An image which was posted on a Patriot web site. Juxtaposing a column of US tanks and the
burning Branch Davidian compound outside Waco, this image suggests the relentless power of
the federal government crushing the Branch Davidians and, in the process, rolling over the
rights of other Americans to worship as they please and to own firearms.
Recent events such as the fiery FBI seige of the Branch Davidian compound outside of Waco, the killing by federal agents of Vicki Weaver and her son at their Ruby Ridge, Idaho cabin, and gun control meaures such as the Brady Bill and the assault weapons ban, all have heightened fear of the federal government among those on the political far-right. In the ideology of the far-right, there is general agreement that something is profoundly wrong with America: that our government has has accumulated so much power that it is a threat to its citizens and their rights; that our economy benefits mostly the very rich while the middle class is smothered by government regulations and taxes; that our society and its traditional values are being undermined.
John McManus, President of the John Birch Society, expressed this view:
...most Americans know something is eating away at the foundations of this great nation. Unemployment, national and personal indebtedness, economic slowdown, loss of faith, declining national stature, a vaguely defined "new world order," broken families, and much more have stimulated worries from coast to coast.... Sadly, we witness the presence of powerful forces working to destroy the marvelous foundations given us by farseeing and noble men 200 years ago (McManus, 1995: ix-x).
In Patriot ideology, individuals and their morally significant actions are at the root of everything that happens in the world. People do good things, or people do bad things, but there is no such thing as a coincidence or an accident, no unintended consequences. As one Patriot explained to a New York Times reporter:
Nothing in government occurs by accident. If it occurs, know that it was planned that way. To be planned...there must be planners. If you have planners, you must have a conspiracy (quoted in Janofsky, 1995).
This conspiratorial rhetoric is directly rellated of the kind of language used by Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1951 to explain perceived setbacks in the seemingly treacherous world of the early Cold War:
" What can be made of this unbroken series of decisions and acts contributing to the strategy of defeat? They cannot be attributed to incompetence. ...The laws of probability would dictate that part of [the] decisions would serve this country's interest...
How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that men high in this government are concerting to deliver us to disaster? This must be a project of a great conspiracy, a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so black that, when it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men..." (McCarthy, quoted in Stern, 1996: 139)
If events had been largely accidental or random, McCarthy suggested, we would expect at least some of them to have favored American interests. On his view, however, world politics had been characterized by an "unbroken series" of setbacks and defeats for the interests of America and the free world. The only reasonable explanation, he asks his listeners to imagine, is that this string of disasters is the deliberate product of a sinister conspiracy which has penetrated American government, sabotaged its policies, and led the US toward internationalist socialism.
Following this kind of reasoning, contemporary Patriots are led to look for the roots of America's problems in the deliberate actions of individuals or groups who, for their own nefarious reasons, are hostile to the American way. Given the divine inspiration of our Constitutional Republic, it is hard to imagine that there might be flaws intrinsic in our social or political system. So, Patriots generally conclude, if something is wrong with America it can only be because somebody somewhere is intentionally corrupting our political legacy, undermining our system, and attacking our God-given rights. But who would do such a thing? And why?
The John Birch Society (JBS) is one of the leading organizations dedicated to answering such questions. Its president, John McManus, explains:
We believe that the first step toward learning what is really going on in our country is the realization that some so-called capitalists are neither conservative nor anti-communist. Instead, they are power-seekers who are using their great wealth and influence to achieve political control. ...Not only the kind of power that flows from great wealth, but absolute power, the kind that can only be achieved politically (McManus, 1995: 3-4).
McManus refers to "the men who really run our country" as "the Insiders." Allegedly led by ultra-rich international bankers such as the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds, and working through elite organizations such as the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission, the Insiders have no loyalty to any particular country or political system. They are no friends of the American Constitutional Republic. Rather, they seek to maximize their own wealth and power on a global scale, and to overcome all obstacles in the way of their desired New World Order. For them to attain their goal of absolute global dominance, the protections embodied in the US Constitution must be weakened or destroyed.
According to John McManus:
The world government sought by the architects of this new world order would mean an end to the nation we inherited, and the destruction of the greatest experiment in human liberty in the history of mankind. World government would also establish socialism in place of the free market system, a certain route to conversion of this nation into another Third World deadend. ...The stakes are nothing short of a future marked by national independence and personal liberty (McManus, 1995: 70, 103).
The John Birch Society and the Liberty Lobby are the most important "Americanist" organizations promoting conspiratorial world-views, but there are significant differences between them. The Birch Society avoids explicit racism or anti-Semitism in its well-produced materials. However, the Liberty Lobby and its founder, Willis Carto, have promoted (more or less thinly veiled) anti-Semitism, holocaust revisionism, and racial views of history (Mintz, 1985; Diamond, 1995: 140-60, 261-5).
For the Birch Society, Americanism means protecting fundamental values of individualism: American national identity involves traditions of strictly limited republican government and free-market, entrepreneurial capitalism.
For the Liberty Lobby, however, Americanism represents a religious, racial, and economic identity. In other words, real Americans are assumed to be white, Christian, middle-class people who work for a living.
Through its lurid tabloid The Spotlight, Liberty Lobby represents itself as defending a "populist and nationalist agenda"; which expresses "the point of view of the unorganized exploited middle class - the 'producers'." According to Liberty Lobby, these hard-working American taxpayers are doubly exploited by two classes of (essentially alien) social parasites: the wealthy elite of stateless international bankers (a thinly veiled anti-Semitic code) who profit from interest payments on national and personal debt, and recipients of welfare and foreign aid (assumed to be mostly people of color) who are supported by US taxpayers. In Liberty Lobby propaganda, then, Americanist conspiracy theory begins to shade over into outright racism and anti-Semitism. Their central claim is that America is being dragged down by an evil conspiracy of stateless international bankers led by the Rockefellers and the (Jewish) Rothschild family, and by the burden of supporting the shiftless poor who populate American inner cities as well as the Third World. This kind of rhetoric, playing into longstanding mythologies about a Jewish global conspiracy, has led the Anti-Defamation League (1995: i) to label Liberty Lobby as "the most significant anti-Semitic propaganda organization in the United States".
Many Patriots sincerely disavow racism and anti-Semitism, and denounce such groups as
the Liberty Lobby as un-American. Others, however, embrace racism
and anti-Semitism and construct their political program on that basis. I encountered
these currents of racist anti-globalism when, at an anti-NAFTA rally primarily organized
by and for Syracuse-area unionists, local neo-nazis circulated through the crowd
distributing audio cassettes. 
I was handed
a recording of the radio program American Dissident Voices, featuring William
Pierce. Pierce is the leader of the neo-nazi National Alliance and
pseudonymous author of The Turner Diaries, the notorious
novel of white supremacist guerilla war which allegedly inspired the Oklahoma City
bombing. On the taped radio program, Pierce (1992) speaks of long-term decline of the US
economy which he represents as the result of basic forces "which any high school
drop-out can understand" - the impenetrable mumbo-jumbo of academic economists
notwithstanding. According to Pierce, internationalization of production and
deindustrialization of the US are two sides of the same coin and have for the last 45
years been the deliberate policy of a "power elite." Pierce described this elite
as "New World Order schemers" seeking to "permanently fasten their grip on
the power and wealth of the world". There are, he told listeners, "men in
Washington and New York and London and Tel Aviv who are behind the policies which are
exporting American jobs to Mexico and Hong Kong because they want to create a one-world
economy in which Mexicans and Chinese and white Americans will have the same living
standard". None too cryptically, Pierce described members of this hidden elite as
"the eternal outsiders, the eternal parasites whose strength always has been in their
ability to manipulate and deceive rather than in their ability to build things."
Stealthily, they control the media, public opinion, and the agendas of both major
political parties in the US. They are "hell-bent" on creating "a world
without national boundaries or even national distinctions, a world in which every national
economy has been submerged in a global economy, a world with a single homogenized labor
force and a uniform standard of living". The inevitable result of global economic
integration, according to Pierce, is racial integration and leveling, the mongrelization
of the US work force and a corresponding loss of racial/national identity among white
American workers, declining harmony and vigor in the workplace, lowered productivity, and
growing social costs for the support of "non-productive" elements in society.
To stop their impoverishment and
subordination into an interdependent and mongrelized New World Order, Pierce urged white
Americans to educate themselves about their racial identity and interests and to organize
accordingly, whereupon, he chillingly suggested, "you can be sure that we'll have a
national cleaning day". What he has in mind here may resemble an episode described in
Pierce’s now infamous novel, The Turner Diaries: after “Aryan”
forces secure politico-military control of southern California, they immediately drive
non-whites into the desert and annihilate those whose racial identity appears ambiguous.
Then, during what Pierce calls “the day of the rope”, tens of thousands of white
“race traitors” who may have supported a political agenda of social equality or
been involved in trans-racial relationships are hanged from lamp posts, trees and traffic
lights all over the city (Pierce/Macdonald, 1980: 153-56, 160-69).
Once white Americans regain control of their own destiny, Pierce envisions a world in which racially and religiously similar nations might be united under a single political authority which Pierce calls "the Aryan World Order" (Pierce, n.d.). And what of the rest of the world? To prevent third world overpopulation from endangering the global ecosystem and thus the racial living spaces of white nations, Pierce explicitly advocates genocide on a global scale. Without equivocation he calls for "the radical depopulation of the non-White world" using "modern chemical and biological means" (Pierce, n.d.). This horrifying vision of a white supremacist response to globalization - a final solution in the US, to be followed by global genocide and an "Aryan World Order"- illustrates the extremes to which the scapegoating tendencies implicit in conspiratorial narratives so readily lend themselves.
Some versions of Christian Patriot ideology are grounded in an obscure racialized theology known as Christian Identity. Identity doctrine teaches that white Anglo-saxons are the true chosen people of God and the descendants of the lost tribes of Israel. Jews are understood to be the direct biological descendants of Satan, fraudulantly presenting themselves as the chosen people but actually offspring of Cain, spawned in the liason between Eve and the Satanic serpent, the product of original sin. Jews are seen as the primary agents of an ancient Satanic conspiracy to destroy the chosen people and frustrate God's design. Pawns in this conspiracy are "pre-Adamic"peoples, "non-whites" who are said to have been created prior to Adam and who are understood to be not fully human. In this racialized view of genesis, "race mixing" between Adamic peoples - whites - and others is seen as profoundly evil insofar as it undermines the identity of God's chosen people and corrupts their bloodlines with those of inferior and evil races allied with Satan (see Barkun, 1994 and Ridgeway, 1995). Among the most prominant evangelists of Identity doctrine are Richard Butler of Aryan Nations, but Christian Identity has a much broader influence within the Patriot movement and in citizens' militias.
Regardless of whether their arguments include implicit or explicit racism or
anti-Semitism, the conspiratorial logic of far-right political discourse leads to scapegoating. 
If America's problems are the result of evil
forces plotting to harm us, then the solution must be to identify and neutralize those
sinister individuals or groups. While only a small segment of the Patriot movement
explicitly calls for something like a "final solution" in America, most Patriot
groups see the world in terms of a conspiratorial narrative which invites its audience to
identify and attack those identified as outsiders, enemies, or traitors. As one caller to
a Patriot-oriented radio talk show put it: "The problem we have right now is who do
we shoot?" (quoted in Stern, 1996: 223). Talk of rough justice and the
"execution" of "traitors" is commonplace within the Patriot movement.
To see an example, click here.
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