American Extremism

History, Politics and the Militia Movement

Darren Mulloy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Edition: 1
• Year: 2004
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Print ISBN:
  9780415483803
  9780415326742
• Subtopic: Politics
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134358014
• Index: Politics & International Relations

American Extremism explains how at the heart of the politics practiced by the militia movement is an attempt to define the nature of 'Americanism', and shows how militia members employ the myths, metaphors and perceived historical lessons of the American Revolution, the constitutional settlement and America's frontier experience to do so. Mulloy argues that militia members' search for the 'authority of history' leads them to a position best characterized as 'ahistorical historicism', in which political interests in the present are given greater weight than the demands of a historically accurate reading of the past.

With discussion of such recent events as the Oklahoma City bombing, Waco and the September 11th attacks alongside topical issues including militia conspiracy theories and the origins of Americans' right to keep and bear arms, this work provides the deepest understanding to date of the American militia movement.

1: Introducing the militia movement

The militia movement began to appear in the United States in early 1994, following the formation of the Militia of Montana and the Michigan Militia in February and April of that year. It grew extremely rapidly. In June 1995 the Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC) "Militia Task Force" reported the existence of "[a]t least 224 militias and their support groups" in "39 states," and by 1996 this had increased to "441 armed militias in all 50 states."¹ It is important to stress, however, that what emerged was not a "movement" in the conventional sense. There were no national leaders directing militia affairs, for example, nor even a national organization to which all militia members belonged. To understand the militia movement we are better to see it as a diverse, decentralized, and, to a large extent, localized collection of groups and individuals with certain shared concerns.

These concerns, broadly stated, center around three key themes: first, opposition to gun control and a strong belief in the Second Amendment, including the right of the people to bear arms against the state;² second, a profound distrust of the federal government, which, it is felt, is becoming increasingly intrusive, has overstepped its constitutional boundaries, and is attacking the personal freedoms and liberties of American citizens; and, third, although this is not a belief shared by all militia members, a fear that the United States itself is under threat from an international conspiracy attempting to institute a "New World Order" or "one world government" on the country under the auspices of the United Nations. More specific concerns of militia members might include those related to environmental issues, abortion rights, jury rights, gay rights, states’ rights, affirmative action, educational standards, immigration policy, religious issues, the effect of international trade agreements such as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the "militarization" of American law enforcement, or the "legality" of federal income tax.³

The diversity of the militia movement is one of its most interesting features. Militia groups range from the extremely open to the intensely secretive. Some are predominately paramilitary in nature, others little more than constitutional discussion groups. Most militia members are law-abiding citizens; a small, but significant, number are criminals and terrorists. Some militias are composed of racists and anti-Semites; others welcome blacks, Latinos, and members of other minority groups. And while some militias are essentially survivalist and have withdrawn from the world and its vices, others have embraced the technology of the Information Age and all the profits to be made from it. Classifying the movement becomes even more complicated when "militia support groups" are included. According to the SPLC, these are groups—such as the American Freedom Network, Police Against the New World Order, or the Outpost of Freedom which "promote the formation of militias or provide information and materials to them" but are not actually "full-fledged militias," although, of course, they may evolve into being one.⁴

Despite such difficulties some attempts have been made to separate the movement into distinct "types" or "wings." Using the example of the two earliest and most influential militias, the Militia of Montana and the Michigan Militia, Joshua Freilich, Nelson Pichardo Almanzar, and Craig Rivera have suggested, for instance, that the movement can be divided into "offensive" and "defensive" wings. For Freilich and his colleagues, the Michigan Militia provides a good example of the defensive wing of the movement, because although it "holds extreme characterizations of the threat posed by the federal government, it is concerned with maintaining the appearance of legitimacy." It does not "openly encourage ‘offensive’ behavior against the government," and employs "hierarchical, military-style organizational structures" as a means of preventing such behavior. "Members of this wing," Freilich et al. write, "appear to be motivated by a desire to organize as a means of civil defense against attacks on their liberties; they are less concerned about the possibility of government infiltration of their movement." In contrast, the "offensive" wing of the movement as represented by the Militia of Montana appears "highly motivated to attack the government in both preemptive actions and retaliation," is not greatly worried "about public perception," but is much concerned with the possibility of government infiltration. Accordingly, this wing’s preferred organizational structure is said to be that of "secret underground cells consisting of no more than seven to 14 people," a structure seemingly modeled on former Ku Klux Klan leader Louis Beam’s notion of "leaderless resistance"—Beam himself, though, does not claim credit for the idea, tracing the concept’s origin, as Jeffrey Kaplan has pointed out, to a 1962 essay by one Colonel Ulius Louis Amoss.⁵

Robert Churchill also divides the militia movement into two distinct wings: a "New World Order resistance movement" on the one hand, and a "constitutional wing" on the other. He sees the former as including the Militia of Montana, and argues that this wing of the movement shares many of the millennial, racist, and anti-Semitic themes of far-right groups such as the Aryan Nations. "This wing of the movement," Churchill writes, "has had some success in recruiting members in the Pacific Northwest and in Southeastern Michigan, regions with a long history of racial tension." As far as Churchill is concerned the "constitutional wing" of the movement is "best represented by large, publicly organized militias" such as the Michigan Militia, the Ohio Unorganized Militia, the Indiana Citizens Volunteer Militia, and the Missouri 51 st Militia, which are distinguished by their "disavowal of white supremacy and their insistence on public meetings." Timothy Seul uses different terms for his system of categorization, dividing militia members into "Patriotic Liberals" and "Patriotic Reconstructionists," but he is in general agreement with the distinctions made by Churchill and Freilich et al. Thus, for Seul the Patriotic Liberal (in the Tippecanoe County branch of the Indiana Citizens Volunteer Militia or the Ohio Unorganized Militia) and the Patriotic Reconstructionist (in the Kokomo branch of the Indiana Citizens Volunteer Militia or the Militia of Montana) both see the federal government as a threat to American rights, American liberties, and the American Constitution. But the former believes that the system can be reformed from within, through education and political participation, while the latter takes the view that such reform is "impossible," and that violence is inevitable. The Patriotic Reconstructionist, unlike the Patriotic Liberal, Seul argues, has a "clear vision about how armed resistance might take place." He also contends that, unlike the Patriotic Liberal, the Patriotic Reconstructionist views life in the present-day United States largely "through the lenses of conspiracy theories."⁶

Such classifications are useful as far as they go, but things are not as straightforward as the key distinction, found in each of these approaches, between less violence-prone, "aboveground," inclusive militias and secretive, more violence-prone, "underground" groups would suggest. Considerable areas of overlap exist with respect to how ideas, attitudes, activities, and people move between the defensive/offensive, New World Order resistance/constitutional, or Patriotic Liberal/Reconstructionist wings of the militia movement (not least, as we will see, when it comes to how militia members employ America’s past to legitimate their political concerns). Therefore, while being aware of, and paying attention to, differences of emphasis and approach between—and even within— militia groups, it is still analytically useful to think of these groups as belonging to a broader "movement," albeit one with varying degrees of ideological and organizational coherence.

So who are militia members? Surveying the existing research, Michael Kimmel and Abby Ferber identify a number of the "demographic characteristics" of the movement. Militia members, they say, tend to come from rural areas and small towns, tend to be Christians—especially "fundamentalist Christians"— are predominantly (but not exclusively) white men, from "lower-middle-class" occupational backgrounds—"small farmers, shopkeepers, craftsmen, [and] skilled workers"—and are frequently military veterans. John George and Laird Wilcox suggest that if a group of militia members were selected at random "five categories" would be represented, in the following order of frequency:

1 People generally conservative in outlook, although not very ideological, who are worried about what they see as a repressive government imposing all manner of strictures on them, from unfair taxes to gun control.

2 Would-be adventurers—generally non-ideological weekend-warrior types who like to wear camouflage and play soldier in the woods. They watch movies with western and military themes and like to hunt and fish.

3 Libertarian conservatives who accept some government on the local or state level, but who oppose federal regulations of almost all kinds.

4 Anarcho-libertarians who consider virtually all government as repressive and overbearing. They refer to themselves as "freemen" or "sovereigns."

5 Hardcore extremists who harbor an obsessive conviction that the United States, indeed the world, is in the grip of an all-powerful conspiracy.⁷

Testing a number of widespread hypotheses about militia members, researchers Sean O’Brien and Donald Haider-Markel have constructed a "preliminary statistical model" to help identify the "social, political, and demographic factors that explain why some states have relatively high levels of militia activity while others have none at all." Some of the hypotheses they tested include whether militia members possess a below-average education; whether because of the antitax perspective of many militias there is a positive relationship between a state’s property-tax burden and militia activity; whether states that elect more Democrats to their legislatures have lower levels of militia activity because militia members tended to "despise liberal Democrats"; whether states with higher numbers of military veterans (especially Gulf War veterans, because, in contrast to the Vietnam War, the Gulf War "was fought by an all-volunteer force") produce a greater number of militia members; whether militia members are more likely to be ardent gun owners; and whether, finally, militia members evidence a "willingness or capacity to partake in violent behavior." Finding little support for the assumption that militia members were more likely to be Vietnam veterans or have a lower standard of education, O’Brien and Haider-Markel conclude that the "most significant predictors of militia activity are the number of ardent gun owners, the number of Gulf War veterans, the willingness/capacity to engage in violent behavior as measured by the amount of stolen explosives, and the percentage of Democratic representation." These findings were broadly confirmed in a more extensive study by Joshua Freilich, who found that militias "are strongest in states which overall, on average, have higher levels of ardent gun owners, current military personnel, military veterans and law enforcement personnel," and that a state’s property-tax burden was "unrelated" to the level of militia activity O’Brien, Haider-Merkel, and Freilich point out, however, that much research into these aspects of the militia movement still needs to be done.⁸

If there are difficulties involved in identifying precisely who militia members are and where they come from, there are also major problems in determining the overall size of the movement. Indeed, as Steven Chermak says, in truth "reliable data on the movement’s size do not exist." Between 1994 and 1996 estimates of the number of militia members ranged, for example, from 7,000 to 300,000, but when militia "supporters" or "potential supporters" were included the figure rose to somewhere between 5 and 12 million.⁹ Given that, during its initial stages at least, new groups were being formed and others disappeared almost on a daily basis, and that anyone with a fax or a modem can claim to have formed a militia, the problems for those monitoring the movement are considerable. Moreover, government agencies are not permitted to keep track of political groups unless there is evidence that they are engaging in criminal activities, and the militias themselves obviously have a vested interest in overstating their own significance. During the mid-1990s militia leaders in Texas, Michigan, and Montana claimed, for instance, to have, respectively, 100,000, 15,000, and 10,000 members.¹⁰

According to Kenneth Stern, of the American Jewish Committee, the Oklahoma City bombing impacted on militia members in four different ways. Some people were driven away from the movement, some militias changed the name of their organizations to "Committees of Correspondence" or something similar, and some people were driven further "underground." Because of "the flood of publicity they received," overall, though, the "militias’ membership actually grew" following the destruction of the Alfred P.Murrah Federal Building. However, if this was the immediate impact of the bombing on the militias, over a longer period the actions of Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols have been viewed in more detrimental terms. Although neither McVeigh nor Nichols ever belonged to a militia group, recent research by Chermak confirms that the association between the movement and the bombing remains firmly fixed in the mind of the American public because of the decision by the media to use militias as part of the explanation for it. The media "framed militias as being outsiders threatening to mainstream values," Chermak says. They were widely portrayed to be irrational, paranoid, extremist, and terroristic. This, combined with the investigative and lobbying efforts of "watchdog" agencies, the intervention of key policymakers and law enforcement officials, and several high-profile criminal cases involving militia members, made it much more difficult for the movement to recruit new members after 1996.¹¹

The movement was also damaged when the twenty-first century arrived without the "Y2K apocalypse" many militia members had been predicting. And for some observers the execution of Timothy McVeigh on 11 June 2001 brought the movement to a symbolic "close"—the SPLC reported that the number of "anti-government Patriot groups" had fallen from a peak of 858 in 1996 to 194 in the summer 2001 issue of its Intelligence Report.¹²The horrific events of 11 September 2001 appear to have halted the militias’ numerical decline, however. Journalists across the U.S. have reported, in the words of one account, "a quiet upsurge" in militia activity since the terrorist attacks. Predictably, perhaps, different militia groups have responded in different ways. Some, such as the Michigan Militia Corps-Wolverines, have offered their assistance to the government to help prevent any further attacks against the "homeland." Some, such as the Militia of Montana, have taken the opportunity to increase sales of survival gear and renew concerns about international conspiracies. And others, such as the Militia of Georgia, have been warning about the threats to civil liberties from new government anti-terrorist legislation such as the USA Patriot Act of 2001.

The impact of the attacks of 9/11 on the militia movement provides a telling illustration of the ways in which the militias are responsive to the broader political and cultural climate in which they exist. All kinds of developments on such issues as the regulation of the environment, immigration, abortion, guns, taxation, or American foreign policy in the Middle East may help to revive the movement further in the future. And if the Gulf War of 1990–1 produced many militia recruits, who is to say that the "second" Gulf War won’t have a similar effect?¹³

Where and why? The location and causes of the militia movement

Militia groups can be found throughout America but they have their strongest presence in the western United States. As noted above, they also tend to be located in rural areas and in small towns rather than large cities. Unsurprisingly, then, those values most strongly associated with "the West"—self-sufficiency, independence, and a commonsense practicality among them—find frequent expression within the movement and seem to inform the hostile attitudes of militia members to the government "back East." As Norman Olson, founder of the Michigan Militia and one of the movement’s most prominent early figures, put it to Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA) during hearings into the militias in 1995: "There are millions, 40 to 70 million Americans out there on the other side of the Alleghenys, and there is intelligent life west of the Alleghenys, sir, and I believe that you have to talk to those people out there."¹⁴ Indeed, for many militia members government is not only metaphorically "remote," it is also physically remote. This remoteness also causes difficulties for local law enforcement agencies who can find themselves outnumbered and inadequately resourced when they have to deal with problems caused by the militias and related groups.¹⁵

Joel Dyer argues that the rise of the militia movement in the 1990s has to be understood within the context of the "farm crisis" which struck rural regions during the 1980s. Driven by a "destructive combination" of Federal Reserve-dictated high interest rates, "low prices for farm products due to multinational food monopolies’ control of the market," and reduced levels of government subsidies, many farms were forced into foreclosure. From 1980 to 1990, depending "on how you define the term ‘farm,’ rural America"lost between 700,000 and 1 million small-to medium-sized family farms," he notes. This had an enormous impact, not just on farmers and their families, but on the whole rural economy. Dyer argues that the anger and stress caused by the crisis was either turned inwards, resulting in major increases in suicide, mental illness, and alcohol abuse, or was directed outwards, either to child and spousal abuse or into "antigovernment beliefs." Long-held "rural myths that spoke of a tranquil and stable lifestyle have been replaced by paranoid conspiracy theories," he says.

As a result, the rural sector of the nation is being transformed, not only into a part of the global economy but also into a wildfire of rage, fueled by its perceived losses and blown by the winds of hate-filled rhetoric. Men and women who were once the backbone of America have been pushed into the ranks of this "anti[government]" phenomenon, some finding their way into the most violent layers of the movement.¹⁶

Michael Kimmel and Abby Ferber largely agree with Dyer’s analysis, but they see the continuing farm crisis as also a "gender crisis: a crisis of masculinity." The men who join the militia movement, they argue, are looking for a means whereby both their and the American nation’s "manhood can be restored and revived." In contrast, Robert Churchill suggests that the constitutional wing of the militias, at least, "derives most of its strength from communities situated within the rural-suburban fringe." Rather than a rural crisis driving the movement, he argues that those on this "rural-suburban fringe" are the last generation to experience the process of suburbanization, and that this involves "a shift in political culture that is profoundly wrenching for those living through it." Suburbanization, he says, "brings in its wake land use regulations, a rising tax burden and the ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Series editors’ preface
• 1: Introducing the militia movement
• 2: Approaching extremism: Theoretical perspectives on the far right in American history
• 3: Conversations with the dead: The militia movement and American history
• 4: A Revolutionary history
• 5: A republican tradition
• 6: A frontier nation
• 7: Conclusion: History and conspiracy
• Notes
• Selected bibliography