(Paper presented at the Midwest Political Science Association Convention, April 1999)

The modern militia movement is one of the more remarkable features of contemporary US politics. Such groups seem to fall outside the "mainstream" of American political life. Rather than advocating a political position, mobilizing support, and "playing the game," militia groups withdraw from the system, even using violence to advance (members would argue, "defend") their goals and values. Thus, while group members evoke the language of American patriotism—respect for the flag, the autonomy of the individual, the legacy of the Revolution, and the like—their appeals do not have broad appeal in the political system. Indeed, it often seems as if the militia is America’s "dirty little secret": a part of the system most people would rather not acknowledge, and wish would go away.

The fact that the militia is not widely discussed is unfortunate for a number of reasons. For example, such groups have used and continue to use violence to achieve their political goals. Timothy McVeigh’s destruction of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, is the most obvious case, but other examples abound. Randy Weaver battled assembled Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) agents for over a week after he shot and killed a federal agent and his own wife and son were killed. An Arizona militia group has been linked with the 1996 derailment of a train that killed several people. Members of another militia group participated in a bloody and widely-publicized gun battle with police when the van they were driving was stopped for a traffic infraction. A Montana group held off federal agents for over a month in a tax dispute. And yet another group declared themselves the independent Republic of Texas and threatened substantial violence before its leader finally agreed to surrender. No amount of wishing the militia away is likely to matter if bombs go off in one’s home town.

More importantly, to dismiss militia groups as groups as aberrations in the American political system is to miss the fact that these groups emerge from and act within American political culture. As will be seen below, the particular characteristics of American political culture provide the context from which the militia movement takes its shape. It also contains the terms, values and symbols that shape group identity. Since many of these symbols are common to American political discourse, militia groups have the potential to significantly influence other, more "mainstream" actors within the political system. To ignore the militia movement is to ignore the opportunity to better understand American political culture and to underestimate the potential significance of the movement in American politics.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the cultural dimensions of the militia movement. The paper applies the Thompson, Ellis and Wildavsky (1990) 4-square model of political culture to an analysis of militia rhetoric as represented in Internet sites, newspaper and magazine interviews, and other texts. In particular, it focuses on three, related questions: 1) how do militia groups explain their ideas, ideals, and programs? 2) How do militia members define their enemies? And 3) What is the relationship between the ideas, ideals and values militia members espouse and the values contained in American political culture? It undertakes an ethnographic analysis of the ways in which militia group members explain their actions, their values, and, significantly, who their enemies are and why this is the case. Militia members, articulating a hyper-individualist version of the "American dream," will be seen to present their struggle as a cultural war between the "real" inheritors of the American Revolution and the alien, immoral actors who, they believe, dominate American government today.

One obvious problem in examining the militia movement is the lack of any consistent definition of what constitutes a militia, as opposed to some other, group. There are a range of right-wing groups in the United States today that span the spectrum from fundamentalist Christian organizations to neo-Nazi hate groups. Locating the militia within this spectrum is, potentially, problematic.

Militia groups can be distinguished from white supremacist and similar hate organizations, however, if one focuses on their respective self-presentations. As is discussed below, racism, as such, is not part of the typical militia group’s "presentation of self" . While specific members may be racist, militia groups’ self-presentations generally explicitly deny that race is a central issue in their ideology. Instead, their focus is on the abuses they believe the U.S. government has committed against its citizens. Militia groups generally argue that the purpose of the United States’ system of government is to promote the autonomy of the individual above all other values. Today, however, they argue that the government of the United States has been corrupted by individuals who seek to use government’s powers to impose anti-individualist policies on America’s citizens. Thus, in contrast with hate groups, militia core beliefs are anti-government in nature. By styling themselves the "militia," such groups evoke the image of the citizen-farmer arming (almost always) himself (almost always) to drive out the alien invaders to save the "real" America.

In general, current analyses of the militia can be grouped into two types: straight-forward journalistic accounts of militia activities, often including personal interviews with group members, and broader analyses of militia activities and ideologies that locate particular groups’ behaviors in a larger context. There is, interestingly, little academic work on the militia. However, accounts of social group formation and action can be logically applied to militia activity.

Journalistic accounts of militia activities refer to those studies that focus on the day-to-day events in which militia groups become involved. They may occur in newspapers, magazines, television, radio, or even Internet outlets. In general, they are spontaneous responses to incidents: members of a militia group do something that draws attention to themselves; reporters respond; and the events are chronicled. Occasionally, such accounts may address the history of the militia movement in the United States, at least in recent history, but this historical focus is secondary to the descriptive purpose of the journalism. Instead, the point is to describe events as they happen.

As with all journalism, such accounts have both strengths and weaknesses in explaining militia violence. Their great advantage is their topicality. By being on the scene, interviewing participants, and documenting the activities of individuals involved in incidents, journalists provide a useful and important record of events that cannot be reconstructed after the fact. However, this topicality is also the Achilles heel of journalism: such accounts do not provide broad, systematic analyses of militia groups’ ideologies, values, and activities. They also do not generally locate a particular group within the broader movement. Accordingly, they provide a limited but useful record of militia activities and violence.

Recently, a number of works have been published that have had a more historical, systematic approach to the extreme right in America, including the militia movement. Such works typically provide a history of right-wing activities, in some cases starting with the Sons of Liberty, moving through the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) , the John Birch Society, and hate groups present in the 1980s like the Posse Comitatus and The Order. They also usually describe a specific sequence of events—Randy Weaver in mountaintop Idaho to David Koresh at Waco to Timothy McVeigh at Oklahoma City—that are understood to be the cause of the contemporary resurgence of militia groups. Finally, they generally provide a basic outline of right-wing ideology focusing on Protestant extremism/anti-Semitism, the rights of property, gun ownership, and perceived federal government actions aimed at undermining group members’ rights that link the movement in a relatively shared philosophy (cf., ).

These historical approaches to the right in America present a much more systematic view of the militia than do journalistic accounts. By linking diverse groups together through an understanding of their differing political histories and relatively shared values, historical approaches provide a much more useful and descriptive account of the breadth and significance of the right in the United States. Accordingly, they are a "step up" from journalistic analyses: the histories make it possible to recognize the linkages among many decentralized groups in terms of their organizations, goals, and practices.

Despite their comparative strengths versus journalistic accounts, however, historical studies are not good at accounting for the conditions that promote and sustain group identity and formation across time. Additionally, they often do not discriminate among different types of groups or ideologies. Accordingly, they provide a helpful, but not definitive, account of militia activity in contemporary America.

Interestingly, there is little academic work on the militia despite the fact that it is a social movement that might be examined within such a framework. Academic research into social movements and the formation of collective identities is focused on several core questions. Issues such as how and why individuals decide that social change is desirable, and so form groups with shared goals, what conditions promote or undermine social movement formation and outcomes, what internal dynamics keep movements together or push them apart, and what long-term effects social movements within a given polity dominate research in this area. Obviously, the militia movement ought to be treated within this approach.

There are two general approaches to social movement research. In one strain, known as "structuralism" or "resource mobilization," groups form when the dominant social order develops "cracks": problems emerge that the established order cannot solve, ruling groups suffer some major setback in their authority, or tensions emerge between what people claim to believe and what they actually do. That is, the social order remains relatively stable, and social movements relatively invisible, until the system develops cracks. Then, in response to the opportunities made available by the system, social movements form to repair the cracks—or, in the case of revolutionary movements, to expand the cracks and topple society, constructing a new social structure in the wake of the old order’s destruction. Importantly, groups rise in response to the system’s flaws—these flaws are opportunities that groups can exploit as they try to achieve their goals. The sources of the goals in the first place is not a subject of careful study. Representative examples of such studies include , , , , , , , , , and .

Alternatively, many studies examine the question of social movements from an explicitly cultural framework. In these studies, the values and ideas that shape a given culture’s characteristics are seen to influence the formation, internal dynamics, and ultimate influence of social movements. For example, studies examine the ways that cultural framing , contradictions , dramatizations of system vulnerability , and the appearance of suddenly imposed grievances shape the emergence of social movements and collective identities. The relationship between the broader culture from which a social movement sharing a collective identity emerges and the group itself is another avenue of research . Other studies examine the unique cultures individual social movements develop and the ways these cultures shape the movement’s success . Additional studies of collective identity and social movements have focused on the roles previous movements play in current efforts . Finally, another group of studies have analyzed the cultural consequences of social movements .

This study derives from this second, cultural, strain of social movement analysis. As Wildavsky , among others, has shown, preferences emerge from culture. More, conflicts can be seen to occur when members of different cultures, espousing different ideals and promoting different visions of what ought to be done, press their culturally-shaped preferences on the political and social system. Thus, exploring the cultural dimensions of social movements is essential if we are to understand why such movements form, what members want, and what influence the movement may have in the political system. It is also important if we are to develop meaningful policy alternatives for dealing with potentially dangerous, yet culturally situated, groups and movements.

Borrowing from the literature of social construction, culture, as used here, describes the values, ideals, beliefs, norms, symbols and ideologies through which people make sense of the world around them. Political culture can be conceived of as a set or sets of relatively shared ideas, ideals, concepts, stories and myths that orient citizens within their political systems; that explain how and why people act as they do within a given polity . It embodies: a) the scope of activities, issues, and decisions which are perceived by people as relevant to the management of political power; b) the body of wisdom and knowledge of the people which makes it possible for them to comprehend, evaluate, and promote relevant political behavior; c) the standards accepted as valid for appraising and evaluating political conduct; and d) the legitimate and common identities people can assume in contending for power. In short, political culture conceived in this way refers to the root principles, ideas, and expectations through which people recognize what is political and judge what ought to be done .

Importantly, it is possible for there to be multiple cultures in any given political or social system. That is, rather than assuming that everyone in a given polity shares the same culture, it is possible that diverse cultures can exist in a single political or social unit. Table 1 below provides a schema to describe the different types of cultures that can exist. Based on the grid-group theory developed by Mary Douglas , and subsequently articulated by Thompson, Ellis and Wildavsky , it describes two dimensions of social interaction among humans. Group refers to the degree to which individuals find meaning and purpose for their lives through their membership in groups. Grid encompasses the degree to which individuals perceive their lives to be controlled by external rules and roles.
 
 

GRID

High

Low                                                                GROUP                                 High
 
 

In those cases where individuals feel that they are strongly controlled by external rules and feel little or no attachment with the group, S1, they are fatalists: the individual feels little capacity to act, and feels no pleasure or significance within a group to derive meaning for life. Alternatively, where individuals are controlled by external prescriptions but feel a strong connection with the group, S2, they are hierarchists: membership in the group legitimates the social controls since each person’s role in the group is prescribed and group membership provides meaning for life. In quadrant S3, the egalitarians, individuals find significance for their life within the group but intra-group relationships are not determined by fixed rules. Instead, everyone is socially and politically equal, and any actions that impose hierarchical relationships are illegitimate. Finally, in quadrant S4, the individual is neither a strong member of a group nor subject to external roles. Hence, members of such a culture are individualists . (There is a fifth category within grid-group theory, the hermits, who withdraw from both group and grid; however, since they are by definition not politically active, they are not addressed here.)

Importantly, members of each of these cultures can be expected to have very different political preferences. Individualists, for example, are likely to oppose any programs and policies that place the rights and preferences of others over their own values; hence, a focus on individual rights and freedom of choice can be expected. Egalitarians, in contrast, are more likely to support plans and programs that promote group harmony and equality so long as those policies are not artificial impositions but rather are negotiated within the group. Hierarchists, too, will support policies that promote group unity, but can be expected to support more rigid, externally imposed roles on the group’s members without the group’s participation. Finally, fatalists are likely to be fairly apathetic in the system, lacking any sense that their activities will matter or have any group-oriented purpose .

It is, of course, possible that one of these types will be more or less dominant within a particular political system. Within the United States, for example, individualism has clearly been the dominant culture ; . Yet other cultural strains can be discerned . Additionally, there are varieties of individualism in the American experience . The frontiersman, for example, is a very different image of individualism than the Yankee entrepreneur, but both are individualist images prevalent in the culture.

As Hunter has noted, a flash point exists between different cultures, or between different varieties of the same culture: they share the same political and social space. Since it is through culture that individuals make sense of the world, and since culture shapes preferences and causes action, there is an inherent tension among inhabitants of different cultures: each, to some degree, must either impose its preferences on the political system or face having some other culture’s values and ideals imposed on it. By passing particular laws, promoting specific values, and otherwise advancing one set of cultural preferences over another, government inevitably favors one culture against others. In response, members of other cultures can be expected to challenge the dominant culture in an attempt to have government promote a different set of values and ideals. Members of the dominant culture can then be expected to resist these challenges, since they are, in a sense, fundamental attacks on their understanding of how political and social life ought to be lived. Political conflict, then, can be cultural conflict, and can tend towards extremism as partisans of different cultures struggle for control of government and its mechanisms of enforcement of their vision of "the good life" .

This project involves an ethnographic, interpretive examination of the militia movement in the broader context of American culture. Ethnography is an approach aimed at understanding how individuals perceive the world. The focus is on how individuals explain events to themselves and how they justify their actions in terms of their own values and ideals. As a consequence, the analytic purpose is to recognize the systems of meaning in which individuals live. Questions like, "What do people say they believe?," and "How do individuals legitimize their actions and behaviors in their own lives?," are the analytic lenses through which individuals and groups are studied .

As was noted earlier, this project focuses on several, related questions: 1) how do militia groups explain their ideas, ideals, and programs? 2) How do militia members define their enemies? And 3) What is the relationship between the ideas, ideals and values militia members espouse and the values contained in American political culture? The purpose of focusing on these questions is to expose the interaction between militia self-presentations and American political culture. In explaining their ideas and programs, militia groups can draw on values inherent to American political culture. In defining their enemies, such groups articulate a particular version of "the good life" that contrasts with some "wrong" alternative. Combined, these questions provide insight into the cultural values that shape militia group formation, values, and, ultimately, action.

In order to do ethnographic research it is necessary to gain access to information about individuals’ beliefs and values. With militia groups, however, such access is problematic: these groups are isolationist, often confined into compounds defended by armed members, and jealously guard their privacy against intrusions from government and other groups. Fortunately, however, there is a data source on militia groups that is publicly available and widely used: the Internet. Militia groups have a substantial presence on the World Wide Web. These sites typically explain what the militia group believes, what activities they think are justified and why, and commentaries on government and other "mainstream" groups’ actions that the militia group finds troublesome. They are, in short, exactly the kinds of self-presentational material that make it possible to carry forward ethnographic analysis. As such, militia WWW sites provide a treasure-trove of information waiting to be mined.

It should be admitted that, to some degree, the use of web sites to discern group values and self-presentations is problematic: such sites may be managed by a single individual, and so may not represent the entire group, and it may be impossible to access all such sites on the internet. This project addressed these problems in several ways. For example, media and other accounts of militia group activities were used in building the data base for this project. As was noted above, journalistic approaches provide a good day-to-day record of what group members do. They also provide an up-to-the-minute record of what members say about why they undertake the actions they do. Accordingly, a survey of major newspapers—i.e., New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune—was conducted for the dates of major militia events like Randy Weaver’s mountaintop stand and Timothy McVeigh’s destruction of the Murrah Federal Office Building. The focus was not on the commentary such sources provide on the events; rather, it was used to gather first-person statements from group members and self-identified supporters about why they undertook such actions and how they justify these behaviors to themselves. Newsmagazines like Time and Newsweek were also covered for similar information.

Further, it should be noted that no claim to absolute representativeness is made in ethnography. Any ethnographic research is constrained by the quality and number of informants and contacts the researcher has in the subject group(s). Accordingly, the fact that the internet search may not turn up every available source of militia group activity on the web is not a fatal flaw in the research design. In fact, the militia presence on the web means that this research design is wider-ranging, and therefore likely to be more descriptive, than a typical ethnographic, participant-observer, study.

Militias generally make their case for their groups in opposition to their enemies; thus, self-construction through defining an enemy is a central part of militia rhetoric. Accordingly, the dimensions of militia thought addressed here rarely unfold systematically in the "real world." However, there is a remarkable degree of unity in the "vision" of militia groups—i.e., the terms in which they present their ideas, the enemies they perceive themselves to have, and the role(s) they wish to play in the system. Regardless of the arena—the internet, newspapers, or public addresses, militia members generally use similar language, concepts, and values in explaining and justifying their actions and beliefs. In essence, they present themselves as the legacy of the American Revolution: bands of hearty individualists protecting their freedom—through violence if required—against the corrupt machinations of an over-bearing central political authority.

Exposing the Enemy

Militia thought, as presented on web sites and interviews, is remarkably consistent in its view of the enemy against whom militia members organize and versus whom they say they are willing to fight. According to militia groups, the Enemy is the Shadow Government, also known as the New World Order, that is corruptly manipulating the institutions of American government and the media for selfish ends. In simple terms, militia members insist that the government of the United States has become corrupted. In rough outline, the militia view of the contemporary US government can be stated as follows: Where once "the people" ruled in the name and defense of individual liberty, today this is not the case. Since the passage of the 14^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, federal officers have increasingly abused individuals’ rights. Its requirement that states follow federal rules illegitimately transcends the intent of the Founders that the rights of the individual were paramount. Thus, when agents of the federal government invade peoples’ homes, often for offenses no worse than owning a gun, or when the regulatory powers of government are used to deny landowners the right to use their lands as they desire, these actions are, according the militia members, unconstitutional. Subsequent developments, such as the creation of the Federal Reserve Bank to centralize U.S. and world money supplies, the extension of civil rights laws, and involvement in international organizations like the United Nations have only further extended the abuse of power committed by federal agents. More, they have provided innumerable opportunities for the corrupt agents of the New World Order to infiltrate and manipulate governing and social institutions. The United States is thus being forced to give up its sovereign rights in favor of environmental, trade, and even military policies imposed by outsiders, aliens—the New World Order. Thus, not only has the American government exceeded the authority and proper role defined for it in the US Constitution, it has done so at the behest of enemies corrupted by Communism, Socialism, and other manifestations of state control over the individual. As one web site dramatically argues:

The Necessity and Legitimacy of the Militia

Having established, at least for themselves, the corrupt character of the enemy they face, militia groups usually argue that citizen militias are a necessary and legitimate component of the American political system. As was the case with their focus on their enemy, militia thought in this area can be hard to decipher or fully apprehend. However, it can be sketched briefly.

Put simply, militias argue that they are necessary because government is corrupt. That is, in the absence of a militia, agents of the New World Order could violate individuals’ rights with impunity. However, militia members, by exposing the Shadow Government’s conspiracies (i.e., black helicopters and United Nations (UN) prisoner of war camps in the U.S.), challenging illegal actions like Ruby Ridge and Waco, and even violently resisting abuses of federal power, serve to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. As one California militia web site put it, "Join us today in the struggle to restore this once great nation to a CONSTITUTIONAL Government of the People, by the People, and FOR THE PEOPLE (emphasis in original)."

Militia groups additionally insist that it is one of their prime tasks to expose the corruption of the Shadow Government. Thus, they are necessary because in exposing the New World Order’s machinations they will stimulate a new American Revolution to overthrow the corrupt leaders and restore real democracy. Hence, by publishing photographs of apparent Prisoner-of-War (POW) camps on military bases throughout the U.S., or of U.N. convoys moving through the United States, the militia claim that they are working towards a restored America. In exposing the Enemy, such groups insist they are serving the nation.

More, militias argue that they are legitimate. Members consistently argue that U.S. law gives them the right to organize, purchase and use firearms, and enforce the law against agents of the government who behave unconstitutionally. In particular, US Code 10 USC 311 establishes all 17-45 year old men as militia members. The militia, the argument goes, consists of both an organized—i.e., the National Guard—and an unorganized component. This unorganized component is entitled to the same rights to bear arms, training, and other authorities contained within the 2^nd Amendment. The US Code, by defining all males between 17-45 as the unorganized militia, regulates and thus legitimates independently organized militia groups.

It is in this context that the militia’s obsession with guns should be interpreted. Guns, training, and exposure of the enemy are the only chance ordinary Americans have to challenge and overcome the manipulations of the Shadow Government. To take away guns, then, is both to take away the only tools Americans have to resist the New World Order and, by extension, to deny the essential autonomy of the individual established in a proper understanding of the Constitution by taking away their legitimate and necessary means of self-defense. There is, thus, no difference between guns, freedom and individual rights in militia thought. Guns are necessarily central to the militia project.

The Agenda

So what, then, do militia groups want? On the surface, militia goals mirror those of many traditional conservative groups. To name only a few, groups want the right to speak their views without fear of intimidation or arrest. They want the unabridged right to own guns. They desire that all laws in violation of the Founders’ intent—as they understand it—be overturned. And they desire the arrest and imprisonment of all federal officers who violate the law.

At a deeper level, however, militia groups are not simply advocating civil rights variously understood. The impulse of their individualist culture is more general. For them, to be an American is to be an individualist. And, just as the Revolutionary militia rose up amongst a sometimes-hostile population to drive out the loyalists, the contemporary militia feel the urge to rise up in defense of the "real" America. By insisting on "rights" protected by "right" interpretations of the Constitution, and backing that insistence with guns and the threat and use of violence, militia members define all choices, actions and beliefs that run counter to their preferences as unconstitutional, improper, perverse and corrupt. What the militia want, then, is an America in which their kinds of choices are the only legitimate choices, in which everyone is a militia member with shared interpretations of human freedom and dignity, and in which all Enemy, New World Order, and Shadow Government operatives and sympathizers have been rounded up, purged, or contained in cosmopolitan enclaves of corruption and decay. Under such circumstances, then, the scene in The Turner Diaries in which the narrator gleefully describes the corpses of UCLA professors hanging from the 405 may not be pure fantasy. Thus the militia vision is fundamentalist, and their goals millennial: one is either with them or against them, and the consequences be damned.

At first glance, the ideas, values, goals and assumptions of militia groups appear to be the stuff of conspiracy-absurdity: black helicopters, U.N. plots, and masses of corrupt federal agents enforcing the goals of the Shadow Government. As such, militia members may appear, at best, to be cranks. However, as the literature on social movements makes clear, this is a serious underestimation of the nature of the militia. As a social movement, militias have a cultural location that informs, shapes, and drives their ideology and activity. In order to understand the militia movement, then, it is necessary to examine its cultural place.

Framed in the context of Figure 1 above, militia groups clearly fall in Quadrant S4, the individualists. According to the grid-group typology, individualists are those who refuse to accept externally-imposed hierarchies (grid) and do not find self-identification through reference to their peers (group). The militia clearly fits this dimension of Figure 1. Militia members, of course, espouse an archtypical, even hyper-real, individualism. Their insistence on rights protected by institutions, their focus on the need for guns against government, and their demand that communities of sovereign individuals have the right to negotiate the use of land, style of life, and social systems are all hallmarks of individualist thought. Militias may take individualism to a comparative extreme, but they are individualists nonetheless.

Importantly, as was noted above, individualism has clearly been the dominant culture within the United States ; . More, the structure of American individualism has tended to be one of self-reliance, individual achievement, and freedom from government regulation: precisely those grounds on which the militia hang their political ideas. Thus, the militia insistence on individual rights protected by the Constitution is out of the mainstream, for example, only because the interpretation they give to Constitutional principles and the violence they are willing to use to defend those principles are not shared by most Americans. The underlying dynamic, of insisting that specific acts, behaviors, and beliefs are and ought to be protected by the Constitution, is a centerpiece of American political life. Militia members are hyper-individualists, indeed hyper-American individualists, in a culture inherently grounded in individualist precepts.

There is more to the cultural place of the militia in America than their obvious fit in a quadrant of the grid-group typology shared by many other Americans, however. Militia groups are explicit in the evocation of the American Revolution as they argue their case and defend their actions. Militia web sites are filled with reproduction of Revolutionary period paintings and etchings. The histories of the militia provided on many web sites explicitly link modern groups to their Revolutionary forebears, who militia groups present as bands of citizen-farmers who took up their muskets whenever they were needed to root out political corruption, enforce the law, or drive the British out of the United States. The Revolutionary founding myth is, of course, one of the central themes of the American polity . Militia groups thus link their existence and actions to the definition of what is means to be an American. To be with the militia is to be an American, the argument goes. To be against the militia is not.

Another dimension of the cultural location of the militia can also be described within the framework of grid-group theory. The Shadow Government that is at the center of militia ideology can be seen to have a cultural shape: egalitarianism. As presented by the militia, the crimes of the federal government are derived from its abuse of individual liberties in favor of federally-imposed rules. Hence the militia’s argument that the 14^th Amendment is unconstitutional: it is understood to violate the Founders’ intent that each state and local community establish and enforce its own laws as each saw fit. As Dennis Wheeler told a militia-related gathering at the Council of Conservative Citizens in Columbia, SC: "The current mark of the beast is the equalitarian religion which names as sins racism, sexism, anti-Semitism and homophobia, among others, rather than the Ten Commandments."

By contrast, for egalitarians, the 14^th Amendment is logical and appropriate. It potentially requires everyone to live by the same rules and face the same opportunities, constraints, and outcomes. Similarly, racism, homophobia, sexism and anti-Semitism are artifically-imposed, arbitrary standards of bias that must be challenged and overcome. Thus, what is required by egalitarians may be inimical to individualists .

So why are federal rules expressions of egalitarian, rather than hierarchical, fatalistic, individualist or hermitic cultures? Egalitarians, as was noted above, do not accept the legitimacy of externally-imposed, bias-producing rules, norms, and values. Importantly, federal civil rights laws, environmental and land use regulations, equal employment and equal access rules, to name a few, are clear manifestations of egalitarian values . For hierarchists, such laws violate proper inequities among people based on characteristics like moral character. For individualists, they violate the aristocracy of talent and intelligence that ought to emerge in the social/political arena. For egalitarians, however, they are right and proper. So, at least in those areas of federal government activity that militias complain about, the federal government is expressing egalitarian political values.

Cumulatively, then, the cultural place of the militia is as self-described individualists struggling against cultural opponents—the egalitarian representatives of the New World Order. As Americans, militia members insist that only their specific brand of individualism is "real" Americanism. Thus their disputes with the federal government are not disagreements of policy, or interpretation, or degree. They are culturally-based conflicts over the meaning of America.

Examining the cultural location of the militia movement has profound consequences for our understanding of who the militia are, what they want, and how to address them in the political system. While an extensive analysis of each of these issues is not possible here, a brief discussion of these points will help conclude this paper.

The question of who the militia are goes to the issue of whether or not the militia are a transient political phenomenon or a fundamental component of the political system. As outlined here, militia groups are likely to endure. Their cultural location as hyper-individualists means that they are always in a position to draw new members. More, any challenge to the individualist worldview is a call to struggle to save America. And given that the federal government’s policies have, to some degree, challenged individualist values in recent years, continued militia activity can be expected. The militia is made up of Americans who happen to take individualism to an extreme. To the degree that the broader culture shapes specific movements, the militia are likely to be present in some form or another as long as American political culture is strongly individualist.

The question of what the militia want is particularly problematic given their cultural position. At one level, militia members claim that they wish only to be left alone in their enclaves, free to make choices as they desire. However, their fundamentalist individualism is in obvious tension with a complex society in which people of significantly different cultural backgrounds interact, make policy, and try to live reasonably peacefully. The fact that militia groups arm themselves and have used violence to defend/promote their vision only further complicates the question of what the militia want. Such a tension is the foundation of a culture war, and culture war can be total war, with all the attendant pain and violence that that concept implies.

Finally, the cultural analysis of the militia movement offered here raises some troubling questions about how the political system may need to respond. To the degree that the militia are engaged in culture war, compromise is difficult. Thus, violent, aggressive conflict can be anticipated—and aggressive, sustained efforts may be needed to overcome militia activities. On the other hand, government-led attacks against avowed individualists advancing Revolutionary themes in a culture responsive to the Founding myth may lead to a backlash that intensifies, rather than moderates, militia activity. In either case, awareness of and sensitivity to the cultural dimensions of the militia movement will be necessary whatever response the system undertakes.

The militia movement, then, is a cultural phenomenon. It is shaped by values contained within the broader U.S. political culture. Its adherents believe its values to be under assault from other parts of the political system. The interaction of this tension will influence the future character of the militia in America. Ultimately, the existence and activities of the modern American militia movement is a sign that the Revolution is not over. The continuing question is: who is going to win?