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HEALTH CARE REFORM AND THE AMERICAN APOCALYPSE
Across the nation this summer, unknown
numbers of people are hunkering down and
arming up for what they believe is an immi
nent battle for the soul of America. Town halls
and tea parties provide just a small glimpse
of the rage, fear and paranoia fomenting on
front porches and in Internet chat rooms,
in the conservative heartland and beyond.
While the details may vary, the visions in such
forums share a common theme: In one way or
another, a fight to the death is coming, and
coming soon.
These deep-seated fears explain at least
some of the vitriol, the violent scuffles and
death threats bubbling up in town hall pro
tests against health care reform. It's all too
easy for certain right-wing activists to accept
that the president's plan will create death
panels or mandate taxpayer-funded abor
tions, because some of these people don't just
believe that Obama wants to destroy capital
ism and kill their granny and their
unborn child—they believe he
wants to kill them, too.
At a town hall meeting with
Democratic Senator Ben Cardin in
Hagerstown, MD on Aug. 12, one
attendee carried a sign that read
"Death to Obama," and "Death
to Michelle and her two stupid
kids." Another sign at the same
event compared Obama to Hitler.
That's not the only insidious com
parison making the rounds: One
protester who attended a raucous
town hall with Pennsylvania Sen.
Arlen Specter told a Village Voice
reporter that Obama was a "21st-
century Marxist" who would adopt
the same methods Hugo Chavez
used to take power in Venezuela:
"infiltration of the education sys
tem, political correctness, class
warfare ideology, voter fraud,
brainwashing through the main
stream media."
As the town halls have
become more heated, the hints
of violence have become increas
ingly overt. One man showed up
outside the president's town hall
meeting in Portsmouth, NH with a hand gun
strapped to his thigh; on Aug. 17, another
brought an assault rifle to a demonstration
at the site of Obama's speech to veterans in
Phoenix. It emerged that the latter's presence
at the meeting had been coordinated with
a former member of the Viper Militia, whose
adherents were convicted of weapons and con
spiracy charges in the 1990s and were accused
of plotting to blow up federal buildings.
Clearly, this is about far more than health
care policy. Instead, it's just one sign out of
many heralding a resurgence of the extreme
right wing. It's been widely reported that
extremist groups are growing, in numbers
and membership, since Obama launched his
presidential campaign. As in the past, some of
the ideas espoused by these groups are work
ing their way further toward the political core
with the help of right-wing politicians and
media figures.
For instance, take Rep. Michele Bachmann's
(R-Minn.) claim that expanding AmeriCorps
would result in liberal "re-education camps."
This statement has now morphed into rumors
that the young community service volunteers
are being armed to take over the country—
possibly with some help from the New Black
Panther Party. Similarly, Dick Armey, the for
mer House majority leader and lobbyist for
the pharmaceutical industry, is predicting an
October surprise from Obama in the form of
"a hyped-up outbreak of the swine flu, which
they'll say is as bad as the bubonic plague to
scare the bed-wetters to vote for health care
reform."
Among liberals, the dominant take on all
of this seems to be ridicule and derision, or
else impotent hand-wringing about the demise
of "civil discourse." It's as if they'd forgot
ten that many of these so-called loonies just
happen to own guns—and while liberals go
on chattering, these folks are stocking up on
ammunition. And right-wing radicals have an
advantage when it comes to ideological fervor.
Obama and the Democrats in Congress quickly
frittered away any populist energy that might
have come out of the recession, the fiasco of
the Bush years or the 2008 election. All that's
left are compromises on top of compromises
that they call policymaking—for which no one
can muster much enthusiasm. Right-wing zeal
ots, on the other hand, think they are fighting
for their lives by standing fast against commu
nism, or the anti-Christ, or both; they're not
only doing God's work, but also fulfilling their
destiny as true American patriots.
Indeed, the right-wing revival is infused
with the words and imagery of the American
Revolution. The gun-toting protestor at
Obama's New Hampshire health care.town
hall was also carrying a sign that read, "It Is
Time To Water The Tree Of Liberty"—a clear
reference to a quote from Thomas Jefferson
that the "tree of liberty must be refreshed
from time to time with the blood of patri
ots and tyrants." (Because he had a permit
and wasn't in shooting range of the tyrant,
the patriot was allowed to keep his gun.)
On a website also called The Tree of Liberty,
members exchange Obama insults and apoca
lyptic visions in a forum called Committees
of Correspondence, named for assemblies in
colonial America that protested tyrannical
British policies.
The denizens of these gatherings and web
sites, the tea parties and the raucous town •
halls, represent a long-standing force in the
country's political culture: American nativ-
ism. This oft-ignored strain draws its central
impulse from an opposition to anything that
challenges the vision of America as a white,
Anglo-Saxon, Protestant nation. Nativists have
taken aim at Catholics, Jews, freed slaves and
successive waves of immigrants, beginning
with the Irish fleeing the potato famine in the
1840s and continuing through to present-day
immigrants from Latin America. They call for
a closing of U.S. borders and support strict
adherence to the Constitution in its most lit
eral sense, shorn of equivocating amendments,
as a remedy for unwanted social change. And
they have been inextricably linked to racist
right-wing movements, from the Ku Klux Klan
to the Militias to the Minutemen who now
"guard" the border.
That's why the election of Barack Obama
adds even more fuel to nativist rage: The pres
ident is a black man, child of an interracial
union, the son of a foreigner who bears a for
eign name. According to some, he is not even
an American citizen. "[T]he face of the federal
government—the enemy that almost all parts
of the extreme right see as the primary threat
to freedom—is now black," says a report
from the Southern Poverty Law Center, which
tracks extremist groups." And the fact that the
president is an African American has injected
a strong racial element into even those parts
of the radical right, like the militias, that in
the past were not primarily motivated by race
hate."
For me, the recent outpourings on the
right-wing fringe resonate strongly with what
I witnessed in the mid-1980s, when I was
working on a book and film on the racialist far
right called Blood in the Face. I came across
people caught in the misery of economic'
depression, caused by tough loan practices
and declining prices for farm commodities,
along with a drive by big banks and insurance
companies—the primary farm lenders—to
consolidate smaller farms into bigger and big
ger agribusiness units in the interest of larger
profits. Many residents were losing farms that
had been in their families for generations.
In this atmosphere of desperation, para
noia flourished. Some talked about a hunting
party in Mexico that had spotted a secret
airfield of MIGs. Some had heard reports from
Baja California of a troop of North Korean
troops hidden in the forest. Others said they
knew the Russians were breeding an especially
strong horse to haul heavy artillery across
the Bering Strait for the coming attack. Still
others told me that the United States and
the Soviets were making deals aboard small
submarines under the Arctic ice. And the
new superhighways leading from Texas up
the Mississippi River, they said, were part of
a secret plan to accommodate Mexicans car
rying backpacks stuffed with small nuclear
bombs. Many also saw social factors like
abortion, feminism, homosexuality and inter
racial marriage as symptoms of the general
devolution of American culture. Behind it all,
they believed, were the Jewish bankers, the
Trilateral Commission, the Federal Reserve, the
UN—and the U.S. government.
The people who believed these things
bought food and ammunition and hid it in safe
places. They got out of the banks, went from
paper money to gold, bought mini 14s. Some
built bomb shelters or small forts for defense.
They studied the Bible at night and believed
they had discovered in Scripture secret plans
to eradicate their way of life.
They got ready to fight. A few
actually died in bloody shoot-
outs with the Feds: Elusive Posse
Comitatus leader Gordon Kaul and
the Order's Bob Mathews were
the movement's first martyrs in
the 1980s, followed by those
who died in the 1990s at Ruby
Ridge and WACO—both cited by
Timothy McVeigh as inspiration
for the Oklahoma City bombing.
The vision of dead babies being
carried out of the Murrah building
in 1995 prompted a crackdown
on far-right movements by federal
law enforcement. But even before
Obama's election, pockets of
activity remained.
The Southern Poverty Law
Center has reported rapid growth -
among right-wing fringe orga
nizations, although it says the
numbers don't yet equal the hey
day of the militias in the 1990s.
Still, the greatest danger is likely
to come not from card-carrying
members of any organization,
but from small, leaderless cells
or lone gunmen, perhaps inspired
by another far-right favorite: the biblical story
of the Phineas Priest, a man who caught an
interracial couple together and slew them
both, declaring that he was acting in the
name of a just God. It is the same notion of
justifiable homicide—whether in self-defense
or in defense of a just cause—that report
edly drove Scott Roeder, the gunman accused
of killing abortion doctor George Tiller, and
James von Brunn, accused of murdering a
guard at the Holocaust Museum.
The people I met back in the 1980s told
me about their theories and their plans for the
coming conflict earnestly, fervently. I first saw
this fervor resurface last year, while covering
the election in the so-called heartland. I saw
it on the fringes of Sarah Palin rallies, and I
saw it when a Missouri ethanol plant manager
leaned forward confidentially and declared,
for the video cameras, why he was against
Obama—because the candidate, he said, bore
the mark of the Beast, of Satan, or the anti-
Christ: 666.
James Ridgeway
Veteran reporter James Ridgeway is a senior corre
spondent for Mother Jones magazine.
Clearly, this is about far more than health care policy.
Instead, it’s just one sign out of many heralding a
resurgence of the extreme right wing.
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8 FLAGPOLE.COM • SEPTEMBER 2,2009