For a couple of months now, I've been immersing myself in research about the 1995 Oklahoma City bombings for the History Commons. The research I've posted on the topic so far is incomplete, to say the least; though I've worked down through the Maddow MSNBC retrospective in 2010, I've posted only through late 2004. That's why when you click on our old entry for the April 19, 1995 bombing as it reads today, it's more concerned with the quickly-disproven speculation that it was carried out by Islamist radicals than anything else. That's gonna be fixed, and soon.
Anyhow, I'm doing a lot of research on domestic terrorism and domestic militias from the 1990s through today, in part to provide a complete chronological examination of what they've done and are planning to do in future, and in larger part to try to find and document connections between what happened then and what's happening now with the tea parties, the Cantor/Bachmann/Palin/King/Gohmert fringe of the GOP, and the conservatives' all-out assault on America's social democracy. I've learned enough to conclude that the idea of a new and shiny "tea party" movement is bullshit: the "tea parties" are nothing more than the same old militia wannabes and social conservatives who plagued us during the Carter and Clinton movements, just given a fresh coat of lipstick by FreedomWorks, AFP, and the Koch brothers. There are too many connections, ideological, tactical, and participatory, between the 90s militias and the post-millennial teabaggers. The move to "mainstream" and "soften the image" of the old racists, white supremacists, and militias has borne fruit. Bachmann is, in many aspects, a militia candidate, as was Palin, Joe Miller, Sharron Angle, and others. We will see more.
So what does this have to do with Timothy McVeigh's dad and our dealings with today's terrorist-lite teabaggers and right-wing Republicans? More below the fold.
Many progressives and liberals still believe that if we could just make those conservatives see reason, they would stop their insanity and, perhaps not join us, but at least drop the most insane of their agenda items.
This will not work. We have to beat them back first, render them politically and socially powerless, before we can start talking with them. (This does not apply to individuals, who can sometimes be reasoned with. I'm talking group dynamics here.)
Of course the idea of "groupthink" is at work here: the conservatives in mob form push for radical, insane ideas and principles that many of them would never countenance if left to their own devices. But there's more at work here: personal dysfunction.
In 1998, the New York Times published a story on McVeigh's family's response to the bombing, material that had not previously been made public. Buried deep in the story was a bit about William McVeigh, Tim's father, and his interviews with FBI investigators who were trying to learn as much about his son, the then-suspected bomber, as quickly as possible. The working theory, which was pursued during McVeigh's trial, was that McVeigh had been driven to his actions by the 1993 Branch Davidian debacle. It was a good theory, and had plenty of merit. But according to William McVeigh, there was more at work in his son's overheated mind. He believed that one trigger came in 1992, when the Army began dunning his son for the return of what it called an "overpayment" for his Army service. That's two triggers: McVeigh's understandable outrage at what he believed was the government's deliberate slaughter of 78 people in Waco, and his equally understandable fury at what he saw as an unfair and financially crippling demand for money he felt he had legitimately earned.
Those triggers, William McVeigh said, rested on an underpinning of personal dysfunction. His son had never been successful, Mr. McVeigh said, because he didn't handle pressure well, didn't work well with superiors (i.e. refused to take orders or work in a group setting where he wasn't the guy in charge), and didn't handle day-to-day responsibilities well.
In other words, when you get down to basics, McVeigh was driven to his extreme white-supremacist ideology, and later to an extreme act of domestic terrorism, because of his own personal dysfunctions. Sound familiar?
We spend endless reams of virtual print discoursing about the personal, social, financial, business, and political dysfunctions of every Republican that comes down the pike. Some of them are idiots. Some of them are little fascists-in-waiting. Almost all of them are spoiled, self-entitled narcissists that believe the world was created for their convenience, and the 99.999999% of the world's population that isn't them or isn't just like them are, well, inconvenient. They are all fundamentally dysfunctional on a personal level.
I work with dysfunctional kids and their families every day. When the kids are about to do something harmful and stupid -- hit another kid with a chair, drag out a pistol from their backpack, set in motion a firestorm of lying gossip with the express purpose of destroying an "enemy" -- you don't negotiate with them. You stop them. Then, after they've been disarmed or whatever and rendered harmless, you talk with them. You work to understand why they did what they did, but at all stops along the way, you hold them accountable. And you never, never create a situation where they can inflict harm on others (or themselves). They cannot be trusted to that degree until they've shown they can function safely and positively. ("Okay, Johnny, I'm glad you understand why bringing a Glock to class is a bad idea. Now let's put it back in your backpack and you take it home and put it away, okay?" I don't think so.)
We've said for a long time that Republicans negotiate like hostage-takers, like terrorists. That's exactly right. At this moment they're holding a virtual gun to the head of the American economy and telling the White House, "If you don't give us what we want, we'll pull this trigger, and it will be your fault." The principle of not negotiating with terrorists on an equal footing applies to our "negotiations" with the Republicans and our "discourses" with the teabaggers. They are negotiating from a position of personal dysfunction and a perfect willingness -- perhaps an eagerness -- to use violence if they don't get what they want. And hell, if they don't get what they want, that's okay too. They get to inflict harm and then wallow in their own victimhood. (McVeigh apparently blamed the government for his choice to blow up the Murrah building, in an Oliver Hardy-ish "Now look what you made me do" sense. We've spent almost as much time talking about their celebration of their own perceived victimization.)
We've made the fundamental mistake of negotiating with conservatives as two groups of equals who both care about the good of the nation, just with two different approaches to improving society. That may have been true at one point (though with our history of the Civil War, Gilded Age economics, the right-wing coup attempt against FDR in favor of Nazi sympathizers, the Red Scare, Kent State, and Reaganomics among so many other examples, I'm not sure this has ever really been true). It is most certainly not true now. Remember what drove McVeigh: inability to handle pressure, inability to work in groups where he isn't the boss, inability to handle day-to-day responsibilities, and inability to take personal responsibility. Add a dose of narcissism, self-entitlement, and brutality to the mix, and you have today's Republican hostage-takers.
We don't argue with them except to keep them from pulling the trigger. We don't look at them as if they were as sincere about wanting what's good for the country as the rest of us, liberals, moderates, sensible conservatives, and the remainder. We negotiate in order to learn what's driving them, buy time, change the situation in our favor, and finally to render them powerless -- to get their finger off the trigger and disarm them.
We have to start approaching our dealings with this breed of Republicans, teabaggers, and whatnots as hostage negotiators, not as one group of sincere, patriotic Americans dealing with another such group.
(Sidebar for conspiracy nuts: McVeigh did it. Nichols did it. They both confessed to it. McVeigh was proud of it. The 9/11 truther crowd has nothing on the OKC truther bunch; in fact, the 9/11 truthers borrowed a lot of their weaponry from the OKC crew. I don't wanna hear it.)
(Second sidebar: I'm writing this from my own personal viewpoint, not as any sort of "official History Commons spokesperson". The History Commons is merely an information repository, it takes no sides on any issue.)