Where might an enterprising, public-spirited IRS agent get the idea that a tea party group deserved more scrutiny from the government than the typical band of activists seeking tax-exempt status? Oh, I don’t know: why, maybe from all the prominent voices who spent the first two years of the Obama era worrying that the tea party wasn’t just a typically messy expression of citizen activism, but something much darker — an expression of crypto-fascist, crypto-racist rage, part Timothy McVeigh and part Bull Connor, potentially carrying a wave of terrorist violence in its wings.
The historical term for this kind of anxiety is “Brown Scare” — an inordinate fear of a vast far-right conspiracy, which resembles the anti-Communist panics of our past. As the historian Philip Jenkins wrote in 2009, Brown Scares no less than Red Scares recur throughout U.S. history. They fasten on real-enough phenomena, from homegrown fascist sympathizers in the 1930s to the militia movements in the 1990s, but then wildly exaggerate both the danger these extremists pose and their ties to the conservative mainstream.
In the ‘30s, Jenkins noted, this mentality inspired the persistent media-fed fear that “the U.S. was about to be overwhelmed by ultra-Right fifth columnists, millions strong, intimately allied with the Axis powers.” In the ‘60s, it persuaded many liberals that Dallas’ right-wing fever was somehow responsible for John F. Kennedy’s assassination even though the president’s actual assassin was a communist sympathizer. (This idee fixe persists to the present day.) After the Oklahoma City bombing, it led many people to tar the entire militia movement as terrorist, not just extremist, and then to conflate the militias (this was one of Bill Clinton’s defter moves) with the mainstream small-government right.
Our own era’s Brown Scare followed a similar pattern. Early in President Barack Obama’s first term, a Department of Homeland Security report predicted an increase in right-wing extremism, citing real threats but also employing “a definition of extremist so broad,” Reason magazine’s Jesse Walker noted, that “it seemed to include anyone who opposed abortion or immigration or excessive federal power.”
As the tea party movement gathered steam, liberals consistently echoed the DHS report’s themes, warning that the movement’s fringier elements and often-overheated rhetoric (which were real enough, and worth criticizing) were laying the groundwork for a wave of far-right violence.
Invoking JFK’s assassination and Oklahoma City, these critics then leapt to connect the dots every time a kook pulled a gun or set off a bomb somewhere — whether it was a lone neo-Nazi shooting a guard at the Holocaust museum in Washington, the apparent murder (ultimately ruled a suicide) of a census worker in rural Kentucky, or even the failed Times Square bombing (which turned out to be the work of a would-be jihadist, but not before Michael Bloomberg had suggested that it might be “someone with a political agenda that doesn’t like the health care bill or something”).
The dots-connecting peaked, of course, with the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords, which was instantly deemed a case of right-wing incitement leading to political violence, with the blame going to Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck and conservatism in general.
When none of this turned out to be true, however — the shooter was not really a political actor at all, just a mentally ill lost soul with no connection to partisan politics — the scare began a slow retreat. The tea party had won its midterm victory, and as the movement’s ardor cooled and its influence diminished, the fears of its critics began to diminish as well. With Beck off Fox and the tea partyers off the streets — replaced by Occupy Wall Street and union protesters, often shouting none-too-moderate slogans of their own — it became harder to look at American conservatism and see Brownshirts or grand wizards on the march.
Moods and prejudices linger even after panics recede. The IRS and the conservative movement have never been on the best of terms, and perhaps the recent abuses just reflect that longstanding tension. Yet I suspect that it’s more than that, and that this episode will be remembered as one of the last embarrassments produced by our era’s Brown Scare.
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