The One World Government Conspiracy Theory Has Homes Across the Political Spectrum (Parts I and II)

I.

I had the same instructor for each of my State of Maryland-mandated, Drivers’ Ed instructor-led driving sessions. He was an ex-cop in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, and was the most popular of the Drivers’ Ed instructors. During the summer where I moved from Learners’ Permit to Restricted License, we spent six hours together, broken into two-hour driving sessions, each session involving a similar monologue from this popular instructor.

“You know I’ve watched the Zapruder film a bunch of different times, and you know the thing that really always got me was the plume of smoke from behind the bushes, but you know the government’s never really gonna tell us who actually did it. Like I was taping the NASCAR race where Dale Earnhardt died. Taped it. Watched that video a bunch of times, I’ll tell ya. A bunch of people think that Sterling Marlin killed him. I mean I watched it a lot. You can see his seatbelt snapping before his crash. Exactly what that means it’s hard to say. Dale had a lot of enemies, but you just never know these things.”

There was a slight variation in our final drive. The instructor followed his standard script for the most part. I remember he made me drive to the Shell station on Jumpers Hole Road, and as we pulled up to a filling station, he changed up the classic riff.

“…seen the seatbelt, and you know, you just saw it snap. I watched it a ton of times, and I think it had to have been pre-cut. I mean I seen and heard of a lot of weird things. I had a friend who was in the Army. You know about the invasion of Panama? Well, he was in the invasion of Panama, but our soldiers stuck around a longer than anybody really knows about. And you know what it was all about? They said it was about Noriega, but my friend, he says you know why they were down there? While he was down there he tells me all these American soldiers were down there in Panama, and they were building a road.”

II.

This week in mainstream apocalyptic thinking finds the New World Order/Antichrist concept getting traction. In a New York Times Op-Ed piece, History Professor Matthew Avery Sutton gives a brief retelling of this U.S.-based Christian apocalyptic trope:

Biblical criticism, the return of Jews to the Holy Land, evolutionary science and World War I convinced [Christian fundamentalists during the Great Depression] that the second coming of Jesus was imminent. Basing their predictions on biblical prophecy, they identified signs, drawn especially from the books of Daniel, Ezekiel and Revelation, that would foreshadow the arrival of the last days: the growth of strong central governments and the consolidation of independent nations into one superstate led by a seemingly benevolent leader promising world peace.

This leader would ultimately prove to be the Antichrist, who, after the so-called rapture of true saints to heaven, would lead humanity through a great tribulation culminating in the second coming and Armageddon.

Sutton argues that this vision of the end explains Christian fundamentalists’ (1) allegiance to the ostensibly anti-statist Conservative Movement and (2) opposition to Barack Obama:

A new generation of evangelicals — well-versed in organizing but lacking moderating influences — is lining up behind hard-right anti-statists. While few of the faithful truly think that the president is the Antichrist, millions of voters…fear that the time is short. The sentiment that Mr. Obama is preparing the United States…for the Antichrist’s global coalition is likely to grow.

Barring the rapture, Mrs. Bachmann or Mr. Perry could well ride the apocalyptic anti-statism of conservative Christians into the Oval Office. Indeed, the tribulation may be upon us.

Like I said before, this piece got traction, especially as a “THE RIGHT WING IS COMPLETELY CRAZY” story. This appeared on CNN’s religion blog:

On our sister blog The 1600 Report, CNN’s Alex Mooney notes a discrepancy in the official White House transcript of a California fundraiser Monday night, during which a person who heckled President Barack Obama was escorted out by security.

Here’s the White House transcript’s account of the heckler:

AUDIENCE MEMBER: The Christian God is the only true living God, the Creator of the heavens and the universe.

But Mooney observes that the White House pool report records the heckler as being much more blunt, yelling “‘Barack Obama is the Antichrist!”

The president interrupted his remarks at the fundraiser, held at Los Angeles’ House of Blues, to respond to the heckler.

[…]

Ironically, the remark about Obama as the Antichrist came the same day that The New York Times ran an op-ed arguing that the Antichrist is assuming a bigger place in the public discourse, as evangelical Christian ideas about the end times gain traction.

There’s no dispute that there is a powerful allegiance to this apocalyptic story among some in the U.S. Conservative Movement. Consider this: the Left Behind series is basically a telling of this “One World Government Led By the Antichrist” story, and one of that book series’ creators, Tim LaHaye, is a powerful Movement Con figure. This comes from a Michelle Goldberg-penned Salon piece from 2002:

The former co-chairman of Jack Kemp’s presidential campaign, LaHaye was a member of the original board of directors of the Moral Majority and an organizer of the Council for National Policy, which ABCNews.com has called “the most powerful conservative organization in America you’ve never heard of” and whose membership has included John Ashcroft, Tommy Thompson and Oliver North. George W. Bush is still refusing to release a tape of a speech he gave to the group in 1999.

Something worth teasing out, though, is that this One World Government story, despite some variations, is put forth by conspiracy theorists on the right and left. It’s a story with deep roots in U.S. conspiratorial thinking, and has been voiced by people with viewpoints as diverse as the right-wing anti-feminist activist Phyllis Schlafly and the late left-wing comedian Bill Hicks. The One World Government story (frequently the New World Order story) is malleable, fitting different ideological valences and historical situations. It operates almost like the US-American Paranoiac’s Constitution, sacred to many, and subject to interpretations that affirm whatever its speaker wants to be true.

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I figured it was sensible to split this essay into different posts, given that all of this stuff above–the introduction–was over 1,000 words. More of this essay will post on Sunday, October 2.