66 The two-party system
cities throughout the United States. In 1992 the beating of a black man,
Rodney King, by the Los Angeles police, and the subsequent acquittal of the
officers charged with the assault, led to widespread rioting in which thirty-
eight people were killed. Again the National Guard was called out and the
federal government intervened, calling in marine units to maintain order.
Other manifestations of extremism have little to do with ethnic prob-
lems, on the surface at least. The John Birch Society, the Minutemen and the
fundamentalist movements of the Reverend Dr Schwartz and the Reverend
Billy Hargis found their targets in the communist influences that they saw
everywhere in American public life. The Minutemen were a group formed
to train for armed guerrilla warfare against communism; right-wing militia
movements are deeply opposed to the federal government, and are prepared
to use armed force against it. The bombing in 1995 of the Federal Build-
ing in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, was attributed to members of the
militia.
The John Birch Society advocated the use of communist tactics to fight the
agents of communism whom they believed to have taken over government,
churches, schools, universities and business corporations alike. Robert Welch,
the founder of the John Birch Society, described President Eisenhower as
‘a dedicated, conscious agent of the communist conspiracy’, and named the
President’s brother Milton as his superior in the Party, from whom he took
his orders. The Society also believed that John F. Kennedy fed the communist
point of view to the American public. In 2005, the President of the John Birch
Society, John F. McManus, identified the attempts of the Bush administra-
tion to establish the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) as part of a
conspiracy to undermine American national sovereignty dating back to the
eighteenth century.
However, extremism is not a right-wing monopoly. The later years of the
Vietnam War saw the rise of militant left-wing movements, particularly
among students. The New Left sprouted its crop of organisations demand-
ing radical changes in the structure of American society, and in the political
system, geared as it is to producing compromise solutions, or to shelving dif-
ficult problems for which no easy compromise solution is possible. The Black
Liberation Front, the Young Socialist Alliance, the W.E.B. Dubois Clubs and
the Progressive Labor Movement were some of the movements that focused
discontent over racial discrimination, and anger over the American involve-
ment in Vietnam, into a general attack on the values of American society.
The ending of the Vietnam War seemed for a time at least, to take the steam
out of the protest movement and to have returned the United States to a
more ‘normal’ political atmosphere.
Violence as a political weapon is no newcomer or stranger to the American
scene. Whether in the hands of the white supremacist, the advocate of black
power, the anti-Castro guerrilla or the right-wing libertarian, it seems a sim-
ple direct solution to intolerably complex problems, in an intolerably complex
system of government. America, with its traditions of frontier life, with its