Fear and Loathing : We’ve been reading about extremist groups, but now we can read what they write themselves : EXTREMISM IN AMERICA: A Reader, <i> Edited by Lyman Tower Sargent (New York University Press: $55 hardcover, $17.95 paperback; 380 pp.)</i>

The street in front of the White House is closed to traffic, staid commentators are in a tizzy, TV cameras are chasing talkative armed men through the woods. . . . What’s going on? The political and media establishment is panicked by the sudden discovery that not all Americans approve of every aspect of their government.

The Republican victories in the November, 1994, election appalled liberal pundits and Democratic Party loyalists, who promptly denounced the GOP resurrection as if it were a terrorist attack. Then, when the murderous bombing in Oklahoma City slapped the nation with the distinct differences between metaphor and reality, the President, Congress and the mainstream media seemed shocked to discover that thousands of ordinary citizens view them as sinister enemies.

Before we are overwhelmed by the rhetoric of the 1996 presidential campaign, we need to remind ourselves that hostility toward government has been around since well before the Boston Tea Party.

Government conspiracy theories are a mainstay of popular culture. A nationally distributed magazine called “Paranoia” reports on numerous conspiracies in every issue, as does a weekly newspaper called “Contact.” The popular television drama “X- Files” has as its premise an enormously complex government plot to cover up all sorts of bizarre activities by a shadowy cabal of international spooks.

The great majority of Americans believes that it is not just our right, but our duty to criticize government in all its forms. And citizens’ complaints don’t materialize out of thin air. Government--unintentionally and otherwise--does things to irritate people. Within memory, the federal government has withheld information from us about the Kennedy assassination, lied to us about the war in Vietnam, disgusted us with Watergate, insulted us with the Iran/Contra affair, picked our pockets with the savings and loan scandal, horrified us with the Waco fiasco--and now wonders what everybody’s so mad about.

Rushing to help answer this question, New York University Press is pushing forward the publishing date of an anthology peculiarly suited for the times. “Extremism in America,” edited by political scientist Lyman Tower Sargent of the University of Missouri/St. Louis, collects original source material from a broad range of fringe political groups. Read together, they may provide insight into not only the social concerns that fueled the 1994 Republican landslide but also the radical sentiments that may have led to the Oklahoma City bombing.

Sargent’s book is drawn from the remarkable Wilcox Collection of Contemporary Political Movements at the University of Kansas. Compiled by Laird Wilcox, the country’s unofficial archivist of volatile political movements, it includes material from about 8,000 radical and fringe organizations, including posters, flyers, pamphlets, books, newsletters, magazines, photographs, videotapes and taped and transcribed interviews.

Choosing seminal writings from dozens of organizations on the Far Right and both the Old and New Left, Sargent offers a sampling of direct, unexpurgated statements delineating the political stances of groups ranging from the right wing American Nazi Party to the left-wing Students for a Democratic Society, from the racist Aryan Nations to the Black liberation-oriented African People’s Party, from ultra-conservative John Birch Society to the Communist Party of America.

Sargent has organized the tracts into chapters dealing with common themes: race relations, family values, education, taxes and so forth. The arrangement usually offers various right-wing views of the topic, followed by some representation of left-wing thinking on the same subject. Each section and group is introduced by Sargent’s remarks placing the material in historical and political contexts. The writings are largely products of the last 25 years, primarily because that is the period covered by the Wilcox Collection.

As Sargent acknowledges, this anthology gives substantially more space to far-right organizations than to the left wing. The feminist presence, for example, is extremely limited. Very few black organizations are represented, and there is a notable absence of other minority groups. Sargent offers two reasons for this slant: The Wilcox Collection itself includes more far right- wing than leftist material, and, in Sargent’s view, the new left has traditionally been discussed more seriously and in a more balanced fashion. The far right has more often been viewed as the ravings of a few lunatics, and is better known for what it is against than for what it supports.

The result is a demonstrative primer of the intricate complex of themes and views that make up the modern history of American extremism. What might have been simply a required text for undergraduate poli-sci classes takes on more general relevance now because extremism is in the air, and this volume contains original documents from some of the groups that are making news today. By drawing the voices of so many different groups together, Sargent allows us to see how much they have in common, despite their opposing positions on the political spectrum.

Most of the texts in this volume--right, left and otherwise--presume a mind-numbingly vast conspiracy theory. Some shadowy group is always portrayed as pulling the levers of power, lining its pockets at the expense of average citizens. The power brokers vary from conspiracy to conspiracy, depending on the group doing the theorizing. To the Ayran Nations, the villains are the Jews. To the Left Green Network, they’re capitalists. To the Posse Commitatus, it’s the Federal Reserve Board. To the Lavender Left, it’s the Patriarchy. To other groups, the villains are Masons, Humanists, the Illuminati, blacks, feminists--but whatever the case, government is nearly always a part of the conspiracy. Although it’s hard to imagine the John Birch Society and the Association of Libertarian Feminists agreeing on much, both oppose public child care as a government plot.

The enemies always have monumental power, which naturally enhances the prestige of the groups who are fighting them. A powerful enemy can only be defied by a noble and courageous hero. Or, to use the emotional rhetoric of the Posse Commitatus: “We are facing a lawless group in power who are in the process of destroying our freedoms and making us serfs of a ONE-WORLD GOVERNMENT, ruled by the ANTI-CHRIST. It is time that we stand up and be counted. This is no game for weak-knees or panty-waists. This calls for men with guts; men who will fight to protect their rights and God-given heritage, not those who would feed their neighbors to the crocodiles in hopes that the crocodiles would eat them last.”

The layout of this book inadvertently clarifies the profound similarities in tone and style between the various groups. Sargent’s explanations of each group are italicized at the beginning of their tracts, but it’s easy to overlook these transitions and plow through an entire chapter without realizing where, exactly, one screed ended and another began. This is partially due to the stentorian pomp that seems endemic to political diatribes. But sometimes opposing groups even attack the same targets, as in these passages railing against international bankers by the far-right Lord’s Covenant Church and the socialist Left Green Network:

“America will not shake off her Banker-controlled dictatorship as long as people are ignorant of the hidden consequences. International Financiers, who control our government, as they control almost all governments in the world, and the news media, have us almost completely within their grasp. They can begin and end wars at will, bring prosperity or depression to our nation, give us peace or unleash ‘urban guerrilla warfare’ on our cities.” (from LCC’s “The Constitutional Way--Every Citizen a Stockholder,”

“The world economy today, under both corporate capitalism and state-’socialism,’ is an interconnected system based on the exploitation of the many. Its goal is not to meet human needs in harmony with nature, but the investment of capital to create more capital in order to satisfy the profit and power motives of the elite few that control the means of production and militarist nation-states.” (from “Principles of the Left Green Network,” 1989)

The virulence of the “enemy” rhetoric has prompted more objective readers to apply the “Hate Group” label to extremists. But it is also apparent that many of these groups exhibit a similar style of “love” for their cause. Their enemies may be evil incarnate, but their friends and supporters are equally good--incapable of wrong, and prepared to create heaven on earth, if only the conspiracy which they oppose were put to rest.

Sargent is alert to the progression of ideas through time, and the fact that an extremist view may eventually become mainstream, and vice versa. Consider the following quote:

“Legal and illegal aliens are increasing unemployment among citizens, adding to already overburdened welfare rolls, and contributing to violent crime. The time has come to demand enforcement of our laws concerning illegal immigration and to severely limit legal immigration.”

These words are taken not from a recent speech by Gov. Pete Wilson but from a 1980 flyer from the rabidly-racist National Assn. for the Advancement of White People. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the NAAWP has infiltrated the California Republican Party; it simply shows that the group happened to identify a hot-button issue long before it was acknowledged by politicians.

Perhaps Sargent’s most important contribution to the escalating debate is his analysis of populism. In his scholarly introduction, Sargent discusses the rise in the 19th Century of a movement to make government more responsive to the needs of farmers and small business owners, to limit federal activity and retain more power on the state level. Not surprisingly, populism and its fundamental question--who holds the power, who makes the decisions--is also at the heart of many of today’s radical fringe movements. This thinking is apparent in tracts from groups on both the right and left. The right wing Posse Comitatus, for example, believes that the county sheriff should be the highest government official. This small and diffuse group has clashed with officials over taxes and weapons since its founding in 1969. But the leftist Students for a Democratic Society (from the same era) and the Left Green Party have also argued for radical decentralization of government and devolvement of power to the governed.

Although civil rights groups and the media are quick to label the Far Right as racist and anti-Semitic, these modern populists are obsessed less with blacks and Jews than with the growing size and power of such agecies as the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and the Bureau of Land Management. If the material in this book is any indication, these anti-government views can be just as passionately felt as bigoted belief. This may come as a revelation to a nation groping to understand an act of the enormity of the Oklahoma City bombing and may help explain how someone like Timothy McVeigh, who does not seem overtly racist or anti-Semitic, or conform to our clearest image of someone filled with hate, could carry out such a barbaric act. As Sargent explains in his introduction, “If there is something seriously wrong with the world--and everyone in this book believes there is--it is only sensible to go to whatever lengths are necessary to correct that wrong or those wrongs.”

In recognizing the intense convictions and volatile emotions revealed by the groups depicted in this book, one can’t help but remember that this is only a small sampling of the 8,000 groups represented in the Wilcox Collection, and that the primary focus of the collection itself is on just the last twenty-five years of American history. The reader may come away from all this vehement rhetoric convinced that it’s not at all surprising that the Federal Building in Oklahoma was bombed. What is surprising is that much more violent terrorist activity does not happen in this country.

We can only suppose that, for the great majority of sympathizers with these extremes, talking about it, writing about it, getting together with a few like-minded cronies over pizza and beer to staple and mail pamphlets or to pass out flyers are sufficiently satisfying actions. The evidence suggests that in many cases the First Amendment may act as an effective steam valve releasing pressure by nontoxic means and that attempts to suppress it would only increase the incidents of violence in the future.

The United States is an ongoing experiment in the evolution of a culture based on idealistic principles. The same energy that spawns our multifarious, constantly changing music, art, literature and technology, the chaotic diversity that makes this nation a prolific source of innovation in every field is also expressed in our politics. Today’s government is far from perfect in the eyes of most Americans. It is not the same government as it was 50 or 100 years ago, much less identical with what was designed by its founders. And it will continue to change, to shift and grow and shed like the enormous and complex human ecology it serves. Part of the reason government changes is the constant spawning, growing and dying of political groups and views that test each other and the status quo. This huge and intricate social organism we call a nation is far more complex and interdependent than that of the deepest rain forest. It may be that, as in other complex ecologies, it is the balance created by opposing forces that sustains life for the whole.