Why Do Republicans Insist on Fanning the Flames of Domestic Terrorism?

You will be forgiven if you’ve recently considered the idea that somehow you’d fallen asleep and awoken in 1994. A centrist Democrat resides in The White House, Democrats control the Congress, the country has been debating the President’s health care reform proposal for more than a year and the newspaper headlines speak of violent right-wing militants.

Conservatives do not have a monopoly on over-heated, paranoid and even delusional rhetoric but two things separate the liberal activists and their conservative counterparts. First is the long standing willingness of Republican politicians to not merely acquiesce to the rhetoric but to court it and embrace it.  In the mid-1990s ties to extremists proved not to be an electoral liability for Republican candidates and today we’re seeing Republican candidates again reaching out to extremists and mimicking their language and fears.

For nearly a year and a half now intemperate Republican politicians have been stoking fear and rage amongst their base. From Sarah Palin accusing then-candidate Obama of “palling around with terrorists,” to Congressman Steve King urging conservative activists to “implode” IRS offices in the wake of an attack on an Austin IRS office this winter. We’ve seen Republican leaders repeatedly prodding their base while attempting to disavow any responsibility for bad acts. Those bad acts are the second distinction between left and right – the willingness to act on violent urges.

The recent history of violent political episodes in this country are all rooted in right-wing sentiment. Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post writes today,

There was a time when the far left was a spawning ground for political violence. The first big story I covered was the San Francisco trial of heiress Patricia Hearst, who had been kidnapped and eventually co-opted by the Symbionese Liberation Army — a far-left group whose philosophy was as apocalyptic and incoherent as that of the Hutaree…

But for the most part, far-left violence in this country has gone the way of the leisure suit and the AMC Gremlin…

By contrast, there has been explosive growth among far-right, militia-type groups that identify themselves as white supremacists, “constitutionalists,” tax protesters and religious soldiers determined to kill people to uphold “Christian” values. Most of the groups that posed a real danger, as the Hutaree allegedly did, have been infiltrated and dismantled by authorities before they could do any damage. But we should never forget that the worst act of domestic terrorism ever committed in this country was authored by a member of the government-hating right wing: Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City.

McVeigh is only the most obvious example. There was also Olympic Park bomber Eric Rudolph (he also bombed a couple of abortion clinics and a gay nightclub) and scores of other less well remembered attacks and near misses carried out by  people such as Bufford Furrow.

After the attack on the IRS building Newsweek’s David Graham noted the parallels between the mid-1990s and today,

In a report tracing far-right terror between the Oklahoma City bombings and fall 2009, SPLC found six cases of attacks targeting the Internal Revenue Service. More important,12 of the 75 overall incidents documented have happened since Obama’s election, or else happened prior but involved Obama (as a motive or a target) anyway. Potok says the level of violence is reaching levels last seen during the 1990s, when a wave of militias arose—especially in states like Montana and Michigan—of people who believed they needed to protect themselves from the government.

Still, we should remember that this isn’t a recent phenomenon in American politics. In 1964 Richard Hofstadter wrote a seminal piece for Harper’s Magazine entitled “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” in which he detailed the history of American political paranoia back to the Founding of the nation. In his essay Hofstadter deconstructs the elements of Goldwater era right-wing thought,

First, there has been the now-familiar sustained conspiracy, running over more than a generation, and reaching its climax in Roosevelt’s New Deal, to undermine free capitalism, to bring the economy under the direction of the federal government, and to pave the way for socialism or communism…

The second contention is that top government officialdom has been so infiltrated by Communists that American policy, at least since the days leading up to Pearl Harbor, has been dominated by men who were shrewdly and consistently selling out American national interests.

Identical sentiments are still expressed daily on radio and television by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and their minions of imitators. Does this mean that a significant portion of those who watch Fox News should be viewed as potential domestic terrorists? Certainly not, but it doesn’t even take an insignificant portion – just two guys with some fertilizer, a Ryder truck and a belief that their country faces a dire threat from their own government.

Photo by MeetTheCrazies’