynotprotectthemjiavegainedaccess to local cable IV, with programs leadingdinxUy to violence in San Francisco, Kansas City and Portland. It's part of Novick' s thesis that the Klan and racist pólice are "shock troops for servative and right-wing interests," working with their consent if not outright conni vance. Assertions like this, rather lacking in nuance, erop up throughout. When Novick suggests, forexample, that federal efforts to curtailnght-wing violence may be "a kind of obedience training of the newreservesofthe Nazi-Klan"-implying that such groupsaregovemment adjuncts-or writes that the F.B.I. "rebuüt the Klan in the South" in the 1970s, he does his case little good. Other assertions beg to be backed up. At one pointNovickstates that "federal inents have exposed a massive racist operation stealing vastquantities of military weaponry ." Are such robberies tied to the recent wave of attempted bombings of federal installations in western states, readers may wonder? No more is said on the subject. Such sloppiness may make it too easy for critics to overlook the book's real valué. In the Conservative He art of Darkness A tone of barely restrained outrage permeates White Lies, White Power, Novick clearly hopes to arouse readers toaction. But understanding the motives of the angry cop or reactionary white male requires another, more sympathetic approach. This challenge is taken up in James Gibson's Warrior Dreams: Violence and Manhood in PostVietnam America, a book that gained attention when firstpublished in 1994, but which draws new resonance from the Oklahoma City bombing, especially in what it can teil us about the thinking of men like Nichols and McVeigh. Gibson is ably suited to his task, having grown up around guns and having insight about people who defend their ownership. He's interested in the violent fantasy life of American males, and in ways Hollywood and publishers nourish such fantasies. From westerns to war stories, Gibson shows, books and movies aimed at American males long assumed the superiority of American morality and culture. But America's loss in Vietnam - and the agonized controversy that surrounded our involvement in the war - dealt a blow to such assumptions. Gibson limits himself to Vietnam, but it's clear that disturbances accompanying the - including demands by women and minorities for power - set off a wave of reaction and paranoia that may still be rising. Gibson examines the moti vationsof those caught up in the strongest wave of reaction, those whom he calis "the new Warrior class," among whom the likes of McVeigh and Nichols - and more peripherally a great many American men - must be counted. And he discems an underlying myth or story that is told and re-told obsessively in books and movies they consume. The myth, whose contours will be recognizable to anyone (SEENEXTPAGE) Novick documents recent violence against minorities, gays and progressives by rightwing groups, including David Duke 's NAAWP and militia groups supporting Pat Buchanan's presidential campaign wíio has seen a few Charles Bronson orCIint Eastwood films, goes like this: The hero loses his family, generally through some act of violente perpetrated by society's "dark" forces, and sets out to obtain a "justice" that the official world - grown too corrupt, too liberal, too tolerant of criminal and moral excess - would deny him. Though hindered by misguided orevil authorities and various women, he nonetheless achieves bloody vengeance. Many innocents die; they go unmoumed. The violence comes too thick and fast, and the hero - and millions who watch or read - is relieved of the diflïculty of deciphering issues in the moral minefield that American life has become. Gibson doesn't say so directly, but a great sense of powerlessness is addressed in such art. Timothy McVeigh obsessively watched such films, according to reports. And Hollywood and publishers have discovered an insatiable appetite for films and books - from Billy Jack to Dirty Harry to Lethal Weapon - that regurgitate some or all of its elements. Gibson traces the power of this fantasy to govem even our leaders' actions. The notion that the American military was forced to fight Vietnam with a "hand tied behind its back," as Ronald Reagan often put it - though a million American soldiers were deployed in Vietnam, and four times more bombs were dropped there than were used in all of World War II - has dominated foreign policy ever since. It led to Colin Powell's the U.S. should never again enter a conflict unless willing to use all its resources against " an enemy. It underlay the Gulf War onslaught against Iraq. Readers may note a correlation between such official arguments and the cries of the N.R.A. and others against gun control: Liberáis, it is asserted, would force decent citizens to fïght the war on crime with their hands tied behind their backs, lea ving them defenseless even in their homes. The two to three million military-style rifles sold since the Vietnam War's end can't be correlated to rising crime, though, but to rising fear - and not so much fear of crime as of lost power. Buying guns, it would seem - and buying into gun culture - buys back lost dignity, a dignity many feel the culture has for, and - as important - a means to do it with. Paramilitary culture and the dream of open conflict, Gibson writes, "offerfs] men the fantastic possibility of. . .being reborn as warriors," remaking a world grown hostile to their kind. That such a forcé won the American Revolution, Gibson states, is "of profound consequence" to militia members, who treat the Second Amendment's assertion of their right to arms as gospel. Ultimately, it might lend authority for another war, against a government bent on denying their "rights." Gibson, oddly, feels men need such fantasies. Absorption in them, he thinks, reveals that at an "unconscious level these ancient creation myths live on," that warriors and war still shape men's fantasies aBout wno they are? uut 11, as Gioson asserts, such fantasies are imbedded in the brain's deep structures, why take such pains to show how they' re inculcated, how rooted in contemporary life they are? Aggression in males may be natural, but the culture of violence - as Gibson makes clear - is learned. It's likelier such dark imaginings address a social crisis, the problem of creating new responsibilities for men in a culture which has long gained purpose and prestige from militarism, but where even the dignity of subsistence labor is now no longer a given, and lifelong uselessness looms areal possibility. Such conditions, which reflect both a spiritual and social crisis, are likely to fuel hatred, to which the rhetoric of Newt Gingrich and Pat Buchanan lends legitimacy. But what the press and many liberáis overlook is that all those scary white guys in battle fatigues, right along with those scary black guys with their violent music - and nowadays a great many members of the middle and lower middle classes - have reason to be furious. Their litany of woe is now so widely known that even the shameless Buchanan can recite it: downsizing, underemployment, lack of education and health care. Berlín Wall or no Berlin Wall, as Diamond points out, the struggle for some equitable sharing of labor' s spoils remains the subtext of all political struggle. The question is to what purpose all that anger will be bent. What the press and many liberáis overlook is that all those scary white guys in battle fatigues, right along with those scary black guys with their violent music - and nowadays a great many members of the middle and lower middle classes - have reason to befurious. Their litany ofwoe is now so widely known that even the shameless Buchanan can recite it: downsizing, underemployment, lack ofeducation and health care.