Conversing with the Dead: The Militia Movement and American History

Abstract

If one forgets the past, he will not be prepared for the future.The Militia of MontanaYES! TODAY JUST AS YESTERDAY.The Michigan MilitiaWhen the militia movement emerged in the United States during the mid 1990s its members were widely seen as simply the latest practitioners of what Richard Hofstadter famously called “the paranoid style in American politics.” There was much comfort to be had in this characterization. It fitted the militia movement into a long-standing model for understanding right-wing extremism in American life, one in which the principal characteristics of such extremism were readily understood: conspiratorial, Manichean, absolutist – if not apocalyptic – and, of course, paranoid. The problem with this approach, though, is that it tends to discourage any examination of mainstream culture's role in the creation or sustaining of those defined as extremists. It downplays the extent to which the pool of ideological resources employed by the extreme right exists not just on the margins of American life, but also in the very fabric of the American ideology. Little attempt is made to explore the extent to which the ideas and beliefs of these “extremists” are related to, and are drawn from, key periods in US history: from the American Revolution, the period of the constitutional settlement or the settling of the American West, for example. Yet such ideas and beliefs are absolutely central to how groups like the militias see themselves and the world around them.