On Trump, Fascism, and Stale Social Science

Donald Trump's rise as a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination set off a flurry of articles labeling him a fascist. These pieces -- which have appeared on sites as varied as Newsweek, Common Dreams, and CounterPunch -- are misguided. Calling Trump a fascist promotes a distorted understanding of fascism and obscures the fact that Trump's demagogic hate-mongering is deeply rooted in mainstream U.S. politics.

I was planning to blog about this until Chip Berlet, my friend and former co-author, made a lot of the points I wanted to, in a piece entitled "Corporate Press Fails to Trump Bigotry," for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. Chip's article (I'll call it "Trump Bigotry") emphasizes the need for historical context and clear analysis, an approach that I strongly support. At the same time, I disagree with some of the specific ideas about the far right that the article presents. These ideas are drawn from recent scholarship about right-wing movements, but I think they make it harder for us to understand -- and effectively combat -- what many rightists are saying and doing today. This response to Chip's article is offered in the spirit of friendly, constructive criticism and moving the discussion forward.

"Trump Bigotry" debunks claims that Donald Trump is a fascist or that he represents "a new force in American politics." The article rightly places him in right-wing populist traditions that go back to Andrew Jackson in the 1820s, traditions that blend scapegoating, repression, and mass violence with distorted anti-elitism. Chip's article also outlines some of the historical dynamics of the past few decades -- ranging from the erosion of traditional social privileges to increased infusions of cash -- that have contributed to the rightist upsurge we see today. As Chip argues, there are dangerous synergies between Trump-style nativism and the fascism of, say, accused Charleston shooter Dylann Roof, but there are also vital differences between those rightists who work within the existing political system and those who seek to overthrow it.

This delineation isn't just an intellectual exercise -- it's about recognizing qualitatively different opponents so we can respond to them intelligently. As I wrote in the 2007 article "Is the Bush administration fascist?":

"militaristic repression -- even full-scale dictatorship [or racist populism, in Trump's case] -- doesn't necessarily equal fascism, and the distinction matters. Some forms of right-wing authoritarianism grow out of established political institutions while others reject those institutions; some are creatures of big business while others are independent of, or even hostile to, big business. Some just suppress liberatory movements while others use twisted versions of radical politics in a bid to 'take the game away from the left.' These are different kinds of threats. If we want to develop effective strategies for fighting them, we need a political vocabulary that recognizes their differences."

Where I take issue with "Trump Bigotry" has to do with the specifics of what fascism and neo-fascism mean and how to delineate different branches of the right. Here Chip relies on recent work by social scientists, especially Cas Mudde, a choice that may largely reflect editorial constraints or the limits of writing a short article for a broad audience. I'll highlight and respond to three quotes from the article:

1. "For many scholars, right-wing populism is classified as part of the 'radical right,' while the term 'extreme right' is reserved for insurgent groups seeking to overthrow the constitutional order."

This statement is accurate as far as it goes, but points to problems with the scholarship that should be addressed. Right-wing populism refers to political initiatives that seek to mobilize "the people" against both oppressed or marginalized social groups and against some image of elite power (Jewish bankers, globalist corporations, the secular humanist conspiracy, etc.). Many, if not most, extreme rightists in the United States, past and present, have embodied some kind of right-wing populism -- and this is in fact crucial for understanding their mobilizing potential. Witness the original Ku Klux Klan of the Reconstruction Era, which was a mass-based movement of southern Whites that used violence and terror in an effort to resubjugate Black people and overthrow "northern military despotism." Witness the sovereign citizens movement today, a 300,000-strong offshoot of the Patriot movement that claims the U.S. government is a fraud and imposter and urges people to declare their independence from it. There are lots of other examples. (As a secondary point, I take issue with the scholarly terminology: why is the "radical" right called radical if the "extreme" rightists are the ones advocating more radical change?)

2. "In his Ideology of the Extreme Right, [Cas] Mudde wrote: 'The terms neo-Nazism and to a lesser extent neo-fascism are now used exclusively for parties and groups that explicitly state a desire to restore the Third Reich (in the case of neo-fascism the Italian Social Republic) or quote historical National Socialism (fascism) as their ideological influence.'"

Mudde may be "the pre-eminent scholar in this area," as Chip suggests, but his delineations in the above quote are way too narrow, and don't account for the fact that far right politics have changed enormously over the past 70 years. Lots of neo-fascists don't invoke classical fascism explicitly, but hide their true beliefs under a more innocuous veneer. Liberty Lobby founder Willis Carto, for example, made a career of this for half a century. Others have developed new forms of fascist ideology that are very different from, and often reject, those of Hitler or Mussolini. The European New Right is a prime example. Whether or not Mudde acknowledges these developments (I haven't read him, so I can only comment on Chip’s quotes and paraphrases) there are other fascism scholars who do. Roger Griffin, for example, has written about them a lot.

3. "In his book Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe, Mudde lists as common 'extreme right' features nationalism, racism, xenophobia, anti-democracy and the strong state, including a law-and-order approach."

Like the Mudde quote above, this list doesn't adequately describe far right currents today. Sure, some far rightists still glorify a strong state, but one of the biggest developments in far right politics since the 1970s has been the rise of political decentralism -- ranging from the European New Right's vision of autonomous ethnically pure communities to Posse Comitatus's rejection of state authority above the county level to Christian Reconstructionists' dream of a libertarian theocracy, in which God-fearing men rule through local and non-state institutions. Even the emphasis on nationalism, racism, and xenophobia overlooks the dramatic growth of far rightist currents -- such as Christian Reconstructionism -- that want to overthrow the established political system and replace it with a new order centered on religion (and patriarchy), rather than race or nation.

None of this calls into question Chip's basic point that we need to apply terms like fascism clearly and thoughtfully. But it does highlight the need for more scholarship that addresses the full, living reality of right-wing politics. A typology of fascism and more broadly of the far right or extreme right, whatever we call it, needs analytic precision, but it also needs to be flexible enough to account for variations and changes in what rightists say and do.

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After almost a century of debate, there’s still no agreement among scholars, or among activists, about what fascism is or what it encompasses. My own thinking on this question has continued to evolve. In 2007, I offered a descriptive profile of fascism based on four core features: radical break with the established order, totalitarian mass politics, twisted anti-elitism, and autonomy from business control. In 2008 I argued for a synthesis of Roger Griffin’s ideology-based analysis of fascism and independent Marxist class-based approaches and offered a new draft definition: Fascism is a revolutionary form of right-wing populism, inspired by a totalitarian vision of collective rebirth, that challenges capitalist political and cultural power while bolstering economic and social hierarchy.

More recently, I’ve concentrated more on delineating the far right -- which arguably includes both fascists and non-fascists -- from other currents. In the context of the United States today, I use the term "far right" to mean political forces that (a) regard human inequality as natural or inevitable and (b) reject the legitimacy of the established political system. That covers some (but not all) white nationalists, the theocratic branch of the Christian right, the hardline wing of the Patriot movement, and a few other currents. In other words, I see the far right as cutting across standard political categories, because I think the emergence of a truly oppositional right -- which doesn’t want to just take over the U.S. political system, but bring it down -- is ultimately more significant than ideological differences about race, religion, or other factors.

But oppositional and system-loyal rightists aren't just in conflict. As Chip Berlet points out in "Trump Bigotry," they also fuel each other. For example, "the Trump candidacy and the shooting in Charleston are connected thematically by a mobilization to defend white nationalism while the racial and ethnic face of America changes hue." This is a complex, fluid situation, with different branches of the right both divided and interconnected, and we need a dynamic approach to understand it. Debates about terminology or definitions aside, I know that Chip and I agree about this.

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Oath Keepers, Ferguson, and the Patriot movement’s conflicted race politics

When a group built around right-wing conspiracy theories sends heavily armed white men onto streets filled with Black Lives Matter protesters, it makes sense to be worried. But if these are white supremacist vigilantes, why are they proposing to arm black protesters and march alongside them?

Police sharpshooter at Ferguson protests - a repressive
response strongly criticized by Oath Keepers

Oath Keepers has drawn a lot of discussion and criticism for deploying men with guns to Ferguson, Missouri, last fall and again this summer. As a part of the Patriot movement, Oath Keepers’ politics are predictably right wing on a host of issues — it glorifies private property, promotes homophobia and anti-immigrant scapegoating, and accuses Marxists of making common cause with radical Islamists to destroy western civilization. But Oath Keepers doesn’t fit the white supremacist profile that many leftists expect. Not only has the group disavowed racism (which in itself doesn’t mean much), more surprisingly it has also supported African Americans’ right to protest and even their right to practice armed self-defense. Very recently — apparently in the past few days — Oath Keepers has split over this very issue, suggesting a larger conflict within the Patriot movement over whether to maintain white centrism or pursue a more inclusive strategy. While some leftists may see this as a hopeful sign, I believe it has the potential to make the movement more dangerous.

Backgound on the Patriot movement
Oath Keepers is a Patriot movement organization for current and former military, law enforcement, and emergency personnel. Like other Patriot groups, Oath Keepers believes there is a conspiracy by globalist elites to turn the United States into a dictatorship. Members of Oath Keepers declare they will refuse to follow orders to impose martial law, round up U.S. citizens, or take away their guns. In a speech earlier this year, Oath Keeper leader Stewart Rhodes warned that the U.S. government is plotting to cause economic chaos, start a race war, unleash ISIS cells, and keep new immigrants from assimilating — all paving the way for a police state.

The Patriot movement is a political hybrid, a meeting place for several different rightist currents. Its ideology is rooted in a mix of libertarianism, John Birch-style conspiracy theories, white nationalism, and Christian theocracy. Although all Patriot movement activists are hostile to the federal government to a degree, some have taken an essentially defensive position while others reject the federal government in principle, and a few have planned or carried out physical attacks against federal institutions or personnel. Many Patriot groups avoid explicit racism, yet ideas rooted in white supremacist or antisemitic ideology circulate freely, such as the belief that black people have far fewer rights than whites, because most of them did not become U.S. citizens until passage of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution after the Civil War. Anti-immigrant politics and the implicitly racist claim that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States (and therefore is ineligible to be president) have also become major movement themes in recent years.

The Patriot movement had its first big upsurge in the 1990s, when hundreds of thousands of activists (or more) — claiming core state functions for themselves — formed “citizen’s militias,” “common law courts,” and related groups. That movement wave didn’t last long, but Barack Obama’s election as president in 2008 sparked a second, even larger upturn. Since then, the number of Patriot groups rose from less than 150, peaked at 1,360 groups in 2012, then dropped to 874 in 2014. Oath Keepers, founded in 2009 and with a (disputed) claim of 30,000 members in 2015, has been on the leading edge of the movement’s resurgence. The movement got another boost in the spring of 2014, when hundreds of activists (including Oath Keepers) gathered at Cliven Bundy’s Nevada ranch to support his “right” to graze his cattle on federal lands without paying the grazing fees. Guns drawn, the heavily armed activists forced federal officers to back down.

Oath Keepers to Ferguson
Last December, after Ferguson, Missouri, exploded in fury over racist police violence and the legal system that protects it, Oath Keepers sent armed volunteers to guard Ferguson businesses and homes against arsonists and looters. This month, as protesters commemorated the anniversary of Michael Brown’s police killing, several heavily armed Oath Keepers were back on the streets of Ferguson. They said they were protecting reporters with Infowars.com, Alex Jones’s right-wing conspiracist website, as well as businesses and residents. Both times, all of the Oath Keepers present were apparently white men.

The Oath Keepers first appeared in Ferguson after reports that Ku Klux Klansmen were converging on the Ferguson area to protect white-owned homes and businesses. One Klan group referred to Darren Wilson (whose killing of Michael Brown touched off Ferguson’s 2014 protests against deadly police racism) as “the cop who did his job against the negro criminal,” and the group’s leader declared, “we can’t have blacks robbing and murdering innocent whites.” Many other rightists, including Patriot groups, echoed this view. When Oath Keepers showed up, a lot of people assumed it was following in the Klan’s footsteps. Many Ferguson activists pointed out that the Oath Keepers had the privilege to carry heavy weapons openly while black people were being arrested just on the suspicion that they were armed. Whatever Oath Keepers’ intentions, as Andrew O’Hehir noted in Salon, “the icon of the white man with a gun” is bound up in American mythology with the long history of Klan terror and racist lynchings.

But Oath Keepers is not the Klan. In some ways it’s rooted in the same legacy, and old-style racist attitudes can be found in its ranks. But overall its response to the Ferguson protests and the Black Lives Matter movement has been very different. It’s worth looking at this response closely, as well as the organizational split it generated, if we want to understand what the Patriot movement is about and why it dwarfs the openly white supremacist right. The New York Times, Washington Post, BBC News, and National Public Radio haven’t done this — and neither have the Southern Poverty Law Center or even Political Research Associates in their reports on right-wing responses to Ferguson. Here’s some of what they left out:

• In August 2014, while the Klan was cheering Officer Wilson, Oath Keepers’ Missouri Chapter sent an “open letter of warning” to Missouri Governor Nixon. The letter harshly condemned the Ferguson police for violating people’s right to protest, and offered detailed criticisms of its “spectacularly unsafe weapons discipline and methodology” such as pointing automatic weapons at unarmed protesters. “The militarized police response we saw in Ferguson did not work. All it did was violate the rights of peaceful protesters and media, alienate the community, and make our country look even more like a police state…”
• The Oath Keepers’ open letter to Governor Nixon related the Ferguson crackdown to earlier examples of militarized, abusive police practices, including tactics used against Occupy Wall Street and the lockdown after the 2013 Boston Marathon Bombing. Oath Keepers also connected police militarization with U.S. aggression abroad. “[M]uch like over-the top and indiscriminate threat displays and use of force in Iraq lost the hearts and minds of the locals, so too does it lose the battle for hearts and minds here at home – assisting in the agendas of those who wish to divide us along racial lines and create an ‘us vs. them’ mentality among both the people and the police.”
• In November, Oath Keepers followed up with an open letter to the people of Ferguson, which began by declaring that “you have an absolute, God given, and constitutionally protected right to protest and speak your mind,” and that “the police have no right, no authority, and no power to violate those rights…” The letter reiterated Oath Keepers’ earlier criticisms of police repression in Ferguson, while also urging protesters to “‘police their own’ by looking out for hot-heads in the crowd who may resort to violence, looting, or property destruction,” so as not to distract from the reasons for the protest.
• Addressing the local community, Oath Keepers specifically urged black military veterans to form armed patrols and neighborhood watches to keep Ferguson safe, and cited the Deacons for Defense and Justice (whose armed members defended 1960s civil rights marchers in the Deep South and helped to inspire the Black Panther Party) as a “proud and noble” example to follow, “except this time, you must defend against violence by anyone, whether outsiders or locals, of any race, against anyone, of any race.”
• As an example of what they had in mind, Oath Keepers reposted an article about a group of armed black men in Ferguson who were standing guard protecting a white-owned gas station and convenience store. “They said they felt they owed it to [the store owner], who has employed many of them over the years and treats them with respect.”
• In August 2015, an Oath Keeper interviewed on the streets of Ferguson offered an angry litany of recent police killings around the U.S., beginning with twelve-year-old Tamir Rice and other African Americans, then noting that police have also killed several whites, such as James Boyd, a homeless man in Albuquerque. In a separate interview, when St. Louis County Oath Keepers leader Sam Andrews was asked what he would like to say to Ferguson protesters, he replied, “The first thing I would say is ‘Black Lives Matter.’ The second thing I would say is that the Oath Keepers are there to protect your rights. We care about you, regardless of all the lies that the media and some other instigators have tried to propagate. Black lives matter, we care about you, we love you and we are there to protect you.”
• Andrews also announced plans to hold a march through downtown Ferguson in which Oath Keepers members would accompany fifty African Americans armed with long barrel rifles. “Every person we talked to [among black protesters] said if they carried [guns] they’d be shot by police. That’s the reason we’re going to hold this event and it will be a legal demonstration,” Andrews said. “I’m sick and tired of law enforcement who doesn’t think they have to abide by the law.”

Color blindness and self-defense
These statements and actions by Oath Keepers reflected an ideology of color blindness, as expressed in their November 2014 letter to Ferguson residents:

“For us, this is not about race. This is about defending the Bill of Rights, which is a shield against government abuse that is meant to protect ALL Americans, of whatever color. Those of us who served in Marine or Army infantry learned to see only one color: green. Some of our brothers in our fire-teams and squads were dark green, while others were medium or light green, but they were all our brothers, and in combat, they all bled the same color – red – in defense of this nation and in defense of the Constitution…”

Stewart Rhodes, Oath Keepers founder and leader

Oath Keepers’ color blindness ideology set them miles apart from the Klan and other white nationalist groups. Their criticism of the Ferguson cops and support for the community’s right to protest contrasted with, for example, the Patriot Action Network (a Tea Party group), which claimed that Ferguson protesters had threatened to rape the wives of police officers. And by invoking the Deacons for Defense and urging African Americans to arm themselves, Oath Keepers stomped on one of the traditional core principles of U.S. white supremacy, that black people must never practice — or be able to practice — self-defense.

To be clear, color blindness is not an anti-racist ideology. It opposes overt racial discrimination but also masks (and thus helps to protect) the implicit but powerful racial oppression that remains central to U.S. society. Oath Keepers’ critique of police repression, for example, didn’t acknowledge the fact that cop violence systematically targets people of color. And some of its members echoed other racial messages that are common in the Patriot movement. The group’s New York state chapter dismissed the Black Lives Matter movement as a pawn of Communist, anti-American “race-baiters.” One Oath Keeper interviewed in Ferguson referred to President Obama as a “mulatto” and suggested he was a Muslim born in Kenya, which is right-wing code-speak for “a black man has no business being in the White House.” As a national organization, Oath Keepers has also called for a crackdown against “illegal aliens,” who it claims are being ushered in by the Obama administration in a large-scale, planned “invasion” of the United States — although the group’s leader denies that this position is “about race.”

To further illustrate its approach to racial politics, Oath Keepers has co-sponsored two “Racial Reconciliation of the Races” events with the African American pastor James David Manning, who is virulently homophobic. At the July 2015 event, Manning led the crowd in chanting, “Sodomites, go to Hell!” and offered similar comments throughout his sermon.

Although Oath Keepers was apparently the only Patriot group to show up on the scene, color-blind responses to Ferguson have also come from others within the movement. Chuck Baldwin — an anti-gay, anti-Muslim, pro-Confederate pastor who was 2008 presidential candidate of the Patriot movement-oriented Constitution Party — declared that the August 2014 crackdown on Black Lives Matter protesters in Ferguson represented “A Preview of America’s Burgeoning Police State.” Baldwin conceded (to other rightists) that “race-baiters” were exploiting the conflict and suggested that the federal government was using “paid provocateurs” to inflame it, but chastised fellow pastors who keep silent about “the way our policemen are being turned into soldiers” and argued that the Republican Party has been “the most aggressive” in militarizing local police. Baldwin concluded, “This is not a Republican or Democrat issue; it is not a liberal or conservative issue; it is not a black or white issue; it is not a Christian or secular issue. It is a liberty or slavery issue!”

On the issue of African American self-defense, in 2012 the Lone Star Watchdog (apparently now defunct) published an article under the headline “Hidden History of Militias Protecting Liberty in the 20th Century. Before they Were Called Oath Keepers,” which was reposted on a number of Patriot movement sites. The anonymous article celebrated the role of “Black Militia” groups such as the Deacons for Defense and Robert Williams’s Black Armed Guard in deterring racist violence against the civil rights movement. “Hidden History” argued that these groups were demonized and discredited by an FBI disinformation campaign and referred to the Klan as “an arm of COINTELPRO.”

Oath Keepers split over arming black people
In late August, the Oath Keepers national leadership reportedly withdrew support from the planned Ferguson march involving armed black residents, causing a split in the organization. Sam Andrews and his “tactical team” withdrew from Oath Keepers, vowing to carry out the march on their own, and a group of Oath Keepers in Florida also quit. Andrews commented, “I can’t have my name associated with an organization that doesn’t believe black people can exercise their First and Second Amendment rights at the same time.”

Both Andrews and “James Wise” (a former Oath Keeper in Florida who used an alias) pointed to the inconsistency of Oath Keepers’ willingness to confront police at the Bundy ranch but not in Ferguson. As Wise, who is Cuban American, put it:

“Unwilling to confront the cops. What the hell are we here for then? Who is going to violate the rights of the people? The Boy Scouts? If you plan on keeping your oath, you had better be willing to confront cops….You know race isn’t a huge issue here, but I have to believe that an organization that is OK with a bunch of white guys pointing guns at cops in Nevada over grazing rights shouldn’t turn into complete [multiple expletives deleted] [cowards] at the thought of blacks just holding guns in a march protesting people getting beaten and killed by cops. You know there’s something wrong there…”

A related issue, Andrews said, is that the new Oath Keepers’ board is made up almost entirely of retired police. He, most of his tactical team members, and Wise are all former military special forces.

Patriot movement racial politics
Differences within the Patriot movement over racial politics are not new. A point that Chip Berlet and I made twenty years ago (about what we then called the militia movement) remains true today:

“While some militias clearly have emerged…from old race-hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan or Aryan Nations, and while the grievances of the militia movement as a whole are rooted in white-supremacist and antisemitic conspiracy theories, many militia members do not appear to be consciously drawn to the militia movement on the strength of these issues…. To stereotype every armed militia member as a Nazi terrorist…lumps together persons with unconscious garden-variety prejudice and the demagogues and professional race-hate organizers.”

Today, the split in Oath Keepers indicates that some Patriot activists are willing to pay more than lip service to the idea that constitutional rights should apply to everyone regardless of race.

In addition, while the Patriot movement has been predominantly white and male, it has also included a few African Americans, such as J.J. Johnson, who co-founded the Ohio Unorganized Militia and described militias as “the civil rights movement of the 1990s.” Johnson urged black people to join the Patriot movement and argued, “If our ancestors would have been armed, they would not have been slaves!” Today, among the members profiled on the Oath Keepers website are several people of color, reflecting the group’s claim that “Oath Keepers come in all colors, shapes, sizes, ages, and backgrounds…”

The emphasis on gun rights, which Oath Keepers shares with the rest of the Patriot movement, helps us understand the movement’s often muddled racial politics. In the United States there’s an organic connection between racism and guns, because an armed white male populace was historically one of the cornerstones of the whole system of racial oppression. Frontier settlers needed guns for conquering Indian and Mexican lands, and white men in the South needed to be armed to keep control over enslaved black people, who were not allowed to have guns. Armed, decentralized white power has generally served ruling elites but has also fueled right-wing populist upsurges that clashed with elite interests — such as the original Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan, which fought a guerrilla war against “northern military despotism.” And people of color and their allies, too, have invoked the right to bear arms — from anti-slavery activists to Chicano land rights defenders and the Black Panther Party. As a result, gun control has sometimes been used to enforce white rule, as when conservatives in the late 1960s advocated stricter gun laws because they were afraid of the Black Panthers.

All of this history is in the mix when Patriot groups talk about the Second Amendment. And while the predominant thread of that history is about defending white privilege, other threads are sometimes visible.

Capitalist individualism
There’s room for disagreement about race, too, because the Patriot movement’s common denominator isn’t defending white privilege (or heterosexuality, or national borders) — it’s a vision of unregulated property rights, a capitalist individualism that’s militantly opposed to government “interference.” That’s why the Oath Keepers often talk about “protecting life, liberty, and property,” and why they initially went into Ferguson to guard businesses. Defending supposed property rights against federal government intrusion was what drove the Bundy ranch action in 2014. For similar reasons, armed Oath Keepers and other Patriot activists have more recently protected disputed mining claims in Oregon and Montana against “unlawful” federal action. These Oath Keeper operations reflect a Patriot movement consensus. When over 100 Patriot movement delegates met in a 2009 “continental congress” outside Chicago, they declared that “The United States is the only nation on earth specifically based on the premise of the right of individuals to own and control property," and that owning private property was “the root of our individual Freedom.”

Capitalist individualism and racism are historically and culturally connected, but they’re not inseparable. In an era when overt racial bigotry is widely discredited, it shouldn’t be a surprise when even hardline right-wingers want to move beyond the white supremacist legacy. Andrew O’Hehir may well be right when he suggests that the group’s Ferguson foray was a “kind of attempt at cross-racial outreach, however deluded and misguided in execution.”

We should have no illusions that such outreach represents a move to the left. It’s highly unlikely — given that he’s a Donald Trump supporter — that Sam Andrews is going to turn his splinter group into a progressive version of Oath Keepers. However, capitalist individualism (coupled with anti-globalist conspiracism, homophobia, and a strong emphasis on gun rights) could well provide the basis for collaboration between some Patriot groups and right-wing black nationalist organizations such as the New Black Panther Party. There are precedents, such as the Lyndon LaRouche network’s cordial dealings with the Nation of Islam in the 1990s. New or not, it’s hard to see this kind of right-wing alliance-building as anything but ominous.


Photo credits:

Police sharpshooter - By Jamelle Bouie [CC Attribution 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Stewart Rhodes - By Gage Skidmore [CC Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0], via Flickr Commons

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The LaRouche network’s Russia connection

In the United States, Lyndon LaRouche is widely dismissed as a wing-nut conspiracist — a guy who claims that Queen Elizabeth pushes drugs. But in Russia, LaRouchite ideology is taken seriously by high-ranking politicians and scholars, and is cross-pollinating with the ideas of Russian far rightists such as Aleksandr Dugin.

The LaRouchites’ wing-nut reputation actually masks a lot of their more dangerous politics and history. LaRouche, a former Trotskyist, founded the National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC) in 1969 as a Marxist organization, but in the 1970s transformed it into a fascist political cult with a unique ideology centered on grandiose, arcane conspiracy theories. By the 1980s, LaRouche’s followers had built an extensive network of organizations on several continents, dedicated to propaganda, fundraising, intelligence gathering, and political dirty tricks. (For details, see Dennis King’s 1989 book, Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism, which is accessible online.) For several years, the LaRouchites had a friendly relationship with the Reagan administration and its security services, but illegal fundraising eventually got them in trouble, and LaRouche himself went to prison for fraud and conspiracy from 1989 to 1994. However, his organization rebounded by shifting to more “leftist” positions, with an emphasis on opposing U.S. military interventionism and international finance capital.

Having lost the U.S. government connections they enjoyed in the 1980s, the LaRouchites worked to expand their ties with political elites in other countries — above all, Russia. In recent years, the LaRouchites have increasingly emphasized the importance of Russia on the world stage, and have largely aligned themselves with President Vladimir Putin’s international policies, for example on the conflicts in Syria and Ukraine.

A recent article by Anton Shekhovtsov traces some of the story behind this new alignment:

“With the demise of the Soviet Union,… LaRouche became genuinely interested in Russia and its economy, arguing against adoption of Western liberal economic models by Russia. In 1992, the Schiller Institute for Science and Culture was established in Moscow as a Russian branch of the LaRouchite international Schiller Institute, and started publishing Russian translations of LaRouche’s essays.”

During the 1990s, LaRouche visited Russia and spoke at a number of academic meetings. His economic ideas sparked interest among some members of the elite who were unhappy with the laissez-faire policies that prevailed under then President Boris Yeltsin.

“LaRouche’s contacts in Russian academia and the Moscow-based Schiller Institute for Science and Culture actively promoted his ideas in Russia, and, since 1995, he was trying to exert direct influence on Russian policy-making in the economic sphere. Representatives of the Schiller Institute for Science and Culture presented LaRouche’s memorandum ‘Prospects for Russian Economic Revival’ at the State Duma, while later that year LaRouche himself appeared in the Russian parliament to present his report ‘The World Financial System and Problems of Economic Growth.’ His conspiracy-driven economic theories that denounced free trade and commended protectionism, as well as attacking the workings of the International Monetary Fund, stroke a chord with many a member of the Duma largely dominated by the anti-liberal and anti-democratic forces such as the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, Liberal-Democratic Party of Russia and other ultranationalists.”

Shekhovtsov’s article centers on LaRouche’s relationship with Sergey Glazyev, who in the early 1990s was minister of external economic relations (but resigned because of a disagreement with Yeltsin) and then a member of the State Duma, or parliament. Since 2012, Glazyev has been a prominent adviser to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“During the 1990s, the LaRouchites praised Glazyev as ‘a leading economist of the opposition to Boris Yeltsin’s regime’ and published Glazyev’s interviews and articles in their weekly Executive Intelligence Review. In 1999, LaRouche published an English translation of Glazyev’s book Genocide: Russia and the New World Order in which the author exposed his theories about ‘the world oligarchy’ using ‘depopulation techniques developed by the fascists’ ‘to cleanse the economic space of Russia for international capital.’”
* * *
“Glazyev’s promotion of LaRouche and his ideas in Russia resulted in the latter’s growth in popularity as an opinion-maker and commentator on political and economic issues in Russia – a status that LaRouche could not enjoy in his home country where he has remained a fringe political figure.”

In some ways the LaRouchites’ current stance resembles that of Russian nationalists who combine support for Putin with romanticism about the Soviet Union. Although Shekhovtsov writes that “In the 1970-80s, the LaRouchites were highly critical of the Soviet Union and believed that it was controlled by the British oligarchs,” that’s not entirely true. Dennis King offers a fuller account:

“LaRouchian publications until the death of Leonid Brezhnev [in 1982] expressed an affection for hard-line Stalinism because of its no-nonsense attitude toward Zionists and other dissenters and its commitment to central economic planning. New Solidarity’s obituary on Brezhnev praised him as a ‘nation builder’ and avoided any mention of his invasions of Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan. Thereafter, as LaRouche became more heavily involved in supporting Star Wars and NATO, the NCLC line changed. Moscow became the ‘Third Rome,’ a center of unremitting Russian Orthodox evil. When Gorbachev took power, the LaRouchians said he was the Antichrist.”

As King details, from 1974 to about 1983 members of the LaRouche network also repeatedly met and shared information with KGB officers and other Soviet officials. The LaRouchites claimed that they served as “the ‘open channel’ through which the KGB could pass ‘policy-relevant’ information to the CIA, and vice versa.”

The LaRouchites don’t like to talk about this part of their own history nowadays, but they have nothing but praise for ex-KGB officer Vladimir Putin. In 2011, for example, LaRouche applauded the nomination of Putin (who was then serving as prime minister) to return to the office of president (which he had previously held in 2000-2008): “"This assertion of leadership sends a clear message of defiance against the British Empire's divide-and-conquer games, and represents a major step forward toward a new Pacific-centered recovery program for the entire world.”

Map of the Trans-Siberian Railway, an early example of the
kind of big infrastructure project the LaRouchites glorify.

The LaRouchites like Putin not only because he has challenged the United States and European Union, but also because they see him as a kindred spirit on questions of national development. The LaRouchite program, for Russia and elsewhere, emphasizes a strong state role in society, classical culture and religion as the moral basis for politics, and big, high-tech infrastructure projects — notably a “Eurasian Land Bridge” transportation network — to drive economic recovery.

The Eurasian Land Bridge idea highlights the question: how much does LaRouchite fascism have in common with the politics of Aleksandr Dugin, which centers on the vision of a new Eurasian empire?  In some ways the two are very different. While the LaRouchites wrap themselves in the mantle of science and rational humanism, Duginists call for Russian ethno-cultural rebirth in much more mystical terms. LaRouchite publications rarely mention Dugin, but a 2012 article in Executive Intelligence Review refers to his “gloomy Germanicism” with “a strong metaphysical component, but almost nothing by way of a coherent economic program.”

Yet both LaRouche and Dugin offer a deeply authoritarian, culturally elitist vision of society, and a conspiracist critique of international elites, while claiming to reject racism and antisemitism. Hearing LaRouche demonize Britain as the center of the global oligarchic conspiracy, it’s not a big jump to Dugin’s view of history as a secret geopolitical contest between the good land power (Eurasists) and the evil sea power (Atlantists). And, above all, both LaRouche and Dugin see Russia as the key hope for humanity today.

So it’s not a big surprise that Sergey Glazyev is on friendly terms with both the LaRouche network and Dugin. Glazyev participated in the founding conference of Dugin’s Eurasia Party in 2002 before helping to found a separate far right party, Rodina (Motherland), the following year. Glazyev and Dugin are both members of the Izborsky Club, an influential far right think tank that proclaims Peter the Great and Josef Stalin as the main heroes of Russian history. And one of Glazyev’s main jobs for Putin has been to negotiate greater economic integration of former Soviet republics under the rubric of a Eurasian Union — a project dear to both Dugin and LaRouche.

Glazyev isn’t the only link connecting LaRouche and Dugin. Another is Nataliya Vitrenko, leader of the Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine. Vitrenko is a member of Supreme Council of Dugin’s International Eurasian Movement, which has branches in 22 countries. But she is also a close ally of the LaRouche network, who has for years promoted LaRouche’s ideas, addressed LaRouchite-sponsored meetings and conferences, and received favorable coverage in LaRouchite publications. In February 2014, for example, Executive Intelligence Review published a statement by Vitrenko under the headline “U.S.A. and EU, With Ukrainian Terrorists, Establish Nazi Regime.”

These indirect ties between LaRouchites and Duginists in Russia are particularly striking given how politically isolated the LaRouchites are in the U.S. — even from other far rightists. This doesn’t mean the two movements are likely to join forces directly. Differences of ideology and political culture — not to mention their leaders’ egos — stand in the way of an actual alliance. But figures such as Glazyev and Vitrenko may serve as conduits — or “open channels” in the LaRouchites’ spy-novel terminology — that promote a sharing of ideas and information between the two. Glazyev and others in the political elite may also borrow ideological and programmatic elements from both movements to make something stronger. This is a level of influence most wing-nuts can only dream of.

Image credits:
LaRouchePAC poster collage - By Racconish (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.
Trans-Siberian Railway map - By User:Stefan Kühn (Own work) [GFDL, CC-BY-SA-3.0 or CC BY-SA 2.5-2.0-1.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

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Dylann Roof's white nationalism

The racist manifesto and photos on Dylann Storm Roof’s website spell out many of the beliefs that drove him to murder nine people at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, on June 17. Leading white nationalist websites have distanced themselves from Roof’s terrorist actions, but many of them have praised his ideas about race and U.S. society.

Most of the manifesto (which I will assume was in fact written by Roof) is a rehash of standard white supremacist propaganda themes — African Americans are “stupid and violent”; slavery and segregation were benign; Jews stir up black people to cause trouble; and whites today are scared, disempowered, and under attack. The manifesto also rejects American patriotism as “an absolute joke”: “Many veterans believe we owe them something for ‘protecting our way of life’ or ‘protecting our freedom’. But im not sure what way of life they are talking about. How about we protect the White race and stop fighting for the jews.”

Roof called his website (which is no longer active but is archived here) LastRhodesian.com, expressing solidarity with the former white settler colonial Republic of Rhodesia. The website included many photos of Roof posing with a Confederate battle flag, a gun, a burning American flag, or the neonazi code-phrase “1488” written in the sand. (“88” stands for “HH” or “Heil Hitler,” while “14” refers to the “Fourteen Words” slogan coined by neonazi David Lane: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for White children.”)

Despite his use of neonazi symbolism and rejection of U.S. patriotism, Roof differs with standard white nationalist positions on several points of racial ideology. For example, he declares that “the majority of American and European jews are White. In my opinion the issues with jews is not their blood, but their identity. I think that if we could somehow destroy the jewish identity, then they wouldnt cause much of a problem.” The manifesto also expresses ambivalence about Latinos (“there are good hispanics and bad hispanics”) and even a wish for a racist alliance between white nationalists and East Asians. Roof also rejected the idea of a racially pure white enclave in the Pacific Northwest, a vision promoted by the old Aryan Nations organization and others: “To me the whole idea just parralells the concept of White people running to the suburbs. The whole idea is pathetic and just another way to run from the problem without facing it.”

Other white nationalist websites have had mixed responses to Roof and his manifesto. Several commenters on Stormfront questioned the manifesto’s authenticity, or dismissed the Emanuel Church massacre itself as a “false flag” operation designed to discredit the white nationalist cause. On the Vanguard News Network, Tim McGreen wrote, “I rather doubt [Roof] is capable of writing anything. Unless it can be proven otherwise I am convinced that ZOG invented this whole story, complete with fake pictures of the ‘perpetrator’ and a fake ‘manifesto’.” (“ZOG” stands for “Zionist Occupation Government” and is standard neonazi-speak for the U.S. government.) A more positive spin came from “Macromedia” on Stormfront: “This young man gave a sophisticated analysis of black behavior and the media's role in it…. Though I can't condone or support the shooting of unarmed citizens in religious service, this act forces America to read his manifesto…. Perhaps this will reverse the tide by awakening many more, just like Dylann himself was awakened in the wake of Trayvon.”

On Counter-Currents, which offers a more intellectual brand of white nationalism, Editor-in-Chief Greg Johnson argued, “It seems unlikely that this manifesto is fake, since Roof is alive and could expose it if it were.” Johnson added, “If I had a son, he would look like Dylann Roof.” The general sentiment on Counter-Currents was respect for Roof’s views and disappointment about the massacre — not because of the people killed or injured but because it makes white nationalism look bad. As one commenter (“Christopher”) put it: “A cogent and insightful piece. [Roof] quite plainly is a white nationalist, and a moderately intelligent one at that. This makes his choice of target even more puzzling; based on this text, he should be smart enough to know that attacking a church would do significant damage to the cause and would do nothing to halt the kinds of things he’s upset about.”

Marcus Cicero* offered a detailed critique of Roof’s manifesto on his new website Majority Rebellion (tagline: “help save Western civilization”). In a guest post on Brad Griffin's Occidental Dissent blog, Cicero referred to Roof as a “drug-addled maniac [who] is obviously mentally-deranged, and has only caused an exponential increase in the level of hatred geared toward pro-White and pro-South causes and individuals.” Still, Cicero argued that the manifesto “does not come across as all that controversial or fanatical,” and that much of Roof’s discussion of U.S. society “show[s] at least a respectable understanding of the workings of both Blacks and the Jew, [and] contains truths that nearly every White Nationalist would be able to agree with.” He also agreed with Roof in rejecting the Northwest Enclave idea: “although I personally dislike having to agree with this lone-wolf fool, who has likely hurt our Cause due to his idiocy, facts are facts.” On the other hand, in Cicero’s view, Roof does not sufficiently understand the inherent genetic inferiority of Hispanics, East Asians, and Jews.

[*Note: The original version of this post mistakenly attributed Cicero’s statements about Roof to Brad Griffin, who runs the blog Occidental Dissent under the pseudonym Hunter Wallace. Griffin pointed out this error in a comment below.]

Dylann Roof’s manifesto helps us understand the Emanuel Church massacre as an expression of white nationalist politics. This is useful, but it’s not enough. Because in a larger sense, the massacre is also an expression of U.S. society as an overall system. As AlterNet’s Kali Holloway wrote in “Dylann Roof is America,” “We are a country where mass shootings are weekly news, where gun violence is a fact of daily life, where there is a legacy of terror against black people and communities, where white racists have long targeted black churches, where African-American life is so devalued it can be taken with impunity.” Roof’s reported comment to the Emanuel Church congregants before he shot them — “You rape our women, and you’re taking over our country, and you have to go” — expresses widespread, deeply rooted white myths about black people, as Jamelle Bouie has argued, among others. And as the website Africa is a Country reminded us, Roof’s glorification of white-dominated Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa puts him in the same camp as “mainstream” politicians such as Jeane Kirkpatrick, Jesse Helms, Pat Robertson, and Dick Cheney.

Photo: From LastRhodesian.com, republished on Daily Kos.

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July 25 International Day of Solidarity with Antifascist Prisoners!!

From NYC Antifa:

"The July 25 International Day of Solidarity with Antifascist Prisoners originated in 2014 as a Day of Solidarity with Jock Palfreeman, an Australian who is imprisoned in Bulgaria for defending two Romani men from an attack by fascist football hooligans. Groups around the world took action: holding demonstrations, benefits supporting the Bulgarian Prisoners Association, writing to Jock, and talking about the plight of the Romani and Sinti people in general.

"In 2015 we would like to expand this day of solidarity to all antifascist prisoners around the world. We encourage groups to take the day to plan an event of their choice—whether it is a letter writing, demonstration, benefit, or other action—and to focus on the prisoners and related issues that are of most importance to them locally."

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A few websites that monitor the Right

You probably know about the Southern Poverty Law Center, but do you know about South Asia Citizens Web or the Association for Women’s Rights in Development? There are lots of groups out there that monitor right-wing political forces and the struggles against them. In this post I highlight eight of them. I’ve picked sites that may be lesser known, and that target various branches of the right, in various parts of the world, from various political perspectives. I don’t necessarily agree with their politics, but I’m grateful for the reporting and analysis that they provide.

Anton Shekhovtsov’s blog is written by Ukrainian political scientist Anton Shekhovtsov, whose research interests center on far right politics in Europe, particularly central and eastern Europe, as well as red-brown alliance-building. A number of related resources are available via Shekhovtsov’s website. Here are some examples of recent articles on his blog:

• “Whither the Ukrainian Far Right?” 
• “The ‘National-Bolshevik’ alliance is again at work in the European Parliament” 
• “Aleksandr Dugin and the SYRIZA connection” 
• “Russian extreme right White Rex organisation engaged in training of British neo-Nazi thugs”

Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID) is a global feminist member organization with offices in Capetown, Mexico City, and Toronto. One of their areas of focus is their Challenging Religious Fundamantalisms program, which shares information about fundamentalist movements and supports efforts by women’s rights activists to combat them. Some recent articles in AWID’s Facing Fundamentalisms Newsletter have included the following:

• Review of Men In Charge? Rethinking Authority In Muslim Legal Tradition
• “Women's Rights Activists Resist Myanmar's Proposed 'Law on Protection of Race and Religion’”
• “Armenia’s Far-Right Pitting ‘The Family’ Against Fundamental Rights”
• “Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Activists Challenge Regressions In Croatia” 

Autonomous Action (Avtonomnoe Deystvie, or AD) is a libertarian communist federation with branches in Russia, Ukraine, and Belorus. Its Manifesto includes an emphasis on anti-fascism and anti-nationalism, among other themes. AD reports on far right activities, anti-fascist activities, and state repression against anti-fascists.

• “On racism in the Russian antifa and hardcore subculture”
• “The End of Antifa?” (about anti-fascists fighting on both sides of the conflict in Ukraine)
• “Russia: Parents of arrested anti-fascist Alen Volikov threatened with violence by police”

Center for New Community is a Chicago-based liberal social justice organization that places special emphasis on countering anti-immigrant nativism and related forms of bigotry. Its Resources page (http://imagine2050.newcomm.org/resources/) features a series of brief articles and charts on topics such as eugenics and Islamophobia. Here are some recent articles from its Nativism Watch section:

• “Geert Wilders in Washington: ‘The less Islam, the better’”
• “Nativist former Rep. Tom Tancredo to speak at Oath Keepers rally”
• “FAIR state group: Immigrant workers prone to gun violence, resemble sheltered animals” 

South Asia Citizens Web (SACW) is a left-leaning secularist website that provides reports and commentary on a wide variety of topics related to Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and South Asians in the diaspora. SACW devotes a lot of attention to Hindu nationalism, the Islamic right, and other forms of "communalism" (ethnoreligious bigotry and violence). Here are some of their recent publications:

• “Hindu Nationalism in the United States: A Report on Nonprofit Groups”
• “Daily Life of Segregation and Ghettoisation in Modi’s Gujarat”
• “Video report: In Pakistani Schools, Jihad Is Back” 
• “Bangladesh: editorials and commentary following the killing of the blogger Avijit Roy”

Tahrir-International Collective Network (Tahrir-ICN) is a an online network whose tagline is “bringing together anarchist perspectives from the Middle East, North Africa and Europe.” Tahrir-ICN’s Manifesto notes that radical movements  in all of these regions face “similar challenges: the implementation of a liberal economy and the threat from the extreme right, whether Christian or Islamic.” Recent posts have addressed events in Syria, Palestine, Morocco, Kurdistan, Iraq, Bahrain, Egypt, Germany, France, and Israel.

• “Syria’s multi-party conflict and multi-way war”
• “Fathers of ISIS”
• “FRANCE: Weekend of anti-fascist resistance in Calais, 5-7 September and Defence Of Migrant Squats”
• “PALESTINE: Sexual Violence, Women`s Bodies, and Israeli Settler Colonialism” 

Talk To Action is a leading forum for research and analysis on the Christian right in the United States, covering topics such as Christian Reconstructionism, the New Apostolic Reformation movement, Opus Dei, the Left Behind book series, biblical patriarchy, and the ties between Christian rightists and the neo-confederate movement. Regular contributors include Rachel Tabachnick, Frederick Clarkson, Bill Berkowitz, Frank Cocozzelli, and others. Here’s some of their recent work:

• “Whither the Christian Right in the Democratic Party?”
• “The Duggar Family, the Girl Scouts, and the Christian Right's War on Transgender People”
• “Could Support for LGBTQ Rights Disrupt the Coalition of Jews and Evangelical Christian Zionists?”

We Hunted the Mammoth (WHTM) is freelance writer David Futrelle's blog about the “Manosphere” — an online antifeminist subculture that has exploded in recent years, largely outside traditional right-wing patriarchal networks such as the Christian right. In Futrelle's words, “WHTM tracks and mocks the New Misogyny online, focusing especially on Men's Rights, Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW), and Pickup Artist (PUA) sites.” The phrase “We hunted the mammoth” comes from an old Men's Rights quote about all the unappreciated things men had supposedly done for women since the Stone Age. (Futrelle used to call his blog Manboobz, which he concedes was “kind of a dopey name.”)

• “You Won’t Be Shocked by This Crappy Return of Kings Post Telling Men Not to Date ‘Girls Who Claim They Were Raped’”
• “Toronto police investigating PUA who posted video saying a woman should be ‘stabbed and cut up into tiny pieces’”
• “‘Women enjoy being forced to do things, just like children,’ creepy-as-hell Red Pill Redditor observes”

Photo credit: By Reategui12 (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

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New look for ThreeWayFight

I'm working on ThreeWayFight again after a hiatus of a few months, and have updated the design template for the first time in many years. Time for a change.

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