Blood and Politics (58 page)

Two thousand activists gathered at a Washington hotel under the banner the tide is turning, but the Christian Coalition conference itself was swirling with conflicting currents. On one hand, Ralph Reed loaded the platform with Republican Party regulars, including Kansas Senator Bob Dole and Texas Senator Phil Gramm, who talked about such economic
issues as taxes and health care. They received polite Republican applause. On the other side were the cultural warriors, best represented that day by Pat Buchanan, who urged no compromise with the Republican Party establishment. He thumped the issue of “multiculturalism” and argued that “our culture is superior because our religion is Christianity.” He also pounded free trade and NAFTA with all the pent-up ferocity that his primary campaign had produced. Opposition to NAFTA too was a cultural issue. “The battle over NAFTA is also a struggle about what it means to be a conservative in 1993,” he wrote later. “Who defines the term?” he asked. “America first” or “New World Order” were the choices Buchanan posed.

White supremacists had opposed free trade since before Willis Carto’s Liberty Lobby had testified before Congress on the issue in the early 1960s. And Buchanan had made it one of his signature issues during the 1992 primaries. As
The New York Times
reported, this conference crowd endorsed Buchanan’s America first thumping over Ralph Reed’s free trade conservatism. Reed’s resolution endorsing NAFTA never came to the floor after Buchanan spoke. For those who believed the Christian right represented a homogeneous movement of biblically motivated evangelicals, Buchanan’s dashing of Reed’s plans showed that a rift on fundamental issues existed within the ranks. At that moment, at that convention, Buchanan-style nationalist forces held the highest hand.

The debate over free trade at the Christian Coalition contained, in miniature, differences within the right wing over the meaning of fighting a culture war as well as the nature of the so-called religious right itself. In this discourse the most forceful and clear-eyed account was not put forward by Pat Buchanan but by his friend and colleague Sam Francis. In speeches and in columns for the monthly magazine
Chronicles
, Francis argued that the religious right’s constituency was motivated primarily not by theological concerns, but by the attempt to defend its traditional white civilization. In his account, conflicts over issues such as abortion and gay rights were really clashes over the “traditional middle-class social and economic dominance . . .”
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The promotion of religion was only one moment in a “social convulsion for the preservation of class, ethnic and cultural dominance.”
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Rather than a movement to implement a particular vision of God’s Law, he argued, “the religious right . . . is merely the current incarnation of the on-going Middle American Revolution.”
²⁴
Accordingly, the Reverend Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition and like groups were not the most effective instruments “because the Christianity of the right simply doesn’t encompass very many Middle American interests.”
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Francis
prescribed a formula that called for adding support for gun rights, opposition to immigration, and opposition to free trade to the cultural warfare agenda.
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He wanted this war, fought under the banner of tradition, essentially to reconquer the American state and reinstall the pre–civil rights regime. It was a fight for power and control. Francis put it bluntly: the “white middle-class core of American society and culture was being evicted from its historic position of cultural and political dominance.”
²⁷
And he wanted it back.

The concept of dominance loomed large in Sam Francis’s analysis. He sometimes spoke of “preserving” dominance, an implicit acknowledgment that society’s commanding heights were still held by his brand of white people. And his movement, whether marching under the banner of the religious right or Middle American Radicals, was seeking to conserve and protect the privileges which that dominance accrued. At other times Francis argued that “dominance” had already been lost and needed to be regained.

“The first thing we have to learn about fighting and winning a culture war is that we are not fighting to ‘conserve’ something; we are fighting to overthrow something,” Francis contended. “If our culture is going to be conserved, then we need to dethrone the dominant authorities that threaten it.” At a conference convened by Pat Buchanan, Francis did not mince his words about the total upheaval he sought: “When I call for the overthrow of the dominant authorities that threaten our culture . . . it involves the almost total redistribution of power in American society—the displacement of the incumbent governing and cultural elites, the dismantlement of their apparatus of domination, the delegitimization of their political formulas and ideologies . . .”
²⁸

He did not advocate anything illegal or violent, nor did he propose the immediate seizing of political power. The governing elites, he believed, did not rule through a monopoly of violence or the naked exercise of raw state power. Rather, they exercised ideological hegemony first, thus guaranteeing their stranglehold on the minds of the white majority. For this analysis Sam Francis, the ultraconservative anti-communist, explicitly invoked the name and the theories of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who had died in 1937, a victim of Mussolini’s prisons.

Francis demonstrated a keen grasp of Gramsci’s intellectual contributions. Gramsci had used the concept of ideological hegemony to explain how exploited workers borrowed parts of their worldview from the same capitalist class that oppressed them. From his prison cell, Gramsci posited a war of position—that is, a war for the ideologically commanding heights—prior to launching a war of maneuver, the fast-paced battle for state power. When applying these ideas to the culture war,
Francis believed that the dispossession of the white majority was legitimized by the widespread acceptance of concepts such as egalitarianism. This was the meaning of ideological hegemony in this context. As a result, a war of ideas had to be fought and the notion of egalitarianism itself had to be attacked.

Framing his disquisition on winning the culture war, Francis had started with a critique of the religious right and ended up on territory already occupied by white nationalists. Wilmot Robertson had made much the same argument two decades before: white men were a dispossessed majority in their own homeland and were ruled over through control of the political culture by a government and a class of elites hostile to their interests.

During the next years, events seemed to confirm Francis’s views. Angry white men took center stage in the electoral arena. The Republican Party led the battle against immigrant rights. Scientific racism once again entered public discourse and presented a theory contrary to the concept of natural equality. At the same time, however, the Republican Party leadership and the probusiness wing of the Democratic Party managed to pass NAFTA in both houses, and President Clinton signed it into law. After Congress combined several gun control measures into one piece of legislation, Clinton also signed the Brady Bill. Named after James Brady, an aide who was shot and severely wounded during an assassination attempt on President Reagan, the bill had previously languished in congressional committees for years.

An extraparliamentary common law and militia movement flourished during and after 1994, motivated by ideas rooted in the old Posse Comitatus. It challenged these existing institutions of authority and control and fed off the opposition to NAFTA and free trade as well as a mass resistance to gun control. The election of President Clinton and an administration of cultural and racial liberals seemed to accelerate these developments, particularly in places geographically or culturally farthest away from the centers of ideological hegemony. To understand these future events, however, it is first necessary to take one step back in time to Waco, Texas, and the trial of Randy Weaver.

April 19, 1993.
A helicopter and tanks and armored personnel carriers driven by FBI agents began a military-style assault on a seventy-seven-acre compound populated by a religious sect known as the Branch Davidians. After hours of gunfire and tear gas, a fire started and swept from one building to the next. The origins of the fire remained in dispute, as did the exact number of deaths from the fire. But at least seventy-six Davidians died altogether, including twenty-one children. For hundreds of thousands of Americans they became symbols of the federal assault on gun rights and religious beliefs.

The Branch Davidians started as an obscure splinter of the Seventh-Day Adventists, itself one of the hundreds of smaller Christian sects that abound in a land that prides itself on religious liberty. They established a religious commune called Mount Carmel outside Waco, Texas, and garnered little interest from government authorities until 1987, when a fight for control of the sect ended in a gun battle. Eight Davidians were charged with attempted murder; they included a young man who later changed his name to David Koresh. A deadlocked jury ended in acquittals, and Koresh emerged as the unquestioned guru of the Mount Carmel cult.

Davidian theology focused on an arcane set of revelations and End Times prophecies. Except to the most trained eschatological eye, it was an unfamiliar and inaccessible set of beliefs. But as Koresh transformed the commune into a heavily armed walled fortress, it began to recognizably resemble camps like the Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord compound James Ellison once controlled on the Arkansas border. The Davidians shared none of Identity’s theological preoccupation with Zionist Occupied Government or the belief that spiritual grace was attained via biological race. In fact, a mix of approximately one hundred
varied multiracial souls from Australia, the United Kingdom, Jamaica, and the United States inhabited the commune in mutual and complete obeisance to Koresh’s supposedly God-inspired will.

Early in 1992 a Texas state welfare department investigated charges of child abuse at Mount Carmel. (Like James Ellison and other cult leaders, Koresh took multiple wives, including in this case a fourteen-year-old girl.) At the same time, a local reporter began inquiring about possible plans by communards to commit mass suicide at Koresh’s instruction. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) agents also opened an investigation and learned that Koresh and associates were buying large numbers of guns and manufacturing illegal weapons. The ATF described the religious commune in terms usually reserved for paramilitaries, and undercover agents reported that Bible lessons and shooting assault rifles on a firing range were part of communal routine.

According to a report by the Treasury Department, on February 23, 1993, the Davidians showed an ATF informant a video, produced by Larry Pratt’s Gun Owners of America, that portrayed the ATF as a threat to liberty. Five days later ATF agents raided the compound on a warrant for illegal weapons. From the first minute this raid bled disaster. Four ATF agents were killed, and another twenty wounded, by an incredible barrage of gunfire from civilians. ATF bullets killed three cult members, and three others were killed either by other cultists (in mercy killings) or by suicide. Four were wounded, including David Koresh.
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Only a negotiated cease-fire allowed the ATF to disengage and carry off all its dead and wounded. With President Clinton’s administration less than six weeks old, a siege by the FBI began in the wake of the failed ATF raid.

A semipermanent camp of observers soon grew up outside the barricades. Relatives and friends of those inside the compound, their attorneys, media professionals, the merely curious, and a smattering of activists of all stripes converged. Unlike Randy Weaver’s cabin on Ruby Ridge, the Branch Davidian compound on the plains of Texas was visible to both television cameras and the gathering crowd. Virtually every FBI misstep became the subject of international news broadcasts, as did the Davidians’ theological invocations of the End Times. A month into the standoff, Louis Beam and Kirk Lyons joined this apocalyptic spectacle.

Beam’s appearance at Waco was short-lived and of little consequence to either the Davidians inside the compound or to the FBI outside it. While presenting himself as a journalist representing a California-based Christian Identity monthly tabloid, he created a small ruckus at an FBI press briefing, got himself arrested, was represented briefly by attorney Lyons, and the charges were dropped. Nevertheless, the apparent support for a multiracial (and race-mixing) sect by a former Klan dragon
who had once pledged to rid North America of every nonwhite gene signaled a significant shift in strategy. Waco became a test of the ideas enunciated at Estes Park: first establish a common front for a Christian nation and against the Beast government. Worry about the ultimate fate of people more darkly hued later.

Kirk Lyons injected himself into the legal imbroglio growing around the standoff. Before it was all over, he pressed four different lawsuits against the federal government and sought financial support for those cases from the multimillion-dollar budget of the National Rifle Association. Although he received an initial pledge of funds, the country’s biggest gun lobby ultimately decided not to support him. Despite this setback, the events at Waco enlarged the political space Lyons, Beam, and other white nationalists opened after Ruby Ridge.
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On April 13, six days before the final fiery conflagration at Waco, the trial of Randy Weaver and codefendant Kevin Harris started in Boise, Idaho. Both were indicted for conspiracy to murder as well as for the murder itself of Federal Marshal William Degan during the siege at Ruby Ridge. In addition, Weaver faced the charges that had initially provoked the conflict, selling a sawed-off shotgun and failing to appear for trial. While federal prosecutors might have believed these were sound criminal charges, untainted by public sentiment or political concerns, the defense proved otherwise. By the trial’s end the government case against Weaver was a more wretched failure than the prosecution at Fort Smith, where charges of seditious conspiracy had evoked libertarian concerns for “free speech.”