Garry Wills, the historian, writes a thought-provoking essay in The New York Review of Books, August 10, 1995, on "The New Revolutionaries," about the militants and the political and social grievances that undergird their movement -- many of which are shared, Will states, by a wide spectrum of the populace discontented with the government: The suspicion that government has become the enemy of freedom, not its protector, crosses ideological lines. Liberals point to FBI plots against American citizens like Dr. King, to CIA experiments with LSD on American citizens, to the Defense Department's use of Americans as guinea pigs in nuclear testing. The right sees assaults on liberty from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the Department of the Interior, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Many people resent the fact that government has become a dictator of the terms of societal conduct -- in welfare programs, in affirmative action and other preferential attitudes toward citizens' rights, in schools that seem to have a "multicultural" or antireligious agenda, in confiscatory taxation, in the keeping of elaborate files on citizens' activities, in various agencies' surveillance techniques and bribing of informers. Wills goes on to review these grievances: Taxation. The jury system. Regulations. Police power. Schools. Family. Religion. Citizen militias. Constitutionalism. Corruption. Guns -- discussed at length. And, he summarizes in closing: With the end of the cold war, the justification for government activism has been taken away. If the government is only good for fighting Communists, and it no longer fights Communists, then what good is it? No convincing answer comes from above -- which lends the answer from the depths its new plausibility: It is good for nothing, and citizens must take their own lives in hand again, vindicating their own liberties. Right or wrong, the armed patriots at least have arguments they can believe in wholeheartedly. They take the mood of post-cold war drift, of Perotista resentment, of disillusionment and economic shakiness, of fin de siecle fear, and change it into a plan for doing something about one's gripes. The militias and their supporters are not the most central social symptom of our time, but they are among the more dramatic symptoms of a general crisis of legitimacy. The authority of government can no longer be assumed. It has to be justified from the ground up. Many people who are not militants or conspiratorialists can agree with parts of this analysis. Libertarians wonder why people who keep to themselves should be bothered. It is no longer so "extreme" to believe that our government is the greatest enemy to freedom. We see this in a new hatred of government agents (who fear for their lives in western states). Or in the unprecedented vilification of the head of our government. The fierce contempt for Hillary Rodham Clinton, for the Attorney General (called "Butch" Reno on bumper stickers), for "Condom Queen" Joycelyn Elders, reflects misogyny rebelling against feminism's gains; but it is also a sign that the office of the presidency itself may now incur a contempt as routine as the respect it once commanded. The heaping of filth on the personnel and symbols of government has a delegitimating effect in itself; and the assault is joined to the disillusion, anger, and disorientation that have marked recent electoral behavior. Where the heated deny legitimacy and the cool are doubtful of it, a crisis is in the making. WIL_mil (about 50K, in 3 parts)