Eric Langborgh

    For students at the University of Montana who may have thought a course on the “right wing” might have included discussion on Ronald Reagan, Bob Barr, and Clarence Thomas, they were hit with a big surprise when they found out from their professor that the conservative movement consisted of white supremacist militiamen like Matthew Hale, John Trochmann, and Johnny Bangerter.

    Those respective leaders of the racist World Church of the Creator, the fringe Montana Militia, and a skinhead group in southern Utah are among the guest representatives invited to speak to a University of Montana-Missoula (UM) sociology class on “Extraordinary Group Behavior” this semester. The leader of the World Church of the Creator, “Pontifex Maximus” Matthew Hale, presented his “right wing views” to over 600 of professor Robert Balch’s students on the fifteenth of October, with Trochmann and Bangerter due to visit later this semester.

    “Because it (the racist movement) is in the news so much and it is such an important movement,” Balch confided, “I thought it important for sociologists to study it.”

    However, many conservative students object to the inclusion of white supremacists under the label of “right wing.” UM College Republican (UMCR) Charles Denowh complained, “It paints a bad image for conservatives who definitely don’t share those views. White supremacist groups should not be lumped together” with mainstream conservatives.

    Added the former president of the UMCRs and senior at UM Amanda Pressley, “It impedes the conservative movement when we are accused of racism.”

    Most criticism, though, came from minority students who objected to university money bringing white supremacists to campus. But Balch, a self-described “radical environmentalist,” insisted, and department head Fred Reed, himself a Jew and part black, okayed the move. “I belong to two groups that Matt Hale would want to see annihilated and that is deeply offensive,” stated Reed, who nevertheless told the Montana Kaimin that he sees value in providing evidence for a course that deals with the subject of “right wing radicalism.”

    Explained Balch, “Most college students, what they know or the little they know about the racist movement is what they see on TV talk shows. Typically, the people they have on there is your ignorant, pot-bellied, beer-swilling Klansman who can’t get through a sentence without saying ‘nigger’ and ‘kike’ at least once.”

    But the racist motives of the “Right” aren’t always so blatant, Balch continued. “Matt Hale, on the other hand, is young; he’s a nice-looking guy; he’s physically fit; he’s got undergraduate degrees in classical music and political science. He’s got a law degree and he’s very articulate.”

   Hale spoke to two introductory sociology courses, two history classes dealing with human rights and social movement politics, and 20 students from a nearby high school, as well as Balch’s “Extraordinary Group Behavior” class for over five and a half hours. Not once, Balch noted, did Hale lose his cool in answering the myriad of questions he received—many of which were hostile. “He has no use for the old-style racists that like to dress up in Nazi uniforms and Klan robes. I feel like he is representative of what I’d call the new generation of racists.”

    Indeed, it is because of this surface appeal that Balch considers this type of racist to be the most dangerous.

    Challenged on his use of the “right wing” label when characterizing white supremacist movements, in effect grouping conservatism with racism, Balch answered, “That’s why I always preface the term ‘right wing’ with ‘radical.’” 

    Though he swore that his intention was not to stroke the whole conservative movement with the racist paintbrush, Balch added that for a lot of people concerned with the New World Order, gun control, and Y2K, “you don’t have to scratch too deep to find that there is a racist underpinning. That’s certainly not the case with all of them and that doesn’t seem to be their focus, but I think that’s accurate.

Are Neo-Nazis Really ‘Right Wing?’
    “There are all sorts of ways in which the Radical Right departs from the mainstream right wing,” Balch contended. “There is a way in which I think the extreme Left and the extreme Right kind of bend around and have a lot in common with each other.” Examples he gave were of similar conspiracy theories, new age ideas, UFOs,  mysticism, and a dogmatic belief in using only “health foods” and natural remedies.

    But this leads to the question, is this “Radical Right” really on the right, or should it be grouped with the Left, if anywhere at all?

    Modern conservatism is characterized by its adherence to free market economics, limited government, a belief in at least the utility of Christianity and the Ten Commandments in governing society, and in family values—especially as it pertains to limiting abortion. Yet, the white supremacist movement seems to be diametrically opposed to each of these tenets.

    A perusal of the worldwide website of the World Church of the Creator revealed certain tenets held by the white supremacist movement:

    · Socialism – “We espouse racial socialism to embrace all the good white people on the globe.”

    · Anti-Christianity – “While Christianity says to ‘love your enemies’ and to hate your own kind, we say just the opposite.” “We do not (believe in a hereafter) because there is not the slightest shred of evidence of any ‘pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die,’ nor, thank goodness, do we believe in ‘fry-in-the-sky-when-you-die.’”
 
     · Radical Vegetarianism – “Your Pontifex Maximus is now living strictly in accordance with…The Three Short Rules of Salubrious Living…. I have not consumed any foods which have been cooked or altered from their natural state and I have avoided all meat products.”

    · Abortion and Euthanasia – Hale told Campus Report that he revered Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger and her desire to legalize abortion for the purpose of eliminating blacks and other colored races, and to weed out weak or “impure” members of the white race.

    So, how can these groups—groups that despise Christianity, support abortion and euthanasia, and adhere to other historically Leftist causes such as socialism and radical vegetarianism—be considered “right wing?” “I guess technically that’s not really accurate, and until you brought up the question I hadn’t given it much thought,” confessed Balch. “For the lack of a better word I just kind of lumped them in together.” 

    Still, he likened the racist movement with conservatism’s desire to “turn back the clock to ‘better times,’” and in abiding by a philosophy of “the less government, the better.” “The underlying theme in all those groups (KKK, neo-Nazis, militiamen, Constitutionalists) is that they are anti-government,” insisted Balch.

    But there is a large difference between fighting against unconstitutional government, as conservatives do, and an abhorrence of the American system of governance, as exhibited by many campus Leftists. In the end, large, intrusive government and state police power is necessary to impose the utopian dreams of both the Left and the racist movement. Small, decentralized government, as promoted by conservatives, leaves little room for such vast social planning.

Academia’s Racist Paintbrush
    The University of Montana is not alone in equating conservatism with stealth racism. This semester, several schools are offering courses devoted to “outing” the conservative movement.
At Harvard University the course, “Conservatism and Rightwing Politics in 20th Century American Life” provides what they call “an introduction to debates among historians and social scientists on the American Right.” Rather than taking a dispassionate look at the “ideas, social groups, and cultural settings” that have influenced the conservative movement from the Religious Right to the libertarians, the course instead groups together “religious fundamentalism, the KKK in the 1920s, the Right during the Great Depression, McCarthyism, the conservative intellectual movement since 1945, the John Birch Society, the Goldwater movement and the New Right.”

    An analogous program is found in Rutgers University’s “Ideologies of the Right,” which discusses the ramifications of  “reactionary movements in selected countries.”

    Cal State-Northridge got in on the act in the fall of 1996 when it invited ex-Klansman David Duke to represent the conservative position in a debate on Proposition 209 and the effort to eliminate affirmative action from higher education.

    Does similar treatment confront modern liberalism and other Leftist movements? Experience indicates no, as witnessed in Michigan’s course on affirmative action, which explicitly works to “articulate affirmative action as a right and not a benefit;” Bucknell’s “Green Utopias,” which introduces students to “literary utopias and the cultural writings of various ecological movements offering alternative concepts to the increasing destruction of nature;” “Black Marxism” at University of California-Santa Barbara; Columbia University’s “The Radical Tradition in America,” which explores “major expressions of American radicalism, ranging from early labor and communitarian movements to the origins of feminism, the abolitionist movement, and on to populism, socialism, and ‘old’ and ‘new’ Lefts;” and many other courses in many other schools across the nation.

    Similarly, the Left is placed in a much more favorable light in Balch’s class at Montana. As he told Campus Report, his classes have never in 24-years visited any radical left wing groups other than an apolitical ‘60s-based peace and love commune called The Love Family near Seattle, Washington.

    “The social movement I focus on mostly is the radical right wing, including the racist groups,” Balch admitted, though he does address some liberal movements, as well. It is the light he casts them in, though, that many conservatives take exception with.

    While he tackles the “Radical Right” by exploring the ideas of the Nazis and the World Church of the Creator, the civil rights and anti-war movements are used by Balch to exemplify Leftist movements, “which include free speech and the Black Panthers, but nothing contemporary.”

    The lesson here, claim conservative critics, is that left wing politics encompasses all that is good to fight for, while its dark side is not “contemporary” anymore. Meanwhile, they say, the Right gets sverely disfigured.

    “We just have a different way of sustaining and facilitating society than liberals do,” testified College Republican Pressley in defense of conservatism. Is there a racist element behind those policies, though? “Not at all,” she quickly answered, and then added that “there can be some very tricky lines drawn and it’s a play on words,” when the media and the academy groups white supremacists within a category of “right wing radicals.”