Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America

The period from the end of the Vietnam War in 1975 to the Oklahoma City bombing in April 1995 marked a decisive shift in the white power movement. Once divided into various factions such as neo-Nazis, Klansmen, and neo-Confederates, they coalesced into a unified front that shared the goal of waging war on an American state they believed had betrayed them. The white power movement connected people from all regions of the country and walks of life, who were traumatized by defeat in Vietnam, disillusioned by political scandals, and anxious over rapid social changes. The experience of Vietnam helped shape the movement’s self-conception as an army at war, which they would fight in both foreign battlefields like Nicaragua and El Salvador as well as at home against communists and other threats to a white-dominated political order. Even the election of the ultra-conservative Ronald Reagan failed to quell what Time magazine called “thunder on the right” (3), and the white power movement broke with the state entirely, undertaking a literal war against the US government. While not a mainstream movement, the militias it spawned claimed upwards of five million members in the mid-1990s, drawing on the most extreme tendencies of both conservative politics and evangelical Christianity.