Saturday, January 12, 2008

Your taxpayer dollars at work

-- by Dave

We've periodically reported on the antics of far-right maven Hal Turner, who most notably has made a career out of threatening people. This includes issuing threats against judges (and taking credit when one of his target's family members were murdered), calling for vigilante force to "rescue" Terri Schiavo, and demanding we begin shooting Mexican border crossers on sight.

Now it seems that, according to a devastating report from the SPLC, he's been doing it on the payroll of the FBI:
On Jan. 1, unidentified hackers electronically confronted Turner in the forum of his website for “The Hal Turner Show.” After a heated exchange, they told Turner that they had successfully hacked into his server and found correspondence with an FBI agent who is apparently Turner’s handler. Then they posted an alleged July 7 E-mail to the agent in which Turner hands over a message from someone who sent in a death threat against Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wisc.). “Once again,” Turner writes to his handler, “my fierce rhetoric has served to flush out a possible crazy.” In what is allegedly a portion of another E-mail, Turner discusses the money he is paid.

On Thursday, as the E-mail exchange was heatedly discussed on a major neo-Nazi website, Turner suddenly announced he was quitting political work. “I hereby separate from the ‘pro-White’ movement,” he said, adding that he was ending his radio show immediately. “I will no longer involve myself in any aspect of it.”

The FBI declined comment. “Longstanding FBI policy prohibits disclosing who may or may not provide information,” Agent Richard Kolko of the agency’s press unit said. Reached in New Jersey, Turner also declined all comment.

The apparent revelation set off a torrent of criticism from experts in criminology and the use of informants. “This is clearly over the line,” said James Nolan, an associate sociology professor at West Virginia University who is an expert in police procedure and a former unit chief in the FBI’s Crime Analysis, Research and Development Unit. “Informants may be involved in drugs, and you overlook that because of the greater good. However, these are viable threats — they could be carried out — that the FBI clearly knows about. I want to see the FBI stop it.”

Over the years of covering cases involving the far right and federal law enforcement's use of informants, I've certainly seen them indulging the use of some of the most questionable characters for this work. But I don't think I've ever seen anything this irresponsible before.

As Mark Potok of the SPLC put it when I talked to him about this case: "These people were playing Russian Roulette with the lives of the people Hal Turner was targeting."

Potok also spoke with Mike German, a former undercover FBI agent whose work I once covered. "This certainly raises a whole lot of questions that need to be answered in a public forum," he said. "There are strict rules about what an informant is allowed to do, and certainly encouraging or instigating others to commit acts of violence is far beyond what FBI agents should have their informants doing. Aside from the fact that you're possibly encouraging someone to commit an act of violence, there¹s also the danger that you're actually entrapping that person, which means he would get off."

This deserves to be a significant scandal. We'll see if the press can divert its attention long enough from Britney Spears to bring it to the public's attention.

2008: Which Rough Beast? -- A Conclusion

Part I: A Year in Limbo
Part II: Hold on Tight to Your Dream
Part III: Where There Is No Vision, The People Perish
Part IV: On Denial, Collapse, and the Laws of Physics

-- by Sara

Returning once more to Yeats' apt description of our current moment:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand...

....And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

-- William Butler Yeats, "The Second Coming" (1921)


Yeats wrote "The Second Coming" in the aftermath of World War I, at the beginning of an era that saw the fall of great royal houses and the collapse of the European colonial order. Things as they had been for many centuries were indeed coming apart; the center provided by Europe's hereditary aristocracy (which he believed essential to political and social order) could no longer hold. Mere anarchy, in the form of fascism, communism, and self-rule, was being loosed upon the world.

What rough beast would be born of all this? Looking back down the last century, there are a couple of answers. In Yeats' mind, one of them looked like the rising United States -- its hour come round at last, as it slouched in unknowing innocence toward Bethlehem to be born. Come the nativity, Yeats seems to predict, this newborn ruler would be Europe's salvation and the world's next superpower -- even as it created a future in which nothing of the old regime he cherished would continue to exist. It wasn't a prospect he relished.

But in that same moment in the early 1920s, other, far more dangerous rough beasts were also slouching through Europe, spreading tides of blood-dimmed anarchy much closer to home. That was the decade that both communism and fascism began to take hold, dooming the continent to sixty years of totalitarianism and genocide. It's not clear to me that Yeats was consciously alluding to the threat of the Bolsheviks and Fascisti, even then emerging in Russia and Italy. But this poem has endured because it captures the raw and terrifying essence of those certain rare moments in which we finally accept that the past that we have known is over; and that all that remains before us is a choice of unknown and largely unknowable futures. And yet, even amid the collapse and chaos, we know we are making foundational choices that will determine how billions of people live and die for several generations to come.

The Beast in History
We are, once again, standing at that inflection point. The center is not holding. The structures that sustained the past as we knew it are being swept away -- as the colonial order was swept away in 1776, and the slaveholder order was shattered in 1865, and the tyranny of the industrialists was leveled in 1932. Now, a world built on oil and consumerism has become too dangerous to sustain; and that center, too, is falling away to make room for something new.

But we don't yet know what will rise in its place. That's what's being decided now. The biggest determining factor at these moments -- and also, far and away, the biggest risk -- is who gets to the center first and lays down the most compelling vision. Because, for better or worse, that will very likely become the memetic foundation on which the entire new age will arise. The founding myths, the cultural metaphors, the worldview and essential beliefs that define right and wrong, good and bad, useful and irrelevant for the new era are all embedded in this new foundation; and everything else that follows will be built on and out of that mental framework. The conflicts ahead of us will, in essence, be a sort of epistemologicial "capture the flag:" Whoever wins this race for the hearts and minds of the nation will win control of the future for most of the rest of this century.

America has been fairly lucky. At similar points in the past, we've been blessed with fleet-footed, reform-minded idealists like Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt -- leaders who weren't afraid to step into the breach and challenge us to become something entirely new and (for the most part) considerably better. Jefferson and his fellow Founders did this with such vision and passion that they remain one of history's prime examples of how this kind of transformative moment can be used to usher in an entirely new era of history.

Lincoln offers a more sobering view of what can also go wrong. After his assassination, Andrew Johnson allowed the corporate royalists to capture the still-very-new Republican party, and co-opt Reconstruction for their own ends. The military part of the revolution was won; but without The Great Emancipator's steadying hand through the aftermath, the social revolution that was supposed to finish the job of bringing African-Americans to full equality was throttled in its crib. The result was the rise of the Jim Crow and the robber barons, the excesses of the Gilded Age, the financial panics of the 1880s and 1890s, and (forty years on) the wrenching crusades of the Progressive Era in which a new generation fought to take back their government and use it to reclaim the common good.

One of those Progressive reformers was Franklin Roosevelt, whose seized his own moment and used it to create the modern middle class. He succeeded in part because he had 14 years in office -- plenty of time to follow through. By the time he died, his efforts had taken solid root, and the emerging middle class he sought to nurture had begun to flourish. As long as people remembered what he'd done, the will to maintain that middle class remained strong. It was only when the main beneficiaries were too old and comfortable to remember clearly, and a new generation came up with no such memories at all, that the Reaganites could finally get out the tools and begin to chip away at it.

The Roughest Beast
Moments like this one are a vortex that draws in the corrupt, absurd, opportunistic, and authoritarian, all of whom instinctively scramble for the center in hope of carving out their piece of the new order. (This fact, in a nutshell, explains how the Republican Party -- which set up shop right at the center of the old order, and is thus taking the brunt of its failure -- wound up with the unqualified and bizarre likes of Rudy and Fred and Ron on its primary ballot this year.) Throughout history, strongmen have waited and watched -- and done their part to instigate -- such moments. When the center fails, and the yawning void is at its deepest, they confidently step in and and take over, winning popular support by promising to restore order to a terrified nation.

At every previous transformational moment in American history, we've had plenty of these same people standing by, ready and eager to seize the moment and use it to reassert the prerogatives of the rich and powerful. The Founders faced down Loyalists -- and summarily expelled them from their new country after the Revolution was won. Lincoln's achievements were obliterated by the corporatists who followed in his wake, leaving us with a shattered South, Jim Crow, and a national wound that has yet to heal. FDR was the target of a coup attempt led by the nation's richest industrialists, who hoped to co-opt the military and set up something like fascist rule. (The plot only failed because they picked the wrong man.) And the Bush regime's careful care and feeding of the country's most authoritarian elements over the past seven years has left us with a sleek, well-fed royalist class that's already looking for its moment to sweep in, seize the future, and set the agenda for the rest of us.

So who will be competing for the spoils this time?

There are, of course, the aforementioned economic royalists. In the strengths column, they've had 30 years to pile up boggling fortunes, which they've used to capture the world's governments (we're hardly the only one with a corruption problem), place financial bets that ensure they win no matter what happens, and perfect a little history-shaping technique of their own, which Naomi Klein finally put a name to -- the Shock Doctrine.

America's ruling classes have learned how to deliberately create their own moments of destructive chaos, and then take advantage of them to control the future. Some of those experiments don't turn out so well (see "Iraq" and "Chile"); others turn out slightly better, but only slightly. The only sure bet in any of these situations is that a few will profit, many will die, and many many more will have their lives destroyed so that the world's rich will continue to get richer.

But on the weaknesses side, the balance is tilting. All of these destabilization campaigns have occurred in the context of (and in service to) the current systems of oil and consumption. When those systems fail, the meaning and purpose of Shock Doctrine invasions will change with them. They may become more numerous -- but also much riskier. Some of those great fortunes will be lost. Resistance will mount. Taxpayers will rebel. Groups of nations (South America would be one strong candidate) will band together and get creative about resisting these takeovers. The balance of power will shift, creating opportunities to solve problems in other ways. And, with enough resistance, Shock Doctrine-type tactics may eventually be abandoned as a money-losing proposition.

Another wild card is the religious right, whose long alliance with the royalists has come up for a serious re-negotiation on several fronts. As I've noted before, there are a number of long-term forces that are moving the next generation of Evangelicals slowly toward the center. One of these (crystallized in the campaign of Mike Huckabee) is a deep sense of betrayal at how their 30 years of loyal support have failed to pay off politically for them. Another is a growing sense of populism that is putting them back in touch with their own class interests. A third is a younger generation that's beginning to engage with the same issues of ecology and economy that the rest of us see, and are mounting a powerful Scriptural critique of it.

For the past decade, observers of the radical right have been worried that this group would be ripe pickings for a populist leader who promised them palingenesis -- a Biblical renewal of national purity, achieved through an eliminationist purging of the country's liberal and decadent elements, undertaken (as mandated by some theologies) in order to prepare the way for the Second Coming. If the right leader emerged to unite the moral passions of the religious right with the economic rapacity of the corporatists, a fascist state would almost certainly be the result.

However, given recent trends on this front, it seems possible that that the ripest moment for this may have come somewhere around 2003, and is now passing. It could still happen, especially in the event of another large-scale terrorist attack. But, absent that, as the dissatisfactions between the religious and economic right widen it will continue to become less likely.

The Beast Is Us
The third wild card -- and the one we must believe will be the real determining factor -- is how strongly and confidently the progressive movement can rise to the occasion, raising up leaders who can step into the void and fill it with compelling visions of the future we want to bring the country to.

That's why we need to be very skeptical about our sudden glut of "change" candidates. It's not enough to say you're for change -- Hitler was, too -- you need to lay out, very specifically and in the most visionary terms possible, what changes you seek. In the week since my last post in this series, the New Hampshire primary came and went -- and with it, a substantial realignment of the rhetoric being used by the candidates of both parties. Iowa and New Hampshire slammed the message home to campaign managers that people are fed up, and ready for change. As a result, candidates like Mitt and Hillary -- who, two weeks ago, were trying to sell their experience -- are now rushing to re-brand themselves as The Candidates of Change.

We're only two primaries down, and "change" already become a schtick -- a sort of rueful cliche, delivered in some cases with a broad wink at the corporate funders, meaning whatever the speaker thinks it means. But have you noticed how few of the candidates now extolling their ability to "create change" actually take the time to define what the word means to them?

"I am the candidate of change" tells us absolutely nothing; and we're fools if we accept this proclamation as sufficient. We need to know: What does change mean to you? Where do you want to take us? And, most importantly: Do you fully understand the magnitude of change possible in this moment? Are you willing to think at a scale that will help us lay down the foundation for a reworked economy, a new energy paradigm, a set of cultural values that don't depend on consumerism, and an entirely different relationship with nature and the rest of the world?

Because all of these things are now becoming possible. We are out here, 300 million strong, craving to be led in a new direction, into a new relationship with each other and the planet. Just saying they're for "change" is no promise that a would-be leader understands this, or is willing or able to deliver on it.

Conclusion
Moments of change and reform are terrifying because they take us right down to the most essential questions of who we are, what we stand for, and how we define what is good in the world. During stable times, when strong economic, social, and political systems are in place and working fairly predictably, we create change slowly, through persuasion, deal-making, and compromise. You find a leverage point or two, and keep working it slowly until the whole system begins to move in a direction that's more to your liking.

But we are not in a stable time. Except for those still in denial, most of us are quite clear that the systems themselves are broken. The job isn't about changing the behavior of an existing structure; now, we've got the rare opportunity to build ourselves a whole new economic, political, technological, and social order, constructed out of entirely new premises. We are being faced with the choice of what will be brought forward with us; and what will be allowed to pass away into history.

It's terrifying work, especially for those of us who are intelligent and prudent and like to make well-considered decisions based on piles of information. On one hand, progressives in particular have been so disillusioned by the past 30 years that we're more prone to heckle a big dreamer than follow them. On the other, we want to fill the void with something that will transform the future into something far closer to our values -- something that cannot happen unless we get over our cynicism and dare to dream big. Right now, the blogosphere seems to be grinding its wheels on these kinds of functional questions: How much change can we dare ask for? How big should we dream -- or should we even bother dreaming at all? How will we know if we're making the right choices?

These are the kinds of questions managers ask. In the meantime, while we're all dithering, opportunistic would-be leaders are already acting.

While we're standing around, hemming and hawing, far less prudent people are already hurling themselves into the breach. They don't have a moment's hesitation about dreaming big; and they don't worry in the least about having enough information, or thinking through the consequences, or wondering if their decisions are reasonable. They want CHANGE, dammit, and they want it now. Their appeal is emotional, furious, and sometimes incendiary. And while their definition of "change" is incoherent -- even those involved in some of their movements can't quite tell you what they stand for -- their zeal to get in there and become the first to seize the center more than makes up for it. The details can wait, they figure -- they'll work that out once they've taken control of the new reality, which will allow them to frame the terms of the conversation about possible solutions.

That's what leaders and winners look like in this moment. And it's why serious factions, yearning for change, are lining up behind people like Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich. Their common trait is their willingness to hurl themselves into that breach in the name of creating change NOW, and -- for better or worse -- working out the details later.

The old saying says, "Be careful what you wish for, for you will surely get it." A lot of us -- especially those who remember what was lost -- have wished for this moment our entire lives. Now that it's upon us, we have to act. Ready or not, it's here, and we need to trust ourselves to make the leap into that void. Either we believe in the progressive vision with the same zeal as the True Believers of the Religious Right or the shrewd disaster capitalists of the economic right -- and are willing to stake our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor on that belief -- or we lose. And then, like the Founders and FDR did (and Lincoln could not do), we have to be ready to stay in the fight until it's over, until the new center is holding fast and the country has begun to organize around it.

Rough beasts that we are, we need to stand up straight, form up, and start marching toward Bethlehem with all deliberate haste. Because our hour has come. In this eventful year, the future we've been waiting for will finally begin to be born.

Friday, January 11, 2008

Chris Matthews and His All-Boy Revue


Brothers in slime

-- by Sara


Chris Matthews is in deep hot water this time. What's most surprising about this is that it's taken so long -- if he'd been saying this kind of stuff about African-American politicians, he'd have been off the airwaves years ago, faster than you can say "Don Imus."

Just to prove the point, I did a little translation exercise over at the Group News Blog, turning some of his most egregious sexist comments into comparable racist ones. It's not pretty, but it is pretty instructive. And it proves the point that, in 2008, with women governors, senators, pundits, and perhaps presidents, we still tolerate a hell of a lot more sexism from the men in charge than we do racism.

You can read the whole post here. And then go tell MSNBC that it's time for Matthews to shut down the no-gurlz-aloud treehouse for good here.

The buck stops here

-- by Dave

OK, I've been proceeding to try to engage Jonah Goldberg in a discussion of his Liberal Fascism in good faith. Indeed, I've been preparing an in-depth counter to his response, but before we proceed, I think it's essential that he actually address the central point of my review.

After reading this, I'm calling a halt to it all (temporarily, I hope), because I'm doubtful that my good faith is being returned in kind:
I'm tempted to just leave it there since I think so little of Neiwart's attempt. It seems to boil down to: Fascists are always the bad guys. There are real bad guys today. They are on the right. Therefore they are the real fascists. Talk about anti-intellectual!

Of course, anyone who reads my point will see that this is not my argument at all.

The people I'm talking about -- the Klan, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, skinheads, and nativists -- are not definably fascist because they're bad guys (whatever the hell that means). We can identify them as fascist for a number of reasons:
-- They share a direct lineage with American fascists of the 1920s and '30s whose activities never ceased in the intervening years, and whose ideologies and activities both in the 1920s and since were clearly on the political right, as they are today.

-- These contemporary groups all currently employ the symbolism, ideology, rhetoric and behavior of classical fascists. Many of them openly admire, even worship, Hitler.

-- They fully meet the definition of fascism -- not merely Jonah's, which as we've explained is wholly inadequate, but the broadly accepted understanding of fascism derived from the academic study of the phenomenon.*


Finally, we know that these organizations exist today on the right side of the political spectrum not because they're "bad guys" but because of what constitutes their ideology and agenda:
-- Anti-Semitism

-- Racial separation

-- The quashing of civil rights for minorities

-- The destruction of federal government power

-- Anti-welfare

-- Anti-public education

-- Anti-homosexual

-- Anti-abortion

-- Anti-immigration

Each of these positions today is largely a tenet of the political right, and has been for some time.

I'm going to hold off on my posting my longer response to Goldberg's response -- which is mostly involved with secondary issues -- until he actually takes the time to respond to what I'm actually arguing.

___

*Once again, see Paxton's nine "mobilizing passions" of fascism:
-- -- a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional solutions;

-- the primacy of the group, toward which one has duties superior to every right, whether universal or individual, and the subordination of the individual to it;

-- the belief that one's group is a victim, a sentiment which justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against the group's enemies, both internal and external;

-- dread of the group's decline under the corrosive effect of individualistic liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences;

-- the need for closer integration of a purer community, by consent if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary;

-- the need for authority by natural leaders (always male), culminating in a national chief who alone is capable of incarnating the group's destiny;

-- the superiority of the leader's instincts over abstract and universal reason;

-- the beauty of violence and the efficacy of will, when they are devoted to the group's success;

-- the right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint from any kind of human or divine law, right being decided by the sole criterion of the group's prowess in a Darwinian struggle.

Roger Griffin has also offered a more detailed definition of fascism:
Fascism: modern political ideology that seeks to regenerate the social, economic, and cultural life of a country by basing it on a heightened sense of national belonging or ethnic identity. Fascism rejects liberal ideas such as freedom and individual rights, and often presses for the destruction of elections, legislatures, and other elements of democracy. Despite the idealistic goals of fascism, attempts to build fascist societies have led to wars and persecutions that caused millions of deaths. As a result, fascism is strongly associated with right-wing fanaticism, racism, totalitarianism, and violence.

These definitions generally reflect the academic consensus about fascism.

A serious person

-- by Dave

While I'm working on my counter-response to Jonah Goldberg, I should point out that he gave an interview to Salon, where Alex Koppelman performed the Sysiphian task of trying to pin him down. It concludes:
Well, I'm perfectly glad to concede that people who do judge books by their covers or think it's more important to read a title rather than read a book will be confused and jump to conclusions. But these are people that I don't generally respect. The cover was Random House's invention, and I'm still sort of ambivalent about it, but you make covers to sell books, you make titles to sell books, even though my title comes from a speech by H.G. Wells ... The cover, the smiley face with the mustache, is a play on something I explain on basically Page One of the book, and it's a reference to what George Carlin and Bill Maher call smiley-face fascism. And if you can't get past the cover and the title, then you're not a serious book reader and you're not really a serious person.

Indeed, Goldberg notes he "must say it about 25 times in the book" that liberals are not Nazis.

But if not, then why the title Liberal Fascism? It's clear that he intends to say that liberals can be Nazis -- and as he maligns everyone from Woodrow Wilson to FDR to LBJ to Hillary Clinton as "liberal fascists," it's clear he's saying they in fact often are.

This is simple disingenuousness. It reminds me of the way Michelle Malkin wrote a book titled In Defense of Internment that justified the forced incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, and further inveighed in the book against policies regarding ethnic profiling in the wake of the 9/11 attacks -- and then insisted, in the same text, that she wasn't advocating the internment of Arab- or Muslim-Americans. As I noted at the time:
This is, however, more than a little disingenuous, since Malkin's text is not merely a rationalization for racial profiling but indeed one for mass internment based on ethnicity as well. Beyond the immediate question -- Why use a massive violation of civil rights to justify relatively limited measures such as those proposed? -- there is the effect this logic has on the discourse: Justifying an action may not be semantically the same as advocating it, but it can have the same effect.

Likewise, when one identifies liberals with fascists in the title of a book, it's somewhat dishonest to later claim within the text that the intent is not to identify all liberals with all fascists: the effect on the discourse is the same. Look at a similar mashup -- "Islamofascism" -- and how it is commonly used in the right-wing lexicon now (see, e.g., Little Green Footballs, Atlas Shrugged, or the Free Republic for freshly recurring examples) to smear all Muslims.

In promoting the concept, as it were, by making it his title, he's debasing the public understanding of fascism in such a way as to lead people to believe that liberals are fascist. And in mashing together two terms that generally are mutually exclusive (one of the hallmarks of Newspeak, incidentally), he's attempting to deny that they are so. But he fails to do so miserably, mainly because he elides all the evidence that, for the most part, they actually are.

Along these lines, it's worth pointing out that there's really nothing new to to what Goldberg imagines is his provocative and groundbreaking thesis: we've been hearing about "feminazis" and "liberal Nazis" and "eco-fascists" from the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage for many years, and it's been gaining prominence on the right in recent months as well, thanks to folks like Bill O'Reilly (who compared DailyKos to Nazis and the Klan) and Debbie Schlussel.

It's an old meme. All Goldberg has done is wrap it up in a nice cover and given it the official imprimatur of the conservative movement. Watch how much we hear it being used as a way to smear all liberals in the coming months and years.

A serious person would understand that, of course. But it's hard to take anything about this enterprise seriously -- except how badly it pollutes the public discourse.

Jonah's response

-- by Dave

Jonah Goldberg has posted a response to my review of Liberal Fascism.

I'll have a great deal more in the morning, but I'd like to point out initially that, while expending a great deal of time excoriating and dismissing the review, he utterly neglects to address its central point -- the one raised in the review's subhed, to wit:
In his new book, Goldberg has decided to dream up fascists on the left rather than acknowledge the fact that the real American fascists have been lurking in the right's closet for lo these many years.

As the review states in its culminative paragraphs:
What goes missing from Goldberg's account of fascism is that, while he describes nearly every kind of liberal enterprise or ideology as representing American fascism, he wipes from the pages of history the fact that there have been fascists operating within the nation's culture for the better part of the past century. Robert O. Paxton, in his book The Anatomy of Fascism, identifies the Ku Klux Klan as the first genuine fascist organization, a suggestion that Goldberg airily dismisses with the dumb explanation that the Klan of the 1920s disliked Mussolini and his adherents because they were Italian (somewhat true for a time but irrelevant in terms of their ideological affinities, which were substantial enough that by the 1930s, historians have noted, there were frequent operative associations between Klan leaders and European fascists). [More here on that.]

Beyond the Klan, completely missing from the pages of Goldberg's book is any mention of the Silver Shirts, the American Nazi Party, the Posse Comitatus, the Aryan Nations, or the National Alliance -- all of them openly fascist organizations, many of them involved in some of the nation's most horrific historical events. (The Oklahoma City bombing, for instance, was the product of a blueprint drawn up by the National Alliance's William Pierce.) Goldberg sees fit to declare people like Wilson, FDR, LBJ, and Hillary Clinton "American fascists," but he makes no mention of William Dudley Pelley, Gerald L.K. Smith, George Lincoln Rockwell, William Potter Gale, Richard Butler, or David Duke -- all of them bona fide fascists: the real thing.

This is a telling omission, because the continuing existence of these groups makes clear what an absurd and nakedly self-serving thing Goldberg's alternate version of reality is. Why dream up fascists on the left when the reality is that real American fascists have been lurking in the right's closet for lo these many years? Well, maybe because it's a handy way of getting everyone to forget that fact.

Or, to put it more simply:
Why talk about liberals as fascists when we have living, breathing fascists in our midst today -- fascists whose philosophies are about as diametrically opposed to those liberals as one can find?

Jonah devotes not a single sentence to addressing this point.

What is so aggravating about Jonah's book is that much of the debate and discussion focuses on words and ideas whose real-world meanings were different in the 1920s and '30s than they are today, largely because contexts have changed so much in the ensuing years. A large part of Goldberg's response involves this discussion, and I'll have a great deal more to say on this shortly.

But the point is this: If we're going to talk about fascism, we should be referring to what it means currently. And there are indeed contemporary fascists, both in America and Europe, who continue to operate and organize, and whose presence and activities continue to affect us both politically and culturally. And these people are decidedly right-wing in its current meaning. Moreover, they are adamantly, diametrically, even violently opposed to "liberalism" in its common current meaning.

There are, in fact, people whose work it is to monitor and expose the activities of these factions, and the general decay of the usefulness of the term fascism is a source of constant dismay to them (as it is to me). When people throw the word "fascist" about willy-nilly, it makes it that much more difficult to make the public aware of the societal dangers posed by the activities of real fascists.

And a book like Goldberg's -- which almost renders the word finally, irrevocably meaningless -- is the worst immanation of this trend yet, in no small part because its fundamental silliness undermines something very serious indeed.

(Incidentally, I predicted elsewhere that Jonah would fail to tackle the review's central thesis. I hate it when I'm right about these things.)

That definition of fascism


-- by Dave

While awaiting Jonah's response to my review, I should note, via John Holbo via Ezra, that Spencer Ackerman observes a passage that does in fact seem to be a kind of attempt at a definition of fascism, to wit:
Fascism is a religion of the state. It assumes the organic unity of the body politic and longs for a national leader attuned to the will of the people. It is totalitarian in that it views everything as political and holds that any action by the state is justified to achieve that common good. It takes responsibility for all aspects of life, including our health and well-being, and seeks to impose uniformity of thought and action, whether by force or through regulation and social pressure. Everything, including the economy and religion, must be aligned with its objectives. Any rival identity is part of the "problem" and therefore defined as the enemy. (My emphasis.)

I said in my review:
he makes use of that confusion to ramble on for pages about the disagreements without ever providing readers with a clear definition of fascism beyond Orwell's quip.

So this is not exactly correct -- he does indeed give us a definition of fascism, of sorts. But it's so stunningly inadequate, and so nearly completely misses the essence of fascism, that it's anything but clear.

As Ackerman says:
It's no accident, as the Marxists/fascists used to say, that Goldberg started out by shrugging at how difficult it is to define fascism. What he offers isn't a very serviceable definition, but rather one that can offer about 40 feet of bridge to cross the 50 feet of chasm between liberalism and fascism, in an attempt to get the reader to continue on into a Wile E. Coyote-esque act of intellectual gravity-defiance. Fascist regimes do not impose their wills by force "or" through regulation and social pressure. They systematize violence. There isn't anything at all fascist about a neighborhood noise ordinance, and nothing at all fascist about scrunching up your noise in discomfort when someone lights a cigarette. But this is how distinctions between statism and fascism collapse, a necessary move when redefining fascism to include liberalism. If Goldberg wants to posit that statism is fascism, then he'd really better aim his Glock at George W. Bush, champion of massively expanded state power. (Though, as we'll see, Goldberg is rather soft on fascism-qua-fascism for a determined enemy of liberal fascism.)

More to the point, Goldberg's definition does not fit fascism specifically. One could use nearly the same terms and ideas to define Leninist Marxism, or a totalitarian state of any kind. That's because what his definition describes is not fascism specifically, but totalitarianism (or authoritarianism, if you will) generally.

Fascism is a specific species of totalitarianism, and it's best understood not by the things it has in common with other forms of this phenomenon, but what distinguishes it from those other forms. This is why the academic debate has raged for some years over the "fascist minimum", for which Roger Griffin, at least has provided a worthy start by defining fascism as "palingenetic ultranationalist populism." You'll note that all three of these traits are in fact unique to fascism.

But there are other traits common and in many cases unique to fascism as well, and Goldberg overlooks these as well -- while such scholars as Robert Paxton, Stanley Payne, and Umberto Eco, all of whom Goldberg cites in his book, in fact emphasize them. For example, see Paxton's nine "mobilizing passions" of fascism:
-- -- a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional solutions;

-- the primacy of the group, toward which one has duties superior to every right, whether universal or individual, and the subordination of the individual to it;

-- the belief that one's group is a victim, a sentiment which justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against the group's enemies, both internal and external;

-- dread of the group's decline under the corrosive effect of individualistic liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences;

-- the need for closer integration of a purer community, by consent if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary;

-- the need for authority by natural leaders (always male), culminating in a national chief who alone is capable of incarnating the group's destiny;

-- the superiority of the leader's instincts over abstract and universal reason;

-- the beauty of violence and the efficacy of will, when they are devoted to the group's success;

-- the right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint from any kind of human or divine law, right being decided by the sole criterion of the group's prowess in a Darwinian struggle.

Griffin has also offered a more detailed definition of fascism:
Fascism: modern political ideology that seeks to regenerate the social, economic, and cultural life of a country by basing it on a heightened sense of national belonging or ethnic identity. Fascism rejects liberal ideas such as freedom and individual rights, and often presses for the destruction of elections, legislatures, and other elements of democracy. Despite the idealistic goals of fascism, attempts to build fascist societies have led to wars and persecutions that caused millions of deaths. As a result, fascism is strongly associated with right-wing fanaticism, racism, totalitarianism, and violence.

Note that none of these aspects of fascism appear in Goldberg's "definition." In fact, he seems to studiously avoid discussing them as essential to fascism because they are so plainly antiliberal.

Goldberg's "definition" can't be taken seriously because it's so clearly meant to enhance his thesis, while omitting the facets of the term he seeks to define that undermine or in fact destroy his thesis.

It would have been fine, really, if Goldberg had chosen to write about "Liberal Totalitarianism" or "Liberal Authoritarianism." I have no doubt that there is such a thing, and examining it might even make an interesting book and subsequent discussion.

But "Liberal Fascism" is, as I said, beyond being an oxymoron. It's Newspeak.

Thursday, January 10, 2008

Surviving Ron Paul





-- by Dave

I've got a post up tonight at Firedoglake about Ron Paul, titled "Moral Responsibility":
Unsurprisingly, Ron Paul's defense regarding the revelations in The New Republic about his newsletters was of a piece with his previous dubious defenses regarding this subject. As we noted, all the newsletters really do is confirm what we already know about Paul: that he built his political career around making appeals to the most noxious far-right elements in American society.

Here's the press release he issued in response:

"The quotations in The New Republic article are not mine and do not represent what I believe or have ever believed. I have never uttered such words and denounce such small-minded thoughts.

"In fact, I have always agreed with Martin Luther King, Jr. that we should only be concerned with the content of a person's character, not the color of their skin. As I stated on the floor of the U.S. House on April 20, 1999: 'I rise in great respect for the courage and high ideals of Rosa Parks who stood steadfastly for the rights of individuals against unjust laws and oppressive governmental policies.'

"This story is old news and has been rehashed for over a decade. It's once again being resurrected for obvious political reasons on the day of the New Hampshire primary.

"When I was out of Congress and practicing medicine full-time, a newsletter was published under my name that I did not edit. Several writers contributed to the product. For over a decade, I have publicly taken moral responsibility for not paying closer attention to what went out under my name."


Well, we have two choices here:

-- Paul allowed racists and homophobes to publish material under his name for over a decade and did nothing about it until called on it, at which point he in fact denied any responsibility for its publication (his response at the time: "I could never say this in the campaign, but those words weren't really written by me. It wasn't my language at all."); or

-- Paul is lying, and these newsletters really do reflect his longtime views.


Either choice, as it happens, should disqualify the man from the presidency.

Meanwhile, the folks at the Ron Paul Survival Report are doing great work. Ron Lawl's post on Paul's attempts to claim he's now the anti-racist candidate by holding a fund-raiser on Martin Luther King Day is a must-read:
In today's interview with Wolf Blitzer, Ron Paul claims that he's the "anti-racist," and denies the allegations against him involving the recent newsletter. As proof of this fact, he lists the upcoming freeatlast2008, where he plans to hold his next "money bomb" on Martin Luther King Day. This is an event that's so tasteless that even a large group of Paultards from the ronpaulforums thought that it was a bad idea, although mostly because they didn't want to sully Dr. Paul's reputation by associating him with a filthy communist. I haven't written much about this in the past, because a) it didn't seem to be getting much publicity, and b) the Paultards could deny it by insisting that it wasn't part of the official campaign. Guess what? Not anymore. Check 1:50 into the video.

As it happens, this complements the point I made at Firedoglake:
If Ron Paul were serious about assuming "moral responsibility" for more than a decade's worth of allowing vile xenophobic hate and conspiracy-mongering to be published under his name, he'd be doing his utmost to decry the racists and xenophobes who have been supporting his campaign. He would have avoided, during the "decade" of "taking moral responsibility" he now claims, appearing before (and accepting money from) white-nationalist groups like the Council of Conservative Citizens and the Patriot Network. And he would return that $500 donation from Stormfront's Don Black.

Instead, he's refused. Instead, he happily poses for pictures with Don Black and his son at the January 10, 2007, "Values Voters" Conference in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., as he does in the photo atop this post. ...

As Chip Berlet observed: "Those neo-Nazis have a First Amendment right to endorse Ron Paul, but Ron Paul has a moral obligation to disavow that donation.

"There's two issues: Why would anyone have to ask Ron Paul to disassociate himself from the endorsement of neo-Nazis? And the second is that when they did ask him, his silence spoke volumes about his values. You know, 'I don't enjoy the endorsement of neo-Nazis' -- how hard is that to say? And why hasn't he refunded it? It's not like this is a gray area."

But I'm sure we'll keep hearing how straight a shooter Ron Paul really is.

Moral Responsibility

Ron Paul with Don and Derek Black.


[Cross-posted at Firedoglake.]
 
Unsurprisingly, Ron Paul’s defense regarding the revelations in The New Republic about his newsletters was of a piece with his previous dubious defenses regarding this subject. As we noted, all the newsletters really do is confirm what we already know about Paul: that he built his political career around making appeals to the most noxious far-right elements in American society.

Here’s the press release he issued in response:
"The quotations in The New Republic article are not mine and do not represent what I believe or have ever believed. I have never uttered such words and denounce such small-minded thoughts.

"In fact, I have always agreed with Martin Luther King, Jr. that we should only be concerned with the content of a person’s character, not the color of their skin. As I stated on the floor of the U.S. House on April 20, 1999: ‘I rise in great respect for the courage and high ideals of Rosa Parks who stood steadfastly for the rights of individuals against unjust laws and oppressive governmental policies.’

"This story is old news and has been rehashed for over a decade. It’s once again being resurrected for obvious political reasons on the day of the New Hampshire primary.

"When I was out of Congress and practicing medicine full-time, a newsletter was published under my name that I did not edit. Several writers contributed to the product. For over a decade, I have publicly taken moral responsibility for not paying closer attention to what went out under my name."
Well, we have two choices here:

– Paul allowed racists and homophobes to publish material under his name for over a decade and did nothing about it until called on it, at which point he in fact denied any responsibility for its publication (his response at the time: "I could never say this in the campaign, but those words weren’t really written by me. It wasn’t my language at all."); or

– Paul is lying, and these newsletters really do reflect his longtime views.

Either choice, as it happens, should disqualify the man from the presidency.

The first makes clear that he operates as a kind of "absentee overseer" when it comes to the views he promotes in the public sphere and elsewhere — in a way that makes the current holder of the White House look downright responsible. Indeed, Paul’s version of "taking responsibility" in this matter looks a lot like Bush’s: say you’ll "take responsibility" but then blame everything on underlings.

The second — well, that’s fairly obvious. And there’s reason to believe it might be the case. Ed Brayton has a post with commentary from Paul’s former staffer Eric Dondero, who writes that Paul indeed was intimately involved — and that his cohort was Lew Rockwell:
Lew Rockwell was 80% the Ghost writer for Ron Paul’s Newsletters. Again, key word "Ghost writer."

I’d say Ron himself authored about half the Newsletter.

He’d have a yellow pad, and every time we traveled by car, he’d break it out while I was driving and scribble on it for hours.

When we got back from Houston, he’d either giver it to his daughter Lori in Clute, or Jean McCiver in Houston. They were the only two who could interpret his hand-writing.

If it was Lori, she’d fax the draft to Marc Elam at his office on Fuqua in south Houston.
Jean McCiver worked out of that office directly for Elam.

She was the one who edited and put the Newsletter together. She would gather all the various items faxed from Rockwell, and faxed from Ron to input into the word processing program.
As Nick Baumann at Mother Jones observed:
After all, the newsletters have names like "Paul’s Freedom Report," "Ron Paul Political Report," and "The Ron Paul Survival Report," and a lot of them are written in the first person, which, as Kirchick points out, implies authorship. Kirchick’s best point is that, whatever the source, the publications "seem designed to create the impression that they were written by him–and reflected his views."
You can see some of the newsletters here, here, here, here, and here.

If Ron Paul were serious about assuming "moral responsibility" for more than a decade’s worth of allowing vile xenophobic hate and conspiracy-mongering to be published under his name, he’d be doing his utmost to decry the racists and xenophobes who have been supporting his campaign. He would have avoided, during the "decade" of "taking moral responsibility" he now claims, appearing before (and accepting money from) white-nationalist groups like the Council of Conservative Citizens and the Patriot Network. And he would return that $500 donation from Stormfront’s Don Black.

Instead, he’s refused. Instead, he happily poses for pictures with Don Black and his son at the January 10, 2007, "Values Voters" Conference in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., as he does in the photo atop this post. [Source: Stormfront. For those interested in seeing the URL, feel free to e-mail me, but only go there if you must. I've had the photo examined for authenticity and it appears to be genuine.]
As Chip Berlet observed: "Those neo-Nazis have a First Amendment right to endorse Ron Paul, but Ron Paul has a moral obligation to disavow that donation.

"There’s two issues: Why would anyone have to ask Ron Paul to disassociate himself from the endorsement of neo-Nazis? And the second is that when they did ask him, his silence spoke volumes about his values. You know, ‘I don’t enjoy the endorsement of neo-Nazis’ — how hard is that to say? And why hasn’t he refunded it? It’s not like this is a gray area."

Somehow, his followers seem to think it is. And so does Ron Paul.

Not that it’s likely to make any difference at this point: Paul’s poll numbers are in free-fall. A thrid-party run is very likely, which should make Democrats happy. But the rest of us should be fully aware of what the man represents, especially in terms of the mainstreaming of extremist ideas from the fringe right.

Shallow and cliche-ridden

-- by Dave

This just in:
Ezra also credits David Neiwert whose review is exactly the sort of shallow, cliche ridden, attack- the-messenger stuff that I would expect Ezra to find so persuasive. More on that in a moment. But I find it hilarious that the part Ezra thought sufficiently profound to highlight was, in part, the bit where Neiwert insists that the fascist threat remains on the right and in particular that there's a threat of "totalitarianism" from "dogmatic individualists."

High-larious.

Neiwert, what with all of his credentials and seriousness might want to explain how a dogmatic individualist can be a totalitarian, since totalitarian in the academic literature he so esteems defines totalitarianism as anti-individualism. Totalitarianism is about trying to define the lives of others through state power. Individualists might be bad or wrong or selfish, but they aren't any of those things because, again, they're frick'n individualists! Anyway, more on Neiwert's review after I deal with some deadlines. It should be fun.

Indeed. I'm breathless with anticipation.

But just to note: I don't call the neo-Nazis and white supremacists of the American proto-fascist right "dogmatic individualists." I call them "right-wing populists," who as I explain in the review "combine attacks on socially oppressed groups with grassroots mass mobilization and distorted forms of antielitism based on scapegoating." They are distinctly authoritarian in inclination, and what their populist pose disguises is that it is always a highly selective form of populism.

I'm sure Jonah will want to clear up that he's discussing Ezra's words, not mine.

UPDATE: Goldberg has indeed posted a nice correction, which is duly appreciated. Though I doubt that he'll like my review any better the second time around.

In search of the white homeland






-- by Dave

White supremacists have made a living in the past couple of decades advocating the notion of a "white homeland" here in the Pacific Northwest. It's the reason the Aryan Nations moved here from Southern California; the late Robert Miles (a Michigan "pastor" of a white-supremacist church) spent his declining years pushing the concept as well. It had some modest effect: besides the arrival of some right-wing millionaires and a handful of other white-nationalist factions, the demographics of northern Idaho and western Montana shifted rightward sharply in the ensuing years.

In recent years, these white supremacists -- who have taken to renaming themselves "white separatists" -- have shifted their focus somewhat in an attempt to broaden their appeal. The new tactics include recasting themselves further as simply "devout Christians" and setting up shop in South Carolina, which indeed may be more hospitable to their desire for a "white homeland" than Idaho.

You can imagine the sigh of relief in this neck of the woods.

But no. Idaho's back in their plans again:
ANDERSON, S.C. — A Christian group pledging heavy involvement in government could make an “exodus” to Idaho rather than South Carolina.

According to the most recent issue of the Christian Exodus newsletter, the group’s new target may be Idaho.

“Several Christian Exodus members realize that due to commitments to extended family or other reasons, they will not be moving to South Carolina,” the newsletter stated.

Instead, they may be moving to Gem County in Southwest Idaho.

Christian Exodus, a group of individuals who believe in a literal interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, tempered with a devout Christian faith, had previously called for thousands of similar Christians to move to South Carolina one county at a time, starting with Anderson County. Their goal was to move enough people into the area to influence local elections, and in turn affect state elected officials.

With those key elements in place, the group hoped to either influence national legislation to return to a policy of limited federal government and increased states’ rights, or to secede from the Union of States.

In June, Cory Burnell, president and co-founder of Christian Exodus, announced that he would be moving to South Carolina. By July, he said he could not, as he had been terminated from his job. Since then, he has said previously, he has been working to increase the client base of his financial planning business in order to move to South Carolina in the future.

But, in the fall issue of the group’s newsletter, Christian Exodus announced creation of the Idaho group and identified Paul Smith, a former Congressional candidate with the Constitution Party of Idaho, as its volunteer coordinator.

Burnell, as we noted previously, was an activist with the secessionist neo-Confederate group the League of the South. More recently, he's been operating out of California.

Somehow, I don't think Gem County has a lot to worry about. But stranger things have happened.

Wednesday, January 09, 2008

Liberal Fascism Leftovers: #1


-- by Dave

I mentioned when I ran my review of Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism that there was a lot of leftover material I couldn't squeeze into the review, and some material that substantiates what was in the review that I think will be of interest to readers. I'll be sprinkling these about the blog over the next week or so.

So here's the first one, which is in the form of substantiating a point made in the review:
Robert O. Paxton, in his book The Anatomy of Fascism, identifies the Ku Klux Klan as the first genuine fascist organization, a suggestion that Goldberg airily dismisses with the dumb explanation that the Klan of the 1920s disliked Mussolini and his adherents because they were Italian (somewhat true for a time, but irrelevant in terms of their ideological affinities, which were substantial enough that by the 1930s, historians have noted, there were frequent operative associations between Klan leaders and European fascists).

Here's Paxton, from The Anatomy of Fascism:
… [I]t is further back in American history that one comes upon the earliest phenomenon that seems functionally related to fascism: the Ku Klux Klan. Just after the Civil War, some Confederate officers, fearing the vote given to African Americans by the Radical Reconstructionists in 1867, set up a militia to restore an overturned social order. The Klan constituted an alternate civic authority, parallel to the legal state, which, in its founders' eyes, no longer defended their community's legitimate interests. In its adoption of a uniform (white robe and hood), as well as its techniques of intimidation and its conviction that violence was justified in the cause of the group's destiny, the first version of the Klan in the defeated American South was a remarkable preview of the way fascist movements were to function in interwar Europe.

Here's what Goldberg specifically says about the Klan:
The nativist Ku Klux Klan -- ironically, often called "American fascists" by liberals -- tended to despise Mussolini and his American followers (mainly because they were immigrants).

Of course, this obviates a historical fact about fascism: because it was congenitally nationalistic, each expression of it reflected bigotry against other "foreign" nationalities. Naturally, Italian fascists have been as hostile to immigrants historically as American fascists.

But the ideological affinities always eventually come to the surface, as they did with the Klan. From David Chalmers' Hooded Americanism: The History of the Ku Klux Klan (p. 322):
These were just not lucky days for the Klan and the next serious bit of trouble came over the German-American Bund. Not that the Klan and the Bunsh were antagonists -- far from it. During the late thirties there was a prolonged flirtation between the Klan and a growing proliferation of fascist organizations. The names of William Dudley Pelley, Mrs. Leslie Fry, James Edward Smythe, Col. E.N. Sanctuary, Gen. Foerge Van Horn Mosley, and many other "front" leaders turned up with Klan associations. Some had gotten their start in the Klan. X-Ray editor Court Asher was once D.C. Stephenson's lieutenant in Indiana. White Shirt leaders George W. Christians had been a Klansman. So had George Deatherage, founder of the Knights of the White Camellia, who claimed that the Nazis had copied their anti-Jewish policy and their salute from the Klan and who suggested to his followers that they now shift to burning swastikas. Deatherage did his best for the Nazi cause in America; so did Colonel Sanctuary, who organized the company that published the Klan's semiofficial history. Mrs. Leslie Fry had slipped back into Germany, but testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee claimed that she had made Hiram Evans a $75,000 offer for possession of the Invisible Empire.

Southern Klansmen and The Fiery Cross were generally hostile to the German-American Bund, but things were somewhat more friendly elsewhere. Two Klan leaders, one a New Yorker and the other from the West, reportedly wanted to support Hitler. Bundesfuhrer Fritz Kuhn later told Ralph McGill that there has been negotations with representatives from the Michigan and New Jersey Klans, with what he expansively claimed was the understanding that the Southern Klans would go along.

Things had certainly reached a far cry from the early 1920s when Klansmen in Paterson, New Jersey, had protested against the Steuben Society and the teaching of German in the schools. On August 18, 1940, several hundred robed Klansmen shared the grounds of the Bund's Camp Nordlund, near Andover, with a similart contingent of uniformed Bundsmen. Clad in yellow robes, Arthur H. Bell, the Bloomfield lawyer, who had led the New Jersey Klansmen in the 1920s, attacked the singing of "God Bless America," which he described as a Semitic song fit only for the Bowery taverns and brothels. Edward James Smythe, Protestant War Veteran head, who has organized the meeting, lauded Bund leader Kuhn. Then the Camp Director and Deputy Bundesfuhrer stepped to the front of the platform. "When Arthur Bell, your Grand Giant, and Mr. Smythe asked us about using Camp Nordlund for this patriotic meeting, we decided to let them have it because of the common bond between us. The principles of the Bund and the principles of the Klan are the same," he proclaimed.

As for Goldberg's consistency ... he later points to the Nation of Islam's occasional dalliances with the Klan (p. 196) as evidence of their innate fascistic impulse.

Then, on p. 259, he writes:
Perhaps an even better indication of how little moderrn popular conceptions jibe with the historical reality during this period is the Ku Klux Klan. For decades the Klan has stood as the most obvious candidate for an American brand of fascism. That makes quite a bit of sense. The right-wing label, on the other hand, isn't nearly as clean a fit. The Klan of the Progressive Era was not the same Klan that arose after the Civil War. Rather, it was collection of loosely independent organization spread across the United States. What united them, besides their name and absurd getups, was that they were all inspired by the film The Birth of a Nation. They were, in fact, a "creepy fan subculture" of the film. Founded the week of the film's release in 1915, the second Klan was certainly racist, but not much more than the society in general. Of course, this is less a defense of the Klan than an indictment of the society that produced.

This is just flat-out false: the Klan was much, much more than a "creepy fan subculture" of a film. The other event that inspired the founding of the Klan, of course, besides Griffith's movie, was the lynching of Leo Frank. The prescripts of the Klan at its founding were as follows:
First: To protect the weak, the innocent, and the defenseless from the indignities, wrongs and outrages of the lawless, the violent and the brutal; to relieve the injured and oppressed; to succor the suffering and unfortunate, and especially the widows and orphans of the Confederate soldiers.

Second: To protect and defend the Constitution of the United States ...

Third: To aid and assist in the execution of all constitutional laws, and to protect the people from unlawful seizure, and from trial except by their peers in conformity with the laws of the land.

Likewise, the Klan's battle cry was for "100 percent Americanism". One of its more popular tracts was titled "The Klan's Fight for Americanism," and it stated that the Klan
... makes no apologies for its members' attempts to impose their views upon "liberals," immigrants, Catholics, Jews, or peoples of color. Instead it sounds a clarion call for the Klan's "progressive conservatism" and celebrates its influence in American public life.

The Klan's "progressive conservatism," of course, was similar in tenor to "compassionate conservatism" -- the adjective serving mostly to soften and broaden their appeal, while remaining adamantly "conservative." That is, right-wing.

What this really demonstrates is Goldberg's tendency throughout the text to take the appeals of these rightists -- both Nazis as well as the Klan and other fascist figures, all of them people with a historically established and duly recorded tendency to nakedly lie -- in their attempts to soften or broaden their appeal at face value, when in fact these appeals were purely cynical attempts to disguise their real agendas. It's pure propaganda, and Goldberg simultaneously succumbs to and propagates it.

At any rate, Goldberg goes on at length pointing out that the Klan was not just a rural fundamentalist phenomenon but was also fully urbanized and spread throughout all layers of American society. This is factually correct -- but it does not make them any less a creature of the right.

Moreover, the Klan in every incarnation -- its original, its second, and its current, has been a creature of right-wing politics. Consider its current program:
-- Anti-Semitism

-- Racial separation

-- The quashing of civil rights for minorities

-- The destruction of federal government power

-- Anti-homosexual

-- Anti-abortion

-- Anti-immigration

What exactly is "liberal" about that? Well, nothing. All of these positions typically are part of what we call right-wing, and in the Klan's case, they are drawn to an extreme degree. The Ku Klux Klan are right-wing extremists by any accounting, and always have been. Indeed, much of their explicit animus has historically been directed at liberals -- as with the fascists, their antiliberalism has been a defining feature for most of their existence.

It's hard to tell in fact what Goldberg is actually saying -- at times he seems to scoff at the idea they were fascists, then at others tries to embrace the concept. But if he's trying to claim that they weren't and aren't creatures of the right -- well, then he's just obscuring and confusing both the history of the Klan and the meaning of "the right." Which, in the latter case, seems the larger purpose of this book in any event.

Silencing the hard truth

-- by Dave

Just to gain a little perspective on how up-is-down the world is becoming, the Minutemen -- who by any standard are an extremist organization spawned by the militia movement of the 1990s -- managed to force an official investigation of a top law-enforcement officer in Arizona merely for speaking the truth about them publicly:
Back in March, an undercover Mesa police detective spoke at the state Capitol about how the national immigration debate was providing fuel for hate groups and violent extremists throughout Arizona.

Detective Matt Browning, who is recognized as one of the top investigators of extremists and racism in the state, went on to say he believed certain border activists were involved in what amounted to "domestic terrorism."

The East Valley Tribune has now learned Browning spent almost eight months under investigation by his own department for the comments he made that day.

The investigation began after several border activists, including at least one former member of the Minuteman Project, wrote letters and e-mails to Mesa Police Chief George Gascon to complain. They said Browning used his badge to support a political cause, and, in doing so, broke rules of police conduct.

On Thursday, the department released its full investigation to the Tribune. It shows Browning was eventually cleared of all such accusations.

Here's what Browning told them:
Browning told the handful of lawmakers and spectators that he had gone undercover in six white-supremacist groups and three border militias during his career.

"Every meeting, every discussion, everything revolves around immigration," Browning said during his presentation. "Every meeting has started with somebody spouting off something about stopping the dirty Mexicans, stopping the wave of the browns, stopping it from happening."

He said members of the National Alliance, one of the largest, most-active hate groups in the nation, had been cooperating with the Minutemen. He also said some had been trained with firearms and were looking to start a border war.

"It doesn't matter what you want to call it; it's the same thing," Browning said near the end of his talk. "It is terrorism. It is domestic terrorism."

I suppose that you could call this political -- but the division is the far right against everyone else. Especially those with a basic sense of decency and doing what's right.

Good for Detective Browning. But now anyone else in the law-enforcement community who wants to speak up about what the reality on the ground is will have to think twice or three times.

Tuesday, January 08, 2008

Ron Paul's far-right foundations

-- by Dave

Jamie Kirchick at The New Republic went digging into Ron Paul's old newsletters, and what he found was quite revealing:
Finding the pre-1999 newsletters was no easy task, but I was able to track many of them down at the libraries of the University of Kansas and the Wisconsin Historical Society. Of course, with few bylines, it is difficult to know whether any particular article was written by Paul himself. Some of the earlier newsletters are signed by him, though the vast majority of the editions I saw contain no bylines at all. Complicating matters, many of the unbylined newsletters were written in the first-person, implying that Paul was the author.

But, whoever actually wrote them, the newsletters I saw all had one thing in common: They were published under a banner containing Paul's name, and the articles (except for one special edition of a newsletter that contained the byline of another writer) seem designed to create the impression that they were written by him--and reflected his views. What they reveal are decades worth of obsession with conspiracies, sympathy for the right-wing militia movement, and deeply held bigotry against blacks, Jews, and gays. In short, they suggest that Ron Paul is not the plain-speaking antiwar activist his supporters believe they are backing--but rather a member in good standing of some of the oldest and ugliest traditions in American politics.

A sampling of what he found:
Martin Luther King Jr. earned special ire from Paul's newsletters, which attacked the civil rights leader frequently, often to justify opposition to the federal holiday named after him. ("What an infamy Ronald Reagan approved it!" one newsletter complained in 1990. "We can thank him for our annual Hate Whitey Day.") In the early 1990s, a newsletter attacked the "X-Rated Martin Luther King" as a "world-class philanderer who beat up his paramours," "seduced underage girls and boys," and "made a pass at" fellow civil rights leader Ralph Abernathy. One newsletter ridiculed black activists who wanted to rename New York City after King, suggesting that "Welfaria," "Zooville," "Rapetown," "Dirtburg," and "Lazyopolis" were better alternatives. The same year, King was described as "a comsymp, if not an actual party member, and the man who replaced the evil of forced segregation with the evil of forced integration."

While bashing King, the newsletters had kind words for the former Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, David Duke. In a passage titled "The Duke's Victory," a newsletter celebrated Duke's 44 percent showing in the 1990 Louisiana Republican Senate primary. "Duke lost the election," it said, "but he scared the blazes out of the Establishment." In 1991, a newsletter asked, "Is David Duke's new prominence, despite his losing the gubernatorial election, good for anti-big government forces?" The conclusion was that "our priority should be to take the anti-government, anti-tax, anti-crime, anti-welfare loafers, anti-race privilege, anti-foreign meddling message of Duke, and enclose it in a more consistent package of freedom." Duke is now returning the favor, telling me that, while he will not formally endorse any candidate, he has made information about Ron Paul available on his website.

... The newsletters are chock-full of shopworn conspiracies, reflecting Paul's obsession with the "industrial-banking-political elite" and promoting his distrust of a federally regulated monetary system utilizing paper bills. They contain frequent and bristling references to the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission, and the Council on Foreign Relations--organizations that conspiracy theorists have long accused of seeking world domination. In 1978, a newsletter blamed David Rockefeller, the Trilateral Commission, and "fascist-oriented, international banking and business interests" for the Panama Canal Treaty, which it called "one of the saddest events in the history of the United States." A 1988 newsletter cited a doctor who believed that AIDS was created in a World Health Organization laboratory in Fort Detrick, Maryland. In addition, Ron Paul & Associates sold a video about Waco produced by "patriotic Indiana lawyer Linda Thompson"--as one of the newsletters called her--who maintained that Waco was a conspiracy to kill ATF agents who had previously worked for President Clinton as bodyguards. As with many of the more outlandish theories the newsletters cited over the years, the video received a qualified endorsement: "I can't vouch for every single judgment by the narrator, but the film does show the depths of government perfidy, and the national police's tricks and crimes," the newsletter said, adding, "Send your check for $24.95 to our Houston office, or charge the tape to your credit card at 1-800-RON-PAUL."

And the Paul campaign's explanation is, well, precious:
When I asked Jesse Benton, Paul's campaign spokesman, about the newsletters, he said that, over the years, Paul had granted "various levels of approval" to what appeared in his publications--ranging from "no approval" to instances where he "actually wrote it himself." After I read Benton some of the more offensive passages, he said, "A lot of [the newsletters] he did not see. Most of the incendiary stuff, no." He added that he was surprised to hear about the insults hurled at Martin Luther King, because "Ron thinks Martin Luther King is a hero."

In other words, Paul's campaign wants to depict its candidate as a naĂŻve, absentee overseer, with minimal knowledge of what his underlings were doing on his behalf. This portrayal might be more believable if extremist views had cropped up in the newsletters only sporadically--or if the newsletters had just been published for a short time. But it is difficult to imagine how Paul could allow material consistently saturated in racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, and conspiracy-mongering to be printed under his name for so long if he did not share these views. In that respect, whether or not Paul personally wrote the most offensive passages is almost beside the point. If he disagreed with what was being written under his name, you would think that at some point--over the course of decades--he would have done something about it.

Indeed. Sara made a similar point awhile back about Paul's responsibility for his newsletters. And of course, we reached a similar conclusion about Paul's political identity. As Chip Berlet put it, he's not a libertarian, he's a right-wing populist. (And that last link also contains a shot of the first two pages of Paul's 1988 fed conspiracy-theory book, to supplement Kirchick's point.)

Jonah do history bad

-- by Dave

My review of Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism is now up at The American Prospect:
The public understanding of World War II history and its precedents has suffered in recent years from the depredations of revisionist historians -- the David Irvings and David Bowmans of the field who have attempted to recast the meaning of, respectively, the Holocaust and the Japanese American internment. Their reach, however, has been somewhat limited to fringe audiences.

It might be tempting to throw Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning into those same cloacal backwaters, but there is an essential difference that goes well beyond the likely much broader reach of Goldberg's book, which was inexplicably published by a mainstream house (Doubleday). Most revisionists are actually historians with some credentials, and their theses often hinge on nuances and the interpretation of details.

Goldberg, who has no credentials beyond the right-wing nepotism that has enabled his career as a pundit, has drawn a kind of history in absurdly broad and comically wrongheaded strokes. It is not just history done badly, or mere revisionism. It’s a caricature of reality, like something from a comic-book alternative universe: Bizarro history.

I collected a lot of material that couldn't possibly fit into a review in the course of surveying the book. I'll be posting some of these over the next few days.

Monday, January 07, 2008

Eliminationism watch

-- by Dave

The other day Hume's Ghost noticed Neal Boortz indulging in a little old-fashioned eliminationist rhetoric, with a distinctly McCarthyist afterburn:
An election is coming in 11 months and millions of parasites, led by single females, are getting ready to accelerate the destruction of the concepts of individuality, private property rights, self-reliance, and this very country by putting a hideous, power-hungry, big-government socialist* into the White House.

You do know, don't you, that you have absolutely no constitutional right to cast a vote in this presidential election. No .. you probably don't know that. That would mean you are educated, but you're not. You were educated by the government ... and the government sure isn't going to disclose that inconvenient little fact to you. Somehow the media in this country has bought the politician's about this "right to vote." It's not there. Doesn't exist. And to save this country we need to figure out a way to get tens of millions the parasite class off the voter roles. Welfare? No vote. Illiterate? Stay home on election day. Begging for the government to be your lifetime nanny? Let the doers, the achievers cast the votes. Just stay away.

You've gotta admire the way he strings together the staples of eliminationist rhetoric: the targets are "parasites" and generally subhuman vermin -- and just in case they get any funny ideas, they don't even have the right to vote. And oh! Just for good measure: Commies! Pinkos! Socialists!

But then comes the coup de grace:
*About that asterisk. Current language usage compels me to use the term "socialist" when describing Hillary Clinton. The actual word we need to use is "fascist." The left, however, has managed to take the "fascist" word and turn it into an epithet against right-wingers. Nazis were fascists, right? Perhaps you might be one of the few to learn that "Nazi," in German, is "Nationalsozialismus." The true name of the Nazi Party in Germany was the National Socialist German Worker's Party." German Nazis weren't at all fond of capitalism .. and neither is Hillary Clinton. When it comes to the free market Hillary has quite a lot in common with these folks ... not that you'll ever read that in the mainstream media.

Either Boortz has been sampling the Goldberg borscht or he's just a regular consumer of this old right-wing saw. But the irony of calling liberals Nazis in a piece in which he also accuses them of being "parasites" is, well, quite rich.

Is Church Politicking Really A Problem?

-- by Sara

There's been a bit of skepticism from some quarters over whether or not my suggestion that Evangelical churches might step over IRS lines to campaign for Mike Huckabee is, or should be, a real and serious concern for progressive organizers. Is this really a problem we should worry about? Would churches really risk their non-profit status by doing something that stupid? Are there so many pastors out there who are likely to do bend the rules that it's worth our while to make some kind of monitoring effort?

The short answer to all of these questions is: Yes. If you want a long answer, read on.

Is This Really A Problem?
This is a good question, so I took it directly to Beth Corbin and Rob Boston at Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Here is Rob's response:
"Since 1996, AU has reported 73 houses of worship or religious non-profits to the IRS for partisan politicking. But if you are trying to make the case that this is a problem, it’s best to look at that the IRS says. The IRS has announced special policy initiatives to crack down on politicking by religious non-profits, and the agency has repeatedly warned religious leaders about the law. I doubt the IRS would be devoting resources to this matter if it were a total non-problem."
Rob pointed us to a 2006 IRS report that describes just how prevalent this has become in recent election years. The report's executive summary notes that the IRS tracked a significant increase in "the number and variety of allegations of such behavior by section 501(c)3 organizations during election cycles" between the 2000 and 2004 elections; and that "the potential for charities, including churches, being used as arms of political campaigns and parties will erode the public's confidence in these institutions." The report notes that actually enforcing the tax law can be a tricky business:
-- The activities that give rise to questions of political campaign intervention also raise legitimate concerns regarding freedom of speech and religious expression;

-- The Code contains no bright line test for evaluating political intervention; it requires careful balancing of all of the facts and circumstances;

-- The questionable activities are public and occur within the compressed period of time of the election cycle. Keeping in mind that there are over one million 501(c)(3) organizations, media reports on the activities of a small representation of those organizations can, rightly or wrongly, create an impression of widespread noncompliance; and

-- The activities that must be evaluated for potential campaign intervention can be difficult to document, because they often involve events and statements that may not be recorded or otherwise captured.
So the IRS is looking for a "pattern of behavior" that occurs "within the compressed period of time of the election cycle" -- which suggests that a well-executed monitoring strategy could indeed yield exactly the kind of information the agency needs to make its case. And it's pretty clear here that, in the absence of a bright line, good monitors can make a worthy case out of many kinds of evidence. One egregious act is actionable; but the IRS defines the rules broadly enough to also be interested in a pattern of recurring behavior that continually flirts with the legal lines.

Does the IRS Even Care?
The IRS has been so concerned about this that, since 2004, it has stepped up its efforts to educate 501(c)3 groups (which include not only churches, but all kinds of non-profits) about the limits of the law, and the consequences of breaking it. At the same time, it launched a new initiative to "respond in a faster, targeted fashion to specific credible allegations of political campaign intervention." Over the next two years, this fast-track process led the IRS to complete field investigations of 132 new and existing complaints. Among the violations "alleged and determined," they found (again, quoting from the report summary):
-- Charities, including churches, distributing diverse printed materials that encouraged their members to vote for a preferred candidate (24 alleged; 9 determined),

-- Religious leaders using the pulpit to endorse or oppose a particular candidate (19 alleged; 12 determined),

-- Charities, including churches, criticizing or supporting a candidate on their website or through links to another website (15 alleged; 7 determined),

-- Charities, including churches, disseminating improper voter guides or candidate ratings (14 alleged; 4 determined),

-- Charities, including churches, placing signs on their property that show they support a particular candidate (12 alleged; 9 determined),

-- Charities, including churches, giving improperly preferential treatment to certain candidates by permitting them to speak at functions (11 alleged; 9 determined), and

-- Charities, including churches, making cash contributions to a candidate’s political campaign (7 alleged; 5 determined).
Furthermore: "The IRS found that nearly three quarters of the organizations examined under the initiative had engaged in prohibited political activities. As a result, the Service will continue the initiative for future election periods, and as noted above, will focus on both education and enforcement."

So: Is the IRS interested in this issue? Yes. Do they investigate: Often, and quickly. Is this a fair use of our resources? As I said: if we only get a few, it'll give us a critical opening to make a far-reaching critique of the arrogance and anti-social behavior of the Religious Right, which in turn will do much to erode what's left of their credibility and moral authority with the public.

Why Target the Southern Baptists?
Some have questioned my suggestion that if local progressives with limited resources need to do some triage, they should start by aiming their monitoring efforts at their neighborhood Southern Baptists. This recommendation was based mainly on their previous record: the SBC is the second-largest Christian denomination in the country after the Roman Catholic Church; yet they have demonstrated, over and over, a blithe willingness to break the law and abridge the civil rights of people they don't like. It would be brain-dead of us to expect that's going to be any better this year than it's been in the past, no matter who the GOP nominee is. And if it's Huckabee, the odds are overwhelming that will get much worse.

I've written extensively about the sense of smug superiority that's settled into the SBC over the past few years, much of it drawn from an essential belief that their special relationship with God not only makes them morally superior to the rest of us, but also exempts them from the need to observe the law. Beyond that: they're openly committed to tearing down the rule of law entirely and replacing it with a theocracy -- and have taken the leading role in the effort to put judges onto the bench who will enforce their Biblical order in the meantime.

The belief that our democratic government is illegitimate, coupled with the arrogance of the twice-born, has already led them into all kinds of serious legal trouble. A brief recap of posts that Dave and I have done in just the past year demonstrates this more than adequately. The church is currently embroiled in a year-long scandal -- to which it has made no effective policy response whatsoever -- involving over 50 ministers arrested (and many convicted) on charges of sexually abusing children in their congregations. They have also allied themselves with hate groups promoting anti-gay violence (including one that's been implicated in at least one murder). One of the SBC's national leaders has gone on record defending torture as scriptural; another lost his military chaplaincy when it was discovered he was keeping a sex slave. His fellow SBC pastors knew -- but they looked the other way.

And, of course, there's the fact that the church's national leadership has already proven itself -- twice over -- more than happy to break the law specifically so it could endorse Huckabee. And this happened long before Huck had a ghost of a chance in a primary. Since Huckabee is himself an SBC minister, it's not out of line to presume that the church will be uniquely aggressive (and, perhaps, characteristically lawless) in campaigning for one of its own. This is the shot they've been waiting for -- and they've got every incentive not to let a little thing like the IRS stand in the way.

Should We Do This?
Henry Brighouse, writing over at Crooked Timber this morning, noted that it would be irresponsible not to speculate on the potential for Huckabee to rely on churches for his ground game:
...Huckabee doesn’t have any sort of real organization. His decisive win in Iowa demonstrates that he doesn’t need one, at least in states that have a strong evangelical movement. He can rely on the pastors getting out the vote for him. This is one that I’m pretty convinced of – he’s demonstrated that much of the conventional wisdom on the need for organization was wrong. Think of this as the evangelical’s revenge on mainstream Republicans. Much of Karl Rove’s success in 2004 depended on using below-the-radar forms of organization in churches etc to get the vote out. This has created an infrastructure that Huckabee seems to be taking over in the absence of any other real evangelical candidate.
Brighouse is remembering exactly what the IRS reported that it saw: the GOP has become more aggressive in using churches as local organizing headquarters for its candidates -- a development that gives them all kinds of resource and community networking advantages over the Democrats. Over the course of the last two elections, this invisible network has become essential to their operations. Dismantling it is a) ridiculously easy to do; b) absurdly cheap; and c) a way to give a dramatic boost our own local efforts in every precinct in the country. Our folks on the ground shouldn't have to contend with a well-organized foot brigade that's being illegally coordinated through churches. We can put a quick, cheap stop to it -- and if we want to win, we will.

But there's a larger goal at stake here, too. As the IRS report summary notes, it wouldn't take too many of these cases to make a PR point that could shift people's entire view of the Religious Right. A growing number of Americans already have a low opinion of fundamentalist churches. Many of them were badly spooked by the Schiavo incident, which they recognized as a gross overreach by both church and state powers; but that was two years ago now, and memories have begun to fade.

A brief burst -- or continuous trickle -- of well-publicized cases featuring right-wing churches flouting the IRS (during an election year, no less!) will bring all of this back into sharp focus for the voters by refreshing their memories of the overweening arrogance we've been seeing from the fundamentalist right all along. Furthermore, if progressives are serious about neutralizing the religious right as a political force over the long term, branding them as habitual criminals in the minds of average Americans is one potent way to do it. You don't have to be liberal to despise a tax cheat.