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Sunday, June 08, 2003

The latest snapshot of the far right was captured on a Saturday in Murphy, N.C., when a rookie cop found Eric Rudolph, Papillon of the American extremist movement, behind a supermarket dumpster, ankle-deep in the garbage he hoped to eat.

Sought by a $24 million federal dragnet on charges that he bombed abortion clinics, a gay bar and the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Rudolph eluded authorities. His seeming success fed the legend of a shadowy web of anti-abortion guerrillas and Christian Identity operatives able to feed, clothe, house and hide comrades on the run. Story after story coming out of western North Carolina told of sympathetic locals who distrusted government.

"They couldn't even spirit him out of North Carolina," said Mark Potok, editor of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Report, one of the authoritative publications monitoring extremists.

Rudolph later told deputies he nearly starved in his first years in the woods. He ate such game as he could kill with his rifle. He foraged for acorns. In all likelihood, he broke into empty summer homes around the Nantahala National Forest and washed up as best he could. Eric Rudolph's group of co-conspirators seems, in retrospect, to have been a vast, interlocking network of trees.

Consider the difference 20 years ago, when Gordon Kahl, a Posse Comitatus leader, shot and killed two U.S. marshals in Medina, N.D. Kahl was hidden by a collection of Christian Identity and anti-government types. He was found 1,100 miles from his home in a farmhouse in Arkansas and only because the daughter of one of his friends informed on him.

Since the heyday of Gordon Kahl, the Posse Comitatus and the Aryan Nations, far-right extremists -- whose zenith was marked atop the rubble of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City -- have fallen into disarray.

In the past year the National Alliance, the best organized and funded far-right group, has neared collapse with the death of its leader, William Pierce. The Aryan Nations was bankrupted by a lawsuit. Its spin-offs dissolved amid an FBI sting in Pennsylvania. The Klan has splintered and the fastest-rising figure among hate leaders, Matthew Hale of the World Church of the Creator, is in jail awaiting trial for conspiracy to have a judge murdered.

No one who monitors the fringe believes political extremists, be they left or right, will vanish. Most political change, including the startling shift 200 years ago from hereditary monarchy to liberal democracy, comes from testing the boundaries of conventional thought.

Yet Rudolph's surprisingly lonely flight suggests that groups once able to march in Aryan lockstep through such American cities as Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, or close down Pittsburgh for a raucous Saturday afternoon of Klan and neo-Nazi pageantry are now shadows with nothing solid blocking the light.

Part of the far right's lessening grip on the American imagination seems a result of its past successes in smuggling its ideas into the mainstream.

For example, until the conspiracy-laden 1990s, the demonization of immigrants or the promulgation of outlandish theories were largely the preserves of extremists.

Reporters scoffed and ordinary citizens cringed when Klansmen David Duke and Tom Metzger announced a Klan border patrol on the U.S.-Mexican border in 1977. Similarly, they rejected Metzger when he ran for Congress three years later, pledging to end affirmative action and bilingual education.

When Mexican immigration into the Southwest spiked during hard economic times, or when Bill Clinton's administration began to falter in the early going, less stigma attached to baiting immigrants or denouncing bilingualism.

Between the emergence of less openly racist vigilante groups such as Glenn Spencer's American Border Patrol and the rhetorically cautious Federation for American Immigration Reform, citizens put off by the arrival of nonwhite or Spanish-speaking immigrants found places to park their worries without the fear of looking declasse.

"These are not fringe groups. However, kind of shrill paranoid rantings about hordes of swarthy-colored people swarming over the border predated the tremendous success of groups like FAIR by more than a decade," said Daniel Levitas, an expert on political extremists and author of "The Terrorist Next Door."

Little wonder that, as impolitic ideas found root in the mainstream, the need to identify with their most extreme vanguard dissipated. Eric Rudolph was a loner because his worldviews have found less troublesome messengers. The kind of people who might have helped him two generations ago are now busy making policy.

Rudolph was motivated by more than a hatred of abortion. An adherent of the anti-Semitic and racist Christian Identity religion, he hated Jews and saw them as the vanguard of a race-mixing globalism manifested in the Olympics he bombed.

That might seem a forlorn outpost in the 21st century, but Rudolph's cohorts can take some small comfort -- and the people assigned to monitor them some deep worry -- from the findings of a survey done for the past 40 years by various Jewish groups.

Random Americans are asked questions about Jews, ranging from whether they hold too much power to their supposed control of banks. For the first time since the end of World War II, the number of those giving answers that identify them as hard-core anti-Semites rose -- reaching 17 percent, or nearly one in five.

The one place an Eric Rudolph and his adherents has been able to hide without detection is inside the minds of the ordinary.