Charles Koch and far-right "Leninism"

Political Research Associates has an excerpt from Nancy McLean's Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America (2017) about the infamous rightwing billionaire, Charles Koch, the Cato Institute, and the makings of a Right-Wing Empire.

She has this to say about his ideological perspective:

As Koch was building his company into the behemoth it is today, he never stopped reading. Among his favorite authors was Ludwig von Mises, who, like Ayn Rand, wrote of entrepreneurs with reverence, treating them as the greatest heroes in human history. That sense of intellectual and even ethical superiority to others may help explain why Charles Koch bypassed the also libertarian but more empirically and practically minded economist Milton Friedman to make common cause with the more uncompromising [rightwing economist] James Buchanan. Koch referred to Friedman and the rest of the post–Hayek Chicago school of economics he led, as well as to Alan Greenspan, as “sellouts to the system,” in the words of journalist Brian Doherty. Why? Because they sought “to make government work more efficiently when the true libertarian should be tearing it out at the root.” They actually tried to help government deliver better results, which could only prolong the disease. Koch believed that only in its “radical, pure form,” without compromise, would the ideas “appeal to the brightest, most enthusiastic, most capable people.” (Is it any wonder, then, that his allies would now rather bring down the government than improve it?) [my emphasis]

Some people were no doubt surprised by Steve Bannon's description of himself as a Leninist. But it's not unusual in the far-right milieu for activists to style themselves as a mirror image of what they imagine the Enemy to be. Charles Koch's father Fred was a founding member of the John Birch Society. Who made a great deal of his fortune doing oil deals with the Soviet Union during Stalin's rule.

The JBS tried to style its operations around what they understood to be the Communist Party's mode of operation. Magnifying the tiny US Communist Party into a massively effective agent of Soviet influence that somehow dominated the federal government through both the Democratic and even Republican parties, they set out to imitate their image of the CP.

And since the JBS was the mothership of conspiratorial rightwing conspiracy theories in the US for decades after its inception. And so this practice of imagining themselves as a mirror image of what they consider to be the practice of the left was a common posture of far-right figures. This obviously offer a lot of opportunities for psychological projection on their part. Even today, it's worth keeping in mind that what Republicans are saying about the evil intentions and deeds of The Left may be a large clue to what the Republicans themselves are doing or intend to do.

McLean explains how a revered figure among the "paleocons," Murray Rothbard (1926-1995), who also indulged in "Leninist" posturing. And who much impressed Charles Koch:

It was Rothbard who explained to him how small numbers could effect big changes. Rothbard suggested that Koch study Lenin.

“I grew up in a Communist culture,” Rothbard later said of the extended “family, friends, [and] neighbors” in the New York City milieu he rebelled against. Even as he despised their goals, he took from their heated discussions in the 1930s and 1940s, as well as his own wide reading in the original sources, a deep appreciation of the strategic and tactical genius of Vladimir Lenin, who led a revolution in a place where others said it simply could not be done. A champion of “uncompromising libertarianism,” Rothbard, like Lenin, believed that government was “our enemy.” He admired Lenin’s daring leadership, but most of all he saw that some of his techniques could serve a wholly opposite purpose: namely, to establish a kind of capitalism purer and less restrained than the world had ever known.

In 1976, over a weekend of discussion as Koch’s guest in Vail, Colorado, Rothbard explained to his host how a Lenin-like libertarian strategy might work. The Russian revolutionary had once said of the ranks of the revolutionary party, “Better fewer, but better.” To create a sound, disciplined movement, Rothbard explained, preparing a “cadre” must be the top priority. What his admiring biographer [Justin Raimondo of Antiwar.com], a foot soldier himself, summed up as “the general flakiness and counterculturalism” of so many libertarians had had its day, Rothbard told Koch. The survivalist-like stocking up on beans and science fiction novels to last years of exile, with backpacks at the ready to rush for the hills if the statists came, the visions of colonizing remote islands or even of other planets: all that had to go. A new seriousness was needed. It was time for the revolutionary cause to orient itself to Middle America. [my emphasis]

Claire Conner on rightwing extremism

These are two video featuring Clair Conner, author of Wrapped in the Flag: A Personal History of America's Radical Right (2013), talking about far-right extremism.

Escaping Your Family's Extremism 09/09/2013 (about 10 minutes):

A Personal History of the John Birch Society 09/06/2013 (around 20 minutes):

Tags: claire conner, john birch society, radical right

Philosophy of Bizarro World, Bircher edition

I'm reading Claire Conner's memoir of growing up as the daughter of a key John Birch Society leader, Wrapped in the Flag: A Personal History of America's Radical Right (2013). It's a kind of conversion narrative of how she came to understand and reject the Bircher brand of politics and conspiracy-mongering with which she was raised.

In the book, she gives a good example of what I've called the double-reverse thinking of the far right. "Double-reverse" isn't quite adequate, but that's what I use. It's probably more like infinite regression of projections and images of The Enemy embedded in other images of The Enemy.

The Enemy for the John Birch Society has always been The Communists, and behind them the New World Order conspiracy of the Illuminati, who they try to avoid calling "the Jews" in public. They picked up crackpot ideas from a rich pool in American politics going at least back to the Anti-Masonic Party, who formed during Andrew Jackson's time and who very much opposed him as President. Jacks actually was a Mason, though the Masons were never the super powered super conspirators the Birchers and other far right extremists imagined that they were. In Bircher fantasy land, the Masons still figure among the World Communist Conspiracy.

Conner gives this example from Robert Welch, the main founder and first leader of the John Birch Society:

Here, I'll let Welch speak for himself: "Although our danger remains almost entirely internal, from Communist influences right in our midst and treason right in our government, the American people are being persuaded that our danger is from the outside, from Russian military superiority. And under the excuse of preparing to match that military might, of defending ourselves from this threat of outside force ... we are being stampeded into the biggest jump ever toward, and perhaps the final jump right into socialism and then the Communist camp."

Thus, the conspiracy is tricking us into "greatly expanded government spending for missiles, for so-called defense generally," while "hammering into the American consciousness the horror of modern warfare, the beauties and the absolute necessity of peace - peace always on Communist terms."

The goal of all of this: to "make us domestically a communized nation" and "pull us right into the world-wide Communist organizations, ruled by the Kremlin."

Think of it this way: our government does anti-Communist things that are really pro-Communist, but we the people think they're anti-Communist because the pro-Communists in the government said so. So, military spending is just what the Communists want us to do and nuclear war is not nearly as bad as the Commies say.

This kind of thinking is at the core of the kind of isolationism advocated by Ron "Papa Doc" and Rand "Baby Doc" Paul. It may sometimes appear to be dovish or anti-militarist, e.g., "the conspiracy is tricking us into 'greatly expanded government spending for missiles, for so-called defense generally.'"

But at the same time, they were xenophobic and ultra-hawkish, thinking the whole idea of "peace" sounded dangerously Communist and putting quite a bit of effort into minimizing the damage that a full-blown nuclear war between the two superpowers would do.

I've never encountered an entirely satisfactory psychological explanation of this particular brand of mental athletics. It makes me feel like my brain is bending when I try to process an argument like the one Conner quotes Welch as making.

Tags: john birch society, radical right, third subject, robert welch, wrapped in the flag

Bro. Sword-of-Vengeance is after them Muslims again

Bro. Wade "Sword-of-Vengeance" Burleson writes about them thar Muslims in Sharia Law Should Be Resisted in the 21st Century Like Nazism Was Resisted in the 20th Century Istoria Ministries 05/13/2013. Short version: Muslims is like Nazis and Commies and "Adolph" Hitler and stuff and darkie Muslims rape nice blond white women.

He's probably spend the weekend catching up on The New American, the magazine and website the John Birch Society, the mother ship of crackpot rightwing conspiracy theories and one of Bro. Sword-of-Vengeance's favorite sources.

His post is Bircher quality, in its reasoning and its imagery. Oklahoma passed a law against the non-existent threat of Sharia Law (Islamic religious law). Even though for the state to have Sharia law the legislature would have to pass it. And an Australian woman was raped in Dubai and the country's justice system didn't seem to perform very well in her case. Therefore: "Does Oklahoma look so backwards now?"

Uh, yeah, Bro. Sword-of-Vengeance. And you ain't helping its image much.

The story of the Australian rape victim is real: Alicia Gali, Woman Who Spent 8 Months In UAE Jail After Being Raped, Tells Her Story The Huffington Post 05/12/2013.

But the use Bro. Sword-of-Vengeance makes of it is straight out of the segregationist playbook.

When rightwingers start expressing their heartfelt concern for the rights of women in Muslim countries, especially blond white women sexually assaulted by locals, it's time to be alert to the political message they're actually trying to send. American conservatives generally care about women's rights abroad only in countries they want to bomb and/or invade.

And Bro. Sword-of-Vengeance has really been eager lately to see the swords start swinging. Last November just after President Obama was re-elected, he wrote in On Dog Poo and Politics: A Metaphor Istoria Ministries Blog 11/07/2012. His post is about President Obama's re-election. His maudlin take on the immediate future:

I believe our world is about to be shaken on several fronts. The coming fiscal cliff, the impending Israel/Iran war, the Russian and Chinese push to switch to the Yen as the world's currency, and a host of other foundation shaking events are just months away. However, that is a good thing. Too many put their trust in this world's systems, governments, and political leaders. We are foreigners. Foreigners' votes never count because there is no stake in the election.

Now, I'm not one for using only prissy language in politics. And I've referred to the Republicans as being in a "poo flinging" mood in the last four years referring to their often hysterical attacks on Obama.

But Bro. Sword-of-Vengeance in this post devotes four paragraphs to a graphic metaphor of why four more years of a Democratic Administration is like stepping in a big pile of dog shit. I think it's kind of sickening myself.

But fear and hatred is what the Christian Right traffics in.

Tags: john birch society, wade burleson

Bro. Wade opposes same-sex marriage, but is happy to marry his Christianity to far-right crackpot theories

That the good Southern Baptist minister, the Rev. Wade Burleson, is a babbling rightwinger isn't news. Don't think I'm being "uncivil" in saying that. He almost certainly would take it as a compliment.

In Storm Clouds Are Brewing on America's Horizon 08/07/2012, Bro. Wade's title doesn't refer to biweekly mass gun murders. Instead, he pulls various flotsam and jetsam out of the wingnutosphere for fellow rightwingers to entertain themselves with.

I check Bro. Wade's blog periodically because he's an example of a minister that has achievement some prominence in the country's largest Protestant denomination but not so much that he's quoted regularly in national publications.

But something anyone who reads and listens to enough far-right propaganda quickly learns is that most of it is dull as dirt, despite the scare words and predictions of doom. And, no, you don't have to read every page of every piece of loony drivel that crackpots promote or watch all of their films to get a decent idea of where they're coming from.

He recommends an explicitly anti-democracy quotation that has been a favorite for the decade or so in the informal conservative e-mail network of anonymous forwarded material, for which there is no real liberal/progressive parallel. (See Snopes.com, The Fall of the Athenian Republic 12/30/2008) For some reason, these vaguely-sourced e-mails, which often use bogus quotes and wrong information, are very influential among conservatives.

He also links to a movie called America: Freedom to Fascism (2006), which was reviewed by Nathan Lee in 'America: Freedom to Fascism' Makes a Mess of the Mess We Are In New York Times 07/28/2006:

It would take two months on Google to sift through all the provocations of "America: Freedom to Fascism," which begins with an intriguing investigation into the methodology of the I.R.S., then extrapolates its conclusions into a tirade against the Federal Reserve, the Homeland Security Department, Congress, presidents of the United States (all of them), judges (all of them), war, computer voting machines, the national ID card, microchip implants, overzealous police, the banking conspiracy, and so on. The mess we’re in never looked so messy.

Dave Neiwert has described the producer of the film as "the late crackpot Aaron Russo." ('Brown Shirts'? Town Hall teabaggers' ranks are indeed riddled with right-wing extremists C&L 08/08/2009) He links to the following piece about Russo and his film: David Cay Johnston, Facts Refute Filmmaker's Assertions on Income Tax in 'America' New York Times 07/31/2012.

Bro. Wade also recommends Sen. Tom Coburn's (R-Tea Party) The Debt Bomb, about how The Deficit is going to kill us all in our beds and make hyper-inflation. Bro. Wade's software might blow a virtual gasket if you tried to explain to him about what a depression is and what interests rate being at the "zero lower bound" means.

And the good Rev. Wade also recommends The Creature from Jekyll Island : A Second Look at the Federal Reserve by Bircher G. Edward Griffin, an editor of the John Birch Society magazine The New American. Sean Easter explains more about Griffith in Who Is G. Edward Griffin, Beck's Expert On The Federal Reserve? Media Matters 03/26/2011. He's a full-blown crackpot who's also into phony quack medicine theories on AIDS and cancer, the sleaziest and most dishonest corner of the the "alternative medicine" racket. The Birchers and Bircher favorites like Ron Paul have various conspiracy theories about the Federal Reserve based on ideas so goofy it would be generous to call them "economics".

(Just to be clear on that last point: Many people use the term "alternative medicine" to refer to health practices, like exercise and healthy dietary practices, that are very much part of what alternative medicine advocates sometimes derisively call "school medicine." But there are some ugly scamsters in the business as well, and fake cancer and AIDS cures can produce big bucks for them.)

I haven't seen any recent polls on how deeply committed rank-and-file Southern Baptist active church members are to particular policies produced by their leaders. But the SBC is the largest Protestant denomination in the US and they a major players in the Christian Right and Republican Party politics.

Also, check out Bro. Wade's participation in the dialogue in the comments to his posts. He sees no ethical problem as a religious leader promoting bonkers Bircher-type conspiracy theories and beggar-your-neighbor economics.

Tags: christian right, john birch society, southern baptist convention, wade burleson

A fundamentalist Christian applies the Beatitudes to the US today - or, at least, he applies FOXist attitudes

(Update 10/29/2012: The Rev. Burleson discussed here has changed the name and graphics on his blog to Istoria Ministries Blog; he seems to have kept many of the posts from his previous blog but not the first one linked here. As of this update, the post is cached here.)

Speaking of Bro. Wade "Sword of Vengeance" Burleson, as I was in the previous post, he also offers his Christian ministerial viewpoint on poverty in America in , where he grumps about "our burgeoning federal welfare rolls, our grotesque increases in disability payments, and a veritable buffet of government handouts where the majority of Americans are now given what they did not themselves earn."

I swear that a lot of Christian fundamentalists are working with some kind of Ayn Rand/Fredrich von Hayek translation of the Christian Gospels that I've never been able to put my hands on.

On the other hand, I checked the link Bro. Sword-of-Vengeance provides for his batty "where the majority of Americans are now given what they did not themselves earn". It links to an article in The New American, the magazine and website for the mother ship of batty conspiracy theories and middle-brow reactionary bigotry, the John Birch Society.

Who needs that Jewish girly-man Jesus and his bleeding-heart concerns about the poor shiftless lazy parasites when you can go straight to the Gospel According To The John Birch Society?

I challenged him on it in a comment at his blog. He added that he uses FOX News and the Drudge Report as sources, too.

I realize that the words of that 1st century hippie Jew Jesus - I know the Birchers consider him an "Aryan" but he wasn't - was a foreigner and all. And he really wasn't a respectable sort. The Romans executed him under their policy of murdering prisoners to spread terror among the subject population. And they knew to NEVER APOLOGIZE! Just the way some good Christian white folks think the United States should handle its wars.

And the words of that loser Jesus came down to us in Greek, for some reason or other. I mean, if English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it's good enough for Americans!

But what Luke 6: 20-21 quotes Jesus as saying:

Καὶ αὐτὸς ἐπάρας τοὺς ὀφθαλμοὺς αὐτοῦ εἰς τοὺς μαθητὰς αὐτοῦ ἔλεγεν, Μακάριοι οἱ πτωχοί, ὅτι ὑμετέρα ἐστὶν ἡ βασιλεία τοῦ θεοῦ.

μακάριοι οἱ πεινῶντες νῦν, ὅτι χορτασθήσεσθε.

... is decently translated in the American Standard Bible:

And he lifted up his eyes on his disciples, and said, Blessed [are] ye poor: for yours is the kingdom of God.

Blessed [are] ye that hunger now: for ye shall be filled. ...

Seems like he was one of those peace-and-love, drum-circle kind of guys. Disgusting. No wonder the Bircher types have to make up an "Aryan" Jesus.

Tags: john birch society, wade burleson

Papa Doc Paul and Bircher "constitutionalism"

We see hopeful speculations pop up now and then on the possibility of some kind of left-right alliance against the various abuses associated with the national security state and unilateral Presidential warmaking.

The problem is that many of the so-called libertarians who occasionally voice seemingly principled objections to one or another of those abuses are actually authoritarian cranks. Like Congressman Ron "Papa Doc" Paul, in an interview he did with The New American. (Rep. Ron Paul on Libya 03/25/2011) Papa Doc is well regarded at The New American, a publication of the segregationist, conspiracy-mongering John Birch Society, who swear up and down they aren't anti-Semitic but really don't seem to like them thar Jews very much. Papa Doc complains of President Obama's course of action intervening in the Libya War:

The argument is that he's getting authority from the U.N. and treaties allow - that's an international law, it becomes the law of the land. But there are limitations. You cannot amend the Constitution by treaty. What if the UN decided that we shouldn't have a First Amendment? Would you say, oh, this is OK because the authority comes from the United Nations? That would be preposterous. [my emphasis]

Papa Doc there gives us a near-incoherent hash of Old Right isolationist hostility to the United Nations and international law, extreme nationalism, Constitutional illiteracy, and one valid (though buried) legal point.

What leaped out at me from this statement from a supposed strict-constructionist libertarian was the sentence I bolded, "You cannot amend the Constitution by treaty." Uh, yeah, Papa Doc, you can. Article 6 of the document you claim to hold so sacred states:

This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding. [my emphasis]

This clear statement that treaties are the supreme law of the US along with the Constitution does mean that a treaty can alter the Constitution. And the courts have in fact upheld that provision in that way. Papa Doc's fans would presumably comma-dance over the fact that the text does not explicitly call a treaty an Amendment. But in fact, Papa Doc and the Birchers and other hardcore rightwingers who like to call themselves "constitutionalists" or part of the "constitutional movement" have very quirky interpretations of the Constitution.

The United Nations has been one of the favorite bogeymen of the Old Right isolationists since it was first proposed. If you wanted to squeeze the remnants of an accurate claim out of Papa Doc's statement, it is true that the United Nations cannot require a member nation to go to war. That's because the UN Treaty specifies that compliance with United Nations actions must be in accord with the constitutional processes of each member state. So by adopting the UN Treaty, the Congress of the United States did not thereby alter the war powers provision of the Constitution.

I'm probably being too generous in crediting him with a valid point there, because he didn't actually make that point explicitly. But that legitimate objection in Papa Doc's comment is buried not only in the mire of Bircher-style UN demonization. Old Right isolationists reject international military alliances in general as undesirable limits on American sovereignty. And they condemn international law as completely illegitimate.

The answer to Papa Doc's question on the First Amendment is straightforward: yes, if an international treaty ratified by the Senate contained provision altering some aspect of the First Amendment, that change would become the supreme law of the land. So far as I'm aware, no treaty has ever had such an effect. But it recalls a couple of noteworthy points.

The treaty restoring Austrian sovereignty and independence in 1955 (Staatsvertrag), signed by the four Second World War occupying powers the US, the USSR, Britain and France, requires Austria to suppress any attempts to restore the Nazi Party. In accord with that treaty, Austria has on their books and enforces laws against Nazi-type activity, including Holocaust denial. The Holocaust denier David Irving did prison time there for violating that law.

This is a different standard of free speech than that of the US under the First Amendment. The treaty doesn't restrict American speech internally at all. But it does represent an instance in which the US recognized in a formal way that some kinds of advocacy - in this case Nazi Party advocacy - has been so thoroughly discredited historically that it should not be permitted: at least in Austria.

(Do I support that particular legal requirement for Austria? The short answer is no. But a one-word answer can't cover all the considerations involved, including how European democracies recognize political parties legally.)

Defenders of freedom of religious and of a nonsectarian government in the United States can also rightly point to the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli that ended the US conflict with the Barbary Pirates, negotiated under Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, as relevant to those questions:

As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Mussulmen; and, as the said States never entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries. [my emphasis]

The bolded provision about how the US government "is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion" is a statement of position. But it is a statement in a treaty that is part of the supreme law of the United States. And one that comes in a treaty negotiated under the authority of one of the greatest advocates for freedom of speech and religion and ratified by a Congress during the first decade of government under the Constitution.

Tags: john birch society, libya war, ron paul

Encounters with fanaticism

Andrew Reinbach's The GOP Checks Into Jonestown Huffington Post 05/10/2011 (also in his Reinbach's Observer) is superficial in some ways. But this is a memorable comment on dealing with the genuine fanaticism that is increasingly prominent in the Republican Party:

I've never met a conservative who knows what to say when I explain the reality of their premise; they just beg for time to consider. And the next time we speak, it's like I never said anything.

And even though it's oversimplified, he's right in this passage to point to the role of the John Birch Society as the mothership for a lot of the kooky, far-right ideas that have been and are being mainstreamed in the Republican Party:

That parasite of course is the Right Wing -- really, the John Birch Society, its allies, and the many fronts they operate. These people, who include Richard Mellon Scaife and the Koch brothers, have been working for decades to turn back the clock to the days when business didn't answer to anybody, could sell the public anything it wanted to, and didn't mind shooting workers.

How else to explain the apparent willingness of the GOP leadership to deny reality in favor of a sort of bizarro universe, filled with claims a four-year-old could shred? Do they really think they can get away with it forever?

Tags: andrew reinbach, second subject, radical right, republican party

The Daily Howler's Tea Party crush Pam Stout - and what she's up to now

Bob "the Daily Howler" Somerby went from being an irreverent but perceptive liberal media critic to a cranky "concern troll" scolding liberals for not agreeing with Republicans.

Somerby was bowled over by the charms of a Tea Party activist named Pam Stout quoted in a New York Times article (David Barstow, Tea Party Lights Fuse for Rebellion on Right 02/15/2010). And he scolded George Packer, Kate Zernike and Steve Benen, and Digby for suggesting that the lovely Pam Stout might be anything more complex than an earnest citizen concerned about all the scary things these here libruls in Washington might be doin' to the country.

In the article that began the Howler's crush, Barstow wrote:

Pam Stout has not always lived in fear of her government. She remembers her years working in federal housing programs, watching government lift struggling families with job training and education. She beams at the memory of helping a Vietnamese woman get into junior college.

But all that was before the Great Recession and the bank bailouts, before Barack Obama took the White House by promising sweeping change on multiple fronts, before her son lost his job and his house. Mrs. Stout said she awoke to see Washington as a threat, a place where crisis is manipulated — even manufactured — by both parties to grab power.

She was happily retired, and had never been active politically. But last April, she went to her first Tea Party rally, then to a meeting of the Sandpoint Tea Party Patriots. She did not know a soul, yet when they began electing board members, she stood up, swallowed hard, and nominated herself for president. "I was like, 'Did I really just do that?' " she recalled.

Then she went even further.

Worried about hyperinflation, social unrest or even martial law, she and her Tea Party members joined a coalition, Friends for Liberty, that includes representatives from Glenn Beck's 9/12 Project, the John Birch Society, and Oath Keepers, a new player in a resurgent militia movement.

When Friends for Liberty held its first public event, Mrs. Stout listened as Richard Mack, a former Arizona sheriff, brought 1,400 people to their feet with a speech about confronting a despotic federal government. Mrs. Stout said she felt as if she had been handed a road map to rebellion. Members of her family, she said, think she has disappeared down a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories. But Mrs. Stout said she has never felt so engaged.

"I can't go on being the shy, quiet me," she said. "I need to stand up."

The Tea Party movement has become a platform for conservative populist discontent, a force in Republican politics for revival, as it was in the Massachusetts Senate election, or for division. But it is also about the profound private transformation of people like Mrs. Stout, people who not long ago were not especially interested in politics, yet now say they are bracing for tyranny. [my emphasis]

Barstow - and Somerby - should have known to be a little more reserved at taking Sweet Pam's self-description as a political neophyte when they saw that she was happily affiliating herself politically with the John Birch Society, the mother ship of most paranoid rightwing conspiracy theories for the last 50 years, and the Oath Keepers, a hard right outfit, which Barstow even noticed is part of "a resurgent militia movement." No one not already pretty accustomed to and sympathetic with far-right ideas and attitudes is likely to be instantly swept away by suddenly discovering such fringe groups.

Barstow:

Tea Party leaders say they know their complaints about shredded constitutional principles and excessive spending ring hollow to some, given their relative passivity through the Bush years. In some ways, though, their main answer — strict adherence to the Constitution — would comfort every card-carrying A.C.L.U. member.

But their vision of the federal government is frequently at odds with the one that both parties have constructed. Tea Party gatherings are full of people who say they would do away with the Federal Reserve, the federal income tax and countless agencies, not to mention bailouts and stimulus packages. Nor is it unusual to hear calls to eliminate Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. A remarkable number say this despite having recently lost jobs or health coverage. Some of the prescriptions they are debating — secession, tax boycotts, states “nullifying” federal laws, forming citizen militias — are outside the mainstream, too.

At a recent meeting of the Sandpoint Tea Party, Mrs. Stout presided with brisk efficiency until a member interrupted with urgent news. Because of the stimulus bill, he insisted, private medical records were being shipped to federal bureaucrats. A woman said her doctor had told her the same thing. There were gasps of rage. Everyone already viewed health reform as a ruse to control their medical choices and drive them into the grip of insurance conglomerates. Debate erupted. Could state medical authorities intervene? Should they call Congress?

As the meeting ended, Carolyn L. Whaley, 76, held up her copy of the Constitution. She carries it everywhere, she explained, and she was prepared to lay down her life to protect it from the likes of Mr. Obama.

“I would not hesitate,” she said, perfectly calm.

People in the John Birch Society orbit often describe themselvbes as "constitutionalists" and treat the Constitution as a patriotic icon. That doesn't mean they know or care about anything in it, other than the far right interpretations of the Second and Tenth Amendments. No, their notions of the Constitution would not "comfort every card-carrying A.C.L.U. member."

Barstow continues later in the piece:

Pam Stout wakes each morning, turns on Fox News, grabs coffee and an Atkins bar, and hits the computer. She is the hub of a rapidly expanding and highly viral political network, keeping a running correspondence with her 400 members in Sandpoint, state and national Tea Party leaders and other conservative activists.

Mrs. Stout forwards along petitions to impeach Mr. Obama; petitions to audit the Federal Reserve; petitions to support Sarah Palin; appeals urging defiance of any federal law requiring health insurance; and on and on.

Meanwhile, she and her husband are studying the Constitution line by line. She has the Congressional switchboard programmed into her cellphone. “I just signed up for a Twitter class,” said Mrs. Stout, 66, laughing at the improbability of it all.

Yet for all her efforts, Mrs. Stout is gripped by a sense that it may be too little too late. Yes, there have been victories — including polls showing support for the Tea Party movement — but in her view none of it has diminished the fundamental threat of tyranny, a point underscored by Mr. Obama’s drive to pass a health care overhaul.

She and her members are becoming convinced that rallies alone will not save the Republic. They are searching for some larger answer, she said. They are also waiting for a leader, someone capable of uniting their rebellion, someone like Ms. Palin, who made Sandpoint one of the final stops on her book tour and who has announced plans to attend a series of high-profile Tea Party events in the next few months.

“We need to really decide where we’re going to go,” Mrs. Stout said.

These questions of strategy, direction and leadership were clearly on the minds of Mrs. Stout’s members at a recent monthly meeting.

Their task seemed endless, almost overwhelming, especially with only $517 in their Tea Party bank account. There were rallies against illegal immigration to attend. There was a coming lecture about the hoax of global warming. There were shooting classes to schedule, and tips to share about the right survival food.

The group struggled fitfully for direction. Maybe they should start vetting candidates. Someone mentioned boycotting ABC, CBS, NBC and MSNBC. Maybe they should do more recruiting.

“How do you keep on fighting?” Mrs. Stout asked in exasperation.

Lenore Generaux, a local wildlife artist, had an idea: They should raise money for Freedom Force, a group that says it wants to “reclaim America via the Patriot movement.” The group is trying to unite the Tea Parties and other groups to form a powerful “Patriot lobby.” One goal is to build a “Patriot war chest” big enough to take control of the Republican Party.

Not long ago, Mrs. Stout sent an e-mail message to her members under the subject line: “Revolution.” It linked to an article by Greg Evensen, a leader in the militia movement, titled “The Anatomy of an American Revolution,” that listed “grievances” he said “would justify a declaration of war against any criminal enterprise including that which is killing our nation from Washington, D.C.”

Mrs. Stout said she has begun to contemplate the possibility of “another civil war.” It is her deepest fear, she said. Yet she believes the stakes are that high. Basic freedoms are threatened, she said. Economic collapse, food shortages and civil unrest all seem imminent.

“I don’t see us being the ones to start it, but I would give up my life for my country,” Mrs. Stout said.

She paused, considering her next words.

“Peaceful means,” she continued, “are the best way of going about it. But sometimes you are not given a choice.” [my emphasis]

But this did not make her an activist of the far right to Bob Somerby. Somerby was also impressed by her subsequent appearance on Letterman (Nikki Gloudeman, Tea Partier Appears on Letterman Mother Jones 03/31/2010; video of the interview is available there.) Here was Somerby's take on that performance:

We said we’d like to hear Stout’s account of the Tea Party movement—her account of her political views.

The silly children on MSNBC failed to jump to our tune. Last night, they played their schoolyard games as Letterman interviewed Stout! You can watch the bulk of the segment here, unless CBS has had the tape taken down. (The last few moments are not included.) We thought Letterman did a good job with the interview in certain ways. In other ways, his lack of political savvy showed.

But then, you’ve already grown accustomed to that if you watch our progressive channel.

Go ahead—take a look at that tape. If you prefer (and many will), you’ll be able to find some ways to insist that Stout is a snarling racist. (Though you’ll have to struggle a bit.) If you’re alternately disposed, you may notice that Stout could play the title role if some producer ever decides to cast Santa Claus as a woman. For our part, we aren't inclined to agree with Stout's views—at least, with the emphases she places. And the interview only ran nine minutes. And, of course, it only involved one member of a large movement.

Question: Can you watch that interview and imagine that Stout is a decent person? By now, many liberals quite likely cannot.

In his blast at Packer, Somerby described Sweet Pam this way:

“Government-run health care!” The sound of those words scares people away. Do you think our side [he means the Democrats, speaking in "concern troll" mode] has asked people why? Do you think our side has busted its keister trying to articulate sounder ideas?
We’re just asking.

In our view, our side rarely asks people about what they’re thinking. This brings us back to recent profiles in the New York Times about those Tea Party adherents. These people lack our sound ideas—but why is that? In a more rational world, it seems that our side might ask.

In his lengthy profile in the Times, David Barstow, for whatever reason, chose to feature Pam Stout, a 66-year-old Idaho woman. It sounded like she has been influenced by Glenn Beck, though Barstow’s profile was sketchy.

How does Pam Stout see the world? What do others around her think? We’d be curious to see her interviewed. But within the aeries of High Manhattan, a high noble lord had a different reaction to Barstow’s report in the Times. At the New Yorker, his highness, the noblest Lord of Packer, condescended to ponder the mind of the hapless commoner Stout.

In a further blast at Digby, Somerby gave her a classic "concern troll" scolding, related to the fact that Sweet Pam professed to take Glenn Beck very seriously:

Digby doesn’t watch Beck a whole lot. Yes, he’s one of the biggest nuts and/or frauds ever seen on TV—but he can’t be dismissed quite that simply. Most of his work comes from fever swamps — but some of his work is quite erudite.

No, Beck is not erudite. Or honest.

Well, there's a new report out about what Sweet Pam's been up to lately: Devin Burghart, Tea Time with the Posse: Inside an Idaho Tea Party Patriots Conference (Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights) 04/18/2011. He writes:

An inside look at a recent Tea Party event organized by Stout shows a very different side of the Tea Parties, and highlights a disturbing direction taken by many local groups.

Little talk of repealing “Obamacare” or of modifying objectionable provisions of healthcare legislation took place at Stout’s “Patriots Unite” event, held March 26. The impending possibility of a government shutdown due to an impasse over the budget was hardly mentioned. Nary a word was spoken about bailouts or taxes. Instead, speakers at this Tea Party event gave the crowd a heavy dose of racist “birther” attacks on President Obama, discussions of the conspiracy behind the problem facing America (complete with anti-Semitic illustration), Christian nationalism, anti-environmentalism, and serious calls for legislation promoting states’ rights and “nullification.”

Stout, the Idaho state coordinator for Tea Party Patriots attracted around seventy Tea Party activists from Idaho, Montana, and Washington to the Coeur D’Alene Inn for the conference. The goal: to bring isolated Tea Party groups together.

Nothing that Burghart reports about that conference sounds erudite. Or pro-democracy.

Tags: bob somerby, daily howler, john birch society, pam stout, tea party

Gary Wills on the current state of Republican extremism

The New York Review of Books PUT up a podcast by Garry Wills on their Web site dated 09/10/09 talking about his article for the magazine, Conservatives: The Tanenhaus Taxonomy for the 09/24/09 issue, on the state of American conservatism, as of a bit over a year ago.

The interviewer, Hugh Akin, asks him at about 7:50 in the podcast:

Akin: And today we have, in some sense, a revival of these extreme positions. We have the Birthers, the death panelists, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh. Do you see in some sense that all of these things are continuing, not so much a death of conservatism as a splintering into these various fringes?

Wills: This is a new phenomenon, the people who say the country has been stolen from them. And there's deep racism and deep xenophobia involved in this. As somebody said, the extremist now looks around and sees a black man in the White House, thinks he's a Muslim. Sees a woman in the Secretary of State position. Sees Ramadan dinner in the White House. So there's now an attempt to deligitimize the entire Democratic Party, saying that Obama is not even a citizen, that the Party is fascist, that it's trying to stage a coup and kill Republicans. You know, this makes the John Birchers look moderate.

This is a really deep, emotional, almost pathological condition. And I'm not sure how extensive it is because a lot of Republicans, I feel, don't have those attitudes. But they've shrunk to such an extent that they're afraid of losing anybody. And they're trying to keep the fringe aboard by humoring them so far as they can.

I think this is a pretty typical liberal reaction to the Tea Party antics we've been seeing during the last couple of years. But the Democrats and progressives have to get beyond that. Because actually there are several things that are problematic about this approach.

One is that something just as fanatical happened early on in the Clinton administration and continued throughout it. The one time I heard the late great Molly Ivins speak live was during the Clinton administration. She said someone had asked her whether she had seen this kind of intense hatred toward a President before. And she told them, yes, back when John Kennedy was President.

This does not mean that it's somehow okay to be fanatical and plunge your head into conspiracy theories and blatantly lie about public policy issues and individual politicians. It also does not mean that racism isn't a part of the current Republican fanaticism. It's not that there's no racism involved now. It's that there was intense racism involved in the anti-Clinton hysteria, too. Remember how he was called "the first black President" because of his friendly position on civil-rights-related issues? Although that was meant as a compliment by his fans, it was a source of horror and hatred to his fanatical opponents.

And certainly the intense hatred of rightwingers for President Kennedy was based on his sympathetic attitude toward racial integration. The fanatics in those days were more likely to be Southern Democrats than Republicans, though. But by no means all of them. The Goldwater Republicans of that day hated Kennedy as much as Southern segregationists did.

So when Wills says, "This is a new phenomenon, the people who say the country has been stolen from them," he's basically blotting out the way we say the Republicans Party act in the opposition in the 1990s. And they were every bit as fanatical against the Democrats and the antiwar movement in the 2000s. Their alleged respect for the Office of the President has dropped right off the cliff. But the country and the Constitution and democratic government and the law are not the authorities which our Republican authoritarians honor. Their authority is the Republican Party.

Gene Lyons is more on track in asking, Is the GOP a cult? Salon 09/10/09. The shouting mobs at the town halls may have been mostly rank-and-file Republicans. But their Party has been ginning up the fury via its Mighty Wurlitzer of Republican operatives and Party-affiliated-but-technically-independent political groups, FOX News and Republican Hate Radio. Saying as Wills does that the Republicans are "trying to keep the fringe aboard by humoring them so far as they can" is just looking the other way at what's happening. Wills makes it sound as though the Reps look at the Tea Partiers and the Birthers as embarrassing country cousins. In fact, they are the activist based of the Christian Republican White People's Party.

On a couple of other points, do the Tea Partiers' antics make "the John Birchers look moderate"? No, they don't. The Birchers are still around, they still have a significant influence within the Republican Party in mainstreaming far-right ideas into the "respectable" precincts of the Party. Ron Paul is a Bircher favorite, and one of the leading figures in that transmission-belt role. And the Birchers' conspiracy theories and political ravings are as crackpot as ever. In the context, Wills was presumably trying to emphasize how kooky some of the Tea Partiers are. But there's no point in adding more legitimacy to the John Birch Society, either.

And are the Republicans "afraid of losing anybody" and therefore reluctantly tolerate the Tea Partiers? Not that I can see. They seem intent on driving away as many African-American and Latino voters as they can. But given the past effectiveness of such tactics - an effectiveness which Wills disappears by framing this as all somehow brand new - and the broken-down state of our news media, whose dysfunctions the Republicans exploit very adroitly, it's more likely that they think they will attract enough scared white voters to offset the blacks and Latinos they drive away.

Tags: john birch society, radical right

Sean Wilentz on Glenn Beck's Bircher conspiracy theory

Historian Sean Wilentz in Confounding Fathers: The Tea Party's Cold War roots New Yorker 10/18/2010 gives some helpful background on the Radical Right theories that the Tea Party has so widely embraced.

Wilentz's description of Beck's John Birch Society ideology is really good. I like the way he describes the continued radicalization of the Republican Party over the last four decades. I'd have to say that as good as his description is, he partially falls into the trap that other liberal writers do even more, of trying to draw too sharp a distinction between respectable conservatives of a decade or two earlier and the radicals of today. This is a habit that goes back to the historian Richard Hofstadter and his otherwise excellent and now-classic piece "The Paranoid Style in American Politics."

The Bircher and other hard-right influences didn't go quite so far underground in the Republican Party as even Wilentz' account might make it sound. The father of the billionaire Koch brothers from Kansas who are major funders of the Tea Party Republican events was a Bircher from the start. He made a fortune drilling oil fields in the Soviet Union, then became rabidly anticommunist. The sons have been major funders of the Libertarian Party and Bob Dole, they play a huge role in promoting global climate change denial, and they have been major contributors to the Tea Party. They don't go on FOX News pimping Willard Cleon Skousen's crackpot books. But that's one of many lines of continuity from the far right of the 1950s to Glenn Beck and the Tea Party Republicans today.

Wilentz also gives the Birchers too much of a pass on white racism. The civil rights movement was the biggest piece of evidence the Birchers used in their early years that the Commies had taken over/were taking over. For virtually all the rightwing gutter, white racism, hostility to socialism real and imagined, and anti-Semitism are part of a single package. When the Birchers describe the master conspirators as "Insiders", they mean "Jews".

The Christian Right has also been a major continuing source of mainstreaming Bircher notions into the Republican Party. Tim LaHaye of the "Left Behind" series of apocalypse porn novels is an old Bircher. Pat Robertson published two books in the early 1990s, The New World Order and The Turning Tide, that elaborated the same basic crackpot worldview about the Illuminati and so forth that Wilentz describes with Beck and the Birchers. Brother Pat even cited neo-Nazi sources and employed a stock technique of "highbrow" anti-Semitic writing, using "German bankers" for the financial villains with Jewish names that he describes masterminding this grand historical conspiracy.

I've posted on these topics earlier.

On Beck's guru Skousen a while back, Glenn Beck's political guru 09/21/2009.

On Brother Pat's conspiracy theory, Pat's paranoia - and bigotry 07/15/2005.

On one guy who was too anti-Semitic even for the John Birch Society (but Palin quoted him in her speech to the Republican Convention in 2008), His soul (Westbrook Pegler's) goes marching on 09/24/2009.

Tags: john birch society, radical right

Christianist theocratic "libertarianism"

Mark Shields may think that libertarians are all a bunch of free-love hippies. But he's clueless about how leave-business-alone libertarianism is often connected to a hardlare Christianist theocratic worldview. As Julie Ingersoll explains in Rand Paul and the Influence of Christian Reconstructionism Religion Dispatches 05/25/2010, noting the close affiliation of both Rand Paul and his fatherRon with the far-right Constitution Party, which is heavily influenced by Christian Reconstructionist ideology:

How can they be theocrats and libertarians? This has puzzled those of us who write on Reconstructionists who see evidence of both libertarian and theocratic tendencies. In other words, how can they advocate limited government and, at the same time, application of biblical Law?

An understanding of the subtleties of Christian Reconstruction is really helpful here. For Reconstructionists, the civil government’s authority is limited to protecting citizens from criminals. Family and ecclesiastical authority are established to uphold (and enforce) other aspects of biblical law. That’s not to say that any of these institutions are understood as functioning autonomously; all are under the authority of God and are to function according to biblical law. But each is independent of the others. So for libertarian Reconstructionists (as many of them are) limited government means limited civil government. Their form of libertarianism is distinct from the more libertine versions of libertarianism. They are much better described as theonomic than theocratic. [my emphasis]

She elaborates with reference to the Constitution Party:

The Constitution Party platform opposes marriage and/or legal partnerships for gays and lesbians. No surprise there, but the plank regarding family articulates a notion of family as one of three governing institutions established by God. Likewise, the platform articulates support for Christian schooling and homeschooling. But it does so on the basis of Reconstructionist framing: the family is understood as a form of government, given by God, with a specific sphere of authority that includes the raising of children, without the interference of the civil government. Opposition to welfare, in the platform, is not based in more common conservative view, such as “welfare allows people to be lazy,” or “it’s unfair (or even inefficient) to tax productive people to care for those who are not.” Rather, it is based in the argument that welfare is more properly understood as charity and is legitimately within the authority of the church, not the civil government. [my emphasis]

Sarah Posner, also in Religion Dispatches, elaborates on the latter point in John Birch Society: You Can't Legislate Christian Charity (Or Integration) 05/25/2010, where she discusses the CEO of the John Birch Society (JBS), the mothership of contemporary rightwing conspiracy theories, defending Ron Paul's opposition to anti-discrimination laws:

Now this week the CEO of the John Birch Society says "forced integration by the government is wrong" and that Christians should just be trusted to do what's right, because you "can't legislate Christian charity."

In this case, the JBS sees anti-discrimination laws as a form of "charity". She continues:

Thompson never specifically addresses Paul's statements on the Civil Rights Act, but intimates that, like Paul, he believes people should be, essentially, trusted to do the right thing. He believes this, it seems, because, like Paul, if everyone acted on Christian charity, we wouldn't need any laws. "With Christian charity," Thompson concluded, "we can work together. Without Christian charity, we can't. And you just can't legislate Christian charity. It's just that simple."

Tags: christian dominionism, john birch society, radical right

A weird reverse defense of the Tea Party extremists

I hadn't heard of this guy John Avlon until Wednesday when I saw what I thought was a fairly decent piece he did in The Daily Beast: Return of the Fright Wing 02/17/10.

But one thing striking about it is that even though he was expressing seeming outrage at the re-emergence of the John Birch Society, which is kind of the mother ship of rightwing crackpottery in the United States, there was something odd about it. What he actually writes there is accurate as far as it goes. But his perspective seemed weirdly stuck in about 1965, when the Birchers had become officially unrespectable in the Republican Party. And he made it sound like their influence in the Party had been pretty marginal since then. (For more on that subject, see my post Historical Footnote on Reagan and the John Birch Society 01/31/04.)

Avlon concludes, "It is an invitation to isolation and ridicule" for Republicans to embrace the Birchers.

I was wondering, did this guy just miss the 1990s, when the Republicans were out there pimping stories about the various murders they claimed Bill Clinton had been involved with? When the "Patriot militia" movement which is pretty much the same thing as the current Tea Party movement was flourishing? And when even the most respectable Establishment "mainstream media" couldn't get enough of the Whitewater fairy tale and a flood of other fabrications from the gutter rightwing about Bill and Hillary Clinton? Not to mention obsessing to this day about Clinton's sad affair with Monica Lewinsky? Even Chris Matthews, who the Birchers and the rest of the Republicans imagine to be a mainstay of the Librul Media Conspiracy, had Paula Jones on his show to discuss the murders she accused the Clintons of having committed. Total fabrications that in 1965 no journalist who expected to be taken seriously would have promoted.

Isolation and ridicule? Is he kidding? Our Pod Pundits think the Tea Party fanatics are salt-of-the-earth Real Americans.

Then someone on a mailing list called my attention to this Australian interview of Avlon: US warned to be wary of wingnuts The World Today 02/17/10.

Knowing that he was a speechwriter for Rudy Giulani explains a lot. I noticed at The Daily Beast article that the cover of his book featured Keith Olbermann along with Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin as a "wingnut". Olbermann is as big a hack as most of his fellow infotainers who play news reporters on TV. But his politics are at best a mostly artless caricature of Democratic Party liberalism. In 2008, he had to apologize on-air twice for sleazy comments about Hillary Clinton.

(Sorry if I sound jaded on Olbermann, but his flighty piece on white racism in the Tea Party movement really bugged me. How can you screw up a topic like that? For anyone who knows what they're talking about, that's like the proverbial catching fish in a barrel.)

So, in Avlon's world, for a "left wingnut" we have a guy who does a half-assed job of playing a shrill liberal on TV. For the "right wingnuts" we have a guy who promotes lunatic Bircher-type conspiracy theories about how moderately-liberal-and-barely-comfortable-with-that Barack Obama is a communist and a socialist and a fascist and a Nazi and the new Adolf Hitler and Mao Zedong. And a female extremist politician who has worked actively with Birchers and neo-Confederates and espouses a theocratic version of Pentecostal Christianity that literally believes in demons and witchcraft and is so kooky that the largest Pentecostal denomination in America officially considers it a heresy.

I thought there was something odd about that picture.

His The World Today interview makes it clear that he's pushing the "centrist" jive our American punditocracy loves, when they aren't marvelling over the antics of Real Americans at Tea Party events. Oh, these horrible partisans - on both sides, of course - just make things so awful. And if we could just get the damn leftwing hippies to shut up and go live on a commune somewhere, and the Birchers and the white supremacists not to state their goals in public during election years, then we could all agree in a nice, bipartisan way that the budget deficit is the worstest awfulest menace to civilization ever known and we have to quick get rid of those terrible Social Security and Medicare programs and cut taxes for our put-upon billionaires.

Naturally, budget deficits are always fine if they are for wars to kill foreigners or to give more tax subsides to the wealthiest. All good bipartisan centrists know that.

Despite Avlon's horse-puckey about being against those extremists of the right and the awful hippie feminist Islamunists of "the left", his World Today interview is really an argument that the Tea Party crowd are just misunderstood Real Americans. I mean, us pore white folks are gone be a minority in our own country here fore yuh know it, and the Tea Party folks are just "the birth of white minority politics." (Those are his words.) Cause, dang, us white folks are oppressed by all these here other minorities and immigrants and sex education teachers and scientists and stuff. This part pretty much states his position:

It is a rising tide. It has not achieved critical mass yet. I think the Tea Party movement has been largely misunderstood. I keep trying to say, I mean it is less than a year old and if you look at the first tea parties which were held nationwide on February 27th of last year, it is at heart, a fiscal conservative protest movement.

And, uh, organized by the Glenn Beck featured on the cover of his book as a "wingnut".

Yeah, right, "at heart" they're just a fiscal conservative protest movement (of the put-upon white minority). And Dick Cheney "at heart" is a pacifist and a civil libertarian.

Tags: john birch society, radical right, tea party

Glenn Beck and isolationism

Andrew Bacevich is correct when he observes that "isolationism" is mostly used as a bogeyman in American national security debates. Neither the Democratic Party nor the Republicans have really been dominated by isolationists since the Second World War. Bacevich would probably argue that even those called isolationists in the 1930s really weren't exactly that. But I won't go there in this post.

But far-right isolationism does play a role in today's Republican Party. Its main effect is to reinforce the narrow nationalist impulses of the main tendencies in the Party, particularly the neoconservatives. Far-right isolationists, which include the John Birch Society, are just as hostile as neoconservatives are to the US being part of any international organizations, particularly the United Nations.

It's notable in that connection to see that as Glenn Beck plunges deeper and deeper into Bircher/Birther-style conspiracy theories, he's also embracing Bircher-style isolationism. Peter Wehner, posting at a blog for the leading neocon journal Commentary (Glenn Beck: Harmful to the Conservative Movement 09/21/09) writes that Beck:

... seems to be more of a populist and libertarian than a conservative, more of a Perotista than a Reaganite. His interest in conspiracy theories is disquieting, as is his admiration for Ron Paul and his charges of American “imperialism.” (He is now talking about pulling troops out of Afghanistan, South Korea, Germany, and elsewhere.) Some of Beck’s statements—for example, that President Obama has a “deep-seated hatred for white people”–are quite unfair and not good for the country. His argument that there is very little difference between the two parties is silly, and his contempt for parties in general is anti-Burkean (Burke himself was a great champion of political parties). And then there is his sometimes bizarre behavior, from tearing up to screaming at his callers. Beck seems to be a roiling mix of fear, resentment, and anger — the antithesis of Ronald Reagan. [my emphasis]

This is not a sign of the Republican Party being on the verge of embracing a non-interventionist foreign policy. It's one of the two sides of nationalist jingoism asserting itself against a Democratic President. If Beck is still around working the political-extremism racket the next time we have a Republican President, I wouldn't be in the least surprised if his isolationism quickly morphs into raving jingoism.

Not all isolationists are equal. Antiwar.com is a site that I've always had big reservations about exactly because it's run by rightwing libertarian isolationists. But they also run a lot of articles and do interviews on their Antiwar Radio service with Scott Horton (not the human rights lawyer) that include perfectly sensible and even left critics of US foreign policy, as well as some top journalists and historians. So it wouldn't be accurate to say it's a rightwing isolationist site. Although that description does fit Justin Raimondo, the editorial director of the site.

The American Conservative also falls into that category. It publishes left-liberal as well as libertarian-isolationist criticisms of US foreign policy, and is especially critical of neoconservatives. Taki's Magazine is more just straight rightwing isolationist. One of their most recent articles is The Forgotten Conservative by Nesta Bevan 09/22/09, which aims to revive the memory of Revilo Oliver, a long-time writer for the John Birch Society who became too rightwing for even the Birchers to stomach. Bevan writes:

Oliver and the John Birch Society came to a final parting in July 1966, after a speech by Oliver, “Conspiracy or Degeneracy?” which he delivered at the New England rally for God, Family, and Country. In this talk, Oliver asked whether the failure adequately to confront Western decline stemmed more from biological degeneracy or conspiracies that aim at our destruction. Suggesting that the former was more likely, he asked his audience to imagine that the Jews, a group he held in the forefront of the anti-Western conspiracy, “were vaporized at dawn tomorrow.” Would not the problems that had led to the present crisis, Oliver thought, soon recur? He was taken by hostile critics to have called for the extermination of the Jews, though this was not what he had said. Nevertheless, his position in the Society became untenable, and, after a bitter break with [JBS head Robert] Welch, he resigned.

The JBS was generally understood to be an anti-Semitic group. But they tried to keep at least a hair of a distance between themselves and explicitly anti-Semitic publish statements like Oliver's eliminationist speech cited there. Bevon says:

Given the record of his later years, it is small wonder that contemporary conservatives prefer to ignore Oliver. To do so, though, is a serious mistake; his thought continues to raise issues of vital concern to the Right.

And what might those be? Bevan explains:

An underlying theme in “Conservatism and Reality” came to the fore in his later work, and this again raises a fundamental issue. If, as Oliver does, one rejects religion as a guide to life, what is to replace it? For Oliver, the answer is clear: race is fundamental. In “History and Biology,” American Opinion [JBS magazine] (1963), Oliver highly recommends Lothrop Stoddard’s “The Revolt Against Civilization” Stoddard, “one of the most brilliant of American writers,” argued that the colored races pose a threat to the white race, and Oliver enthusiastically agrees. For him, racial struggle is primary, and he regards ethical obligations as limited to one’s own race. For him, this view was unquestionable. In response to a correspondent to National Review who asked why one should give primary emphasis to the needs of one’s own race, Oliver was puzzled. Was this not how everyone in fact acted?

So the fact that Beck may be using isolationist criticisms of US military interventions shouldn't mislead anyone into thinking that he's embracing some kind of left-right, out-of-the-box libertarian thinking. A far-right isolationist viewpoint can float in a sewer of anti-Semitism, racism and jingoism.

Tags: glenn beck, isolationism, john birch society, radical right

Glenn Beck's political guru

Willard Cleon Skousen (1913-2006)

When I wrote earlier that Glenn Beck was sounding like a straight-up John Birch Society fantasist, I didn't realize that he had publicly expressed his support for the group's recent paranoid campaign against the imaginary "NAFTA Superhighway", as Dave Neiwert describes in Glenn Beck chases "far left radicals" in White House, but loves right-wing radicals himself Crooks and Liars 09/17/09.

And the man who apparently is Beck's chief intellectual guru of the moment, one of whose books he recommends to anyone who will listen, is the late Willard Cleon Skousen, who is profiled by Alexander Zaitchik in Meet the man who changed Glenn Beck's life Salon 09/16/09. Skousen was a Morman rightwinger who taught at two Mormon universities and served for four years as the Salt Lake City chief of police, until the ultra-conservative mayor of the time fired him for being too hardline. "He operated the police department like a Gestapo," the mayor said.

Skousen in the early 1960s after being canned as police chief was involved with far-right groups like the Birchers' American Opinion Speakers Bureau, the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade, the All-American Society and the American Security Council. Zaitchik writes that Skousen in the early 1960s became "the nation's most prominent Birch defender." The Birchers were angry at Barry Goldwater's movement because the 1964 Republican Convention that selected Goldwater as its Presidential nominee also condemned the Birch Society which viewed former President Dwight Eisenhower as having been a Communist. The pique of the Birchers against Goldwater, despite his endorsement of many views to their liking, was probably not irrelevant to the fact that Goldwater's parents had been Jewish, though they had converted to Christianity.

The Skousen book that Beck so loves is The 5,000 Year Leap (1981). But he also made ripples in the sphere of far-right influence with other volumes like The Naked Communist, The Communist Attack on the John Birch Society, The Naked Capitalist (1970) and The Making of America (1982), the latter of which claimed that slaveowners had been the "worst victims" of the slavery system in the Old South.

As Zaitchik explains, the Mormon journal Dialogue: The Journal of Mormon Thought in its Autumn-Winter 1971 issue published a symposium on The Naked Capitalist, which was receiving notable attention from conservative Mormon intellectuals. Dialogue has made the symposium available on its Web site, including a pitch by an admirer of Skousen's book and a response by Skousen himself. You can get a first-hand look there at the ideology on which Beck is operating and recommending to his followers as it looked during the first Nixon administration, long before the "teaparty" movement became a favorite media entertainment item.

Skousen's view of wealthy and evil capitalists behind behind the Communist movement is a long-time favorite far-right theory, with a conspiracy of Jews playing the main role of the capitalist manipulators in many of its versions. The Birchers then and now truck in nudge-nudge wink-wink theories which mirror anti-Semitic theories like that of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion but don't directly call the conspirators "the Jews". Beck's bizarre concoction of Rockefeller the Communist art conspirator fits comfortably into this model. As historian Louis Midgley summarizes it in the Dialogue symposium:

The "global planners" who are at the center of the Capitalist conspiracy are identified by Skousen as the "leaders of the world's secret center of international banking," the "super-rich," the "super capitalists." The "leaders of London and Wall Street" are chiefs of "the Anglo-American secret society" who are behind communism and everything else. Skousen puts bankers at the top of the list of conspirators: the Rothschilds, Barings, Lazards, Paul Warburg, J. P. Morgan. But also included are the following: John Foster and Alan Dulles, the Rockefellers, Cecil Rhodes, Arnold Toynbee, Walter Lippman, Albert Einstein, George F. Kennan, Douglas Dillon, Dean Acheson, Henry Kissinger, Henry Cabot Lodge, Arthur Burns, George Ball, Ellsworth Bunker, Paul Hoffman, McGeorge Bundy, the Kennedy family, Dwight Eisenhower, John Dewey, and many others. By any standards, this is quite a list.

The Rothschilds are favorite bogey-men in pretty much every anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. Kissinger is a more recent favorite. Albert Einstein, who described himself as a socialist of the social-democratic variety, fits into the picture - not that there has to be any actual sense about which Jewish names get stuck into these lists. (If the title of Skousen's 1967 book Fantastic Victory; Israel's Rendezvous with Destiny is any measure, I'm guessing he promoted some form of Christian Zionism. Though that certainly doesn't exclude anti-Semitism, since its more common versions look forward to the day when God will have most of the Jews in the world slaughtered in a big war, and the rest will convert to Christianity.)

In his Dialogue response, Skousen denies that he listed all those names in The Naked Capitalist. Midgley doesn't respond in his rejoinder. From the way Skousen worded his comment, my guess is that Skousen is comma-dancing. Midgley probably took those names as people mentioned in that context throughout the book. Skousen is denying he listed them that way.

The symposium gives a good glimpse of how crackpot "scholarship" works. Just as Mad Annie Coulter's books are filled with footnotes, Skousen used a book by Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of The World in Our Time (1966) as a source, but used the material in a thorough dishonest and frivolous way. Crackpot conspiracy theories usually don't lack for "sources" and footnotes. On the contrary, neurotic application of such proofs is a hallmark of them.

I checked the nearest library to see if The Naked Capitalist was available; they didn't have a copy available of Skousen's self-published classic. They did have a copy of Tragedy and Hope. It looks as though it were written to be a college text. And though its concluding essay expresses conservative worries about the general decline of civilization due to dirty movies and novels that talk about sex, it's clear that Quigley wasn't promoting anything like the paranoid crackpot worldview that Skousen used his book to justify.

Louis Midgley seems to have had a good sense of how far-right paranoid conspiracy theories are constructed. But in that Dialogue article he does perpetuate a fuzzy-headed notion that Glenn Beck and Jonah Goldberg and other Republicans today also promote, a conceptual merger of socialism with fascism and Hitlerism:

I believe that Skousen started his career with the goal of saving the rich from big government, but has found that the rich don't want his help — the rich he now discovers control big government and, in fact, are rich partly because of big government. Now he wants to attack the rich and especially their power base, their wealth. But he is not the first to have it in for Capitalists and to want to save the people from their rich masters. This is exactly the program of various forms of socialism and communism. It is difficult to miss the parallels between Skousen's program and much of the rhetoric of the New Left. But there are other instructive parallels. In Germany, where they also once came to believe that they were oppressed by conspiratorial bankers who also manipulated the Communists, the program was called National Socialism. Under this program the rich would be eliminated and power given back to the people (or so they said), the schools would be liberated so that the truth could be taught about the evil bankers, international ties would be eliminated, churches would be used for national propaganda and other purposes. Skousen also wants a political party to come to power with the express goal of eliminating the wealth and power of the rich (what better name for such a policy than socialism?) and this key process is to be accomplished by national governmental action — an appropriate descriptive title for his program would be National Socialism.

Without trying to recap decades of German history, Hitler added the word "socialist" to his party's name to make it the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) from the German initials; "Nazi" is a typical German shortening of the Party's name. The purpose was to attract more attention from working-class voters, who heavily supported either the Social Democratic Party (SDP) or the Communists (KPD). The NSDAP never took many voters directly from the SPD or the KPD. The SDP and the KPD both understood that the Nazis did not share either of their basic social, economic or political outlooks, as did the Nazis themselves. And the SPD and the KPD each rejected the other's version of socialism. Merging the concepts of Nazism, socialism and communism makes them basically impossible to understand.

But it is clear that Skousen and his disciple Glenn Beck have a political-paranoid, far-right vision of the world that has very much in common with that of the John Birch Society. So its not surprising that Beck would be raving on TV about Rockefeller sponsored Communist art to subliminally convert unsuspecting passers-by to socialismcommunismfascismliberalism.

According to this National Review Online article by Mark Hemingway, Romney’s Radical Roots 08/06/07, Mitt Romney is also a Skousen fan.

I see that Salon is running a 3-part series on "The making of Glenn Beck" by Alexander Zaitchik beginning on 09/21/2009.

Tags: glenn beck, john birch society, radical right, w cleon skousen

The Huck and his (godly?) standards

Brother Huck was on CNN a little while ago giving a speech promoting his Fair Tax scam. He said a couple of things I didn't recall hearing before. One was he referred to "boobirds" who opposed his plans. I don't think I've ever encountered that particular construction before.

The other thing he said was that he wanted to amend the Constitution to eliminate the ability of the federal government to impose income taxes. I knew he proposed to eliminate income tax as part of his crackpot Fair Tax scheme. But this business about eliminated the Constitutional Amendment that provides for federal income tax is an old favorite cause for the John Birch Society. The crackpotization of the Republican Party proceeds.

Max Brantley at the Arkansas Blog ("Spotted: an issue 01/27/08) updates us about the Huck's contribution to the overwhelming public demand (NOT) for phasing out Social Security:

The LA Times gives us a welcome break from personality politics with a survey of what candidates are saying about retirement savings - and their utter lack among the American electorate. I still think the most pluperfectly nuts idea offered so far is by, who else, Mike Huckabee. He'd give people a lump sum of their Social Security money to spend or invest rather than lifetime monthly payments. Bass Boats R Us. And a whole new burden for the government when the money is gone. Why in the world you'd want to tamper with the essence of the single most successful government program ever - a program that works because it's universal and which has demonstrably lifted millions out of poverty - is beyond me.

Tags: authoritarianism, john birch society, mike huckabee

You want me to read what?

Antiwar.com 10/05/07 promotes the article War With Iran? Who Decides? from a John Birch Society journal

I know the various sayings: politics makes strange bedfellows, the enemy of my enemy is my friend and yadda, yadda.

But the John Birch Society is a crackpot group of rightwing promoters of hate and bigotry.

So I wasn't thrilled to see at Antiwar.com an article highlighted from a Bircher journal, The New American. The "About" Web page for that journal explains:

In addition to political topics, The New American also publishes articles about economics (from a free-enterprise perspective of course!), culture, and history. It is published by American Opinion Publishing, a wholly owned subsidiary of The John Birch Society.

I've posted before about how Antiwar.com is a "libertarian" site with philosophical affinities to the neo-Confederate LewRockwell.com crew.

I've cited articles on numerous occasions from Antiwar.com, and I expect to continue to do so. The same page that featured the Bircher article link also links to a number of current news articles on war-related matters and to articles by Norman Solomon, Ted Rall and Tom Engelhardt, none of whom are close to the Birchers' worldview. The Antiwar Radio feature there has some very impressive guests, including Juan Cole, Wesley Clark, Chalmers Johnson, Gareth Porter, Ray McGovern, Andrew Bacevich and others who are not associated with some crackpot far-right ideology.

So I encourage people to use Antiwar.com for the resources it provides, as I will continue to do.

But front-paging the John Birch Society? This makes me really wish that there was a comparable site run by real liberals or Greens or Catholic antiwar activists that was providing this service. Because Antiwar.com is also a site where articles by rightwingers from LewRockwell.com and now the Birchers are presented favorably to new audiences and have an additional route to mainstreaming their far-right ideas.

Antiwar Radio also features the occasional "libertarian" guest, like the following:

William Norman Grigg, publisher of TheRightSource, and author of the blog Pro-Libertate, discusses America’s descent into an authoritarian fascist state, our current system’s similarity to the way things are in China and Cuba (executions, slave labor, new prisons in waiting, etc.), the Prison-Industrial-Complex, the economics of the corporate warfare/police state, its origins in the Civil and Indian wars, the solution of laissez faire, the militarization of domestic police, the American civic religion of force that makes it all possible and the push for a North American Union. (my emphasis)

The "North American Union" is a popular bugaboo right now for the black-helicopter nativist crowd.

Far-right Congressman Ron Paul is a real favorite at Antiwar.com. Scott Horton at Antiwar Radio can't seem to do an interview with anyone lately without making a plug or two for "Dr. Ron Paul" and his wise thoughts. As Dave Neiwert has pointed out, Ron Paul has been notable over the years for his role in helping to mainstream themes from the far-right gutter to the "respectable" bosom of the Republican Party. Despite his being one of the few overtly antiwar Republicans in Congress, I've always been very suspicious of Paul's Presidential candidacy and even of his antiwar position. One of the reasons he gives for opposing the Iraq War is that he says it was authorized by and is being fought on behalf of the United Nations, a perennial bogeyman of the far right. (That anti-UN sentiment is very much mainstream Republicanism now.)

But the UN did not authorize the invasion of Iraq. In a weird, mirror-image kind of way, he's defending the false claims of Bush and Tony Blair in 2003 that their invasion of Iraq was in defense of UN resolutions.

The Bircher article that Antiwar.com front-paged is also lavish with the Ron Paul quotations. Not surprising: the Birchers like his crackpot economic ideas, too.

I know, "it takes all kinds," and all that. Some isolationist and "libertarian" types do sometimes have decent analyses of some aspect of the Iraq War or US foreign policy. But rightwing isolationism, whether it's the Old Right brand or the paleo-conservative or the neo-Confederate or the clean-shaven-lets-legalize-dope libertarian variety, is based on the same kind of nationalism and nativism that Dick Cheney's unilateralism is. No one should kid themselves about where that perspective leads, even if it agrees with the liberal/left position on the Iraq War or some other particular issue.

Politics make strange bedfellows, true. But that doesn't mean we have to let them take the covers.

And you may want to look twice and three times at articles from Antiwar.com by authors you don't immediately recognize when they talk about anything to do with Israel or Jews. The Birchers don't much like them either.

Tags: antiwar.com, antiwar movement, isolationism, john birch society, ron paul, scott horton

Should the Democrats be trying to "distance themselves" from MoveOn.org?

The dirty hippie Commies are coming to kidnap your daughters

As mentioned in the last post, I had to shake my head about Mark Shields' latest episode of tangling himself hopelessly in the Republican trap about MoveOn.org. I mentioned in an earlier post that Shields fell into the trap of repeating the Republican huffing-and-puffing about MoveOn's criticism of our Saviour-General David Petraeus. Friday night he had a new reason to bitch about it (Democrats Debate Health Care, Senate Debates Iraq 09/21/07). Now he's upset about it because "Americans do not like to have people's names made fun of."

As the Daily Howler likes to write, try to believe he said it! Or maybe another Howler favorite would be more appropriate: gaze on the empty soul of your press corps.

Here's a longer quote of Shields latest PBS Newshour pronouncement on the vital question of whether it's permissible to insult the divine presence of Saviour-General Petraeus:

I think it's an embarrassment to the United States Senate that they cannot decide anything about Iraq. They can't come to any conclusion, and they can stand up there and berate an ad, which I found and have said was, I thought, tasteless and counterproductive.

First of all, Americans do not like to have people's names made fun of. Everybody has had the experience, him or herself at one time, having their own name made fun of. And to do it in this unflattering, unfair fashion was beyond the pale.

But for Republicans who've been on the defensive, put in a defensive crouch on Iraq, been pummeled about the shoulder and head, now all of a sudden they can come out and they can go on the offensive. And, my goodness, now they're not going to ever let go of it. They're just going to continue.

The Democrats - I agree with Rich on this point, Jim. The Democrats should have taken a leaf out of Ronald Reagan's playbook. Ronald Reagan, when he was running for governor of California, the big issue - some big issue, we always have big issues - was the John Birch Society and whether Reagan would accept their support or their endorsement.

Reagan had a very simple, straightforward statement: I welcome the support of all law-abiding, freedom-loving Californians, because anybody who endorses me doesn't mean I have endorsed them. And they should have done the same thing.

You know, I welcome the support. That does not mean I'm endorsing MoveOn. That is not my platform; that is not my party. But, quite frankly, they did - enough of them didn't do it well. (my emphasis)

Bring out the smelling salts! MoveOn.org showed bad manners! What is our world coming to? Heck, if the Democrats don't rush to denounce it, the Republicans might start showing bad manners! Oh, the horror!

Maybe it's getting time that PBS should look for, say, someone who writes editorials for a union paper to replace Mark Shields to present the liberal side of these discussions. They won't, of course. But maybe they should.

Oh my gosh! MoveOn didn't just accuse him of betraying the public trust when he agreed to be the Cheney-Bush administration's political spokesman to lie to the public about the Iraq War. No, it's not just that. They made fun of his name! Dirty stinking hippies! Have they no shame? At long last, have they no shame?

Digby picked up on this latest idiotic turn in press conventional wisdom (Rulz Hullabaloo blog 09/22/07):

Village rule number one:

You can't employ a play on words that any Republican might be able to use as an excuse to run to the fainting couch and have a good old-fashioned cry. Democrats must be as bland and technocratic as humanly possible in their political rhetoric. If they can put their audience to sleep within the first five minutes, so much the better. But that doesn't mean Republicans and the media can't have loads of nasty "pun" at the expense of Democrats. For instance everybody loves a good joke conflating Senator Obama with Osama.

She goes on to catalogue several examples from Republican Party philosopher Rush Limbaugh and others of making those plays on names that so horrified dainty Mark Shields when MoveOn did it with our Saviour-General Petraeus. Tasteless and counterproductive and unflattering, oh my!

I'm serious, the Democrats should beat Republican members of Congress over the head with examples like the one's Digby cites. How about a resolution expressing the wise opinion of the US Senate that Mad Annie Coulter's book Treason (which directs the charge against Democrats and liberals) is shocking, just shocking, and let's see if FOX News in their commentary declares her book to be "tasteless and counterproductive", as Shields did to the MoveOn ad. Oh, and unflattering and unfair.

I also wanted to comment on Shields' reference to Ronald Reagan's famous comment on the John Birch Society, the rightwing extremist and anti-Semitic group which admires Ron Paul's crackpot economic theories so much.

I've written before about the troubles of political coalitions with groups that are being targeted by the Republicans as unAmerican and unpatriotic. I concluded that post by referring to Reagan's comment about the John Birch Society:

Although the situations are different, there's probably something to be learned from Ronald Reagan on this. In his 1966 campaign for California governor, he was criticized because he was endorsed by the John Birch Society, a far-right group then known primarily for its dogmatic anti-Communism. He effectively dispatched that criticism by saying that if someone endorsed him, it meant that they were buying into his program, not that he was buying into theirs.

On the other hand, he did explicitly reject the endorsement of a Ku Klux Klan group in his Presidential campaign in 1980. Different group, different circumstances.

But it's worth thinking about the context of Reagan's comment. My earlier post was focused more on groups like International ANSWER, which allegedly started as "front groups" for Marxist parties.

First of all, in the real world there is no comparison between the crackpot John Birch Society which claims the country is run by The Insiders, which they are careful not to call "The Jews" in their official publications, though that's most likely how most of them understand The Insiders.

The John Birch Society came up as a controversy at the 1964 Republican Convention that nominated Barry Goldwater for President on what was widely seen as an extremist rightwing platform. there was a debate over whether the convention should condemn the extremism of the John Birch Society, whose supporters were suspicious of Goldwater, most likely in large part because his parents had been Jewish. (Goldwater himself was a Protestant Christian.) In a book published that same year, The Strange Tactics of Extremism, Harry and Bonaro Overstreet wrote of the Birchers and their founder and leader, Robert Welch:

In brief, guided by a line that Robert Welch lays down for it, month after month, the John Birch Society operates to blur the meaning of the term Communist; to substitute facile stereotypes for hard realities; and to plant suspicion where faith is needed, and fear where we need to have confidence.

Secondly, when Reagan made that comment about the John Birch Society in his gubernatorial campaign two years later, he was signalling to rightwing Republicans not only that he was willing to accept the Birchers' support without necessarily endorsing every point of their platform. He was also signalling that he was not willing to disassociate himself from the Birch Society the way Goldwater had been in 1964. He was giving new respectability to a far-right organization who directed quite a bit of their bile toward Reagan's own Republican Party.

But when Reagan explicitly rejected the endorsement of some tiny Ku Klux Klan group in his 1980 Presidential race, he showed that he was perfectly willing to "distance himself" from a group whose support would be politically inconvenient for him. The Birchers, on the other hand, had appeal to rightwing Republicans (including some very wealthy ones) whose support he wanted and who would be useful in mobilizing activists on particular issues, and we would later see.

To give a sense of where the Birchers stood on the spectrum of American politics at that time, I'll quote again from the Overstreets, who discussed a book by Robert Welch, The Politician, which circulated apparently in manuscript form among Birchers and other associates of Welch in the 1950s, and which Welch finally published in 1963. The politician of the title was Dwight Eisenhower. The Overstreets wrote:

The book could scarcely have failed to arouse controversy; for what it amounts to is an elaborated "proof" that Eisenhower, both as General and as President, was "completely controlled" by Communist influences.

"... these Communist influences made him put the whole diplomatic power, economic power, and recognized leadership of this country to work, on the side of Russia and the Communists, in connection with every problem and trouble spot in their empire. ... The explanation calls for a very sinister and hated word, but one which is by no means new in the history of governments or of nations. The word is treason."

Eisenhower, the Birch Society leader claimed, was guided in his appointments by the intent "to put actual Communists or Communist sympathizers into influential positions..." Eisenhower's militantly anti-Communist Secretary of State John Foster Dulles also fell under Welch's suspicion:

For many reasons and after a lot of study, I personally believe Dulles to be a Communist agent who has had one clearly defined role to play; namely, always to say the right things and always to do the wrong ones.

The Overstreets observed of Welch's characterization of Dulles:

... [T]he trick Welch uses against Dulles is an extremist favorite. When a person with a clear record of anti-Communist statements is to be liquidated, what he has said is offered as a proof of how subtly Communist purposes can be disguised.

Even in 2007, when the Republican Party has mainstreamed far-right ideas and practices to an extent that was scarcely imaginable to most people in 1966 after the Goldwater debacle of 1964, the John Birch Society remains outside the Republican consensus. Among the Presidential candidates, one of the distinguishing features of the far-right isolationist candidate Ron Paul is that the Birchers find his bizarre monetary theories compatible with their goofy worldview.

To repeat the two points I made above, whatever else you may say about MoveOn.org, it would be flat-out false to pretend that their politics is anything like the crackpot extremism practiced by the John Birch Society, then and now. MoveOn began as a citizens' group to opposed the impeachment of Bill Clinton. And it's opposition to the Iraq War is far closer to the majority position in the US right now than the Republican Party's very unpopular position. And, with reference to Reagan, his politics in 1966 actually were far closer to the politics of the Birchers than most Republicans of that time. And his allegedly dismissive comment about the Birchers was actually a clear signal to the Republicans that he approved of the Birchers, even if in a nudge-nudge wink-wink form.

Reagan found himself on the same side as the John Birch Society a few years later in one of his most high-profile political battles, the fight over the Panama Canal Treaty in 1977-8. The Canal Treaty fight is often said to be the origin of what was then called the "New Right" that enabled Reagan to become President and the Republicans to grab control of the Senate in 1980. I would describe the origins of that movement in a different way, but there's no doubt that the Canal Treaty fight was of major importance in that process. It also helped in a major way to develop the militarized, xenophobic view that reached its apex (so far!) in the Iraq War and the Cheney-Bush torture policy.

Reagan had made Gerald Ford's willingness to continue the treaty negotiations with Panama begun during Nixon's administration a major issue in his run against Ford for the Republican nomination in 1976. Ford credited the issue with Reagan's victory in a number of Republican state primaries.

The treaty negotiations were completed in late summer 1977 under the Carter administration. The battle over the treaty stretched into 1978, when Carter won a hard fight to get the 67 Senate votes necessary to ratify the treaty. Carter wrote in Keeping Faith: A Memoir of a President (1982) about what happened when the treaty negotiations were completed and it was ready for Senate consideration:

The National Journal reported that several of the archconservative groups saw this year of debate as a way to capture control of the Republican party. Richard Viguerie, the publicist for conservative causes, who would send out hundreds of thousands of computer-printed letters on the subject, predicted, "The conservatives will prevail on this, with well over 40 votes, maybe even 44 or something like that." He went on, "It's an issue the conservatives can't lose on. ... Now conservatives can get excited about the Panama Canal giveaway and they can go to the polls, look for a person's name on the ballot who favored these treaties, and vote against him." This statement was an explicit threat to many members of Congress who were trying to decide how to vote on the Panama Canal treaties. Gary Jarmin of the American Conservative Union said, "It's a good issue for the future of the conservative movement. It's not just the issue itself we're fighting for. This is an excellent opportunity for conservatives to seize control of the Republican Party." This group sent out more than two million pieces of mail, trying to defeat the treaties.

Former Governor Ronald Reagan was a mainstay in this effort. He traveled the country and sent his radio and television tapes to hundreds of stations to rally opposition to the Senate ratification vote. We also had to face the John Birch Society, the Liberty Lobby [considered at the time to be a Bircher front group with a more anti-Semitic emphasis], the National States Rights Party, and similar groups, which banded together in a formidable array. (my emphasis)

The Birchers and their friends on the far right were active against the treaty even before it was completely negotiated. Historian Walter LaFeber wrote in his book The Panama Canal: The Crisis in Historical Perspective (1978):

In April 1977 the Zonians [American residents of the Panama Canal zone] mounted a massive lobbying effort in Congress, presenting an eloquent petition against the pact to the sympathetic House Subcommittee on the Panama Canal. But the negotiations nevertheless continued. Perhaps their frustration was best demonstrated by the Zonian who took paintbrush in hand, and on a Panama City wall that publicized such student slogans as YANKEE GO HOME, wrote in bold strokes, KISS MY AMERICAN ASS.

Frustration grew even as other groups joined the Zonians. Most vocal were right-wing organizations: the Committee on Latin American Policy (part of the John Birch Society), the Liberty Lobby, the National States Rights Party, the American Legion, and the Veterans of Foreign Wars. The Task Force on the Panama Canal sounded innocuous until it was linked to the American Council for World Freedom, a Washington-based conservative group whose president, Fred Schlafly, said it would spend $100,000 "to stop the surrender of the Panama Canal." Other right-wing groups organized letter-writing campaigns to local newspapers (letters notable for their often accurate if highly selective knowledge about the Canal's history) and set up downtown booths to dispense pamphlets about the "sell-out". (my emphasis)

It's ridiculous for Democrats, who are now being regularly and routinely accused of treason by Republicans leaders including Bush and by the various Republican-friendly media outlets and blogs, to be quaking in fear of being criticized for something that MoveOn.org might say. They need to buck up and fight for themselves and little more sensibly than that.

Tags: john birch society, mark shields, moveon.org, panama canal treaty, republican party, ron paul, ronald reagan, treason-baiting