David Neiwert's "Alt-America"

David Neiwert's Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump, was published early this month. The author has been covering that scene as a journalist for decades now. He is currently the Pacific Northwest correspondent for the the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). He has written extensively on the far right and hate groups in the United States, including the books And Hell Followed With Her: Crossing the Dark Side of the American Border (2013), with a Faulknerian narrative touch, and Death on the Fourth of July: The Story of A Killing, A Trial and Hate Crime in America (2004).

Alt-America looks at the evolution of the far right over the last decade, leading up to its distinct influence on national politics in the 2016 election. The book ends its account in the early days of the Trump Administration. Events involving the Radical Right have continued to influence American politics, as Dave himself recounts in White supremacists have been marching in President Trump’s name. Literally. Washington Post 09/14/2017.

His book takes the reader through a tour of Radical Right groups, individuals and concepts, some of which have unfortunately become far too familiar in American politics. Patriot militias. Three Percenters. Steve Bannon. Gamergate. Oath Keepers. White nationalists. White supremacists. Milo Yiannopoulos. Alt-right. "Cultural Marxism." Richard Spencer. Men's rights activists (MRAs). Alex Jones and Infowars. Neo-Nazis.

But the book is not a collection of encyclopedia entries. It describes the evolution and mutual interactions of what we might a call "diverse" groups of characters and political trends. Because it's important to recognize that the far right is a fractious, quarrelsome bunch. Not just because, like with any political groups with limited resources and influence, there is often not much in the way of prestige or material rewards to hand out to supporters. So competition is intense and rivalries often bitter. It's also because the far right is particularly attractive to those who Dave describes as authoritarians (or rightwing authoritarians, RWAs) and "social dominators," terms he takes from the work of psychologist Robert Altemeyer. (John Dean also draws heavily on Altemeyer's work in his columns and his 2006 book, Conservatives Without Conscience.) RWAs and social dominators are inclined to find a lot of people to hate and to use intimidation and violence to act out their hatreds.

Altemeyer is quoted, "When social dominators are in the driver's seat, and right-wing authoritarians stand at their beck and call, unethical things appear much more likely to happen. True, sufficiently skilled social dominators served by dedicated followers can make the trains run on time. But you have to worry about what the trains may be hauling when dominators call the shots and high RWAs do the shooting." These are not people who put playing well with others as a high priority.

Here's a very recent example: White Lives Matter rally sparks infighting among white nationalists KSDK (St. Louis) 10/31/2017.

The "diversity" of these groups can also be misleading. The notorious segregationist Citizens Council (aka, White Citizens Council) was re-founded as the Council for Conservative Citizens (CCC), as recounted in the book. But most people would have a hard time distinguishing the ideology of the present-day CCC from its predecessor. Different branding or labeling doesn't always mean a difference in the "product," which in this case is a set of anti-democratic political ideas. And the John Birch Society, formed in the 1950s and until fairly recently the mothership of rightwing conspiracy theories, still casts a long shadow on the far right.

Dave describes in the book how people who identified with sectarian trends like the "Patriot" militias or "sovereign citizens" or neo-Confederates infiltrated Tea Party groups early after they formed in 2009. (Formed with some well-funded assistance from wealthy Republican donors and a fortune in free publicity from FOX News.) The boundaries between infiltrating, supporting and taking over in groups like this can often be cloudy. And in the process, the difference between deception and tailoring their messages can also be unclear. As he writes of the more recent online incarnations of the Radical Right, "The alt-right's memes and other cultural markers ... can be inscrutable to outsiders, and have served as a kind of secret handshake for alt-right cognoscenti."

For a variety of reasons, the language can also be coded. Something similar happens in cults, and some of the far-right groups can be very cult-like. So when a Three Percenter talks about "liberty," he likely means something different than what most Americans think when they hear the word. Another example comes to mind from the manners of segregation in the South in the 1950s and 1960s, manners which often could be elaborately neurotic. For example, white people who viewed themselves as respectably middle-class considered it rude and low-class to use the n-word. "Nigra" or "colored people" were the more polite terms. Although it was never clear to me whether one of those two was supposed to be marginally more acceptable than the other. However, considering the n-word to be low-class did not mean the people who considered it so were any less committed to maintaining segregation than their "redneck" neighbors.

So among far-right groups, some may be overt advocates of pseudoscientific or religion-based white racism. Others may insist that they are not racist, they are just concerned about the deficiencies of black "culture." Milder examples of this also pop up in things we hear in informal conversation, like when someone starts a sentence with, "Now I'm not a racist, but ..." You know immediately what's coming next is going to be something obnoxiously prejudiced. Sometimes it's hard to tell whether they are using that technique to try to make you think they really aren't racist because they are embarrassed of the label, or whether they are just mocking anyone who might think they aren't.

This has an interesting historical parallel in the Reconstruction period, during the time when Klan terrorism against blacks and white Republicans in the South was particularly intense from 1867 to 1872, violence well-documented in Congressional investigations of the time. But defenders of the Klan, including by northern Democrats hostile to Reconstruction, denied that such groups existed. Elaine Frantz Parsons wrote about this a few years ago. "The idea of the Klan as a fundamental threat to the nation coexisted in tension, throughout the Klan's existence, with the idea that the Klan was simply a product of overheated imagination." (Klan Skepticism and Denial in Reconstruction-Era Public Discourse Journal of Southern History 77:1;Feb 2011)

Today's very bad media habit of coding far-right terrorist acts committed by white perpetrators as the product of "lone nuts" serves a very similar function. Glenn Greenwald flagged a particularly egregious manifestation of this in 2010, Inside the mind of Newsweek on “terrorism” Salon 02/23/2010.Alt-America is especially good at describing this problem and its pernicious effect of leaving the impression that "terrorism" in the US is primarily something perpetrated by Muslims with an Islamist ideology. It's not. It's currently mostly a problem of white, Radical Right terrorists.

And the book illustrates how it requires some effort for law enforcement and the press to ignore white supremacist terrorism. Dylann Roof, who murdered nine African-American participants in a Bible study group in Charleston in 2016 had immersed himself in white-nationalist dogma from sources like the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer website. John Russell Houser shot up a crowd of movie-goers in Lafayette, Louisiana, in 2015, killing two people and wounding nine; he suffered from mental health problems and also identified with white-supremacist and neo-Nazi ideology. The book includes the story of Jerad and Amanda Miller, who in 2014 ambushed and murdered two Las Vegas police officers in a pizza shop. They laid a swastika flag on one of the bodies. The couple later killed another man in a Wal-Mart, where they also died in a shoot-out with police. They had also made a detailed plan to kill public officials in a courthouse. The two had been part of the "defenders" of the Bundy Ranch, where armed civilians faced off with the Bureau of Land Management over rancher Cliven Bundy's illegal misuse of public lands. They left a "manifesto filled with classic anti-New World Order rants."

Dave doesn't focus in particular on Christian Right groups in this book, though Christian dominionism and Christian Identity are persistent influences of the violent Radical Right. Christian Right groups have have been more broadly covered by people like Frederick Clarkson of the Political Research Association, Adele Stan, Sarah Posner and Jeff Sharlet.

While much of the book is devoted to relating the history of the various groups and trends, there are also sections devoted to a more analytical treatment of issues relevant to understanding the Radical Right and how it has successfully mainstreamed many of its ideas. He also provides some insight into how online recruiting for violent rightwing groups functions and how young white guys in particular are drawn into it. Even by targeting players of the Pokéman Go game popular in 2015. The transgressive style of being "politically incorrect" is a big draw. He cites the work of Keegan Hankes of the SPLC, who says, "people are first exposed to alt-right ideas via wildly over-the-top jokes that celebrate Nazis or other kind of ugly behavior designed to attract attention by the craziness."

In the final chapter, he looks at the danger that current trends could lead to a more authoritarian or fascist brand of government in the US via the acceptance of "eliminationist" attitudes toward hated groups, a concern with developing a "pure" community and glorification of violence against the less powerful, and hypernationalism. Unfortunately, these tendencies currently have friends in high places:

Eliminationist rhetoric is the backbone of Trump's appeal. His opening salvo in the campaign - the one that first catapulted him to the forefront in the race, in the polls, and proved wildly popular with Republican voters - was his vow, and subsequent proposed program, to deport all 12 million of the United States' undocumented immigrants (he used the deprecatory term "illegal alien") and to erect a gigantic wall on the nation's southern border. The language he used to justify such plans - labeling those immigrants "criminals," "killers," and "rapists" - is classic rhetoric designed to dehumanize an entire group of people by reducing them to objects fit only for elimination.

This book doesn't wade into the current controversy in the Democratic Party over whether economic concerns or racial and gender prejudice are drawing people to radical right politics. He does note that local political swings to voting for Donald Trump in 2016 were heavily correlated with a recent increase in ethnic diversity, particularly with increases in the Latino population. And he notes, "Such demographic shifts related to race and ethnicity have a long history of also being powerful predictors of interracial violence and hate crimes." Which doesn't settle the complex question of the interaction of economic distress with xenophobic, racist or misogynist attitudes. But it is yet another reminder that motivations in political behavior are complex and determined by multiple factors interacting.

Dave encourages people to have actual conversations with people who have different political views, including with people who buy into some far right ideas. "One healing conversation at a time," he thinks can be helpful. But he also provides some useful advice in dealing with fanatics and hardcore haters: "There's really no point in trying to reach out to people who will only return your hand as a bloody stump."

David Neiwert on Trump populism

Dave Neiwert has a new article out on the Trump brand of populism and today's Republican Party, Trump and Right-Wing Populism: A Long Time Coming Political Research Associates Spring 2016 (accessed 07/15/2016).

However much he may appeal to some white working-class voters, Trump is no champion of the common man (much less women!),
"Although he presents himself as a truth-talking business conservative — having emerged largely from these ranks — Trump has transformed himself into a creature of the populist Hard Right, the movement to which he owes his electoral success."

Dave recounts the recent history of the on-going radicalization of the Republican Party. And he warns that it could continue even if Trump loses the election:

Even if Trump were to fade away after 2016 — something that is becoming an ever more unlikely event — those who support him will not, nor will their alternative universe shatter and fall. What they will become after the election will depend on how radicalized they are becoming during the election process, and on how the rest of society responds to the violence that emanates from their ranks. It will be a serious and significant challenge.

After all, the reality is that they have been around for a very long time — buried deep in the American psyche — and are now springing forth with renewed vigor, thanks to the encouragement that Trump is giving them.

Are there really still sensible Republican opinion leaders out there?

I've referred several times here to what I've called the one decent piece of political analysis I've ever heard of David Frum making: "while Republican politicians fear their base, Democratic pols hate theirs." (Gibbs on the Left FrumForum 08/10/2010)

I may have also called it the one true thing David Frum ever said.

But I guess I have to amend that, now. Because he's just written this, "Trump is running not to be president of all Americans, but to be the clan leader of white Americans. Those white Americans who respond to his message hear his abusive comments, not as evidence of his unfitness for office, but as proof of his commitment to their tribe." (The Seven Broken Guardrails of Democracy The Atlantic 05/31/2016)

Digby Parton comments at some length on Frum's article in “The clan leader of white Americans”: Conservative David Frum perfectly explains how the disintegration of the GOP has created Trump Salon 06/01/2016.

At this point, I'm restraining my enthusiasm for Republicans like Frum who are criticizing Trump. Because Trump provides a desublimated version of what the Republicans have been preaching and practicing for decades. There's no question that Trump is stunningly unsuited to be President.

Charlie Pierce makes pitches on both sides of this perspective in Why Do So Many Conservative Thought Leaders Claim Trump Appeared from Thin Air? and Donald Trump Spent a Portion of His Day Reading the Mind of a Dead Gorilla, both in Esquire Politics Blog 05/31/2016.

But I worry because one of the deep-seated practices associated with the problem referenced in the Frum quote at the start of this post is that when Republicans lose, they conclude afterwards that the problem is they weren't conservative enough. Unfortunately, when the Democrats lose, they also conclude afterwards that the problem is they weren't conservative enough. And the venom which the Clinton campaign and the Democratic establishment have directed against Bernie Sanders this year is a sign to me that the same regrettable tendency is still at work in the Democratic Party.

A bad Republican candidate like Trump should be occasion for the Democratic Party to build a mandate, sharpen the Democratic brand, and create a significant voter realignment.

But this is still the Democratic Party we're talking about. And Hillary Clinton with her current Stronger Together slogan with the accompanying talk about working "across the aisle" with those nice Republicans makes me think the Democrats are going to try to go instead for the "bipartisan" coalition that Obama has always sought.

The principal danger [of increasing rightwing radicalization in the Republican Party] has always been of a kind of political gravitational pull: the more extremist ideologies creep into the mainstream, the more they transform the nature of the mainstream. An excellent example of this effect is the Southern Strategy initially deployed by Richard Nixon in 1968 and 1972. Its long-term effect was to transform the GOP from the party of Lincoln to the party of Strom Thurmond, from a bastion of progressivity on race to the home of neo-Confederates who argue for modern secession and a return co white supremacy.

That was Dave Neiwert writing in 2009 in The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right.

Ron Paul is still a FLAMING RIGHTWINGER!

Charlie Pierce summarizes Ron "Papa Doc" Paul's politics in one pointed paragraph (The Other Problem with Ron Paul Esquire Politics Blog 12/23/2011):

Look, the man's a hoot and all, and he was right on Iraq and he at least talks the talk about civil liberties, which in the current Republican debate is roughly the same thing as shouting your opinions into the engines of a 747. But the man's views of many of his fellow Americans are straight out of a anti-fluoridation handbill that somebody stapled to a telephone pole in 1957. He apparently ascribes to a view of FEMA that is roughly the same as the one that powered the X-Files movie a few years back. ("FEMA - the secret government," hisses Martin Landau, before They do away with him and stuff him in the trunk of a car that explodes.) He attaches himself to assessments of the civil-rights movement that would have embarrassed J. Edgar Hoover. He trafficks with racists, and conspiracy nuts, and he has spent his career marinating in the most toxic sauces of the lunatic Right, the noxious brew that the more respectable Republicans are happy to serve up to the mouthbreathers in their base, as long as it doesn't leach into the Chateau Petrus in their hospitality suites. That's what's happening now, some discreet ratfking to make sure that Crazy Uncle Ron doesn't interrupt too severely the relentless march of Willard Romney. Nevertheless, these newsletters are a look into the political world according to Ron Paul, along look backward in time through the prism of genuine American nativist bigotry. [my emphasis]

The newsletters to which he refers there are the ones that were a lucrative source of income for Papa Doc 20 or so years ago. The invaluable Dave Neiwert explains in The Freedom To Oppress: Why Ron Paul's Old Racist Newsletters Matter C&L 12/26/2011:

Let's face it -- Ron Paul's lame denials about his repulsively racist and homophobic newsletters of the '80s and '90s on CNN should permanently lay to rest everyone's favorite myth about the man, i.e., that he's a "straight shooter" and an "honest man". No he's not. He's a liar.

Anyone who can make millions of dollars for years off a notorious newsletter with their name on it and then later look into a camera and claim with a straight face: "I didn't write them. I didn't read them at the time. I disavow them. That's it" -- that man is a liar, pure and simple. Especially when you can find videos as recent as the above 1995 interview on C-SPAN in which he clearly embraces the content of those newsletters.

That alone should tell us everything we need to know about the man. The facts: Ron Paul had a significant role in determining the editorial direction of his newsletters, which were edited and largely written by Lew Rockwell and a staff under his direction. And yes, those newsletters were ugly, racist, homophobic, and bizarre excursions in right-wing extremism, extraordinarily popular with militiamen and other far-right "Patriots". But then, that would be because Paul built his political career in pandering to such extremists.

Conor Friedersdorf did a piece for The Atlantic last week (12/22/2011) called Grappling With Ron Paul's Racist Newsletters that Dave accurately characterizes as "a thoughtful and nuanced take on the matter" but which nevertheless "also makes excuses for the inexcusable," i.e., he's willing to give Papa Doc a pass on white racism. Friedersdorf winds up arguing that, well, those newsletters weren't so nice and Papa Doc was at least complicit in them; but for his supporters, Papa Doc looks like the candidate who "would do the most to square American government with the highest ideals of our polity". And he expresses his sympathy for the notion that Papa Doc's "policies, the ones he would champion in general election debates and pursue if elected, are the most moral on offer among the GOP contenders."

Dave's not so willing to mealy-mouth Papa Doc's ugliest political traits away:

Well then, let us consider whether or not Paul's policies would be moral ones. And we know, as he has expressed over many years on many occasions, what the outline of his policies would look like: eliminating the income tax, dismantling the IRS, dismantling the Fed, returning to the gold standard, and radically gutting the federal government and its power, notably including its power to enforce civil-rights laws and to protect minorities. It was only recently, after all, that Paul reaffirmed that he would have voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

That agenda, as it happens, matches up with the agenda that has long been promoted by the most racist elements in American politics of the past two generations and more -- the Posse Comitatus, the Aryan Nations, the Klan -- as well as by a variety of extremists with deep roots in far-right anti-Semitism, such as the John Birch Society (with whom Paul has enjoyed a long association).

And while they may employ vicious racism and bizarre extremism in their rhetoric supporting this agenda -- something largely absent from Paul's -- their reasons for pursuing an agenda identical to Paul's supposed "freedom" agenda have to do with the way they define "freedom" -- that is, as the freedom to oppress other people.

Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks has shown some enthusiasm for the fact that Papa Doc's antiwar positions seem to be giving him a boost in the upcoming Iowa caucuses. But in this segment from the 12/22/2011 show, he and his panel of commentators address the question Is Ron Paul racist?, including one of the excuses Conor Friedersdorf makes for him:



Tags: david neiwert, ron paul, white racism

Even the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal ...

Thomas Frank reports in The GOP Loves the Heartland To Death Wall Street Journal 09/10/08:

It tells us something about Sarah Palin's homage to small-town America, delivered to an enthusiastic GOP convention last week, that she chose to fire it up with an unsourced quotation from the all-time champion of fake populism, the belligerent right-wing columnist Westbrook Pegler.

"We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity," the vice-presidential candidate said, quoting an anonymous "writer," which is to say, Pegler, who must have penned that mellifluous line when not writing his more controversial stuff. As the New York Times pointed out in its obituary of him in 1969, Pegler once lamented that a would-be assassin "hit the wrong man" when gunning for Franklin Roosevelt.

Actually, "belligerent right-wing columnist" only begins to describe it. This is a guy who was so far out that the John Birch Society kicked him out in 1964 for being too anti-Semitic.


Diane McWhorter provides some background on Pegler in Dangerous Minds Slate 03/04/04:

Pegler's career took off in 1933 when he became a nationally syndicated columnist with Scripps-Howard, roared along under the Hearst family, and ended 30 years later under the auspices of a twitchy sect of neo-Nazis and professional racists from the White Citizens Council and the Rev. Billy James Hargis' truly reptilian Christian Crusade. At his peak in the 1930s and 1940s, Pegler was a leading popularizer of one of the most concerted antidemocratic crusades in this country's history: the vicious backlash against the New Deal and the labor movement to which it gave legal protection. This anti-Roosevelt front included the country's major industrialists, anti-Semitic, red-baiting pamphleteers, Congressman Martin Dies' Committee on Un-American Activities, and an assortment of Depression-era demagogues (and men on horseback who conspired with Hitler's agents in this country).

Although Pegler did not turn against Roosevelt until the president's second term, he quickly became a shrill cheerleader for the right's campaign to paint the New Deal's democratic advances as an internationalist Communist plot. Pegler compared union advocates of the closed shop to Hitler's "goose-steppers." (In his view, the greatest threat to the country was the corrupt labor boss; his exposé of a union official's mob connections earned him a Pulitzer in 1941.) By the 1950s, however, Pegler was showing some nostalgia for the Third Reich. His proposal for "smashing" the AF of L and the CIO was for the state to take them over. "Yes, that would be fascism," he wrote. "But I, who detest fascism, see advantages in such fascism."

Yep, those neo-Confederate, Alaska-Independence Party/Constitution Party types are some fine Christian white folks, ain't they?

Shouldn't the press be demanding that she repudiate Westbrook Pegler and that McCain repudiate her use of his quote?

David Neiwert cautions, Sarah Palin And The AIP: Not So Fast With The Exonerations, Please FireDogLake 09/10/08. Neiwert is an expert on the far-right milieu. You know, the ones who are about to get one of their partisans in as the new Dick Cheney.

Tags: david neiwert, sarah palin, westbrook pegler

Sympathy for (white) Southerners from Jonah Goldberg

Which of the two major American parties do you think of when you see this flag?

Dave Neiwert reports on one of Jonah Goldberg's hissy-fits about those nasty libruls in About Republicans And Race Firedoglake, 07/09/08.

In this one, Goldberg says, "bigotry aimed at the South never ceases to amaze me." The context makes it clear that he means aimed at the white South.

Goldberg is just horrified that libruls think racism might have something to do with Republican politics. Lordy, bring out the smelling salts! The brave (verbal) warriors against Islamunocratofascism are fainting away by the dozens to hear such a shameless claim by those wicked libruls.

Neiwert writes:

So, a brief reality check: Goldberg does not cite any liberals who actually say that "the essence of conservatism is and always has been Dixiecrat-ism" because, frankly, there aren't very many of them. Most liberals and other critics of the American right take a much more nuanced and realistic view - essentially, that not every conservative is a racist, but rather that every actively practicing racist is a conservative; and that this is the case in today's context not just because racists always have been conservatives, but because the conservative movement has made constant accommodations and appeals to them.

This has been so for a long time, but has become even more self-evident as the Republican Party became the party of the Dixiecrats. The Southern Strategy (note that Goldberg evades any mention of this whatsoever) not only was designed to provide wink-and-nudge acknowledgment to racists that the GOP was on their side but to blunt the advancement of minority interests. (my emphasis)

And he continues with an able summary of the consequences of the Nixonian "Southern Strategy". Which, by the way, was a white Southern Strategy.

Neiwert even indulges in a bit of purple prose, uncharacteristic for him, but I'm a real fan of creative purple prose: "Were it not for the ministrations of the GOP to their withering corpse of an ideology, white supremacy would have vanished from the political scene many years ago." And that's not all:

There may have been much more to Jesse Helms - but his bigoted approach to race revealed a narrow, pinched, and mean-spirited mind dedicated ultimately to primitive racial nationalism and willing to inflict injustice and harm on those he considered his lessers, and that manifested itself in a broad array of policy choices. And that, in the end, is exactly what we can say about the Republican Party, too.

You've got to feel sorry for poor Jonah Goldberg, not understanding how those bad libruls get such ideas. I mean, I'm sure the following was just a coincidence, as historian C. Vann Woodward described it in the third revised edition of The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1974):

Civil rights was not the only issue in the Presidential election of 1964, but it was the most powerful issue. Johnson's opponent, Barry Goldwater, in savage attacks on the Civil Rights Act left no doubt about his stand. He expected support from the much predicted 'backlash' vote of Northern whites and segregationist South. Riots broke out during July and August in New York, Rochester, Chicago, Philadelphia, and three New Jersey cities. They were not of the magnitude of riots to come in later years, but the looting and violence did augment the 'blacklash' [sic] vote. Nevertheless, Goldwater carried only the five states of the lower South plus Arizona, his own. On the other hand, in spite of a landslide victory, Johnson carried only one state of his native South, his own. (my emphasis)

The Goldwater campaign is generally credited as having given birth to the "conservative movement" as we've known it the last four decades plus. But I'm sure that result had nothing to do with white racism, oh no. It was probably devotion to the abstract principle of "states rights". Sure, that must have been it!

Tags: conservatism, conservative movement, david neiwert, racism, republican party

Liberalism and German National Socialism

David Neiwert has been debating with Jonah Goldberg of Goldberg's crackpot new book, Liberal Fascism. I posted the following comment (one typo corrected) at Neiwert's blog (Jonah's response Orcinus blog 01/11/08).

By the time I got through the sixth paragraph of Goldberg's response (dealing with European liberalism) I started having flash-backs to my college political science days. I imagined myself proofreading a paper I had written and seeing that paragraph and thinking, "Oh my God, if I turn in this paper written this way, the professor might just reject it altogether and tell me to go back and do some actual research this time."

It's true that history involves a lot of judgments. But that's a whole different thing than just making words mean whatever you want them to mean to construct a bogus case out of the air.

I would feel embarassed at saying much about it, because it would give Goldberg's playacting more value than it deserves. But to state what would be painfully obvious to anyone who actually knows what European liberalism was and is about, what the Nazis and fascists opposed about them included their commitment to constitutional government, individual political rights and democratic, competitive elections.

Goldberg distinguishes between European and American liberalism, which is valid as far as it goes. But in Germany in particular, liberalism was defined by parties and not just by philosophical definitions. The liberal movement that represented business interests during and after the 1848 revolution soon split into two groups, with the "National Liberals" becoming the party of Bismarck. Bismarck favored some liberal goals such as free market capitalism, nationalism and the secular state, while not being at all keen on the democracy part.

The democratic liberals were basically in opposition during the decades of the Empire (both Bismarck's and Kaiser Bill's) and reached their height of voter appeal in 1919, when the German Democratic Party (DDP) received 18.5% of the vote and became part of the Weimar coalition with the Social Democrats (SPD) and the Catholic Center Party. Those three were the real "Weimar parties" who defended democracy. The National Liberals were still around as the monarchist German Volkspartei, which polled 4.4% in 1919. By 1932, both remnants of the 19th liberals were virtually out of existence, the DDP getting 1.0% and the Volkspartei 1.9%.

The democracy and the democratic ideals that Hitler's National Socialists opposed were those of the DDP, the SPD and the Center; the Communists supported Weimar democracy in practice, more-or-less, except for a couple of attempts at armed revolution tossed in. Goldberg's description is such a garble of the historical facts it's mind-boggling.

To the extent that the Nazis opposed the German conservatives of the day, it would be because some conservatives shared the left's support of the Weimar democracy, as well as inevitable organizational competition. But German conservatives under Weimar weren't like the postwar Konrad Adenauer. Most of them were monarchists or militarists who opposed democracy. It was conservative politicians who Hitler persuaded to bring him into the government as Chancellor in January, 1933.

But, hey, if Goldberg is right that such giants of historiography as Joshua Muravchik, Michael Ledeen and Ayn Rand agree that fascism was a left-wing phenemenon, who am I to argue with that?

Tags: david neiwert, jonah goldberg, liberal fascism, weimar period

Partisanship and its alternatives

Some of the best of the "usual suspects" in the liberal blogosphere have been recently poking holes in the punditocracy's reverence for "bipartisanship" - especially when the Republicans stand to benefit from the Democrats practicing it. I've linked to several of them at the end of this post.

But I want to call attention to somewhat different approaches to understanding the current nature of partisanship. One is highlighted by David Neiwert in two posts, Home for the Culture Wars FireDogLake 12/27/07 and Defending all things white Orcinus blog 12/28/07. Both of his posts remind us that racial hatred is an important motivator in the politics of the Republican base. The Democrats have to recognize this and learn to face it head-on. And hopefully not try to pander to it by appealing to the Confederate-flag bumper-sticker crowd (Howard Dean four years ago) or reminiscing about the good old days of the Confederacy (Joe Biden this past year). Democrats have talked that much about Obama as an African-American candidate. But rightwingers sure have. But whether Obama or another Democrat is the nominee, the racial themes will be played pretty heavily in e-mail and Internet viral channels, on Republican hate radio and to some extent by the official Republican campaigns.

Neiwert's FireDogLake post points out something that probably hasn't received nearly as much public attention by political and media analysts, pollsters and campaigns as it deserves. We all joke about the e-mail campaigns offering us the special chance to help the offspring of some African dictator get a bundle of money out of their country. I still get one about every other day.

But viral e-mails - ones that are forwarded endlessly with the original source often obscured - have also become a key way in which rightwing rumors are injected into the everyday consciousness of voters. The example on which he focuses is the Obama-is-a-Muslim falsehood. He calls this viral e-mail "one of the more unremarked, and yet more effective, components of the right-wing propaganda machine". And he cites an article by Christopher Hayes, The New Right-Wing Smear Machine The Nation (10/25/07; 11/12/07 issue) that discusses the phenomenon in more detail. He even cites a blog called MyRightWingDad.net, started by someone who decided he would post the rightwing e-mails his father passed on to him regularly.

Another perspective comes from Patriotic Dissent by Wendy Kaminer, which appeared in the 11/05/2001 issue of The American Prospect, an issue devoted to "War and Rebuilding" in the early days of the Global War on Terror (GWOT). In those weeks, "bipartisanship" and "national unity" were as much in vogue as they have been in decades. And hopefully more so than we will see every again for decades, or longer. Because Kaminer's non-"bipartisan" viewpoint sound far more sensible from today's perspective than the David Broders of the world would ever be willing to conceive. Here is part of what she wrote:

Public fear has immunized the president from criticism or even muted disapproval, as well as from satire. "Americans need to watch what they say," White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer has ominously observed. It's not that Bush has given people any new reason to trust his judgment or abilities. ... It's just that Americans are too frightened now to continue believing that the president is an inexperienced, shallow, spoiled man of average intelligence.

The hunger for leadership in times of crisis is always unsettling and afflicts nearly everyone. This is how my father, a staunch individualist with a fierce dislike of authority, once described the consolation he derived from Franklin D. Roosevelt's fireside chats: "We felt that he was going to protect us, that he had the public at heart. We felt like we were listening to our father." George Bush is no FDR, but people need to see a bit of FDR, or Winston Churchill, in him. "He's our daddy in chief," one previous Democratic critic of Bush (interviewed on National Public Radio) said approvingly after Bush's September 20 speech before both houses of Congress. This suggests that we're a nation of children, in which case I can only hope that we'll soon start rebelling. Do we really need to be reminded that patriotism--fidelity to the nation's democratic values and respect for the obligations of citizenship--requires us to judge our leaders coolly and criticize or satirize them freely? ...

This is not to suggest that we should blindly oppose all new security measures any more than we should blindly support them. But when the government seeks to expand its power to spy on us, for example, it should be required to show how the loss of anonymity and freedom will make us safer. The FBI already enjoys the broad power to eavesdrop; according to government reports, it intercepts some two million innocent telephone and Internet conversations every year. The administration wants to expand its power to conduct surveillance by minimizing the role of the courts in monitoring it. Will this make us safer from terrorism or simply less safe from our government? ...

Attorney General Ashcroft keeps fear alive by reminding us that terrorists are lurking and planning more attacks: "Terrorism is a clear and present danger to America today," he told the Senate, carefully using the legal catchphrase that justifies the suspension of constitutional safeguards on government power. ...

But it's worth stressing that the administration is not seeking to expand the power of the government's executive branch solely for the sake of combating terrorism: The counterterrorism bill includes general expansions of federal prosecutorial power. And if enacted, many onerous new restrictions on liberty will not expire when the emergency that prompted them has passed. ...

We will all be under surveillance. We are all suspects now. (my emphasis)

Her description of the then-pending, Orwellian-named USA PATRIOT Act today reads, if anything, as too mild. And she was just looking at the law. This was before Cheney and Bush were openly claiming - or at least before our "press corps" or Congress noticed they were claiming - the unlimited power of the President and Vice President to ignore both the law and the Constitution. And before the early indications of the torture program had become clear.

She didn't get that perspective from honoring "bipartisanship" as the highest civic virtue. Or from idolizing Dear Leader Bush as "our daddy in chief". Yes, serious Democratic adults were actually saying things like that in 2001. And even after. It was the triumph of High Broderism - on the Democratic side. For the Republicans, it was the triumph of High Cheneyism. To them, "bipartisanship" just meant that the Democrats were obliged to go along with what Daddy-in-Chief Bush wanted. In other words, for the Republicans "bipartisanship" is identical to "unipartisanship" and the Unilateral Executive (when the Republicans are in power).

The latter is something that Glenn Greenwald's post linked below obscures. He gives a good explanation about how our political class is willing to embrace the notion that the wealthy and powerful are not obligated to obey the law. But he generalizes too much: "And thus we have a perfect oligarchical system in which, literally, our most powerful and well-connected elite are free to break the law with impunity, exempt from any consequences."

What this kind of formulation inevitably masks is the authoritarian nature of the Republican Party. As we saw during the Clinton years, the Republicans are more than willing to use the law as a club against the Executive. Even John Yoo, aka, Torture Yoo, one of the chief exponents of Cheney's Unilateral Executive theory of Presidential tyranny, argued during the Clinton years for a restrictive theory of the President's Constitutional power. Authoritarians can operate with a far higher level of inconsistency in such matters than others can.

We've seen that highly partisan approach to law in the Attorney General's office during Bush's Presidency, abetted in particular by those attorneys trained in Pat Robertson's Liberty University law school in the Christianist approach to law and ethics.

I'm not trying to make the Democratic Party sound like an old-fashioned workers' party. It's certainly not. In class terms, both the Democratic and Republican Parties are parties of big capital. But in the phenomenon that Greenwald is describing as the practice of an "oligarchical system", the current situation is that Republicans are willing to see Republican partisans operate outside the law, and Democrats have been far too willing in some cases to go along with it.

But today's authoritarian Republican Party is most definitely not willing to extend such immunity from the law to Democrats. On the contrary, just as in the days of Kenneth Starr and the Clinton impeachment, they are more than willing to use and misuse the law, the Constitution and ethical claims as partisan clubs against the Democrats. There is just not a mirror-image equivalence here. And that reality is not captured by describing the two parties as "a perfect oligarchical system in which, literally, our most powerful and well-connected elite are free to break the law with impunity, exempt from any consequences." Because Republicans do their very best to see that Democrats suffer consequences, even in some cases where there's no good reason to believe the Democrats have broken the law.

By the way, if anyone wonder why I normally give a long citation to sources rather than just a hyperlink, it's because I discovered fairly early in blogging that if you want to find a story whose URL may have changed, it's a heck of a lot easier to do if you have the name of the article or blog post.

David Broder (the Sultan of High Broderism), Bipartisan Group Eyes Independent Bid Washington Post 12/30/07.

Digby, Hullabaloo blog, Bipartisan Zombies 12/30/07

Glenn Greenwald, Oligarchical decay Salon 12/30/07

Paul Krugman, Progressives, To Arms! Slate 12/26/07

Lambert, Corrente Wire blog, Obama stump speech strategy of conciliation considered harmful 12/28/07

Josh Marshall, TPM blog, Lords of CW 12/27/07

Markos Moulitsas (Kos), Daily Kos blog, Partisanship has *increased* voter turnout 12/27/07

Matt Stoller, Open Left blog, Five Untouchable Symptoms 12/25/07

Mat Yglesias, The Case for Polarization TheAtlantic.com 12/28/07

Tags: authoritarianism, bipartisanship, david neiwert, racism, republican party, wendy kaminer

Politics and torture

One reason I need to write occasionally about less cosmic topics like fun TV shows is that so much of what is central to our politics these days is so intrinsically grim. I've seen a couple of well-thought-out posts recently on the increasingly nasty tone of Republican political discourse by David Neiwert, Watching the Bus Plunge, Campaign for America's Future 10/15/07 and The demonic and the human Orcinus blog 10/18/07. Neiwert has reported on extreme hate groups for years and has done a lot of research and writing on authoritarian politics.

Neiwert points out an important point that others are making, though rarely so clearly as he does:

It is by small steps of incremental meanness and viciousness that we lose our humanity. The Nazis, in the end, embodied the ascension of utter demonic inhumanity, but they didn't get that way overnight. They got that way through, day after day, attacking and demonizing and urging the elimination of those they deemed their enemies.

They did this by not simply creating them as The Enemy, but by denying them their essential humanity, depicting them as worse than scum - disease-laden, world-destroying vermin, in desperate need of elimination. But that kind of behavior, over the years, has hardly been relegated merely to the Nazis; indeed, it has a long history in America as well, and has been bubbling up on the right increasingly in recent years.

And the ugly truth is that the increasing radicalism of the Republican rhetoric has already had a major influence on getting the public and Congress to accept some horrible practices we all know are wrong - even though not all of those who accept it in practice support it in an affirmative sense.

Jeremy Waldron in Is This Torture Necessary? in the print issue of the New York Review of Books 10/25/07 edition (link behind subscription) writes of how the so-called tradeoff between freedom and safety that the Republicans constantly urge on us has worked in recent years:

But trading off liberty against security has a treacherous logic. It beckons us in with easy cases - the trivial amount of freedom restricted when we are made to take our shoes off at the security checkpoint before we board an airplane is the price of an assurance that we will not be blown up by any imitators of Richard Reid. But it is also a logic that has been used to justify spying without a warrant, mass detentions, incarceration without trial, and abusive interrogation [i.e., torture]. In each case, we are told, some safeguards and rights that were formerly regarded as civil liberties have to be given up in the interests of security. But after a while we start to wonder what security can possibly mean, when so much of what people have struggled to secure in this country - the Constitution, basic human rights, and the rule of law - seems to be going out the window.

I believe that the adoption of torture as official American policy (despite the verbal comma-dancing about how anything Bush orders done isn't "torture") has opened the floodgates for the current Republican spiral of rightwing radicalism. Because once you've accepted torture, what would you not accept?

Paul Kiel points out how vapid Attorney General nominee Michael Mukasey's eloquent but vague denunciation of torture really was in TPMmuckraker Is Waterboarding Torture? Mukasey: Yes, if It's Torture 10/18/07. David Luban at the Balkinization blog calls Mukasey's response on waterboarding A Severe Insult to the Brain... 10/19/07.

Brian Tamanaha in Hey America - Can You Explain This? Balkinization blog 10/19/07 describes a conversation he had with a European colleague about the spectacle of a nominee for the chief law-enforcement officer of the American government not being willing to say straightforwardly that "waterboarding" (simulated drowning) is torture:

Seeing the astonishment through the eyes of an outsider made me realize how far we have deteriorated in our moral sense about the impropriety of torture. For Mukasey to say that he first must study whether water boarding is "torture" is a disgrace.

My German colleague wanted to know how the Democrats and the American people could allow such a person to be confirmed.

Here was my response:

The Democrats are so cowed by the fear of appearing weak on fighting terrorism that they won't take a principled stand and insist that a person who cannot forthrightly state that water boarding is "torture" is neither legally nor morally qualified to be the Attorney General.

Torture is not an investigative technique. It's an instrument of state terror. The Los Angeles Times has an important article today on how torture has compromised the ability of the American justice system to deal with even the most heavily-implicated terrorist suspects: FBI working to bolster Al Qaeda cases by Josh Meyer 10/21/07.

I don't know how the Republican Party stops it's own descent into more and more radical approaches to government and rejection of democracy and the rule of law. But the public and Congress have to find a way to stop the torture policy because that's a red line for the basic rule of law and the integrity of the justice system.

Wilhelm Reich had some good ideas along with some pretty strange ones

I also read some blog post within the last several days that had an intriguing, Wilhelm-Reichian theory going about rightwing politics and miserable sex lives, but darned if I can find it now. Wilhelm Reich was a psychoanalyst who was part of Freud's circle who gravitated to the German Communist Party in the early 1930s. He had some intriguing ideas about things that attract people to rightwing politics, most notably in his book The Mass Psychology of Fascism. The Communists disowned him, he had to flee Nazi Germany and he progressively went crazy, developed a bizarre theory about "orgone energy" permeating the world, and eventually ended up as a raving rightwinger who died in federal prison in the US on charges connected with quack medicine claims.

Not exactly a rousing endorsement of his ideas, I realize. Still, with more attention being paid these days to the psychology of authoritarian politics, some of Reich's observations could prove useful. He describes, for instance, how the swastika, which was an ancient fertility symbols used in various cultures, was transformed into a Nazi political symbol and how it fit into the Nazis' psychological appeal.

Tags: authoritarianism, david neiwert, torture, wilhelm reich

The current Republican Party line and the apocalyptic mindset

As we get ready to hear Bush's wise counsel and inspiration in a few minutes, I thought I would share this.

David Neiwert sees the current Nixon-on-OxyContin, liberals-are-traitors line from Karl Rove and the senior Republicans as an example of "eliminationist" rhetoric: The hunting of the liberals Orcinus blog 06/27/05. Speaking of the kind of rhetoric to which Karl Rove treated us last week, he says:

What's important to understand is what the nature of these appeals - and their self-evident success - tells us simultaneously about the nature of the audience. Because the very nature of fundamentalist apocalypticism is profoundly dualist - entirely contingent on a black-and-white Manichean worldview - it is clear that the majority of at least the religious followers of the conservative movement are what is known as "totalists".

Fundamental to understanding totalitarianism is realizing that, contrary to the "brainwashing" model in which the totalitarian regime is imposed on a society from without and against their will, the reality is that nearly every totalitarian regime in history has succeeded because of the avid and willing participation of citizens eager to be its subjects.

As I've gone on to explain elsewhere the emergence of Manichean totalism in the American electorate has become unmistakable in recent months. The open embrace of eliminationist rhetoric by the Bush administration, after years of propagandization by right-wing agitators that made this possible, raises the stakes to genuinely serious levels.

Tags: authoritarianism, david neiwert