Facing the Wrath: Confronting the Right in Dangerous Times.

• Author: Middlewood, Erin

It took a while for the mainstream media to take the hard right seriously. Even when militant rightwing organizing surged following the Ruby Ridge and Waco debacles, many reporters--those on the left, too--dismissed it as the work of a few crazies.

Meanwhile, a few devoted researchers and activists around the country took the far rightists seriously, monitoring their white-supremacist rhetoric and warning about their militia organizing.

Then came the Oklahoma City bombing. Everyone snapped to attention.

Chip Berlet and Sara Diamond were among those who sounded the alarm long before the April 19, 1995, bombing. Berlet's anthology, Eyes Right!, features articles by more than thirty writers (including Diamond) who have been tracking the rise of the right for years.

Not surprisingly, Eyes Right! and Facing the Wrath argue that progressives need to pay attention to the right--a lesson taught not only by the Oklahoma bombing, but also by abortion-clinic bombings, a rash of church burnings in the South, the Freemen standoff, and the arrest of the Viper Militia.

Both books argue against viewing hate groups and militant rightwing organizing as the work of a lunatic fringe. Labeling these elements pathological makes them seem unpredictable and anomalous--and they aren't. Something about our national political climate nourishes militant bigotry.

"Hate groups cannot be dismissed as no more complex than the virulence of a few fringe fanatics," writes Loretta Ross in her Eyes Right! chapter on white supremacy. "With the breathless way the media cover hate groups, it is sometimes easier to characterize them simply as misfits or extremists, rather than acknowledge them as part of the larger problem of widespread racism, anti-Semitism, and homophobia."

The more venomous varieties of prejudice, however, set the margins of acceptability. As Berlet and the late Margaret Quigley write in their overview essay, "The right has managed to shift the spectrum of political debate, making conservative politics look mainstream when compared with overt bigotry, and numbing the public to the racism and injustice in mainstream politics."

Eyes Right! is a grab-bag of articles and essays attesting to the variety of rightwing groups, from home-schoolers to gunslingers.

The first few articles lay out the scope and history of the Christian right, but wind up focusing on the Christian Coalition and its spiritual warfare against abortion, gays, affirmative action, and sex...