People were driven to buy guns not just from fear of Obama but also fear of the social chaos they believed would result from his administration. Video footage from the NRA convention featured a number of white conservative women who were drawn to the organization via fearmongering. In one video, a woman talked about how women were buying guns partly out of a fear that society was about to fall apart. Glenn Beck’s apocalyptic scenarios of a dog-eat-dog society obviously had struck a chord.
One year later in Arizona, that paranoia would strike home in a blizzard of bullets.
Even in its nascent form, Alt-America wanted Barack Obama to fail. Indeed, its earliest inhabitants were drawn to it out of their determination to make that happen.
Even before the inauguration, Sean Hannity had announced on his nationally syndicated radio show, Hannity, that he was organizing a force to attempt to stop Obama from enacting “radical” policies. He called his show the outpost of “the conservative underground.” Another radio host, Mike Gallagher, promoted an effort by a far-right online group called Grassfire to present a petition announcing that signers were joining “the resistance” to Obama’s presidency. That was soon followed by the campaign to prevent Obama from being sworn into office.
The message was clear: conservatives did not consider Barack Obama to be a legitimate president, a fact underscored by the growing Birther campaign. The right had set out to delegitimize Bill Clinton when he was elected president in 1992; now they intended to do the same to Obama. The effort to undermine and destroy Clinton had revolved around his alleged sexual proclivities; the campaign around Obama would focus on his foreignness, his name, his background, and, ultimately, his blackness.
Leading the charge after the election was Rush Limbaugh, who announced his hope that Obama would fail: “Based on what we’ve seen with General Motors and the banks, if he fails, America is saved. Barack Obama’s policies and their failure is the only hope we’ve got to maintain the America of our founding.”
Limbaugh’s wish for Obama’s failure stirred outrage among liberals and centrists alike, but he was defiant. At the Conservative Political Action Conference in February 2009, he justified his stance:
Ladies and gentlemen, the Democrat Party has actively not just sought the failure of Republican presidents and policies and now wars, for the first time. The Democrat Party doesn’t stop at failure. Talk to Judge Robert Bork, talk to Justice Clarence Thomas, about how they try to destroy lives, reputations, and character. And I’m supposed to say, I don’t want the president to fail?
The rant was widely distributed and was discussed in several press reports. It became one of the definitive conservative responses to Obama’s election: open political warfare, a defiance of the new president’s every objective, was to be the right-wing political project for the ensuing eight years.
And within weeks, it had created the impetus for a new right-wing movement: the Tea Party.
Ron Paul, a GOP presidential hopeful who had been a Texas congressman from 1976 to 1985 and then again from 1997 to 2013, played a critical formative role in the gradual merging of the extremist right and mainstream conservatism in the years around Obama’s election. He was also one of the fathers of the Tea Party.
Right-wing populism began surging to the fore in 2008 with Paul’s insurgent Republican campaign. A longtime outsider generally considered to be a fringe candidate, Paul, who called himself a Libertarian, began surprising longtime political observers by attracting large, enthusiastic crowds to his rallies and drawing in substantial contributions.
Paul announced his candidacy in March 2007, and drew little notice at first. However, his presidential candidacy began picking up significant traction early on in the Republican primaries, in no small part because of his opposition to the Iraq War. He began using ingenious online fund-raising methods that quickly broke all kinds of records and won him the position of the GOP’s top fund-raiser for the critical fourth quarter of 2007. Yet Paul tended to be ignored by both the mainstream media and mainstream Republicans: Fox News actually snubbed him by declining to invite him to one of its televised Republican presidential debates. The one exception was Glenn Beck, who invited Paul onto CNN Headline News for an entire hour, the first of many Paul appearances with Beck.
Paul also drew some of his most vocal support from a voting bloc whose presence in the Paul camp also went almost completely ignored by the mainstream media: the extremists of the radical right. It was striking to observe the unanimity with which the far right had coalesced behind Paul’s candidacy.
Rather quietly and under the radar, Paul managed to unite nearly the entire radical right behind himself, more than any presidential candidate since George Wallace in 1968. The two main populist presidential candidates before Paul—Ross Perot in 1992 and 1996 and Pat Buchanan in 2000—had not achieved this level of unanimous and intense far-right support. Virtually every far-right grouping—neo-Nazis, white supremacists, militias, constitutionalists, Minutemen, nativists—in the American political landscape lined up behind Paul. White supremacists from the Nationalist Socialist Movement (NSM), the neo-Nazi website Stormfront, National Vanguard, White Aryan Resistance (WAR), and Hammerskins became outspoken supporters of Paul and turned out to rally for him at a number of different campaign appearances. At a Paul rally in August 2007 in New Jersey, a sizable number of Stormfronters showed up. Paul made no bones about welcoming this source of support. Paul made headlines by declining to return a donation from Stormfront’s proprietor, Don Black, and later posed with Black and his son Derek at a Paul event in Florida.
Paul’s appeal to the extreme right was a natural outgrowth of his identity. Much of his popular image was predicated on the idea that he was a libertarian Republican—he was the 1988 presidential candidate of the Libertarian Party. The libertarian political label was understood to revolve around the promotion of individual liberties in the mold of Ayn Rand and other philosophers. But a closer examination of Paul’s brand of politics showed that he had a closer affinity to the John Birch Society than any genuinely libertarian entity. His declared goals of fighting the New World Order; eliminating the Federal Reserve, the IRS, and most other federal agencies; getting us out of the UN; ending all gun controls; reinstating the gold standard—all were classic elements of far-right populism. Even though Paul’s candidacy received no institutional support from within the GOP, it reflected not just a resurgence of right-wing populism but a dramatic weaving of extremist beliefs into the national conversation. Paul’s multiple appearances on Alex Jones’s radio programs were the best evidence of his close relationship with the conspiracist right.
Paul’s history as a right-wing extremist eventually caught up with him. It had been known among political researchers that, during the 1990s, Paul had produced a steady stream of newsletters filled with vile race-baiting, anti-Semitism, and Patriot-style conspiracy theories about the New World Order and its minions running the Federal Reserve. Finally, in January 2008, The New Republic got ahold of the newsletters and ran extensive excerpts from them, establishing clearly that Paul had sponsored the distribution of some genuinely vile material. His reputation never fully recovered.
But throughout 2007, that side of the candidate had largely remained hidden. Instead, Paul was seen as a genial if eccentric libertarian who wanted to reconfigure the monetary system and international political alignments, but otherwise seemed like an ordinary enough fellow. The people who called him an extremist seemed extreme themselves.
Political observers sat up and took notice after the first of Paul’s fund-raising “money bombs”—a gimmick event that encouraged, through astute use of the Internet as an organizing tool, his supporters to donate small individual