Patriots at the Precipice: The Mainstreaming of Patriot Militia Conspiracies in Tea Party Politics

During the 20^th Century, the American far-right largely consisted of individuals who drifted from one group to another and flirted with a variety of ideological subgroups. Nonetheless, over time, a unifying ideology emerged that was grounded in the belief that the United States’ sovereignty and “Americanness” were being subverted by hostile forces. In the beginning, this claim was framed primarily in religious terms, but during the Cold War, complementary narratives emerged that were secular and anti-communist.  My paper will explore the convergence of far-right narratives about Americanness and trace their effects from the Cold War to the present.

Perhaps the most important organization in this period was the John Birch Society, whose networks helped bring together religious millenarian narratives and secular anti-communist ideology. In the process, social changes and secular modernity were conflated with the United States’ internal cultural destruction, and narratives of persecution of “traditional” and “conservative” “true Americans” gained strength. Fragmentation of the Birchers’ more extreme membership led to new organizations and movements, such as the Zionist Occupational Government views and New World Order groups.  But even as the organizations changed, the stories remained more or less the same.  Today, tea party groups’ fears of internationalism, “death panels,” and “reeducation camps,” all indicate a cultural architecture that is genealogically descended from earlier religious and secular far-right groups.  I hope to discuss these patterns with the roundtable, to understand their appeal, and to explain their various iterations and effects on American life in the 20^th century.