The Republicans and Conservative Revolution

Political rhetoric always has its particular strangeness. Today in the US, a particular part of the strangeness is way in which conservative Republicans use the rhetoric of sedition, nullification and even revolution without sending either their base voters or the mainstream press into orbit with such talk.

White advocates for gun proliferation talk very publicly and proudly about "the people" needing guns to protect themselves from "tyranny." In the plain meaning, that would involve using weapons to kill cops and soldiers and public officials. In practice, most of them that mouth off with that kind of thing have more in mind something like using them against the "tyranny" of teenagers wearing hoodies and carrying bags of Skittles.

This shurff (actually police chief), for instance, presumably isn't organizing his own armed vigilante squad in order to fight police tyranny from the department he runs: (John Usalis, Gilberton police chief says YouTube video supports U.S. Constitution Republican Herald 07/24/2013). Also, according to Ryan Lenz of SPLC's Hatewatch in Oath Keepers Rally Reveals Radical Politics of Group 07/25/2013, the shurff is also part of the Radical Right Oath Keepers group. The Young Turks have images (includes profanity, sex talk), America's Scariest Police Chief 07/25/2013:

Then there's NRA Board of Directors member Ted Nugent: Josh Sugarmann, NRA's Ted Nugent Jokes About Gunning Down South Central LA Residents Like Feral Hogs Huffington Post 07/12/2013; Timothy Johnson, "Anti-Racist" Nugent's Analogy: Profile Blacks Like Dangerous Dogs Media Matters 07/24/2013. In fairness, NRA board member Nugent does suggest there are some some politicians that he might want to murder, too, as he did in 2007: Elizabeth Goodman, Ted Nugent Threatens to Kill Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton During Vicious Onstage Rant Rolling Stone 08/24/2007.

In addition, we have various rightwingers who have shot people for more-or-less political motives in recent years, like the antiabortion extremist who murdered Dr. George Tiller in his own church. I would include Congresswoman Gaby Giffords in that group, as her would-be assassin seems to have been motivated in part for rightwing extremist ideas. The media typically script those events as a Lone Nut doing the attack, even when he shows definite far-right connections. Dave Neiwert's excellent book And Hell Followed With Her: Crossing the Dark Side of the American Border (2013) gives a good look into the violent orientation of the Patriot Militia-type fringe that has been heavily involved in extremist "border watch" actions.

The NRA is an entirely respectable group in today's Republican Party, despite featuring people like Nugent and militia/border-watch leader Jim Gilchrist on their board of directors; And Hell Followed With Her discusses Gilchrist at some length. How respectable is illustrated by this editorial from Bloomberg View/Business Week, On Capitol Hill, More Gun Control Cowardice 07/25/2013:

The ATF is responsible for conducting regulatory inspections of the nation’s more than 123,000 licensed gun dealers. A Department of Justice report released in April found that the agency is so hindered by congressionally imposed obstacles and "insufficient investigator resources" that it can’t adequately perform its duties. In addition to preventing the ATF from keeping computerized records of gun transactions, Congress passed legislation prohibiting the agency from inspecting a licensed gun dealer more than once a year. Because the ATF has only 2,500 agents to police guns, tobacco, alcohol, and explosives, the majority of gun dealers received no inspection at all from the understaffed agency during a five-year period.

From 2004 to 2011 the nation’s gun shops lost 174,679 guns through theft or loss. (That’s the official number; actual losses are undoubtedly much higher.) It’s unknown how many of these ended up in the possession of criminals. Even when the ATF concludes that a gun dealer is not complying with the law, it can take years to revoke a license. The practical consequence is that rogue gun dealers can supply criminals for years without worrying about official disruptions to their business.

The antiabortion movement, which helped spawn the militia movement of the early 1990s and continues to be a source of some of the most extreme, hate-filled and violence-inclined rhetoric of any political faction in the US are happily supported by the Republican Party. If there are any Republican members of Congress that are taking care to distance themselves from the standard movement rhetoric of abortion being "killing babies" and abortions in the US being worse than the Holocaust, I couldn't name one. Yet that inflammatory talk that makes any compromise seemingly impossible is common as dirt among the antiabortionists.

I was struck by a phrase I saw used in Spiegel Online during President Obama's first term to describe the Republican Party's Congressional strategy against his domestic agenda, "fundamental opposition." While I wouldn't call it a "revolutionary" approach, it's certainly a militant nullification strategy aimed at thwarting the majority will being expressed in Congress. Hearing about the Republicans' genuinely unprecedented level of obstructionism in Congress, I'm often reminded of this cartoon depicting the Cech nationalist party in the Vienna Parliament (Reichsrat) of the western part of the Habsburg Empire ("Austro-Hungarian Empire") in the years prior to the First World War. Formally, the Reichsrat was the parliament of "Cisleithanien," the western portion of the Empire; "Transleithanien" was the unofficial name for the eastern part that included Hungary.

"Die tschechische Opposition in unserm Parlament" ("The Czech Opposition in Our Parliament")

Historian Brigitte Hamaan writes about this Czech nationalist group in Hitlers Wien. Lehrjahre eines Diktators (1996). Numerous events had lead to particular political tensions in 1908 and 1909, including confrontations among the various national-ethnic groups in the Habsburgs' often-dysfunctional empire. And those conflicts were reflected in the Parliament in Vienna, which really did come close to fitting the stereotype of a powerless talking shop. "The most dangerous obstruction," she writes, "became that of the 'Czech National Socialists'." They were furious that the German ethnic parties in the Czech homeland of Bohemia had rendered the local party unable to do much of anything.

After martial law was declared in Prague on December 2, 1908, the protest of the Czech parties of made Parliament a complete national witches' kettle. Right at the introductory words of the [parliamentary] President, the Czech National Socialists Vinzenz Lisy, Václav Fresl and František Burival advanced at a double-quick pace towards the Presidential rostrum blowing metal whistles and children's trumpets, following by more representatives whistling and crying, "Boo!" The respresentative Dr. Anton Hajn, armed with a child's trumpet sounded the Sturmmarsch [presumably the Düppeler Schanzen-Sturmmarsch, a well-known Prussian military march]. The Young Czech Prague Representative Václav Choc to the President: "There is the hanging judge!" Lisy followed: "Do you want to impose the martial law of Prague on the Bohemenian Representatives in Vienna?"

[German original: Nach der Verhängung des Standrechtes in Prag am 2. Dezember 1908 machten die Proteste der tschechischen Parteien das Parlament vollends zu einern nationalen Hexenkessel. Schon bei den Einleitungsworten des Präsidenten drangen die tschechischen Nationalsozialisten Vinzenz Lisy, Václav Fresl und František Burival im Sturrnschritt, auf Metallpfeifen und Kindertrompeten blasend, gegen die Präsidententribune vor, von weiteren pfeifenden und »pfui« rufenden Abgeordneten gefolgt. Der mit einer Kindertrompete ausgerüstete Abgeordnete Dr. Anton Hajn blies dabei den Sturmmarsch. Der jungtschechische Prager Abgeordnete Václav Choc zum Präsidenten: »Da ist der Scharfrichter!« Darauf Lisy: »Wollen Sie das Prager Standrecht auf die böhmischen Abgeordneten in Wien übertragen?«

That's what "fundamental opposition" looked like in the Vienna Parliament on that particular day.

(Hamaan notes that the young Adolf Hitler frequently observed sessions of the Reichsrat from the public gallery in those years. He claimed in Mein Kampf that his experience watching the Vienna Reichsrat convinced him of the worthlessness of parliamentary democracy. It may be pure coincidence that his later German Party took the name "National Socialists," for which "Nazi" was the popular short form.)

The Republicans haven't thrown a melodramatic hissy fit quite like that one in Congress. But it's not too hard to picture. And in any case, they're always in a hissy fit about something.

Yet the strategy of disruption and paralyzing the normal working of the institution is a similar one. And the US Congress has far more real responsibility and power than the Imperial Parliament in Vienna in 1908, essentially lacking any real power. The Czech National Socialists were causing a real ruckus by doing that, but not actually hindering any substantial business of the government by doing so. That cannot be said of the current Republican obstructionism of the Republicans in Congress, aimed at nullifying laws of which they don't approve and also nullifying majority rule. Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein have given a careful account of this radical approach by the Republicans in Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism (2012). This summary of a Bill Moyers interview with the two authors, Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann Explain Why Congress is Failing Us BillMoyers.com 04/26/2013, says:

In [the book], they argue that congressional gridlock is mostly the fault of right wing radicals within the Republican Party who engage in “policy hostage-taking” to extend their political war against the president.

What's more, Ornstein and Mann say, the mainstream media and media fact-checkers add to the problem by indulging in "false equivalency" — pretending both parties are equally to blame.

"Sadly, divided party government, which we have because of the Republican House, in a time of extreme partisan polarization, is a formula for inaction and absolutist opposition politics, not for problem solving," Mann tells Bill.

Ornstein says, "Some of this is coming from the kinds of people who we're electing to office, through a nominating process that has gotten so skewed to the radical right. But some of it is an electoral magnet that pulls them away from voting for anything that might have a patina of bipartisan support because they'll face extinction." [my emphasis]

More recently, long-time conservative Ornstein has written, "What is going on now to sabotage Obamacare is not treasonous — just sharply beneath any reasonable standards of elected officials with the fiduciary responsibility of governing." (The Unprecedented — and Contemptible — Attempts to Sabotage Obamacare National Journal 07/24/2013) Prompting Paul Krugman to observes, "When you have a GOP so radical that Norm Ornstein feels compelled to clarify that its actions — its attempts to sabotage the law of the land — don't quite rise to the standard of treason, the old notion that equated centrism with practical politics is utterly outdated." (Things Fell Apart 07/26/2013)

It's said of Republicans that they campaign for office complaining that government doesn't work, then when they get into power they go about proving it true. What we're seeing now is an extreme form of that strategy. And it's accompanied by a notable and enduring radicalization of their program. That radicalization is even more pronounced in the state legislatures controlled by Republicans than it is even in Congress. Those legislature are eagerly passing segregationist laws like Stand Your Ground (which doubles as a gun proliferation measure) and enacting schemes to suppress the votes of African-Americans and Latinos. And these actions are taking place in conjunction with the Tea Party groups and their militant and even revolutionary rhetoric; the gun-proliferation lobby and their supporters; the antiabortion fanatics; and, the substantial Republican media infrastructure of which FOX News and hate radio are the most visible manifestations.

Now, the Republican Party has no shortage of blowhards. And a lot of the militant, violent and "eliminationist" rhetoric we hear coming from those parts of the political spectrum are hot air. But when we look at the popular agitation - and the occasional violent actions - of the more hardline groups over issues like gun proliferation, immigration and abortion combined with the radical obstructionism of the Republicans in Congress and the Republican-dominated Supreme Court making partisan rulings on major issues that overturn important precedents, often with 5-4 votes, I think it's reasonable to say that the Republicans are pursuing a genuinely radical strategy with even quasi-revolutionary elements to it. Handing the Presidency to Republican George W. Bush and Dick Cheney in 2000 against both the popular vote and what the Electoral College vote would have been had Florida's votes been accurately counted was quite a radical step. President Obama said of the Citizen's United ruling, "This ruling strikes at our democracy itself. ... I can't think of anything more devastating to the public interest." (my emphasis)

Which brings me to this. Reading about the political scene on the militant left in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the Untied States is a glimpse into another world. Joshua Bloom and Waldo Martin recently published a history of the Black Panther Party, a leftwing Black Power group that had its political heyday in roughly 1968-1971, Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (2012). It looks at the political impact of that group with special emphasis to the Panthers' political understanding of their own mission and accomplishments. They write in their conclusion:

Members of revolutionary sects can hawk their newspapers and proselytize on college campuses until they are blue in the face, but they remain politically irrelevant. Islamist insurgencies, with deep political roots abroad, are politically significant, but they lack potential constituencies in the United States. And ironically, at least in the terrorist variant, they tend to reinforce rather than challenge state power domestically because their practices threaten — rather than build common cause with — alienated constituencies within the United States.

No revolutionary movement of political significance will gain a foothold in the United States again until a group of revolutionaries develops insurgent practices that seize the political imagination of a large segment of the people and successively draw support from other constituencies, creating a broad insurgent alliance that is difficult to repress or appease. This has not happened in the United States since the heyday of the Black Panther Party and may not happen again for a very long time. [my emphasis]

But when we look at the strategy and practice of today's Republican Party and affiliated groups, how does that affect how we would understand that assessment by Bloom and Martin?

They use the term "revolutionary" there in the sense that was common among the New Left and groups like the Black Panthers to mean groups that are anti-capitalist and seek to fundamentally change both the social and political systems. There are decades of hair-splitting disputes about whether far-right groups like the Italian Fascists or German Nazis that styled themselves as revolutionary insurgent groups as they were building their power were genuinely revolutionary.

The Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse published an essay in 1972 called "The Left Under the Counter-Revolution" in a book called Counter-Revolution and Revolt. He described his perspective this way:

The Western world has reached a new stage of development: now, the defense of the capitalist system requires the organization of counterrevolution at home and abroad. ...

The counterrevolution is largely preventive and, in the Western world, altogether preventive. Here, there is no recent revolution to be undone, and there is none in the offing. And yet, fear of revolution which creates the common interest links the various stages and forms of the counterrevolution. It runs the whole gamut from parliamentary democracy via the police state to open dictatorship.

In one sense, Marcuse was defining the US national security state and the Long War, the unending series of military conflicts that took the form of the Cold War and, after the fall of the Soviet Union, of what we now call the Global War on Terrorism. Marcuse was seeing it from his own Marxist perspective, which saw the capitalist system as permanently destabilized by its own inherent contradictions: economic, social and political.

It's not my purpose here to judge whether the Black Panther Party had a sensible strategy or whether Marcuse's definition of global counter-revolution made sense. The Panthers did have a dramatic if short-lived success in mobilizing a significant group of African-Americans to their cause and in energizing white radical sympathizers. And one doesn't have to assume an inevitable or imminent collapse of capitalism to notice the deeply counter-revolutionary elements in both foreign and domestic policy; the latter is often explicit and, when the revolutionaries are Islamists, often supported by people who understand themselves as liberals or progressives.

All that said, the present-day configuration of the Republican Party and more-or-less affiliated rightwing groups has some elements that have a revolutionary edge in the sense of a Conservative Revolution, to borrow a term from the Weimar Republic. To borrow from the terms used by Bloom and Martin, groups like the NRA, other gun-proliferation groups, the antiabortion movement, the anti-immigration organizations, often used the rhetoric of sedition, but one can't say "they remain politically irrelevant" at the current moment. They certainly don't "lack potential constituencies in the United States," even if those constituencies are mostly some form of older white people with Christian fundamentalist leanings. And with the funding of various rightwing billionaires like the now-infamous Koch brothers and an extensive organizational infrastructure to generate "astroturf" demonstrations, they also "build common cause with ... alienated constituencies within the United States." Alienated in the sense of alienated from the 20th century form of liberal democracy with social-democratic/New Deal elements to protect the rights of poor and working people to some extent and to restrain the more catastrophically destructive tendencies of "free market" capitalism.

And its not too much of a stretch to say that the Conservative Revolution in the US has been able to "seize the political imagination of a large segment of the people and successively draw support from other constituencies, creating a broad insurgent alliance that is difficult to repress or appease." As Digby put it this past weekend (When the inmates take over the asylum (GOP style) Hullabaloo 07/28/2013):

The Republican establishment is afraid of its own voters which is perhaps the most important underlying premise of democratic governance there is. They truly are responding to the will of the people. Unfortunately, their voters have been radicalized by about 40 years of increasingly nihilistic propaganda that's resulted in the insurgency turning on the system itself. Since men like [Sen. Tom] Coburn are responsible for this, it would be tempting to just sit back and munch on the popcorn as the party implodes, but unfortunately the GOP wields a tremendous amount of power in our two party system, even if it has gone nuts. [my emphasis]

Both the Bloom/Martin and Marcuse quotes relate especially to the situation that obtained in the US in the early 1970s, in the first Presidential term of Richard Nixon. This is also a key period for the formation of the leaders of today's Republican Party leaders. It was the the point in which the current terms of the "culture war" were largely fixed, especially as it applies to hurrah-patriotism and race, and to a large extent on women's rights, as well. That was the point at which the Republican Party committed itself to the "Southern Strategy" on race the eventually led them to their current state of "fundamental opposition" to a Democratic Administration headed by an African-American President. Projection looms large in Republican culture war thinking. And at some level, many Republicans see today's approach as an attempt to mount a conservative version of what their culture-war collective memory tells them "The Sixites" were.

I don't have any big insightful conclusion on this. But in the conditions of the 21st century, the Republicans' attempts to restore something like a 19th-century, robber-baron-era approach to business regulation and social policy, and to recreate a new segregation/Jim Crow regime of race relations, look like an attempt to radically alter not only the electoral system (by excluding blacks and Latinos) and to radically change the social conditions (for the worse!) for the vast majority of the public. Whether we want to call those "revolutionary" in a political-science or philosophical sense, it certainly seems that they understand their project as a Conservative Revolution against not just the 21st but the 20th century, as well.

Tags: black panther party, frankfurt school, frankfurter schule, herbert marcuse, radical right, republican party

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 18: Black Power, Black Panthers

Sharon Riley did an interview with Joshua Bloom and Waldo Martin Jr., co-authors of Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (2012) for Harper's The Stream 03/15/2013; the interview has the same title, Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party. Apparently they made joint responses to her questions.

They talk about the period in the 1960s when urban rioting began and Black Power came to be a popular slogan among many African-Americans. This period turned out to be paradigm-setting for segregationists. Because their framing for issues of racial conflict often sound as though they are living in 1969.

Huey Newton and Bobby Seale formed the Black Panther Party (BPP) in 1966 in Oakland. I sketched the history of the BPP in The sixties: Huey Newton and the Black Panther Party 06/247/2008. It emerged from the conditions that faced African-American urban communities in the 1960s.

The peaceful protests of the civil-rights movement proved powerless to address urban poverty and ghettoization. Large numbers of blacks had migrated to the cities of the North and the West for wartime jobs. White and industrial flight left concentrated urban black poverty, and municipalities responded with brutal containment policing. Urban police and fire departments remained almost exclusively white. Blacks were shut out from political machines, underrepresented electorally, denied access to elite white colleges and universities, and mired in poverty. In the mid-1960s, inspired by the civil-rights victories over legal segregation, young black people in Oakland, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, and cities throughout the country took up the cry for "Black Power!" They sought new ways of organizing to achieve economic and political power.

In the late 1960s, the Black Panther Party emerged as the exemplar. The Black Panthers weren’t alone in theorizing that the black community was a "colony in the mother country" and calling for self-determination as part of a global struggle against imperialism. What distinguished them was their advocacy of armed self-defense against the police. They recognized that young urban blacks were ready to stand up to police, as evidenced by Watts and the spread of urban black rebellion, and sought to organize armed resistance into a political force. Initially, the Black Panthers used the law to challenge police brutality while bearing loaded weapons. Soon, hundreds of black people were rallying armed in legal protests against police brutality. The State of California responded by changing the law to restrict the right to bear arms. But the party adapted. Attracted to both armed self-defense and such community programs as Free Breakfast for Children, young black people from across the country contacted the Black Panthers asking to open chapters. During the party's peak, from 1968 to 1970, thousands of young blacks in close to seventy cities dedicated their lives to the party and to revolution, often at great personal risk. [my emphasis]

The year 1968 was the year membership in the BPP soared nationwide. As they say in their book:

As late as February 1968, the Black Panther Party was still a small local organization. But that year, everything changed. By December, the Party had opened offices in twenty cities, from Los Angeles to New York. In the face of numerous armed conflicts with police and virulent direct repression by the state, young black people embraced the revolutionary vision of the Party, and by 1970, the Party had opened offices in sixty-eight cities from Winston-Salem to Omaha and Seattle. The Black Panther Party had become the center of a revolutionary movement in the United States.

The assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. set off urban riots in cities across the country and gave the BPP a sudden new appeal.

But their heyday was a short one. As they recall in the book, "In the early 1970s, the Party rapidly declined. By mid-1972, it was basically a local Oakland community organization once again."

But their memory still haunts today's segregationists.

Many whites found it easy to ask in the 1960s why, after the federal government and white taxpayers had "done so much" for blacks Americans, they were still so angry and staged urban riots. But the lived experience of African-Americans wasn't one of continuing improvement. As John Hope Franklin and Alfred Moss, Jr, put it in From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans (2003):

Between 1949 and 1964 the relative participation of African Americans in the total economic life of the nation declined significantly. During that period the unemployment rate of blacks was at least double that of whites. Even in 1963, a prosperous year, the unemployment rate for blacks was 114 percent higher than for whites. Where blacks were employed, more than 80 percent worked at the bottom of the economic ladder, as compared with 40 percent of employed whites. In later years it was no better. In 1964 the unemployment rate among blacks was 9.6 percent versus 4.6 percent among whites; in 1971 it was 9.9 percent among blacks and S.4 percent among whites. In 1969 the median income of blacks with eight years of schooling was $4,472, while it was $7,018 for whites with the same amount of schooling. In 1970 the Census Bureau, defining poverty as a median income of less than $3,968 for a family of four, reported that one in every three blacks as compared with one in every ten whites was in that category. And the chances for African Americans to move up were greatly restricted not only by general race bias but also by the meager opportunities for apprenticeship training and by discrimination in many labor unions. [my emphasis]

Tags: 1968, black panther party, confederate heritage month 2013, huey newton, sixties

Tags: 1968, black panther party, huey newton, sixties

A moment in the history of California gun control, 1967

This happened. Things were different back then. This event encouraged the passing of more restrictive gun laws. Although the group involved never massacred a bunch of little kids in a school. Or walked into a theater and started murdering people with automatic weapons. Or shot a member of Congress in the head. Yet this helped provocative tighter gun laws. Go figure. From Walton Bean, California: An Interpretive History (3rd edition; 1968):

In the spring of 1967 the California Legislature was preparing to pass a gun control law directed against the Black Panthers; and on May 2, when the bill was debated, a caravan of armed Panthers drove from Oakland to Sacramento, read a manifesto on the steps of the capitol denouncing the "racist legislature," and then walked onto the floor of the assembly carrying guns. They were quickly expelled from the chamber, and [Panther leader Bobby] Seale and others were later arrested. The sensational publicity given to the affair aroused much public alarm, and great condemnation of the Panthers, but it also gave the [Black Panther] party wide advertising among militant young blacks and led to the organization of branches in several other parts of the country.

See also: PBS, State Capitol March, A Huey P. Newton Story (2002).

This is a YouTube video showing what appears to be a contemporary news report narrated by Mike Wallace, The Black Panther Party invade the State Assembly Chamber in Sacramento May 1967:

Tags: black panther party

The sixties: Tom Wolfe and "Radical Chic" (2)

Jason Epstein reviewed Tom Wolfe's little tract Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers (1970) in Journal du Voyeur New York Review of Books 12/17/1970 (link behind subscription).

He gave this account of the background to Leonard Bernstein's fundraiser for the Panther 21, which I discussed in a previous post:

Sometime in December, [wrioter Murray] Kempton, at the suggestion of the Panthers' lawyers, asked some well-connected and respectable friends who have a town house on the East Side whether they would arrange an evening at home to raise money for the Panthers' defense. Not only were the defendants desperately poor, but Kempton felt it important that their situation be publicized; for, as he wrote at the time, "If they cannot be saved from being tried as strangers, they have no chance to be tried fairly at all." Liberal New Yorkers are quick to respond to such appeals, especially where civil liberties appear to be in jeopardy. Furthermore, the Panthers had by this time gained a certain interest—not to say glamour—as the authentic voice of black misery and rage. One tended to hear in their violent language and the shallow Marxism that accompanied it not the sound of revolution but the cry of pain. What liberals found most interesting and hopeful about the Panthers were their efforts to supply dignity and political direction to black street people. Their talk of violent revolution, their identification with third world political leaders, and even the weapons they carried seemed, by contrast, largely rhetoric and theater.

To many liberals it also appeared that the Panthers were right to claim that federal and local officials were out to destroy them. Attorney General Mitchell had begun to talk of preventive detention. Fred Hampton, the Illinois Panther leader, had been shot in his bed by a posse of Chicago police, and Bobby Seale, the national chairman, had been bound and gagged by Judge Hoffman at the Chicago conspiracy trial for having repeatedly demanded no more than his constitutional right to defend himself. Moreover, evidence of the torture and murder of Alex Rackley in New Haven—a crime with which Seale had also been charged, to which two Panthers had already confessed, and for which a third was later to be found guilty—had not yet been made public; nor had any other evidence of Panther violence been produced, including whatever evidence Hogan might have had against the New York Panthers. In any case, what was on Kempton's mind was not the guilt or innocence of the defendants but the need to raise money for their defense and to make them visible.

Thus Kempton's friends sent out their invitations. About forty people came, including Felicia Bernstein, wife of the conductor. The Panthers who addressed these guests were articulate and calm. Their problems were obviously genuine. They talked about their breakfast program for ghetto children and said nothing to suggest that they were terrorists. They did, however, insist that they were revolutionaries, an admission that did not deter Mrs. Bernstein from agreeing to arrange a similar meeting at her own house some two weeks hence. Soon thereafter she sent elegantly engraved invitations, in her name but not in her husband's, to perhaps a hundred people who might be interested in the case. Meanwhile, Charlotte Curtis, the society reporter for The New York Times, who had been in touch with Kempton on other matters, learned of his interest in the Panthers and said she would like to write a piece on their wives. Kempton thought this would be useful to the defendants and suggested that she come along to the Bernsteins' party.

Tom Wolfe was another guest whom Mrs. Bernstein had not herself invited, but who came anyway.

Epstein also sees Wolfe's posture in "Radical Chic" as his own version of Nixonian ideology:

This notion, though not the term itself, derives, according to Wolfe, from the sociological theories of [neoconservative scholars] Seymour Martin Lipset and Nathan Glazer, among others. Presumably it would also describe Edna St. Vincent Millay's interest in Sacco and Vanzetti, Theodore Dreiser's in the coal miners of Harlan County, and Robert Kennedy's in Cesar Chavez.

With equal facility one might propose a theory in reply to the one that Wolfe offers: that his invidious generalization derives from resentment and envy of the rich and talented, fear of the alienated poor, and anxiety over his own precarious situation in between. It is this same resentment of effete snobs and fear of the undisciplined poor that Mr. Agnew, among others, imagines to be the main preoccupation of most Americans.

Epstein's verdict on Wolfe's sneering essay is a good one:

Unself-conscious as always, Wolfe missed what must be the heart of the matter. What he calls Radical Chic is, in fact, only the unhappy residue of the broken promises and defeated politics of the Kennedys, the still flickering desire of an impotent and aristocratic liberalism to restore citizenship to the poor—not, as Wolfe says, to "integrate" the politics of the poor with their own, but to engage the poor as citizens in the political life of the country.

Tags: black panther party, leonard bernstein, new left, sixties, tom wolfe

The sixties: Tom Wolfe and "Radical Chic"

One literary contribution to the early "culture war" narrative about the snobby elitists who supported liberal-radical-hippie causes was "Radical Chic" by Tom Wolfe, which first appeared in New York magazine June 1970, and was later published in book form in Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers (1970).

The "Radical Chic" essay was a rambling meditation and subjective report on a fund-raising event that the famous composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein and his wife Felicia held in their New York City home to benefit a group known as the Panther 21. This was a group of Black Panther Party members who were arrested in 1969 and charged with plotting to bomb several locations and to kill cops. This obituary of civil rights attorney Sanford Katz, who won the acquital for the 13 that evenutally went to trial, gives some background (Sanford M. Katz, 75, Lawyer for Defense in Panther 21 Trial, Dies New York Times 10/13/05):

Mr. Katz was known for representing unpopular defendants in politically charged cases. His most famous was set in motion in the late 1960's, when the New York Police Department planted undercover agents in the Black Panther Party. In 1969, 21 party members were indicted on charges that included conspiring to bomb various sites in New York - police stations, department stores and other public buildings - and to kill police officers.

Though only 13 defendants were eventually brought to trial, the group was known as the Panther 21. The case became a cause célèbre, moving Leonard Bernstein to hold a cocktail party for the group's legal defense in his elegant Park Avenue duplex.

The trial began on Sept. 8, 1970, and ran for eight months. On May 13, 1971, after deliberating for barely three hours, the jury acquitted the defendants on all counts. (my emphasis)

It's amazing what you can learn from reading obituaries. Seriously.

This letter from a philosophy professor expressing support for the Panther 21 was published around the same time Bernstein was holding his benefit fundraiser, Philosophers & Panthers by Kai Nielsen New York Review of Books 07/02/1970 talks about the problems in the handling of the case and said, "Unfortunately, it would appear necessary in the course of any thorough investigation to consider the possibility that this case is part of a nationwide 'police conspiracy' to destroy the Black Panther Party." Now, of course, we know that there was literally such a conspiracy, directed largely by the FBI's COINTELPRO program.

So, Bernstein was supporting raising money for a the legal defense of group of black radicals who had been arrested on charges so dubious that all of them who went on trial were later acquited, and were being effectively denied bail and reportedly mistreated in custody. "In jail they have been the victims of gross brutality," Nielsen wrote. In other words, Bernstein was neither alone nor irrational in his desire to see that these men received a fair trial.

Wolfe doesn't give his readers any of this background in his own voice. After pages of jive talk about how strange it was to see Black Panthers in leather jackets at a party with respectable wealthy white people, he puts what factual account he gives into the introductory speech of attorney Leon Quat, after spending a page or two ridiculing Quat.

And if you cut through Wolfe's sneering society-column chit-chat, you see that Bernstein and his guests actually engaged in a fairly spirited dialogue, challenging the lead Black Panther speaker, Don Cox, on a number of points.

But not everyone was happy about the notion of wealthy benefactors raising money to help black radicals get a fair trial when faced with very dubious charges. The Times obituary quoted above mentioned Berstein's fund-raiser. But it did not mention how the editorial board of the Times had held Bernstein up to ridicule in an editorial which Wolfe quotes as follows:

Emergence of the Black Panthers as the romanticized darlings of the politico-cultural jet set is an affront to the majority of black Americans. [For whom, of course, the New York Times editorial board felt qualified to speak.-Bruce] This so-called party, with its confusion of Mao-Marxist ideology and Fascist para-militarism, is fully entitled to protection of its members' constitutional rights. It was to make sure that those rights are not abridged by persecution masquerading as law-enforcement that a committe of distinguished citizens has recently been formed.

In contrast, the group therapy plus fund-raising soiree at the home of Leonard Bernstine, as reported in this newspaper yesterday, represents the sort of elegant slumming that degrades patrons and patronized alike. It might be dismissed as guilt-relieving fun spiked with social consciousness, except for its impact on those blacks and whites seriously working for complete equality and social justice. It mocked the memeory of Martin Luther King Jr., whose birthday was solemnly observed through the nation yesterday.

Black Panthers on a Park Avenue pedestal create one more distortion of the Negro image. Responsible black leadership is not likely to cheer as the Beautiful People create a new myth that Black Panther is beautiful.

Short version: wealthy white people should not help African-American radicals raise funds or generate publicity to ensure a fair trial for those accused on thin evidence.

Demonstration in support of the Panther 21, New York 1969

Now that he was safely dead, the New York Times was holding King up as a saint of proper conduct on the part of African-Americans. But three years before, when King was still alive and gave his Riverside Church speech against the Vietnam War, the same Times editorialized that King was screwing up the civil rights movement by coming out against the war and his "recklessly comparing American military methods to those of the Nazis". The respectable Life magazine called King's 1967 speech "a demagogic slander that sounded like script for Radio Hanoi". It was only death that made Martin Luther King ultra-respectable to the white Establishment.

Daniel Moynihan, later a Democratic Senator from New York but also a counselor of Richard Nixon's in 1970, also used the Bernsteins' fund-raiser for the Panther 21 as an example of how those who Nixon considered his enemies in what soon came to be known as Moynihan's "benign neglect" memo:

In it Moynihan had presented [Bernstein] and Felicia and their "party" as Exhibit A of the way black revolutionaries like the Panthers had become "culture heroes" of the Beautiful People. Couldn't you just see Nixon sitting in the Oval Room and clucking and fuming and muttering things like "rich snob bums" as he read: "You perhaps did not note on the society page of yesterday's Times that Mrs. Leonard Bernstein gave a cocktail party Wednesday to raise money for the Panthers. Mrs. W. Vincent Astor was among the guests. Mrs. Peter Duchin, 'the rich blond wife of the orchestra leader,' was thrilled. 'I've never met a Panther,' she said. 'This is a first for me.

On February 29 [1970] someone leaked the damned memo to the damned New York Times, and that did it. Now [Bernstein] was invested, installed, inaugurated, instituted, transmogrified as Mr. Parlour Panther for all time. The part about their "cocktail party" was right in the same paragraph with the phrase "benign neglect." And it didn't particularly help the situation that Mrs. Astor got off a rapid letter to the Times informing them that she was not at the "party." She received an invitation, like all sorts of other people, she supposed, but, in fact, she had not gone. Thanks a lot, Brooke Astor.

If Wolfe is to be believed, this negative publicity put an immediate damper on what he called Radical Chic among wealthy New Yorkers. Though since he's more focused in the essay on spinning pretty, smug phrases, it's kind of hard to tell. He doesn't even make it clear what Bernstein's own reaction was. Wolfe tries to leave the impression that Bernstein backed off his support for the Panther 21's legal defense. But he quotes Bernstein as saying that the fund-raising meeting's purpose was to defend civil liberties:

"If we deny these Black Panthers their democratic rights because their philosophy is unacceptable to us, then we are denying our own democracy." He now made it clear that he was opposed to their philosophy, however. "It is not easy to discern a consistent political philosophy among the Black Panthers, but it is reasonably clear that they are advocating violence against their fellow citizens, the downfall of Israel, the support of Al Fatah and other similarly dangerous and ill-conceived pursuits. To all of these concepts I am vigorously opposed and will fight against them as hard as I can."

For a civil libertarian, this doesn't sound like backing off to me. That quote just shows Bernstein saying that even though there are aspects of the Panthers' conduct with which he disagrees, even hates, he still sees a larger significance in what was happening to the Panther 21.

Author Tom Wolfe

Wolfe's essay provides a look at how the notion that wealthy liberals were an elite who favored liberal and even radical viewpoints that were hostile to the needs of those regular people for whom Chris Matthews loves to speak was cooked up in "the sixties". The same script that has seemingly become part of the Republican Party's political DNA. After all, when you're running the government and foreign policy blatantly for the benefit of Halliburton and oil giants and turned over much of writing the laws directly to business lobbies, you need some way to make your Party look like the defender of regular folks.

"Radical Chic" is a political tract disguised as light-hearted style and society-page reporting. The real point of the essay is to ridicule the radicals of the day and especially "respectable" people who might find anything about them to support. Wolfe adopts what is apparently meant to be the tone of a wealthy New York socialite to ramble about topics like the need to have white servants at events where the Black Panthers are featured. "So the current wave of Radical Chic has touched off the most desperate search for white servants."

The whole essay is full of such sarcastic-sneering observations. Here is one paragraph that gives a good flavor of the tone Wolfe strikes in this essay:

Shoot-outs, revolutions, pictures in Life magazine of policemen grabbing Black Panthers like they were Vietcong—somehow it all runs together in the head with the whole thing of how beautiful they are. Sharp as a blade. The Panther women—there are three or four of them on hand, wives of the Panther 21 defendants, and they are so lean, so lithe, as they say, with tight pants and Yoruba-style headdresses, almost like turbans, as if they'd stepped out of the pages of Vogue, although no doubt Vogue got it from them. All at once every woman in the room knows exactly what Amanda Burden meant when she said she was now anti-fashion because "the sophistication of the baby blacks made me rethink my attitudes." God knows the Panther women don't spend thirty minutes in front of the mirror in the morning shoring up their eye holes with contact lenses, eyeliner, eye shadow, eyebrow pencil, occipital rim brush, false eyelashes, mascara, Shadow-Ban for undereye and Eterna Creme for the corners ... And here they are, right in front of you, trucking on into the Bernsteins' Chinese yellow duplex, amid the sconces, silver bowls full of white and lavender anemones, and uniformed servants serving drinks and Roquefort cheese morsels rolled in crushed nuts -

After years of having our leading politcal pundits treat us to their Deep Thoughts about Al Gore's suits, Hillary Clinton's cleavage, John Edwards haircut and now Barack Obama's lapel pins, this kind of style reporting has since been assimilated into mainstream political commentary. At least in 1970, it was taken to be a literary essay that was based on some actual event.

But, like our Big Pundits today, Wolfe for the most part doesn't give us direct quotes from individuals who attented Bernstein's fundraiser about what they actually thought. Was anyone but the writer himself obsessing about whether female Black Panthers were "shoring up their eye holes with contact lenses, eyeliner, eye shadow, eyebrow pencil, occipital rim brush, false eyelashes, mascara, Shadow-Ban for undereye and Eterna Creme for the corners". Did he ask any of the female Panthers themselves if they used eyeliner or false eyelashes? Or was he too afraid they would sock him if he asked such a dumb question?

But if you actually wanted to know something about the political meaning or legal significance of the Panther 21 case, or even about Leonard Bernstein's political outlook, you wouldn't know very much after reading this essay.

Tags: black panther party, leonard bernstein, new left, sixties, tom wolfe

The sixties: Huey Newton and the Black Panther Party

Much of the material in this post is based on the biography Huey: Spirit of the Panther (2006) by David Hilliard with Keith and Kent Zimmerman.

The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP) was one of the most prominent icons in the United States of what we now call "the sixties". The BPP was a revolutionary political party founded by two young African-American men in late 1966 in Oakland CA: an Air Force veteran named Bobby Seale and an intellectually brilliant child of the Oakland streets, Huey Pierce Newton. Newton's first and middle names were after Huey P. Long, the colorful Louisiana populist who was admired by many Southern blacks because his economic programs had benefited them. Newton was born in Lousiana in 1942 but his parents moved the the San Francisco Bay Area in 1944, part of the wartime economic boom that brought large numbers of African-Americans to the Bay Area for the first time.

The organization Newton co-founded and led as its "Minister of Defense" began by striking a militant posture, setting up patrols to monitor the mostly white Oakland Police Department in black areas of Oakland, armed with loaded shotguns and pistols during their patrols. The BPP accomplished many other things, promoting self-reliance in black communities through food programs and community schools, for example. But the early images of gun-wielding African-American militants in black leather jackets and berets that first won them nationwide publicity and recruits continued to define them for much of the public, the police and the FBI. As author David Hilliard, a prominent Panther himself, puts it, "The press painted us as wild, gun-toting animals. We had picked up the gun, now we could not put it down; the media froze us in this agonizing posture".

It would be easy for anyone writing today to dismiss the Panther phenomenon as crazy, violent, self-destructive. Given the factionalism rife among radical activists at the time - some but by no means all of it due to police and FBI disruption activities - it would not be difficult to find plenty of people on the left from that time and later who would denounce them in various ways. The BPP itself split over the emphasis on "guns" (armed self-defense), with high-profile Party leader Eldridge Cleaver promoting a more militant posture and advocating alliances with groups like the Weather Underground, while Newton favored emphasizing their social programs, which he rebranded as "survival programs". Hilliard was a Newton partisan in that split, so that perspective inevitably colors his narrative. In other words, if you were looking for "oppo research" material to use in anti-Panther polemics, there's plenty of it to be found. (Rightwinger David Horowitz has built a substantial part of his public reputation on just such writing about the Panthers, who he credits with making him a flaming rightwinger.) But that doesn't help much in understanding why the Black Panthers had the impact they did among urban African-American communities, white radicals and even mainstream liberals.

Hilliard gives a factual account of Newton's life. But it inevitably takes on some of the feel of a story about a romantic outlaw, because that's partly how Newton styled himself. Newton and Seale founded the BPP in 1966. Hilliard makes it clear that Newton was intellectually adapt and personally gutsy. Newton studied enough law to be able to challenge police who threatened Panthers or member of the community with arrest. In 1967, the BPP conducted their own investigation of a very questionable fatal police shooting of a young black man named Denzil Dowell in the Bay Area city of Richmond, an effort which raised their profile locally.

Later that year, a Republican state assemblyman named Donald Mulford moved to tighten the state gun laws of which the Panthers were taking advantage to induce greater police restraint in dealing with the black community. Bobby Seale led a group of Panthers to the State Capitol in Sacramento carrying loaded shotguns and handguns. (I've read one account saying the guns were not loaded. Hilliard's account is clear that they were.) When they walked near where Gov. Ronald Reagan was giving an outdoor speech, Reagan went scurrying away. The Panthers then marched into the Capitol building with their weapons, and some of them walked right onto the Assembly floor. Although the police found an excuse to arrest them afterward, amazingly enough it was perfectly legal at the time to stroll into the State Capitol with a loaded shotgun. Hilliard does not report what position the National Rifle Association took on this incident.

Black Panther Party Chief of Staff David Hilliard

This demonstration earned the Panthers nationwide publicity and BPP chapters began to spring up in cities across the country. The fact that the Party made big mistakes and missed major opportunities in this situation is not surprising. A local organization led by young men with basically no political experience suddenly became a national phenomenon within a year of its founding. Not unlike a high-tech startup, they found a niche and filled it; the popularity of their "product" could cover up for many organizational weaknesses at first. The BPP immediately attracted the very hostile attention of police departments and the FBI. Hilliard recounts a number of actions of the now-notorious COINTELPRO program which made the Panthers a key target. The repression directed against them resulted in anumber of Panthers being killed, including Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in Chicago, "Lil' Bobby" Hutton in Oakland and George Jackson in Soledad Prison. Hilliard writes, "By August 1970, a total of twenty-two Black Panther Party members had been slain". Seale, Newton and Hilliard did prison time on various charges. Newton spent time in exile in Cuba, Cleaver in Cuba and Algeria. Newton eventually had charged dropped over the fatal shooting of an Oakland policeman, John Frey, and was freed from prison in 1970 after a famous "Free Huey!" campaign. In 1974, Newton was arrested in Oakland and accused of pistol-whipping a tailor, Preston Callins. For good measure, the Alameda District Attorney also charged him with the murder of a prostitute. Out on bail, he fled that same year to Cuba with his wife Gwen, where they remained until 1977. He returned to Oakland, where he beat the murder charge in court, and Callins declined to press charges on the alleged assault.

Hilliard's book includes one long chapter by Newton's second wife Frederika, giving a more intimate picture of Newton as a private person. Hilliard is frank about the substance abuse problems which both he and Newton experienced. Frederika's account of the drug and alcohol problems is vivid and sad. By 1977, the BPP was a significant force only in the Bay Area, where under the day-to-day leadership of Elaine Brown it had achieved a certain amount of conventional political influence and even respectability in Oakland. The Party's fortunes declined fairly rapidly once Newton took over direct leadership. Hilliard's account doesn't explain the reasons for it, though Newton's state of health no doubt contributed much to that result. Newton was killed by a young drug dealer in Oakland in 1989, apparently in a drug deal gone bad, though Hilliard also writes, "I must say, in 1989, during the last six months of his life, Huey was sober". He also writes, "Huey was later diagnosed as being bipolar and [sic] manic-depressive. Unfortunately, we didn't recognize it at the time. None of us understood the severity of his drug addiction and alcoholism".

The Black Panther was the Party newspaper

There's no question that the Panthers had a significant influence. On the positive side, their "self-defense" program, for all its practical faults, was a significant factor in highlighting the severe nature of police misconduct in poor black urban neighborhoods in many cities, a pattern extensively documented in many cities at the time by various observers, including the Kerner Commission Report of 1968. It's pretty obvious that having armed vigilantes following the police around was no more than a very temporary solution. But it had an effect. The BPP encouraged many activists to direct their energies to constructive organizing in other meaningful community projects. And they helped define a self-confident identity among urban African-Americans, especially outside the South, as the most prominent advocates of the Black Power movement. It would be foolish to ignore those achievements or the experience in community organizing that many people gained in working with the BPP.

At the same time, it would be unrealistic to ignore real problems among the Panthers, some of which I've mentioned already. In Newton's particular case, the murder of Officer John Frey was never resolved. The charge of murdering the prostitute sounds unlikely. The Preston Callins assault charge was simply dropped by the alleged victim. Hilliard writes, "The Black Panthers were a party and a movement, not a gang". And that's accurate enough, in general. But they were a tough bunch operating in a tough environment. Though they fought heroin as a danger to the black community and Oakland drug dealers once put out a hit on Newton, the BPP also tried to organize pimps, prostitutes and drug dealers. In their demands for contributions from dope dealers and from some of the shadier establishments in the Oakland area, some of the methods described in Hilliard's account would be hard to clearly distinguish from extortion. They operated on some of the grimmest edges of society, in other words. And that required having a least a partial "gang" aspect. Any serious revolutionary party would have to be prepared to operate outside the law under certain circumstances. (As we've seen the last few years, many Republicans are prepared to do so as well, and not merely in pursuit of personal aggrandizement.)

But that can lead to some ugly compromises. In his famous book Soul on Ice, Eldridge Cleaver had described a black man raping a white woman as an "insurrectionary" act against the white power structure, which in itself is disturbing enough on its face. In a manuscript written long after his break with Cleaver, Newton reported that a black mother complained to the Party that Cleaver had raped her 14-year-old daughter. Newton writes, "When charged by the [Party] central committee, Cleaver's only response was, 'I only wish that she had been 12 years old'." Again, the source had an interest in making Cleaver look as bad as possible. But Newton's account hardly reflects credit on himself or his fellow BPP leaders that they would apparently take no action to at least distance themselves and their Party from him after such a admission on his part. Any organization that considers itself insulated from the normal rules of society, whether its a cult or an established church or a political group, is particularly vulnerable to such abuses. Still, that was an ugly compromise indeed. My point in including that is to say that there were genuinely ugly and indefensible aspects of the real existing Black Panther Party. And you don't have to rely on sources as shaky as David Horowitz to know that. History is not always made by nice people. Or good ones.

But just as it's important to understand those negative aspects, it's also important to understand the social and political context in which the BPP made such an impression on so many people. The Black Panther Party and the their followers and admirers were much more than Huey Newton or Eldridge Cleaver. And to understand that portion of US political history, it's necessary to have some idea about what actions and decisions and leadership factors made their successes possible, however one chooses to judge the nature of those successes.

Tags: 1968, black panther party, huey newton, sixties