The Far Right is upon us.

All editors have a story that got away, the one they wish they'd published in time. So it is with us. The first thing we thought of when we heard about the Oklahoma City bombing was, "It's those Waco avengers that Chip Berlet and Matthew N. Lyons were warning us about."

Since late last year, Berlet and Lyons had been trying to interest us in a story on the dangers of the far-right militias. The authors had sent us a first draft, which we sent back, and they were in the process of revising it when the terrible explosion went off.

Berlet himself had warned the readers of The Progressive about the far right in the cover story of our October 1994 issue, "The Right Rides High." "The major ultraconservative organizations and dogmatic religious and political movements pose a grave threat to democracy in America," he warned, and he cited "the militant, overtly racist far right that includes the white supremacists, Ku Klux Klan, skinheads, neo-Nazis, and armed rightwing revolutionaries."

In that same issue, Loretta J. Ross pointed up the links between the anti-abortion fanatics and white supremacists, who, she said, "are working together toward a common vision of a white, Christian, American revolution."

So these hate groups were not unknown to us, or to our readers, or to the readers of other alternative magazines. Covert Action Information Bulletin published a prescient story in its spring issue entitled, "Angry White Guys with Guns: The Rise of the Militias," which came out weeks before the Oklahoma City bombing. It warned that "an armed confrontation between the government and the militia members seems increasingly likely."

"The militias represent a smoldering rightwing populism - with real and imagined grievances stoked by a politics of resentment and scapegoating - just a demagogue away from kindling an American fascist movement," wrote author Daniel Junas. "The militia movement now is like a brush fire on a hot summer day, atop a high and dry mountain ridge on the Idaho panhandle. As anyone in the panhandle can tell you, those brush fires have a way of getting out of control."

The Covert Action article contained an arresting photo of a smiling girl at a Michigan Militia rally holding a sign that said, Janet Reno Makes the Reason for the Second Amendment Deathly Clear!! That same photo, taken by Bruce Giffin, appeared in The New York Times's "Week in Review" section after the bombing.

There were other Cassandras calling. The Southern Poverty Law Center, the Center for Democratic Renewal, Political Research Associates, Planned Parenthood, Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, and the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith had been ringing the alarm bells, as had many local anti-racism groups, but hardly anyone seemed to be listening.

Before the bombing, only Keith Schneider of The New York Times and Phillip Weiss of the Times Magazine gave the hate groups any significant coverage. The rest of the media were lost.

And they remained lost immediately after the bombing. In some of the most irresponsible media coverage in recent memory, the networks ran with stories implicating Arabs or Islamic fundamentalists or Middle Eastern terrorists. There was absolutely no factual basis for these reports; it was just vicious, bigoted rumor-mongering. And the same old "terrorist experts" were trotted out to offer their authoritative theories as to why the bombers were probably Middle Eastern.

The newspaper columnists didn't bother to wait for the facts before they reached their conclusions, either. Barely hedging, A.M. Rosenthal of The New York Times wrote: "Whatever we are doing to destroy Mideast terrorism, the chief terrorist threat against Americans, has not been working."

Jim Hoagland of The Washington Post suggested that the bombing was connected to Middle Eastern terrorists and represented "the dangers that Americans face from their collective involvement in the world."

The Wall Street Journal in its first editorial noted that three men of "Middle Eastern extraction" had been arrested in Oklahoma. Waving at the possibility that the deed might have been done by Waco avengers, The Journal said, "The more chilling possibility is that this was a foreign-initiated affair."

Why "more chilling"? What could be more chilling than homegrown terrorism?

This reckless speculation that Middle Eastern terrorists were responsible for the bombing had predictably damaging consequences. Arab Americans and Muslim Americans across the country, and particularly in Oklahoma, were harassed: they suffered name-calling and death threats and vandalism. One refugee from Iraq had a miscarriage after someone in a passing car threw an object that shattered her living-room window.

Americans were in a xenophobic frenzy, demanding on talk radio that we bomb the Iranians or the Iraqis or whoever it was that did the deed.

But the Iranians didn't do it. The Iraqis didn't do it. The Arabs didn't do it. The Muslims didn't do it. Lo and behold, it was a white supremacist, Timothy McVeigh, who has emerged as the chief suspect.

And what a piece of work is he. In perhaps the understatement of the year, The New York Times said he "apparently disliked black people." But the rest of that massive profile by Robert McFadden on May 4 demonstrates that McVeigh was racist to the core. McVeigh was in the army for about two and a half years, and he was said to be a perfect soldier - except for one thing: he couldn't get along with African Americans. He called them "niggers," and when he became sergeant, he made the African Americans in his unit do all the menial tasks. McVeigh was so racist he was ultimately reprimanded for his treatment of the black soldiers in his unit.

McVeigh served in George Bush's war against Iraq as a former Desert Storm Bradley Vehicle gunner (the Bradley Vehicles, you'll remember, were responsible for burying thousands of Iraqi soldiers alive during Bush's "turkey shoot"). McVeigh was especially proud of shooting an Iraqi soldier in the head from 1,100 meters.

The guy is a gun nut. He had weapons all over his house, and he would constantly clean them, The Times reported. He subscribed to Soldier of Fortune, and he was an NRA member until he got angry because he felt they weren't doing enough to defend the right to bear assault weapons.

In the last few years, he caught up with the rightwing militia movements that have mushroomed all across this country. He would go to their meetings, read their literature, and write letters espousing their ideas to local newspapers. He was a militia man, through and through.

Our society does not produce a Timothy McVeigh, or a rightwing militia movement, out of nowhere.

He is not an isolated individual, a random kook who just snapped. He is a product of our culture of violence, our culture of guns, our culture of white supremacy. And he and thousands of others like him are buffeted along in their bigotries by the talk-radio hosts of hatred.

Bill Clinton was absolutely right to denounce them. For the first time in his Presidency, he began to exercise real moral leadership when he excoriated these "purveyors of hatred and division" whose "loud and angry" words have polluted the airwaves. He was absolutely right that "they leave the impression, by their very words, that violence is acceptable."

But how was Clinton's speech received by the pundits? They trashed it. William Safire, George Will, John McLaughlin, even Jack Germond cried foul, claiming Clinton was using the Oklahoma tragedy for crass political purposes.

To his credit, Clinton continued to condemn hate radio, especially G. Gordon Liddy. And he denounced the Patriot movement as unpatriotic. But he didn't get at the roots of the militia's support - especially their racist appeals. How could he when just a month before Oklahoma City, he went on record sympathizing with beleaguered white males and their resentment of welfare and affirmative action?

Who is Timothy McVeigh, after all, other than the poster boy for beleaguered white males?

Instead of addressing the sickness in our culture that spawned the Oklahoma City bombing, Clinton took the easy route, calling for the death penalty and cracking down on civil liberties.

What will the government do to protect us from terrorism? That was the first question put to the President in the wake of the tragedy in Oklahoma.

Clinton rushed to reassure the nation that he's tougher than the militia nuts. More surveillance, more wiretapping, and relaxing the ban on military intervention in civilian law-enforcement are among his proposals.

Clinton is stepping up efforts to pass his Omnibus Counterterrorism Act, which he first introduced months before the bombing. He is proposing to expand the powers of the FBI. This will feed the paranoia of rightwing militia groups, and it will dangerously diminish the freedom of all Americans.

Some of Clinton's proposals make sense - limiting the availability of chemical explosives and making it possible to track the materials that go into bombs. But most of his plan is a simple-minded and dangerous assault on civil liberties.

Under the Counterterrorism Act, the President could designate any foreign organization as a terrorist group, and it would become a crime to give money to any one of these groups, even if the money went to peaceful activities.

As Anthony Lewis pointed out in The New York Times, if the Clinton bill had been law before the end of South African apartheid, any American who gave $10 at an anti-apartheid event connected to the African National Congress would have been a criminal. And the FBI could investigate anyone who went to a fundraising event for a foreign group the President termed terrorist.

Furthermore, the bill would allow for summary deportation of immigrants suspected of terrorist ties. "I shudder to imagine what would have happened to Arab and Muslim immigrants in this country" had Clinton's bill been law when the bomb went off in Oklahoma, James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, told The Washington Post. "How many innocent people in our community would have been rounded up?"

The Clinton Administration's proposals are particularly ominous given the history of abuses by the FBI, as people on the left know only too well. Civil-rights activists, members of the Black Panther Party, members of the American Indian Movement, people who opposed the Vietnam War, and those accused of having communist symphathies were the victims of illegal surveillance, blackmail, and sting operations throughout the 1960s and 1970s, during J. Edgar Hoover's infamous counterintelligence program, COINTELPRO. In the 1980s, the FBI conducted a massive spying campaign against members of CISPES (Citizens in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador) - a campaign that was a national disgrace when it was finally made public.

But now it's time to throw caution to the winds, Clinton says. "We must not allow politics to drag us into endless quibbling" over the Counterterrorism Act, he told reporters in the Rose Garden. "We must not dawdle or delay." In other words, Congress should act quickly to cast our civil liberties aside.

Even the director of the FBI, Louis Freeh, told Congress that his agency doesn't need all of the broader powers to investigate Americans that President Clinton is proposing. And many Senators acknowledged that even these new broader powers couldn't have prevented a terrorist attack like the one in Oklahoma City.

Despite the absurd claim by Oliver Revell, the retired FBI official who said on Face the Nation that the FBI can't even compile newspaper clippings on potential terrorists, the FBI has ample powers. In 1983, the Reagan Administration relaxed many restrictions on domestic spying. As a result, the FBI is allowed to use informers and infiltrate domestic groups, collect clippings and other publicly available information on groups not under investigation, and conduct investigations based only on public statements advocating crime or violence.

As Congress debates the Counterterrorism Act, the opinion pages are full of cliches about "balancing" increased safety with increased police powers, and about the "tradeoffs" between a free society and a secure one. But the very issue rightwing militia types like Timothy McVeigh have rallied around is the government's use of excessive force. Increased police powers and surveillance will only escalate the standoff between the government and the fanatical armed right. Meanwhile, the erosion of our civil liberties is a danger to us all.

What, then, do we do about the real threat that these rightwing militias pose? Do progressives have an answer?

First, we need to understand the roots of the militia's appeal. That's why we've put together this special issue. Berlet and Lyons provide a detailed analysis of the social, political, and economic origins of the militia nation. Molly Ivins also points to the economic roots: wages have stagnated or fallen for millions of Americans over the last twenty years, and the economy is beyond their control. As Ivins shows, people understand this, and resent this, and they are right to do so.

This is the soil of populism, and we can plant leftwing crops in this soil, or we can leave it to the far right to sow their seeds of destruction.

As June Jordan and Loretta J. Ross point out, we are living in the land of white supremacy, and we need to get at this problem that is still tearing the country apart 130 years after the end of the Civil War. There is a resurgence of white-supremacist feeling right now, and we need to confront it head on. It is being fueled not just by the haters on talk radio but by the opportunistic politicians who are playing with fire when they stir up resentment around issues like affirmative action, welfare, and immigration.

And when our elected officials play footsie with the militias, as Ross notes in her article, they need to be held accountable by the media and by the voters.

Along with economic dislocation, it is the wave of social reaction that these militias are riding. "The militias are now only the most violent reflection of the backlash against the social-liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s," Berlet and Lyons note. Theirs is a "temper tantrum" of white, Christian males.

And it is a tantrum against the government. In part, the militias are responding to inexcusable acts of violence by the armed agents of our government, most notably at Waco. As we said in these pages after the Waco tragedy: "We have allowed our national zeal for law and order to carry us beyond the bounds of reason. We're at the point where even the most brutal excess by peace officers' sets millions to cheering. "

The violence at Oklahoma City was a fanatical response to the government's violence at Waco, which Clinton to this day defends. Now the government is promising to re-arm. The cycle continues.

Despite their criticism of government authority, however, the militias can hardly be considered civil libertarians in the traditional sense. Their members do not rally to the side of other victims of governmental repression.

Their beef against government is much fatter. In a sense, they have become the armed wing of the anti-big-government crowd. They despise any act by federal departments, such as the Environmental Protection Agency, that asserts a public claim to a public resource - like wetlands. In their mind, the government exists to protect private property; when it expands its role, they lose their faith in it and view it as some Jewish or foreign conspiracy.

The militia movement is also a salute to our culture of guns, violence, and militarism. The NRA has been fueling the conspiracy theories of the far right, and it is responsible for the flood of dangerous arms that is drowning this country. Even now, after the Oklahoma City bombing, the NRA still is calling for a repeal of the ban on assault weapons.

But it's not just the NRA; it's the military, too. We have armed services that glorify killing, that reward the sharpshooter who can blow someone's head off from 1,100 meters. The military is a magnet for the Tim McVeighs in our society; it is a breeding ground for homegrown terrorists.

After the Oklahoma City bombing, news reports said that U.S. soldiers have been participating off-base with militia members. The government is now hatching its own enemies.

Those of us on the left are faced with a daunting task, and we have no magic solution to offer. There is none. But we must stand up for certain basic truths.

We need to denounce bigotry everywhere - in our homes, in our workplaces, in our schools, and in our communities.

We need to demand a just economy.

We need to decry violence in all its forms.

We need to defend a positive role for government.

And we need to protect our civil liberties.

This is a very dangerous time. The growth of the armed far right in America - the closest approximation of native fascism yet to surface - is underestimated at our peril. But the answer is not a more oppressive government; the answer is a more just society.