Patriots, Politics, and the Oklahoma City Bombing (Cambridge Studies in Contentious Politics)
Cambridge University Press, 6/11/2007
EAN 9780521872645, ISBN10: 0521872642
Hardcover, 254 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 1.8 cm
Language: English
Originally published in English
This book explores social movements by analyzing an escalating spiral of tension between the Patriot movement and the state centered on the mutual framing of conflict as 'warfare'. By examining the social construction of 'warfare' as a principal script or frame defining the movement-state dynamic, Stuart A. Wright explains how this highly charged confluence of a war narrative engendered a kind of symbiosis leading to the escalation of a mutual threat that culminated in the Oklahoma City bombing. Wright offers a unique perspective on the events leading up to the bombing because he served as a consultant to Timothy McVeigh's defense team for eighteen months and draws on primary data based on face-to-face interviews with McVeigh. The book contends that McVeigh was firmly entrenched in the Patriot movement and was part of a network of 'warrior cells' that planned and implemented the bombing.
1. Codicil to a Patriot profile
2. Patriots, political process, and social movements
3. Historical context of Patriot insurgency
4. The farm crisis, threat attribution, and Patriot mobilization
5. State mobilization
building the trajectory of contention
6. The gun rights network and nascent Patriots
rise of a threat spiral
7. Movement-state attributions of war
Ruby Ridge and Waco
8. Patriot insurgency and the Oklahoma City bombing
9. Patriot movement demobilization and decline.