The United States has long had traditions of both religious and secular millenarian anticipation as well as violent rebellions against political authority. From the Cold War forward, these formerly separate aspects of American culture have begun to coalesce, using the language of anti-communism and isolationism as the basis for an end times discourse that predicts the subordination of the United States' national and cultural sovereignty to a sinister, trans-national world system. This conspiracy-driven description of a globally integrated system is predicted to act as an obstacle, subverting the United States' divine destiny as a country chosen to lead the world while maintaining separation from other nations. In recent decades, changes in the United States' sexual, racial, and other cultural hierarchies have increased these conspiratorial and millenarian fears, prompting ultra-conservatives to use the widely disseminated anti-communist templates of the Cold War to describe social changes that they have attributed to nefarious foreign influence as well as domestic collaboration from othered elites. In response to such changes, which have been mythologized as precursors to far more oppressive measures by a global system commonly referred to as the New World Order, violent armed groups have arisen, seeking to combat the hidden forces presumed to have orchestrated the cultural changes that they view as an agenda of disenfranchisement and persecution. Apocalyptic and millenarian movements are generally associated with social responses to observable disasters such as famine, war, or economic depression. However this is not the case with the millenarian movements of the American far-right. Through an analysis of these groups' end times fictions (the novels that depict slippery slopes from which perceived social ills lead to the extremity of persecution) the issues that make up the core concerns of American ultra-conservatives are not objective, observable disasters, they are the outcome of cultural alienation at the loss of white privilege and threats to patriarchy. Analysis of the American far-right's end times fiction reveals a literary genre that has evolved from the Cold War's anti-communist hysteria and has since been adapted to address social, political, and economic trends of concern to conservatives ranging from the civil rights era to contemporary trends in the globalization of political and economic institutions. These novels function as foundational fictions ' they seek to define the national spirit as well as its demographic and cultural constitution. Using the form of apocalyptic narrative, this national revitalization is portrayed as the outcome of the violent elimination of the Other to establish a monolithic nation variously characterized as singularly white or Christian in the most extreme examples, but always ultra-conservative and evoking an anti-federalist 'constitutional' or extreme libertarian attitude towards governmental authority. In recent decades there have been numerous cases that demonstrate the influence that far-right apocalyptic fictions have had on acts of domestic terrorism. Furthermore, these texts and their conspiratorial underpinnings have led to the mainstreaming of millenarian scripts: cues by which current events might be interpreted as indicative of an impending apocalyptic singularity. This singularity is a point of no return that, if properly anticipated and reacted against, might allow members of such an interpretive community to pre-empt the end-times disaster and ensure that the emerging millenarian world is a utopia of their own creation. The dissemination of conspiratorial themes and their ideological assumptions have been mainstreamed by the entertainment and conservative media, making these frames available to audiences beyond the extremist fringes and therefore, making the understanding of these texts and their ability to act as lenses through which the world is understood all the more important. / A Dissertation submitted to the Program in Interdisciplinary Humanities in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester, 2010. / November 24, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references. / Will Moore, Professor Directing Dissertation; David Johnson, University Representative; Max Friedman, Committee Member; Maricarmen Martinez, Committee Member; Barney Warf, Committee Member.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_253290 |
| Contributors | Pautz, Johann R. (authoraut), Moore, Will (professor directing dissertation), Johnson, David (university representative), Friedman, Max (committee member), Martinez, Maricarmen (committee member), Warf, Barney (committee member), Program in Materials Science (degree granting department), Florida State University (degree granting institution) |
| Publisher | Florida State University, Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Language | English, English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, text |
| Format | 1 online resource, computer, application/pdf |
| Rights | This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). The copyright in theses and dissertations completed at Florida State University is held by the students who author them. |
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