Eyes Right: Challenging the Rightwing Backlash.

It took a while for the mainstream media to take the hard right seriously. Even when militant rightwing organizing surged following the Ruby Ridge and Waco debacles, many reporters--those on the left, too--dismissed it as the work of a few crazies.

Meanwhile, a few devoted researchers and activists around the country took the far rightists seriously, monitoring their white-supremacist rhetoric and warning about their militia organizing.

Then came the Oklahoma City bombing. Everyone snapped to attention.

Chip Berlet and Sara Diamond were among those who sounded the alarm long before the April 19, 1995, bombing. Berlet's anthology, Eyes Right!, features articles by more than thirty writers (including Diamond) who have been tracking the rise of the right for years.

Not surprisingly, Eyes Right! and Facing the Wrath argue that progressives need to pay attention to the right--a lesson taught not only by the Oklahoma bombing, but also by abortion-clinic bombings, a rash of church burnings in the South, the Freemen standoff, and the arrest of the Viper Militia.

Both books argue against viewing hate groups and militant rightwing organizing as the work of a lunatic fringe. Labeling these elements pathological makes them seem unpredictable and anomalous--and they aren't. Something about our national political climate nourishes militant bigotry.

"Hate groups cannot be dismissed as no more complex than the virulence of a few fringe fanatics," writes Loretta Ross in her Eyes Right! chapter on white supremacy. "With the breathless way the media cover hate groups, it is sometimes easier to characterize them simply as misfits or extremists, rather than acknowledge them as part of the larger problem of widespread racism, anti-Semitism, and homophobia."

The more venomous varieties of prejudice, however, set the margins of acceptability. As Berlet and the late Margaret Quigley write in their overview essay, "The right has managed to shift the spectrum of political debate, making conservative politics look mainstream when compared with overt bigotry, and numbing the public to the racism and injustice in mainstream politics."

Eyes Right! is a grab-bag of articles and essays attesting to the variety of rightwing groups, from home-schoolers to gunslingers.

The first few articles lay out the scope and history of the Christian right, but wind up focusing on the Christian Coalition and its spiritual warfare against abortion, gays, affirmative action, and sex education.

The left is fascinated and awed by the Christian right's organizing strategy. It includes, as Diamond writes in her contribution to Eyes Right!, "a $2.5 billion per year religious-broadcasting industry, a slew of independent book-publishing companies, dozens of independent regional monthly newspapers, several dozen state-based think tanks that do legislative lobbying, and an array of legal firms." Most important, it includes "people who believe in the efficacy of their own small but persistent actions."

Unfortunately, because the anthology's articles were gathered from earlier publications, they don't detail changes in Christian Coalition tactics since it has attained a sort of insider status. No longer does the group rely on stealth campaigns. In today's political climate, the Christian Coalition has nothing to hide.

One section, entitled "Homophobia," recounts the Christian right's attack on gays and lesbians. But thanks to the Supreme Court's recent decision striking down Colorado's Amendment 2, this section can be read with a new optimism. Jean Hardisty writes about the ballot measure's passage and the rightwing groups that made it happen. Suzanne B. Goldberg of Lambda Legal Defense (and one of the lawyers who won the Romer case) decodes the "special-rights" rhetoric employed by anti-gay campaigns.

Unfortunately, after the first couple of sections focusing on the Christian right's efforts, the anthology begins to meander. Although nearly all the articles are strong and well-researched, they take off in different directions. The book has an identity crisis. It doesn't know who its audience is or what it wants to accomplish.

For example, the "Far Right" section is among the best in the book, but even it lacks coherence. Daniel Junas and Jonathan Mozzochi both write overviews detailing the rise of militias. Lin Collette writes a thorough article about Holocaust denial, and yet no article spells out the link between militias and Holocaust revisionists. Many militias are explicitly anti-Semitic and rail against what they call "ZOG" (Zionist Occupational Government). An explanation of how Holocaust denial fits into their world view would have made sense in this section.

When I picked up the book, I was hoping for a primer. I wanted the book to lay out the right's factions and philosophies, from the Christian right to armed Identity Christians like the Freemen. But the book doesn't have much of a conceptual framework, only loosely organized sections. Some essays provide solid background. Others are more particular. A few are sweeping and ungrounded. The result is a fragmented book that lets important points fall through its cracks.

This fragmentation carries over into the "Strategies" section. Some of its chapters--like "Challenging the Campus Right"--give specific, step-by-step advice. Others--like "A Call to Defend Democracy and Pluralism"--are wish lists. A chapter discussing how a community countered hate would have been a good way to show strategies in action. Billings, Montana, which pulled together to fight a wave of racist hate crimes, would have made a great case study for this book.

The best strategy in any battle, though, is knowing the opponent's weaknesses. And while a whole section bemoans divisions within the left, no section outlines divisions on the right.

Diamond's book does a better job of identifying the right's internal tensions. In her chapter "Old Right Soldiers Never Die," Diamond writes about the dwindling faction of nativist, libertarian paleoconservatives and their hostility toward neoconservatives, who work with "Big Government" and tend to endorse military intervention.

Throughout the book, she mentions other tensions, some of which may take center stage at the Republican National Convention. Several factions could splinter: Anti-abortion, nativist, and patriot contingents are all suspicious of the GOP. And within those factions there is further fragmentation between those who support illegal methods of resistance and those who don't.

While Diamond provides detailed information about a number of rightwing groups, most interesting is her criticism of typical leftwing analysis of the right.

She warns against the "radical-right" paradigm advanced by the People for the American Way: "There is nothing particularly `radical' about most politically active evangelical Christians.... The Christian right ... supports existing conditions that effectively maintain inequality between rich and poor, white and black, men and women."

She has a point. We need to resist caricaturing rightwing activists as monsters, which makes it impossible to provide a workable response to their reactionary agenda. Even some of the rightest of rightwingers are just regular people whose friendliness can be disarming if you expect them to be beasts. As Diamond writes, these people are "as common as the neighbors next door," and most work "diligently, using accepted tactics of political influence."

She also warns against "guilt-by-association" analysis that blurs distinctions between discrete factions and leads into conspiracy thinking. Those who use this specious "connect-the-dots" approach--linking anti-abortionists, neo-Nazis, and the Oklahoma City bombers--destroy the credibility of serious analysts.

Diamond, however, could have connected more dots. Her essays in this anthology span the years 1991 to 1995. Though they are sound and ordered in a way that makes sense, one thing is missing: some explanation of how rightwing organizing changed when President Clinton was elected. Though most activists to the right of the Republican Party thought of themselves as outsiders during George Bush's Presidency, Clinton's presence in the White House galvanized rightwing organizing. Analysis of that transition would have been a helpful link in Diamond's string of essays.

In any anthology, it is difficult to convey a single, abiding analysis. And it may be too much to ask for enduring political observations from a collection of ephemeral pieces. But at a time when people are trying to make sense of everything from church burnings to Wise Use ballot initiatives to armed Freemen and the Viper Militia, a book that gives a coherent, current explanation of the subject matter these two anthologies tackle is needed.