History and Analysis of Right-Wing attempts at Coup d'etat

More and more each day, we hear people like Michelle Bachman inciting conservatives to stock up on guns and ammo and launch the revolution against Obama. Will they really do it?

It wouldn’t be the first time. The first rightwing attempt to overthrow the government was driven by an alliance of big business and army veterans. The Liberty League consisted of very rich men in the 1930s who loathed FDR. They included leaders from DuPont, GM, EF Hutton, General Foods, GM, Montgomery Ward, JP Morgan, the Hearst newspapers, Lehigh University, Princeton, Yale, U.S. Steel, Standard Oil (Exxon), Chase National Bank, Goodyear, Birdseye Foods, Colgate, Heinz, Mutual Life...and Prescott Bush. Some Democratic leaders belonged. The group was so powerful that even New York Times gave them dozens of positive front-page stories. Prefiguring today’s rightwingers, they screeched that FDR’s policies betokened "a trend toward Fascist control," and “the end of democracy." Their aim was to use WWI veterans to overthrow FDR so the fatcats could put their own man in. Their first choice to lead the charge was Douglas MacArthur, but the veterans hated him because he had crushed the Bonus Army march a year or two earlier, so they turned instead to another general, Smedley Butler, who (luckily for us all) had the good sense to blow the whistle on these loons in Congress.

Another enabler which makes both small groups and large groups dangerous is the internet. The net can help lone wolves set up their own operations and acquire materials, and it can help larger groups organize without as much external scrutiny. A site to watch is Stormfront, owned by a former Klan leader. Stormfront encouraged their followers to join the army to learn military skills, and set up stories for kids, and computer games allowing kids to “kill” blacks and Jews. They skilfully use texts from the U.S. Founding Fathers, the Bible, and even Darwin for their survival-of-the-fittest philosophy. They are a better fit for the new century that the Liberty-League model or the Klan model would have been. In April 2009 one of its members killed three Pittsburgh cops and tried to kill nine more. Even if Stormfront is not the vanguard for an outbreak of violence, it might be the model for whoever does launch the Crazy Season..

Also, secessionists: last year 22 percent of Americans believed that a state has a right to secede from the United States. Sarah Palin supported an Alaskan secession group, and Mike Huckabee’s most valued supporters include secessionists as well. Some militia groups have been involved.
Watch the northwest in particular: when white separatists start mooning about setting up their own all-white utopia somewhere, separate from the United States, the talk usually revolves around any state within shouting distance of Montana. Also, obviously, watch the South. For a while there, some New England liberals were talking secession, but a lot of that was a reaction to Bush and Iraq, and now that the Iraq issue is resolving itself, such tree-hugging folk are unlikely to get in bed with the Obama-haters of the loony right.

One thing to watch on the map: spikes in unemployment. When you have a small army of poor white trash sitting at home with no jobs and lots of guns, the recruiters for the nut-fudge groups roar into action. Look for one-factory towns that are losing their factories, and obvious places like the Auto Belt in Michigan and throughout the Midwest.

Also, watch the gun shows. They are not known (yet) as hotbeds of extremist activity but they have been known to sell the Turner Diaries and they are linked to criminal activity as well. Easy networking tool. .

Normally I would also watch for stressor events, but right now Obama himself is the stressor, like FDR before him: essentially the entire Obama administration is clearly going to set off gongs at Tin Foil HQ until the day he leaves office. He’s a black guy who is being forced by economic circumstances to expand the scope of government, and he’s pro-choice and sympathetic to gays; although Obama (and his AG, also black) have repeatedly affirmed his support for the Second Amendment, and have tiptoed away from Obama’s earlier rhetoric on assault weapons, the loons simply don’t believe them, and are already collapsing into hysterics and stocking up on guns and ammo.

One thing working against the extremists, is that they may have waited too long. The popularity of Reagan’s mix of snake oil – tax cuts for the fatcats, holy wars for the anti-abortion and anti-gay forces, brain-dead militarism and gun worship, contempt for the government – began its arc across the sky in 1980 and crashed to earth in 2008. The exact mid-point – the high-point – of that parabolic arc was 1994, when they conquered Congress. At that point they should have launched the revolution. Instead, they launched Oklahoma, which backfired badly, and ensured Clinton’s landslide reelection. Now it’s a bit late in the day. The paradox of revolution is that when your ideas are in the ascendant, whipping up the anger among your hard-core adherents is difficult, but once your ideas are exposed as fallacious, everyone but the hard-core abandons you – and the revolution won’t go anywhere unless a million Joe Blows buy into it.