Reading the messy tea leaves of politics and history

Michael Lind has done some good work over on analyzing the far right in US politics. His book Made in Texas : George W. Bush and the Southern takeover of American politics (2003) is very helpful in understanding not only the Shrub Bush Administration but also the evolution of Republican ideology and, in particular, why so many crackpot ideas are churned out by the Texas Republicans. His Rev. Robertson’s Grand International Conspiracy Theory from the 02/02/1995 issue of the New York Review of Books is a classic.

But the whole complex of issues around multiculturalism seems to have always bugged him. And it can lead him astray, which I would argue is what happens in This Is What the Future of American Politics Looks Like Politico 05/22/2016. His analysis of the current consituencies of the two major US parties is both too neat and not specific enough: "Today’s Republican Party is predominantly a Midwestern, white, working-class party with its geographic epicenter in the South and interior West. Today’s Democratic Party is a coalition of relatively upscale whites with racial and ethnic minorities, concentrated in an archipelago of densely populated blue cities." And it leads him to constructions like this:

The rise of populist nationalism on the right is paralleled by the rise of multicultural globalism on the center-left.

For multicultural globalists, national boundaries are increasingly obsolete and perhaps even immoral. According to the emerging progressive orthodoxy, the identities that count are subnational (race, gender, orientation) and supranational (citizenship of the world). While not necessarily representative of Democratic voters, progressive pundits and journalists increasingly speak a dialect of ethical cosmopolitanism or globalism — the idea that it is unjust to discriminate in favor of one’s fellow nationals against citizens of foreign countries.

I have a big problem with the corporate-deregulation treaties like TTIP and TPP that are passed off as "trade" treaties. They have become a major tool in forcing neoliberal economic policies on countries who badly need something else.

Tunisia's situation doesn't have to do specifically with corporate-deregulation trade treaties. But it is yet another addition to the already long list of neoliberal failure stories: Clara Capelli, Tunisia in Turmoil: When Supply-Side Orthodoxy Meets an Angry Citizenry Institute for New Economic Thinking 05/23/2016.

But Lind's framing of the partisan realignment in his article appears to be heavily influenced by the notion that emphasis on multicultural tolerance is in practice hostile to progressive, Keynesian economic policies. At best, that's way too simple an assumption to describe what's happening in US politics.

Another recent article expresses a sentiment with which I sympathize gets lost between considering "America" as an ideal and the real existing United States of America, The right wing hates America: The loudest flag-waving patriots are always the dangerous hypocrites

In their opposition to immigration, mockery of diversity and advocacy of theocracy, the right wing demonstrates that it not only hates what America has become, but has no understanding or appreciation for what America has always been.

What has always made America great is its promise of freedom expansion and enlargement, its integration of various people with different beliefs and behaviors into a shared community, and its foundation as a secular republic with the ability to adapt to new information and make ethical improvements.

The philosophy of the American Revolution was beautiful, but the brutality and hypocrisy of its implementation made the words of the Constitution seem like a cruel joke to those who could not vote, could not live in safety and freedom, and who could not even find a government willing to recognize their humanity. Martin Luther King saw those words not as cynical, but as a “promissory note,” and he, more than most, gave legitimacy and credibility to the American experiment in self-governance.

America triumphs whenever it succeeds in extending freedom and opening opportunity. While still far from perfect, it has made magnificent progress in the expansion of freedom for women, blacks, Hispanics, gays and a variety of other people once locked in the basement of American institutions and culture. It is this exact measure of progress – the fulfillment of the American promise – that frightens and angers much of the right wing constituency. Consistently derisive toward women, supportive of voter suppression and indignant over the protection of rights for gay and transgendered Americans, the right wing illustrates nostalgia for an America that was still in the process of evolving into America. [my emphasis]

Those first two paragraphs just quoted express the contradiction, which I would argue is a contradiction in real history and society, not just a logical/ethical contradiction.

This: "In their opposition to immigration, mockery of diversity and advocacy of theocracy, the right wing demonstrates that it not only hates what America has become, but has no understanding or appreciation for what America has always been" doesn't really fit well with this: "What has always made America great is its promise of freedom expansion and enlargement, its integration of various people with different beliefs and behaviors into a shared community, and its foundation as a secular republic with the ability to adapt to new information and make ethical improvements."

The United States went from being a newly-independent former colony after the Revolutionary War of 1776-1783 to being a major world power by the end of the First World War. And did it while practicing slavery, Indian wars, segregation, and xenophobia. Women's right to vote wasn't even part of the national Constitution until the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920. It correct that extending freedom is as American as apple pie. So is white racism. Recognizing that doesn't validate the latter. It's just recognizing what happened in US history and continues to happen in the present.

I've had occasion to complain recently about what seems to be the dominant approach of both the left and the center-left to see earlier American history, especially pre-Civil War history, as a chain of immoral horrors broken only by the occasional voice of dissent against slavery. The idea that some part of that history developed in the direction of what we think of today as progress (or improvement or advancement) in democracy and freedom gets lost in such a one-dimensional view of history. Whether or not it's packaged with a heavy dose of moral outrage.

Hegel no doubt had some backward and reprehensible ideas. But the American left and center-left could gain some important insight from that tainted and imperfect vessel. For instance: "World history is not the ground of happiness. The periods of happiness are blank pages in it ..." - Hegel, Philosophy of History (German original: "Die Weltgeschichte ist nicht der Boden des Glücks. Die Perioden des Glücks sind leere Blätter in ihr ...") But he also realized that development and progress happened anyway. Without that, we're not left with much more than cynicism or nihilism in how we look at the real history of real countries and peoples.

And, not incidentally, we allow the right and the far right to hijack even the most progressive, democratic, revolutionary thought of real American history. In a review of Conor Cruise O'Brien's The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution, 1785-1800 (1996), Gordon Wood writes (Liberty’s Wild Man
New York Review of Books 02/20/1997 issue):

Because Jefferson the prophet has become so important to America’s civil religion, traditional historians, O’Brien says, have sought to make a sacred icon of the man and have blurred and distorted the real, historical Jefferson. Not only was Jefferson a slaveholding racist who wished to send all blacks out of the country, but he was an extreme fanatic who believed that any number of people could be killed for the sake of a cause. Although O’Brien admits that Jefferson didn’t often say fanatical things, he said enough to be a prophet. Besides, “the fact that the prophet is mostly silent does not mean that he is not always there. He is a brooding presence, possessor of the standard of Liberty, by which all things are to be measured. And the prophet in Jefferson, as in so many others of his kind, is a ruthless prophet.”

Jefferson, it turns out [O'Brien's telling], is responsible for most of what O’Brien dislikes about modern America. Its racism, of course, but more than that. Jefferson is ideologically responsible for the Ku Klux Klan and for lynching and maybe even for the South African doctrine of apartheid. “Someone,” O’Brien suggests, “should write a thesis on ‘The Influence of Thomas Jefferson on Hendrik Verwoerd.”‘

But this is not the worst of Jefferson’s influence. All those militia rebels in “the wilder parts of the American Middle West and Northwest”—those “tens of thousands of Americans ready to fight the Federal Government in the cause of liberty”—are the modern heirs of Jeffersonian ideals. After all, didn’t Jefferson say that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants,” thus setting forth “something very like a Jeffersonian charter for the most militant section of the modern American militias”? Since Jefferson set no limits to “the holy cause of freedom”—“neither geographical boundaries, nor limits assigned by conventional ideas of morality and compassion”—apparently anything goes if it is done in the name of liberty. If Jefferson had accepted that the 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City was “perpetrated in the cause of liberty—as its perpetrators and their admirers appear sincerely to believe that it was — then he would have condoned that act.”

Wood does not approve of this approach:

One would like to believe that much of this book is written tongue in cheek, with some sense of irony and compassion for a country that has as its principal spokesman for its beliefs in democracy and equality a slaveholding racist aristocrat. But no: O’Brien is too enraged and engaged for any humor or ironic lightness of touch. Because he takes ideas seriously and considers them the equivalent of action, he puts more emphasis on what Jefferson said than on what he actually did. And he pays no attention whatever to James Madison’s warning of allowing “for a habit in Mr. Jefferson as in others of great genius of expressing in strong and round terms, impressions of the moment.”

Wood concludes that, in important senses, O'Brien didn't know what he was talking about. At least not well enough:

O’Brien does not seem to possess what should be the basic instinct of a historian—the realization that the past is fundamentally different from the present, with different assumptions, different expectations, different feelings. O’Brien does not seem able to accept the fact that the people of the past did not know what the future was going to be like. Because he also believes that “rational people are generally assumed to intend the consequences of their acts,” he has difficulty in accepting that many of Jefferson’s actions had unanticipated consequences. Finally, he does not know enough about America in the late eighteenth century to develop a full context for understanding Jefferson’s beliefs and actions.

And he notes the perhaps modest but real advantage that careful empirical history can provide in terms of theoretical perspective:

Pathetic as it may seem to present-minded people, he must suggest that Jefferson was a man of the eighteenth century and not our age, that he was not the best of his time perhaps but he was better than most, that on most matters he did not and could not share our ideas, that in fact he could not even imagine our world at all. Jefferson belongs in the eighteenth century [well, 19th century too; Jefferson died on July 4, 1826 after having served as President for the first eight years of that century], but he did make many ringing statements in celebration of liberty and equality that have resounded throughout our culture, indeed the world’s culture, for the past two hundred years.

Frederick Clarkson and Michael Lind on Papa Doc Paul

Unlike the mainstream political press, progressive bloggers have made some real efforts to wrestle with Ron "Papa Doc" Paul's quirky ideology. Some attempts were more successful than others.

I continue to insist that the key to understanding Papa Doc is to see him for what he has been his entire career, a hardcore, unrepentant Southern segregationist and Bircher conspiracist.

Frederick Clarkson, who understands the far right very well, writes in Will Ron Paul Fall after his Surprise Rise? Talk to Action 12/28/2011

Paul also owes considerable thanks to national media that have not devoted much serious reporting to his campaign, perhaps because of his standing in the polls, was not taken seriously as a candidate. Meanwhile, in a remarkable election year twist, his libertarian anti-drug war, and old time isolationist foreign policy views have been taken by marijuana reform and anti-war progressives as a reason to crossover and support Paul in Iowa and elsewhere, while down playing or ignoring his unsavory views that are consistent with the depth and breadth of his support from the far right in the U.S.

Election rules vary greatly by state, and in Iowa it happens that the rules allow for non-Republicans to vote in the GOP caucuses in Iowa. Therefore dedicated antiwar activists (including independents, Greens and Democrats) in the absence of a Democratic challenge to Obama, are planning to turn out for Paul. In so doing however, they are aligning themselves with a man who is about much more than the handful of (important) matters where their views converge. Paul is not only seeking to appeal to theocratic evangelicals, but is also the candidate of members of such anti-progressive entities as the neo-Nazi group Stormfront and the John Birch Society. [my emphasis]

Michael Lind, who has pretty much always been nervous about the Democratic position on "culture war" issues, nevertheless also knows the Radical Right well. In Race, liberty and Ron Paul Salon 01/03/2012, he writes:

Should we be impressed if Paul says that as a personal matter he would oppose such things, while defending their legality? It is hard to see any daylight between an overt racist and someone who claims to oppose racism or anti-semitism, but also denounces the only effective ways to put a stop to them—that is, civil rights laws. If you argue that private racism is bad but anti-racist laws are worse, and if you have no problem with the state’s coercive power when it enforces racism but object to coercive state power only in the service of anti-racism, then you cannot complain when others draw their own conclusions about your motives (even if, unlike Ron Paul, you did not publish white supremacist newsletters for years under your own name).

Lind also points out the key reality-denying aspect of the "libertarian" ideology:

Libertarians typically argue that only government, backed by military and police power, can be tyrannical. Lockean republicans in contrast believe that private power located in the for-profit or non-profit sectors can be tyrannical, as well. By means of their agent, the state, the sovereign people legitimately can protect themselves from predation by private sector tyrants as well as public sector tyrants. ...

Some libertarians concede the legitimacy of government coercion in protecting property rights. But in doing so, these libertarians, like Ron Paul, give up any principled objection to government coercion. They simply want government coercion to be used for some purposes—protecting property rights—and not others—enforcing civil rights.

Bircher "libertarianism" means primarily for rich, mean old white guys to do whatever they want to whomever they want.

And that's what Papa Doc is about.

Tags: michael lind, ron paul, radical right

Imagining Obama as a Republican via Ike nostalgia

I have a love-hate relationship with Michael Lind's writing. And I wonder even with this article that it may be more contrarianism for the sake of being contrary than anything else: Why the GOP should nominate Barack Obama in 2012 06/21/2011. But whatever the reasons, he manages to make an important point. He imagines Barack Obama crossing over to the Republican Party, winning their nomination and giving an acceptance speech to the Republican National Convention:

"I have fought against the failed tradition of New Deal liberalism from the strongest possible position -- the presidency. When the liberals wanted to nationalize the banks, I bailed them out and let their executives reap huge bonuses, thanks to the taxpayers. When the liberals wanted an expansion of Lyndon Johnson’s big government Medicare, I said no and pushed for a version of the Heritage Foundation’s healthcare coverage plan and what Mitt Romney did in Massachusetts. When the liberals wanted a bigger stimulus, I drew the line in the sand. When the liberals criticized the Bowles-Simpson plan to gut Social Security and Medicare, I praised it. When the liberals demanded tougher action against Chinese mercantilist policies that hurt our manufacturing industries, I said no and sided with the U.S. multinationals that want to appease the Chinese government. When the liberals wanted America to withdraw from Afghanistan, I sided with the neoconservatives and ordered the surge. When the voices of the old, failed liberalism said that Congress has a part to play in authorizing foreign wars, I ignored that radical liberal assault on unchecked, arbitrary presidential power and ordered the U.S. to war in Libya on my own authority."

And, sadly enough, Lind has a point.

The problem I have with this approach, though, is that it makes use of a trick that can be misleading. Both Democrats and Republicans like to point back to Presidents of the other party from 20 years or more ago to say, look, the other party used to stand for what I stand for now. It's stock political rhetoric. But it generally depends on making fairly superficial readings of the positions of those Presidents. And it often leaves the real context out of the picture.

And I'm am just weary of Eisenhower nostalgia, which Lind indulges, uh, liberally, in his piece:

Of course, there are limits to Obama’s moderate Republicanism. While his economic policy is moderately conservative, Obama’s foreign policy is expansive -- and expensive -- Neoconservatism Lite, not a rebirth of Eisenhower’s cautious, budget-conscious "New Look" strategy of the 1950s.

In spite of an economic boom, Eisenhower worried about the effects of military spending on the civilian economy. In spite of a near-Depression, Obama exempted defense spending from the government spending freeze.

Eisenhower wound down the Korean War that he inherited from Harry Truman. Obama expanded the Afghan War that he inherited from George W. Bush. In Afghanistan Obama pursued the "surge," a strategy backed by neoconservatives that will have led to the unnecessary death and crippling of even more Americans before the inevitable U.S. withdrawal.

Eisenhower refused to take part in the British, French and Israeli attack on Egypt, during the Suez crisis in 1956. Obama, in contrast, agreed that the U.S. would provide most of the muscle in the Franco-British-American attack on Gadhafi’s regime in Libya.

Yes, Ike kept military budgets down. But he did so by relying heavily on a high-risk nuclear weapons policy  known as "tripwire, massive retaliation."

Yes, he was willing to lean on Israel, Britain and France to withdraw from Suez in 1956. But it's only been within the last 20 years that American Presidents adopted a position of never exerting meaningful pressure on Israel in foreign policy. Eisenhower's position on the Suez crisis was sensible. And it put the US on that issue in the role of restraining the former colonial powers Britain and France over a military aggression in the Arab world.

But Anglo-American cooperation was very much the order of the day three years earlier, when Ike had the CIA get involved in the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Iran under Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh. It wasn't exactly a model James Bond operation. As John Prados explains in Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA (2006), its success owed at least as much to dumb luck as to black-ops competency. And given that it has become part of the national mythology in Iran, it's probably reasonable to say we're still dealing with the negative repercussions of that "success."

And when it came to French colonialism, Ike was happy to fund the French war effort in French Indochina up until the battle of Dien Bien Phu put an end to that enterprise. Then the US stepped directly into the role of South Vietnam's main Western patron and encouraged them to block the implementation of the Geneva Accords that formally ended the French colonial role in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Ike's Administration didn't even formally recognize those accords as binding. There were a few problems later growing out of American policy in Vietnam. Ike's clandestine operations in Vietnam under Col. Edward Lansdale failed to achieve anything like the (blundering) successes of the the Iranian coup of 1953 or the Guatemalan coup of 1954, the latter also blessed with considerable blind luck.

Ike did manage to end combat operations in Korea, thanks in part to a very reckless threat that he would use an atomic bomb there and also benefiting from the change in leadership in the Soviet Union after Stalin's death. The Korean War has never formally been terminated, though hostilities were ended by an armistice in 1954. US troops are still in South Korea. Leaving troops behind permanently after a "small war" has become the standard assumption for Pentagon planning, it seems. Remember the bold Maverick McCain's rambling about staying in Iraq for 100 years, or maybe 1,000 or 10,000? He cited Korea as an example of why that's a wonderful idea.

So let's give the Eisenhower Administration credit for the constructive things it did. But Ike nostalgia by Democrats? That, we should forget.

Once again, Lind manages to make a useful polemical point in this piece. But this approach has its limits. And the Republicans are going to keep calling Obama a Marxist Kenyan socialist Islamunist anyway.

Tags: barack obama, eisenhower, michael lind, obama administration

Michael Lind scolds liberals for mocking crazy ideas of Republican stars

Michael Lind put on his "concern troll" hat again in Hey, liberals: Time to give the Beck bashing a rest Salon 02/15/2011.

When I was thinking about posting on this, I was considering pointing out how his criticisms are painfully vague. And discussing how his griping about liberal "elitism" just echoes the chronic rightwing Republicans whining on the same topic, which God Herself couldn't persuade them to give up. And talking about how it's important to pay attention to those actually setting the tone and spreading the popular ideas among Republicans and not just pretend that their more clean-shaved compatriots like David "Bobo" Brooks are somehow satisfactorily representative of raw-meat Republican opinion.

But all I really feel like saying is: Grow up, dude! Mockery and ridicule are part of politics and always has been. Sure, we can all agree with your statement, "The center-left needs its own village explainers, with their own charts and their own blackboards." But to be effective, they would have to use mockery and ridicule even more than Rachel Maddow or Chris Matthews.

And it's hard for me to think of Chris Matthews, who spent years adoring that bold Maverick McCain and drooling over George W. Bush manly manliness in his flight suit as being a "liberal". Matthews is so chronically sloppy it's easy to find examples of his sloppiness. But your criticism of his treatment of Michelle Bachmann's loopy talk about the Three-Fifths Clause and how the Founders ended slavery didn't even make sense.

Lind can't seem to resist the "concern troll" impulse from time to time. Earlier examples in Salon include Are liberals seceding from sanity? 08/11/2009 (from the month that Tea Partiers showed up disrupting town hall meetings) and The rubes and the elites 04/15/2008.

Tags: michael lind

Hippies to the right of me, hippies to the left, here I'm stuck in the middle with Evan Bayh

There was an episode of Law and Order (that would be Law and Order Prime, the one with Sam Waterston) in which Waterston's Jack McCoy prosecutes a case of a 1970s terrorist would gets busted years later after having transformed herself into a respectable Republican lady under an assumed identity. There is a lot of conversation about the meaning of "the Sixties" in connection with the case. In the end, she's sent to prison to get out, as I recall, sometime in the early 2000s. McCoy says wearily at the end (quoting from memory), "Maybe by then the Sixties will finally be over."

The fictional Jack McCoy was too optimistic. For a lot of Republicans, it will always be 1969, Dick Nixon and Spiro Agnew will always be bravely defending white civilization and hippies and antiwar protesters and scary rioting black people, and the Commies will always be poised to come ashore in San Francisco and begin their conquest of America. There are even young conservatives who parents hadn't hit puberty yet in 1969 who are stuck in 1969!

So is recovering conservative Michael Lind. Lind is one of the best in analyzing the pathologies of the American right, which he has being doing for years now. His takedown of Pat Robertson's paranoid conspiracy-theory classic The New World Order is one of the best of that sort of thing I've seen. But, Lordy, that fellow Lind is as haunted by the Sixties as he former fellow conservatives are. In Glenn Beck is the new Abbie Hoffman Salon 02/23/10, he argues - I'm not sure if it's even partially tongue-in-cheek - that Glenn Back and the Tea Party movement are the dirty freaking hippies of today.

In doing so, he uses some compulsive Centrism to set up a just-like-the-hippies comparison to today far-right activists and loons. For example:

Just as the New Left claimed that the New Deal era wasn't really liberal, so the countercultural right claims that the Republican Party from Nixon to George W. Bush wasn't really conservative. '60s radicals like Carl Oglesby denounced John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson as sinister "corporate liberals" in the same way that the radicals of the right claim that the two Bushes, if not the sainted Reagan, were inauthentic "big government conservatives." The radical left had Ralph Nader. The radical right has Ron Paul.

It's not quite nails-on-the-blackboard bad. But here are a few obvious problems with this approach.

You would be hard put to find anyone reasonably identified with the "New Left" of the 1960s saying that the New Deal "wasn't really liberal". If you were going to research this in some detail, some obvious American sources among the more intellectual ones would be the publications Monthly Review, Radical America, Socialist Revolution (later Socialist Review) and New Left Notes.

The New Left is a term that covered a broad range of people, from some (but not all) civil rights activists, the more militant Democratic Party reformers, the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and other student activists, anti-Vietnam War protest groups, and an assortment of critical intellectuals, Maoists, and a variety of leftwing political sects. Basically, they rejected what they called "Cold War liberalism", though I'm not sure how often they used "corporate liberal" as a pejorative. "Establishment liberal" was probably more common. (All three are useful descriptive terms, although the outlook known as "Cold War liberalism" or "Scoop Jackson liberalism" back in the day would now be called "neoconservative".) The New Left also rejected Soviet-line Communism. The Communist Party (and the Socialist Party) were the Old Left.

The term New Left I believe originated in Britain, although it wasn't not such a drastic neologism. It was the more-or-less Trotskyist British journal New Left Review, which is still published, that popularized the term. The New Left in the United States is conventionally dated from the 1964 Democratic convention, specifically the establishment of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) in opposition to the desires of the Democratic leadership at the time.

But the general perspective of the New Left was that they wanted either radical reforms or revolution, the latter term various and imaginatively defined. Except for maybe the more dogmatic (or maybe hack) Marxists, they hardly accused the New Deal of not being "liberal". They might criticize the New Deal for being a too-limited set of reforms designed to preserve the capitalist system, which the New Left generally preferred to see replaced by some form of socialism. Liberals wouldn't argue with that analysis. On the contrary, they would have bragged that the New Deal saved capitalism by curbing its worst abuses. And that Franklin Roosevelt had no intention of setting up socialism, the paranoia of the Glenn Becks of the 1930s notwithstanding.

If the New Left particularly emphasized one negative aspect of the New Deal, it would be that it didn't directly address the problems of white racism and Southern segregation, in particular. That aspect of the New Deal was not liberal, although a 1960s New Leftist might say that it was all too characteristic of Democratic and Republican Party liberalism (yes, there once was such a thing as Republican liberals!) that it failed to address both structural and subjective white racism. And who would step up today to argue against the accuracy of that criticism? Even Republicans are happy for any opportunity to label liberals racists, no matter the contortions in which they may have to indulge to get there.

You can always make superficial comparisons that are plausible at a high level. You could say, for instance, that in 1965 the Democratic Party, the Republic Party and the US Communist Party were all political parties and so they were basically the same. It wouldn't tell you anything meaningful about American politics. It might tell you something meaningful if you were looking at laws applying to political parties in 1965.

So, yeah, Glenn Beck criticizes Republicans as well as Democrats. And New Left activists in the Sixties criticized Democrats as well as Republicans. So what?

Lind's article also blurs the difference between hippies and New Left activists. Yes, there was considerable crossover influence. But the actual hippie counterculture tended to be nonpolitical, and was a distinct phenomenon from the New Left. Hippies for the most part didn't spend their time organizing antiwar rallies or writing historical articles analyzing the history of white racism. And while some members of the Black Panthers may have used drugs, their activity had more to do with things like going out armed with their own shotguns and confronting abusive cops than with getting stoned and teasing out the deeper meanings in Herman Hesse stories.

In the nightmares and daymares on which so many of today's Republican conservatives feed their fears, those hippies are still out there all mushed together with black people with leather jackets and shotguns and unkempt Vietnam veterans demonstrating against the war and Bill Ayers plotting with ACORN to bomb bathrooms in government buildings. I'd prefer to see liberals and progressives de-mystify those fears and distorted images rather than clumsily try to turn the composite bogeyman against the Tea Partiers.

In any case, Lind's article gets the wrong counterculture for the Tea Partiers. Since the 1920s, Christian fundamentalists have nurtured a kind of religious counterculture that heavily overlapped with what is sometimes politely called the "folkways" of white Southerners. And there has been a subculture of fanatical, conspiracist rightwingers with clear continuities back into the 1930s. It today's Tea Partiers are part of a counterculture, those are the sources of it, not the mushed-up scare image of "the Sixties".

In fact, the Christian fundamentalist subculture actually had a small overlap with the hippie movement - not so much with other Republican bogeymen of the Sixties. Those were the "Jesus Freaks" or "Jesus people" or "Jesus movement" of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Billy Graham even cranked out one of his many proselytizing books under the title, The Jesus Generation (1971). It left one clear cultural heritage, "Christian contemporary" or "praise" music. Also known as 7-11 music, i.e., seven words repeated 11 times.

I recently came across a 2007 book by Preston Shires, a history done from a conservative Protestant viewpoint, called Hippies of the Religious Right : From the Counterculture of Jerry Garcia to the Subculture of Jerry Falwell (2007), published by Baylor University Press. Baylor is a private Baptist liberal arts school that in recent years expressed high academic ambitions. But they recently selected former special prosecutor Kenneth Starr as their president; see Marv Knox, Kenneth Starr named Baylor president Associated Baptist Press 02/15/10. From the parts I've read, the book itself seems remarkably superficial and credulous, but it does give an account of the phenomenon of that time.

However, he also absurdly asserts that violence in the anti-abortion movement is the fault of the hippies of the Sixties and Seventies! Here is his typical rightwing justification for that polemic:

This violent aspect of the Christian Right was beholden to the darker side of the counterculture. In the same way that certain sixties’ youth could justify violence against those who advocated and practiced war or who denied civil rights to nonwhites, some Christian Right activists justified violence against those who advocated and practiced, in their mind, murder.

It's all those damn fucking hippies' fault!

Git over it, people! A rightwing fanatic walking into a church in the Midwest and shooting an "abortion doctor" in the head is not the fault of some hippie smoking pot in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco in 1967! This is just the typical projection strategy that so many Christian Rightists commonly employ to avoid taking responsibility for their "bad choices", as they like to say of other sinners. Anybody even remotely familiar with the history of lynching in the US knows that rightwing fanatics and sadists didn't need the Sixties Flower Children to teach them about murdering people for their own bigoted ends.

Here is also the conflation of the conservatives' images of the enemy from 1969 that Lind's article plays into: hippies, antiwar activists, uppity black people, and those dadgum loose wimmin screwin' around and gittin' theirselves pregnant.

Wake up and smell the global warming, folks. Log on to the Internet, this new thing all the kids are talking about. You might even be able to dig up some reality-based information on the alternative movements of the Sixties there. This sitting around yelling, "You hippies git off my lawn!" is getting a little old.

Tags: jesus freaks, jesus movement, michael lind, radical right

Winning the retail political battles

The health care debate is a critical moment for the Obama administration and the progressive movement. The essentials needed in a health care reform package are a public option to provide a competitive to the private insurers, most of whom operate in a oligopolistic or near-monopolistic status in most states; a requirement that insurers not refuse to accept people with "pre-existing conditions" to prevent insurers from gaming the system by cherry-picking health clients; a requirement that businesses contribute to their employees' insurance to prevent businesses from gaming the system by dumping their employees onto the public plan (or dumping their health insurance altogether); and, a requirement that individuals buy health insurance to prevent individuals from gaming the system by only signing up for insurance when they are sick.

With all of those elements, a reform would have limited value and would likely make some things worse. Requiring individuals to buy insurance without a public plan available or tough limits enforced on insurance companies give the insurers a guaranteed new market but allows them to gouge their customers. Jane Hamsher explains today at FireDogLake about the consequences of such an approach:

It's just a guess, but when average Americans understand that "health care reform" means they will be forced to pay Blue Cross more money than they do now for worse insurance or be fined 2.5% of their income, I have a feeling it's not just going to be a couple of radical lefties who are pissed off about what amounts to an increase in middle class taxes.

Jane's post is titled, "White House Admits the Public Option is Gone, Will Sistah Soulja the Left." That doesn't mean that the fight for the public option is over. Dozens of House Democrats have pledged to vote against any bill that doesn't include a public option. The Progressive Caucus in the House has made that a "red line" for their support of a health care reform package.

She's referring to this Politico piece today, Under fire, President Obama shifts strategy by Mike Allen and Jim Vandehei.

Obama is considering detailing his health-care demands in a major speech as soon as next week, when Congress returns from the August recess. And although House leaders have said their members will demand the inclusion of a public insurance option, Obama has no plans to insist on it himself, the officials said. ...

On health care, Obama’s willingness to forgo the public option is sure to anger his party’s liberal base. But some administration officials welcome a showdown with liberal lawmakers if they argue they would rather have no health care law than an incremental one. The confrontation would allow Obama to show he is willing to stare down his own party to get things done.

“We have been saying all along that the most important part of this debate is not the public option, but rather ensuring choice and competition,” an aide said. “There are lots of different ways to get there.” [my emphasis]

With typical Beltway Village standards, Allen and Vandehei (whose wife worked in Tom "the Hammer" DeLay's office when he was the Republicans' Majority Whip in the House) allow "an aide" to make this comment without further identification, much less a name attached to it.

Of course, Obama would only get credit for staring down his own Party - credit from whom, the residents of Pundit District 9? - if the Progressive Caucus caves and enough of them vote for a health care bill without the public option. If that doesn't work, what the voters will see is that Obama failed to pass his most important domestic reform program and that the Republicans beat him. Our Pod Pundits may blame "the left", but the Republicans will take credit for exposing the President and the Democrats and their reform promises as hollow shells.

As Shaunna Thomas of ProgressiveCongress.org says on Twitter: "looking forward to the prez debunking rumors he's ditching the public option. speculation is silly, he loses too many votes [without] it." The Blue Dogs gained a powerful position in Congress and the Party because they were willing to vote to kill legislation that crossed their own "red lines". If the Progressive Caucus holds firm on the public option, then it will be the White House and those aides hiding behind anonymity to trash the members of Congress who they should count as they most staunch supporters who will then be confronted with the choice of taking a good health care reform (meeting the essential conditions including a robust public option), or getting nothing and letting the Republicans roll them. The Blue Dogs don't appear to have the strength to block a White House-backed plan with the public option; the Progressive Caucus does.

Robert Reich has some useful thoughts about the Democrats' chronic difficulties in dealing with aggressive Republican opposition politics in The Guns of August, and Why the Republican Right Was So Adept at Using Them on Health Care TPM Café 08/31/09:

The most important difference between America's Democratic left and Republican right is that the left has ideas and the right has discipline. Obama and progressive supporters of health care were outmaneuvered in August -- not because the right had any better idea for solving the health care mess but because the rights' attack on the Democrats' idea was far more disciplined than was the Democrats' ability to sell it.

I say the Democrats' "idea" but in fact there was no single idea. Obama never sent any detailed plan to Congress. Meanwhile, congressional Dems were so creative and undisciplined before the August recess they came up with a kaleidoscope of health-care plans. The resulting incoherence served as an open invitation to the Republican right to focus with great precision on convincing the public of their own demonic version of what the Democrats were up to -- that it would take away their Medicare, require "death panels," raise their taxes, and lead to a government takeover of medicine, and so on. The Obama White House -- a veritable idea factory brimming with ingenuity -- thereafter proved unable to come up with a single, convincing narrative to counteract this right-wing hokum. ...

You want to know why the left has ideas and the right has discipline? Because people who like ideas and dislike authority tend to identify with the Democratic left, while people who feel threatened by new ideas and more comfortable in a disciplined and ordered world tend to identify with the Republican right. Democrats and progressives let a thousand flowers bloom. Republicans and the right issue directives. This has been the yin and yang of American politics and culture. But it means that the Democratic left's new ideas often fall victim to its own notorious lack of organization and to the right's highly-organized fear mongering. [my emphasis]

Although he defines a key part of the problem that we see playing out right now with the fight for health care reform, I don't entirely agree with his formulation because it doesn't make clear the key role that the Blue Dog Democrats have played in opposing health care reform.

Michael Lind, a former conservative turned Democratic liberal, tries to articulate an expansive vision for fighting Dems. In Can Obama give 'em hell before it's too late? Salon 09/01/09, he looks nostalgically at Roosevelt and the New Deal to complain:

The most dangerous deficit that the United States faces is not the budget deficit or the trade deficit. It is the Democrats' demagogy deficit.

But he's still in thrall to some flawed conservative assumptions. In fact, his (ironic?) embrace of FDR's most combative political rhetoric as demagogy may in itself be a sign of lingering Republican understandings of That Man in the White House, as the plutocrats of the 1930s called Roosevelt, a patrician himself but seen by his social peers as a "class traitor".

Lind is misleading at best when he writes:

While the right was rejecting its gloomy elitism and embracing the mass society and populist politics, liberalism was moving in the other direction. Liberal intellectuals, shocked by McCarthyism and the rejection by the voters of the urbane Adlai Stevenson for Dwight Eisenhower, concluded that the American people themselves were the problem. In "The Age of Reform" and other works, the influential liberal historian Richard Hofstadter argued that the Progressive and Populist movements, far from being the precursors of New Deal liberalism, were reactionary movements by downwardly mobile professionals or farmers suffering from "status anxiety." Seymour Martin Lipset and other sociologists and historians including Daniel Bell and Peter Viereck argued that many members of the working class had "authoritarian personalities" and that populism here as in Europe could lead to fascism. Although more accurate historians and pollsters demolished their caricature of working-class Americans as proto-Nazis suffering from "status anxiety," the damage had been done. The New Left of the 1970s and 1980s, clashing with socially conservative blue-collar "hard-hats," were if anything even more hostile to the white working class, and sought allies instead among blacks, immigrants and various "social movements," most of them staffed and run by members of the college-educated upper middle class.

I won't try here to dig into whether he's characterized the work of those scholars correctly. But there have been some serious sociological and political-science studies on authoritarianism. And people who want to understand politics shouldn't just dismiss them as accusing "working-class Americans" of being "proto-Nazis".

The idea that "the New Left of the 1970s and 1980s" were "hostile to the white working class" is thinly-based at best. To the extent he's describing the McGovern/Kennedy activists in the Democratic Party, it's frivolous. And it's a recitation of the Nixon-Agnew posturing that transformed the Republican Party through their "Southern Strategy" into what it is today. Confronted when they took office in 1969 with an active antiwar movement in which veterans, always a significant part of the movement, were taking an increasingly prominent role, and a labor movement increasingly critical of the war as well as dismayed by Nixon's economic priorities, went all out to stigmatized the antiwar, civil rights and youth movements of the time as elitist, snobbish, un-American and opposed to the salt-of-the-earth values crooks like Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew stood for. That was demagogy and a largely fanciful view of the world. But it did have appeal to Republicans and to many of the more conservative Democrats of that time, especially in the South.

As I've written before, Lind has a bee in his bonnet over alleged liberal elitism.

Lind spins an equally fanciful diagnosis of the Democrats' timidity in confronting the "populism" of the e-coli Republicans:

Whereas progressives and populists alike had been able to invoke the people against the interests, the mid-century liberals and many of their successors on the center-left to this day fear the people even more than they fear the interests. They worry that if liberals rile up the crowd against Wall Street, the rampaging mob, like the torch-bearing Transylvanian villagers in the old Universal Pictures Frankenstein movies, might turn on the universities or carry out political pogroms against minorities.

No, the Blue Dog Democrats and the more timid of their liberal compatriots are not biting their nails over the prospects that howling mobs will storm the campuses. (Even howling mobs generally find more suitable targets for their outrage.) They are fretting about their corporate campaign contributions.

And, like most politicians in all times in all democracies, they have to be pushed by their constituents to get constructive things done. Otherwise, the .001% of the public that have particular interest in individual pieces of legislation will dominate their attention.

The rest of the piece continues in much the same vein, reading more like "concern troll" sniping at the real and imagined failings of Democratic liberals. Lind is much more perceptive, it seems to me, in analyzing the darker side of his former colleagues on the Republican right than he is in diagnosing the problems of the Democratic Party. His New York Review of Books article "Rev. Robertson's Grand International Conspiracy Theory" 02/02/95 on the radical-right political assumptions behind Pat Robertson's Christian Right worldview and his 2003 book Made in Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics are two excellent examples.

Joe Conason does a much better job of criticizing the weaknesses of the Democratic political strategy on health care reform in articles like Obama and the Drawbacks of Rahmism PolitickerNY.com 08/18/09 and Now more than ever, bipartisanship is for suckers Salon 08/21/09; In the 08/18 piece, he writes:

The ultimate responsibility for this sorry state of affairs belongs with the president, who vacillates between speaking out boldly for a “public option,” and permitting his aides and appointees to undermine his message by confiding their plans to sell out. His worst tendency, to exalt bipartisan compromise above progressive policy, has left him at the mercy of senatorial frauds like Charles Grassley, the Iowa Republican who pretended to negotiate over details while denouncing the president for seeking to terminate America’s grandmothers. He assigned far too much responsibility for health care reform to aides who exacerbate that weakness—and in particular to Rahm Emanuel, the current chief of staff and former congressman from Chicago.

Every mistake made by the Obama White House in the pursuit of health care reform can be traced to the political style and ideological prejudices of Mr. Emanuel, who has sought to intimidate progressives and empower conservatives, always in the name of winning elections and “getting things done.” [my emphasis]

Tags: democratic party, michael lind

Michael Lind goes on a Blue Dog Dem rant

Michael Lind has written some of the more perceptive things I've ever seen about the effects of segregationist traditions in the American South on present-day Republican Party politics.

So it's kind of sad seeing him fret so much over the fact that Democrats today are actually trying to find a voice to address the Republican town hall mob movement. And it's also sad to see him doing so in prose that sounds like "concern troll" talk, as he unfortunately does in Are liberals seceding from sanity? Salon 08/11/09.

Back in the 1960s, Seymour Martin Lipset and Richard Hofstadter and other liberal sociologists, historians and political scientists, puzzled that anyone could support Barry Goldwater rather than Lyndon Johnson, concluded that Goldwater supporters were deranged. They didn't say so directly, of course. They said that members of the radical right were emotionally disturbed victims of "status anxiety." The evidence? They didn't vote the way that Lipset and other academics thought that they should vote. Therefore they had to be crazy.

In the decades since, far better scholars than Hofstadter and Lipset, for whom history and sociology are not exercises in partisan Democratic mythmaking, have established that Goldwater and Reagan Republicans often were highly educated, socially secure individuals who happened not to share the values of liberal professors and journalists. This scholarship has been wasted, to judge by the glee with which the liberal blogosphere, in the aftermath of the ephemeral "Birther" flap, has dusted off the old conservatives-are-crazy meme, and revised it to suggest that all white Southerners are crazy.

Let's start here. Seymour Martin Lipset (1922-2006) may have been a Dem back in the day. But he was a pretty conservative political scientist, in a profession that in the US has tended to skew conservative. When he died in 2006, he was a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institute, one of the high temples of neoconservatism.

Richard Hofstadter (1916-1970) was an historian who was best known for his writing on anti-intellectualism in American history and for an essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics", which described and analyzed the influence of far-right ideology, conspiracy theories and counterfactual convictions on Sen. Barry Goldwater's 1964 Republican candidacy for the Presidency, the seminal event of what is now known as "movement conservatism". That essay clearly talks about a political style. No reasonably honest reading of it could conclude that he was commenting about the mental health of those who voted for the Republican ticket in 1964.

Lind also employs a common but superficial trick here. Any sociological analysis of trends among the population can be cherry-picked to make it sound "elitist". After all, a sociological study involves somebody, usually some annoying intellectual, looking at data about some phenomenon affecting human populations and attempting to make some judgments about what might be causing it. Any such study can be stereotyped as some know-it-all assuming he or she knows better than everyone else what people are thinking and blah, blah. Also, sociological writing often requires the use of words with more than two syllables, which can also be taken as a sign of snobbish elitism.

Lind's article is surprising in the disappointing sense. It really is a stock recital of whiny-white-guy arguments for getting all huffy about any liberal saying anything touching on the subject of white racism. He rags on "liberal pundits" and the "liberal blogosphere" for trashing white Southerners as a group. His examples are exactly four: the two deceased professors already mentioned; Mother Jones blogger Kevin Drum; and, (gulp) Kathleen Parker. Yes, that would be Kathleen Parker of the Washington Post Writers Group, who for years devoted her columns to providing respectable-white-lady versions of hardline Republican policies. Just within the last year or so, she's started to rebrand herself as a kinda-sorta moderate Democrat. And what he cites from Drum is a comment on a Parker column about what conservative Republican Ohio Sen. George Voinovich said about Southern Republicans.

Now, it's true that Beltway Village celebrity pundits are pretty much as flaky when they write about race as they are about everything else. That quality was on display last year around Hillary Clinton's Presidential campaign and this year around the Gates incident. But if Lind wants us to worry that liberals in general and the Democratic Party are trashing white Southerners - he says Kevin Drum expresses "creepy bigotry" - he needs to make a case that such a thing is actually happening. In the end, his only evidence for such a trend is that a Mother Jones blogger made what at worst was a mildly clumsy attempt to talk about the role of racism among white Southern Republicans.

The article is so uncharacteristically light for Michael Lind that it makes me wonder if he isn't considering a rebranding of his own.

At the end of his piece, he makes what on the surface looks like a Blue Dog Democratic argument for downplaying "culture war" themes:

Here's how I see it. Liberals should respect and promote the interests of working Americans of all races and regions, including those who despise liberals. They are erring neighbors to be won over, not cretins to be mocked.

The majority of Southerners, white and black, including the black Southern diaspora in other regions of the country, are victims of the South's historic caste and class system, just as many Latino immigrants come from families and regions oppressed by Latin American oligarchies. Needless to say, Southern blacks suffered far more from slavery, segregation and the inequality that has persisted even after the abolition of the formal caste system. But Southern whites reduced to debt peonage after the Civil War, and the half of the white Southern electorate that effectively was disfranchised by the Southern elite in the South between the 1900s and the 1960s, were victims of the oligarchs as well. It is only to be expected that people, black and white, who have been deprived of adequate education will be more likely than educated people to believe in nonsense like Birther conspiracy theories and AIDS conspiracy theories. And it is only to be expected that people, black and white, who have been frozen out of politics by oligarchic elites will turn to flamboyant populist tribunes as their leaders, including theatrical preachers like Pat Robertson and Jeremiah Wright, Al Sharpton and Jerry Falwell.

The traditional liberal solution to such alienation is economic reform, education and political empowerment. But reform is difficult and expensive. And it is much less fun than caricaturing entire ethnic or regional groups, particularly those whose members tend to have less money, less education and less power than those who lampoon them.

Compare that argument to his opening two paragraphs about the dead professors. If I were to characterize Lind's closing argument using the analysis-by-scorn method he uses in his article against his liberal strawmen, I would say that he shows shocking elitism. Why, those dumb Southern Republicans, he says, they're too stupid to recognize their own economic self-interest! They're just too dang unejicated to understand that geniuses like Michael Lind know what's best for them. And yadda, yadda, yadda.

More realistically, Lind's closing pitch is a ready-made argument for the Democrats to downplay issues like combating racial discrimination, gay rights and abortion. In the end, it comes down to the idea that the Dems should try to look and sound more like Republicans but have economic policies more favorable to working families.

But if we're talking about getting loyal white Republican voters to switch parties, in the South or elsewhere, the Democrats can't afford to ignore those touchy "culture war" issues. Because if some of those voters are actually voting against their own economic self-interest - as even the supposedly non-elitist Michael Lind thinks they are - then the Dems can't ignore that there are other than purely economic issues affecting their voting behavior. After all, the Republicans were successful at building a "Southern Strategy" based on exploiting those kinds of issues.

And if that successful Southern Strategy should really wind up leaving the Republicans as a Southern regional party, then Lind's Blue Dog strategy makes even less sense. Why should the Dems in a country that's demographically significantly different (i.e., a larger proportion of non-white minorities) try to copy a strategy that today threatens to prevent the Republicans from being a national Party at all?

Tags: blue dog democrats, democratic party, michael lind, racism

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2009, April 30: Antebellum Southern Political Economy

Michael Lind always has provocative and interesting ideas about the politics of the South and how the heritage and interpreted history of slavery and the Civil War and Reconstruction shape them.

In Democracy And Political Economy TPM Cafe 02/26/09, he offers the following observations:

Our own history as a nation has provided a prolonged and sometimes bloody experiment showing the importance of economic and social structure to constitutional politics. Both the North and the South were heirs to the British tradition of constitutionalism, individual liberty, and the rule of law. But notwithstanding a common Protestant, Lockean liberal, Anglo-American culture, the South developed a political culture resembling that of Latin American banana republics more than that of the North and Midwest.

The reason was the plantation economy, which endured beyond the abolition of slavery (and exists in some form in parts of the South today). The plantation system created a society divided between a small oligarchy of wealthy landowners, a weak and subservient class of professionals like lawyers and professors working for them, a tiny and weak urban working class, a large number of poor farmers and a large population of slaves, sharecroppers or campesinos. It didn't matter whether the local cultural legacy was that of constitutional, liberal Britain or despotic, Counter-Reformation Spain. In both Anglo-America and Latin America, similar economic structures produced similar results: perpetual political war between the propertied oligarchs and populist demagogues, with each side--not only the demagogues--resorting to lawlessness and sometimes terrorism in the struggle. [my emphasis]

And he draws this lesson:

The lesson of the American South, for us as well as others, is that it is not enough to have a culture of constitutionalism in a society with the economy and class and caste system of a banana republic.

It's always easy, and often tempting, for political commentators to float away in historical generalities. But what Lind is pointing out is that their are ways in which the distinctive history of the South affects national politics still today that are important to understand. The ideology and pseudohistory of the Lost Cause being one of them.

Lind is one writer who has made a conscientious attempt to understand some of the ways these historical traditions have worked themselves out and continue to do so today. While I find myself disagreeing with him on some of his points in this regard, he is looking at some important trends and pulling useful insights from them.

He does this at length in his 2003 book Made In Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics. For instance, he points to how the particular of Southern conservatism influenced the Cheney-Bush unilateralism foreign policy, or more specifically how it provided a voter base supportive of those policies:

Throughout the twentieth century, many white Southerners were hostile to the League of Nations, the United Nations, and other international organizations, for two reasons - one racial, one religious. The racial reason, important in the decades before the Civil Rights Revolution, was the fear that international human rights treaties might be interpreted to require the abolition of racial segregation in the South. While the civil rights reforms of the 1960s eliminated the rationale for this kind of rejectionism, the legacy persisted in the efforts of North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms for decades afterward to prevent the ratification by the Senate of various international human rights covenants.

More important than vestigial racism today is the religious motive for hostility to international organization: the sincere belief on the part of many Southern Protestant fundamentalists that the United Nations, the European Union, or some other international organization or multinational bloc is under the control of Satan. Most Americans, as well as most foreigners, find it difficult to believe that anyone in an advanced industrial society can believe this. But millions of Americans, particularly in the Deep South, have grown up listening to local pastors or television or radio preachers explain that the European Union is one of the horns of the multiple-headed dragon of the Book of Revelation, or that the UN is the "Beast" described in the same book.

Lind has also addressed the theme in articles like The economic Civil War Salon 12/18/08, in which he argues for a third Reconstruction in the Deep South:

The alternative to the Southernization of the U.S. is the Americanization of the South -- a process that was not completed by Reconstruction and the New Deal and the Civil Rights era, which can be thought of as the Second Reconstruction. The non-Southern states, through their representatives in Congress and the executive branch, and with the help of enlightened Southerners, need to use the power of the federal government to put a stop to the Southern conservative race-to-the-bottom strategy once and for all.

Call it the Third Reconstruction. The first step is to end the race to the bottom in wages and regulation, by national action. The national minimum wage should be gradually raised until it is a living wage, of $10 to $12 an hour, and it should be adjusted for inflation. At the same time, federal regulations should set a higher floor with respect to worker safety regulations, environmental regulations, and others, preventing America's own internal rogue states from gaining any advantages by flouting national standards. Most Southern politicians and business leaders will howl that this will bankrupt the South. That's what they said about the abolition of slavery, child labor, and the convict lease system, too. The South was a better place to live after those reforms, and it will be a better place to live when there is a living wage throughout the South. [my emphasis]

Another is Jesse Helms is not dead Salon 07/11/08:

Where Jesse Helms came from was the Third World, the American South between World War I and the civil rights revolution. In the generation before Helms was born the son of a police chief in 1921, the Southern oligarchy had been terrified by Populism. The greatest threat to the white elite was the revolt of white workers and farmers. To forestall that possibility, the Southern state governments, in the decade before World War I, used literacy tests, poll taxes and other measures to eliminate not only all blacks but half of the white Southern population from the electorate. In the election of 1936, voter turnout in Georgia was 16.1 percent, 13 percent in Mississippi, and only 10.7 percent in South Carolina. (It was higher, 42.7 percent, in Helms' North Carolina, where populists had abolished the poll tax.)

Having crushed the Republican and Populist parties, the oligarchs imposed a one-party dictatorship on the region, with secret state surveillance units and occasional collaboration between the police and the Ku Klux Klan. In its economy, the South was a banana republic, a commodity-exporting resource colony in which a "comprador bourgeoisie" of local landowners and local businessmen collaborated with investors in New York and elsewhere in fleecing the region.

To serve their interests, the old latifundist families and corporate elites hired "Dixie demagogues," who were to genuine populists like William Jennings Bryan what a Disney pirate is to a pirate. All of them were entertaining. Some began as entertainers, like musician-slash-flour miller W. Lee "Pass the Biscuits, Pappy" O'Daniel, who went from hosting the "Hillbilly Flour" radio show to the Texas governor's mansion in 1939. The "Dixie demagogues" denounced various supposed enemies of the white tribe, but with two exceptions -- Huey Long and George Wallace -- they never threatened the rule of the country clubs and courthouse gangs. Jesse Helms was one of these theatrical quasi-populists, an uncomplicated establishment conservative who parlayed a liberal-baiting radio show into a political career. Like other faux-homespun Southern conservatives, he employed rhetorical populism against blacks, homosexuals, liberals, professors, modern artists and "common-ists" in the service of his business backers, most noticeably North Carolina's tobacco industry. [my emphasis]

Today's Republican Party not only depends on the votes of conservative white Southerners as its most important voting base. The national Party's conception of itself, of the proper role of government, of how political and social authority should function, of foreign policy, owe far more to Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond than to Dwight Eisenhower or Wendell Willkie.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2009,michael lind, us south

A foreign policy that recognizes sensible limits

The Cheney-Bush foreign policy was a disaster

Michael Lind looks at the direction such a policy would take in No more "wars of choice" Salon 01/22/09.

He's very much on the right track when he writes, "While we have to defend ourselves against genuine threats, we need a prolonged period without any more 'wars of choice' and with fewer other optional and costly interventions abroad, in order to concentrate on reconstruction at home."

And he points out this will mean departing from both Cheneyist-neoconservative unilateralism and militarism, on the one hand, and refraining from undertaking "humanitarian" wars:

When Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the 1980s, he sought a truce in the Cold War, a breathing spell that would provide time for reformers to engage in "perestroika," or "restructuring," of the Soviet Union. In the aftermath of the Bush administration's hyperactive militarism and manic overextension, the U.S. needs a similar breathing spell in foreign policy that will permit concentration on rebuilding, not just reviving, the U.S. economy and its social contract. The Soviet Union proved to be unreformable and collapsed. But an American perestroika has the chance to result in a modernized, stronger American economy and society - if a period of relative calm in foreign affairs allows resources and attention to be given to domestic reform.

Unfortunately, the Democratic Party's foreign policy mandarins are ill-prepared for peace. Many centrist Democrats have spent so much time in the last few decades trying to prove that Democrats can be as hawkish as Republicans that they have become hard to distinguish from bellicose neoconservatives. A number of liberal hawks joined the Weekly Standard neocons in supporting the Iraq war. To make matters worse, many "humanitarian hawks" have spent a generation arguing that the U.S. should fight more wars, not fewer, intervening in countries like Sudan in the name of human rights or a "responsibility to protect." Worst of all, the fashionable idea among centrist Democratic foreign policy intellectuals has been the concept of a "concert of democracies," which would marginalize China and Russia. No wonder that John McCain and the neocons love the concert-of-democracies idea.

And he addresses a genuine concern: is the Democratic Party up to the kind of foreign policy changes we need?

I think there is a historic opportunity for a new American internationalism in the [Franklin] Roosevelt tradition that is not neoconservatism lite and that would buy time for U.S. domestic reform. But that opportunity will be missed if Democrats cannot unbend from a defensive crouch and they continue to tremble in fear at the thought of what their enemies might scrawl about them on the alley wall.

Tags: michael lind, us foreign policy

Michael Lind and liberal "elitism"

Mississippi segregationist Governor Ross Barnett: he was against snobs and elitists, too

I have to confess to being a bit lost in the Democratic circular firing squad over Obama's alleged "elitism". I've thought that the Obama campaign and our broken national press corps were working way too hard to paint Clinton's campaign as "playing the race card". On the other hand, I see that the Republican Party has been running against black people since 1964, and it was obvious to me that they would work a racial theme in 2008, which they are doing energetically already.

As I explained in an earlier post, I think the best way for the Democrats to address the "elitism" nonsense is to go on the offense about the fact that Republicans in the Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches of the federal government have adopted the attitude - and even the explicit argument - that they think the rules don't apply to them.

I actually don't think Obama's idea was far off, though you don't have to be part of an "elite" to see that or think it. Since it's being sliced and diced to death - while Dick Cheney plots war with Iran or Lord-knows-what else and Maverick McCain goes around branding himself as a moderate for the general election - I won't belabor that aspect more in this particular post.

On this one, I find myself at odds with at least three thoughtful analysts with whom I usually agree more often than not: Gene Lyons, Bob Somerby and Michael Lind. Lyons I blogged about earlier. And here I'll just mention Somberby's Daily Howler post of 04/15/08.

But I was intrigued to see the explanation by the New America Foundation's Michael Lind in The rubes and the elites Salon 04/15/08 of just how he thinks the Democrats and liberals have been communicating their supposed snobbery toward white working-class voters.

He cites several examples. One is an editorial from a Seattle "alt-weekly" called the Stranger, which I don't recall having heard of before or ever before seeing it quoted, by liberals or anyone else. Another is a self-published book by John Sperling, an "80-something billionaire", and Samuel George called The Great Divide. Strike two for me, I've also never heard of that, though evidently it must be taken as Gospel by sneering liberals everywhere. Sperling's name sounds vaguely familiar somehow.

There's a Daily Kos diarist he cites named RKA citing something he thinks is elitist, presumably in part because RKA uses the term "low-information" voters. Silly me, I thought that was just a description of voters who, well, weren't that informed about election issues. Little did I realize it was a snob's term of contempt for salt-of-the-earth heartland Americans. What would be a non-snobbishly-correct term for voters who are poorly informed about an election, is left unclear. Small town residents are evidently quite touchy about any adjectives that might be interpreted as other than deferential and admiring.

Lind also cites "liberal hawk" Peter Beinart, who is apparently representative of liberals because he was editor of the New Republic, even though that journal has pushed an neoconservative foreign policy line for years, including Beinart's own enthusiasm for the Iraq War until fairly recently. Spencer Ackerman, another New Republic alum, has said it seemed to him that New Republic was not so much prowar as that they were obsessed with the idea that if the war were prevented that some hippie somewhere might be pleased, and they couldn't bear the thought of that happening. But on domestic issues, New Republic does still take liberal positions so Beinart is not a complete outlier of liberalism. Beinart's offense was to suggest that perhaps the Democrats shouldn't do backflips to win that segment of white working-class voters who were never going to vote for them anyway.

Todd Gitlin would count as a liberal by most any measure, and he cites a sentence by him from a TPM Cafe post as showing this wicked liberal elitism. Later, he cites the very same post approvingly, which is understandable, because Gitlin's post was raking Obama over the coals for the same reason Lind is.

But, you learn something new every day:

Now consider the disturbing way that mainstream progressive thinkers and strategists discuss working-class white voters in terms of demeaning stereotypes. Working-class Catholic voters in the industrial states used to be "hardhats." Now they are "Archie Bunker voters," or "Joe Lunchbucket," or "the beer track voters." Even worse are the terms used for the Southern white working class. It's composed of "rednecks" or "Bubbas" or - more recently - "NASCAR man" or even "white trash."

Gosh, I must not be around that many liberals, living as I do in Democratic Congresswoman Barbara Lee's district. I can't remember the last time I heard the term "Archie Bunker voters". Does anyone under,oh, 45 or 50 remember who Archie Bunker was? "Beer track voter" is entirely a new one for me. What the hell it means, I can't fathom. Beer track?

And when in the name of Andrew Jackson did "Bubba" become a negative term? Is that supposed to be elitist-liberals who think it's negative? Or Lind who thinks it's negative? Or Lind who thinks that liberals think it's negative, whether it is or not? I'm soo-ooo confused!

George Wallace: he was opposed to "pointy-headed intellectuals" in the 1960s (whatever "pointy-headed" may have meant)

Lind writes, "The path of least resistance for liberal journalists and bloggers is to respond to these disturbing numbers by demonizing less-educated white Democrats." That explains why every liberal blog I know for the last week has been frantically declaring, "Damn those less-educated white Democrats!" (NOT!)

Lind cites the dubious analysis by David Sirota in The Clinton Firewall In These Times 03/31/08, which used a dubious methodology to conclude that in the Democratic contest, Obama ran strongest in states where there was a relatively small black population and in states where there was a relative large one, but in states with a "big-but-not-huge African-American population", Clinton did better, a result which Sirota attributes in part to a "race chasm".

Now Sirota's analysis, as I said, is very dubious. Somerby discusses why in his post of 04/08/08. Brendan Nyhan at his blog challenges the Sirota analysis in Be careful interpreting primary results! 04/02/08.

But Lind links to Sirota's article and says that Sirota:

... has suggested that white racist voting increases with the black proportion of the population of a state - high in Mississippi, low in Minnesota. Racism is supposed to explain why Obama does poorly with white Catholic voters in big industrial cities, who presumably see themselves as competing for jobs, status and real estate with urban black Americans.

Uh, no, that's not what Sirota said. His argument focused specifically on the Democratic caucuses and primaries, and concludes that in states with a medium-sized black population, racial prejudice among whites benefits Clinton. How Lind got "white racist voting increases with the black proportion of the population of a state" out of that, I don't know.

Somehow, in an even more elaborate exercise of imagination, Lind even squeezes out of Sirota's article that Sirota is saying that "everyone knows that all white Southerners are racists, even the ones without black neighbors". And, even worse, he claims Sirota is suggesting that "all white Democrats are at least latent racists".

Now, Sirota's article was sloppy and he failed to prove his case. But Lind's characterizations of his article are just whacked. I guess I should confess here that I have a particular perspective on a couple of things. Having grown up in Mississippi, I'm trying to think if there is anyone among all the people I know in Mississippi and from there who wouldn't look at me as though I had lost my senses if I were to say to them, "Whites in Mississippi don't apply any racial considerations in voting". Actually, thinking I was insane would be the generous response, the alternative being to wonder if I'd joined the White Citizens Council or something.

Also, I've paid relative close attention to the immigration issue over the last 16 years or so. And good grief, does anyone seriously think there are no racial considerations in the anti-immigrant movement. Please.

Actually, all this hoo-ha about Democratic "elitism" reminded me about how Jerry Brown, currently California's Attorney General, former two-term Governor and likely Democratic candidate for Governor next time around, doesn't make any pretense of being Mr. Cornpone in his public appearances. The guy's a real intellectual by any remotely sensible meaning of the word and he couldn't hide it if he tried.

I remember in the last major wave of anti-immigration agitation in California back in 1994, I heard Jerry addressing Pete Wilson anti-immigration Proposition 167 that was on the ballot that year. Among other things, he said that part of what happens in these anti-immigrant waves is that some people start looking around and thinking, "there's too many Mexicans around here." He left no doubt that he thought the measure was a bad idea. He memorably suggested, quoting from memory here, "If you want to do something about illegal immigration, stop eating. Because every time you sit down at the table, it's likely that something on the table involved illegal immigrant labor in getting it there."

Well, the measure won. But it was such a dumbass law that what the state courts didn't throw out turned out to be practically unenforceable. It made a long-term political difference in California though, because Latino voter participation has been up significantly every since. Why? Because like Jerry Brown, Latino voters could see that there damn well was racist and nativist sentiment involved in this kind of crap and if they didn't vote to oppose it, Latino citizens would also be victims of it. I suppose someone taking Michael Lind's approach could say that my preceding sentence was condescending because I didn't specify that Latino voters could also think it was a bad and/or impractical policy for dealing with the problem. But as much as I enjoy brain-teasers at times, I'm just not adapt at splitting hairs that finely.

Lind then goes on to elaborate some near-incomprehensible regional theory of voting that apparently revolves around the notion that New Englanders are snobs and this somehow determines national political trends. But I don't want to misrepresent Lind's flawed argument like he does to Sirota's flawed argument, so I'll refer you to Lind's article to see for yourself.

Lind even pimps the "Marxist" label that the Republicans and Joe Lieberman have been pushing the last few days. [Deep sigh] That's because a self-described Marxist, Theodore Adorno, was one of the co-authors of the pathbreaking study The Authoritarian Personality, which looked at sociological and psychological factors that led people to support authoritarian movements. And the analysis of conservative political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset about the role of "status anxiety" among Barry Goldwater's supporters was refuted by someone else. So it's a Commie idea to think that some voters in small towns are "bitter". Say what?

I think I'm going to spend the evening reading an H.P. Lovecraft novel. It couldn't be any weirder than Michael Lind's psychedelic analysis of Obama's supposed elitism.

Tags: barack obama, jerry brown, michael lind, racism

Analyzing "neoconservatism"

This article is from 3 1/2 years ago but I don't recall coming across it before now: A Tragedy of Errors by Michael Lind The Nation 02/23/04 issue. Near the end, Lind - who counts himself as a former neoconservative - recalls the connection between the neocons' unrealistic and aggressive hawkishness toward the Soviet Union with their current threat inflation of just about everything:

Unfortunately for them, a political ideology can fail in the real world only so many times before being completely discredited. For at least two decades, in foreign policy the neocons have been wrong about everything. When the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse, the hawks of Team B and the Committee on the Present Danger declared that it was on the verge of world domination. In the 1990s they exaggerated the power and threat of China, once again putting ideology ahead of the sober analysis of career military and intelligence experts. The neocons were so obsessed with Saddam Hussein and Yasir Arafat that they missed the growing threat of Al Qaeda. After 9/11 they pushed the irrelevant panaceas of preventive war and missile defense as solutions to the problems of hijackers and suicide bombers.

They said Saddam had WMDs. He didn't. They said he was in league with Osama bin Laden. He wasn't. They predicted that no major postwar insurgency in Iraq would occur. It did. They said there would be a wave of pro-Americanism in the Middle East and the world if the United States acted boldly and unilaterally. Instead, there was a regional and global wave of anti-Americanism.

David Brooks and his colleagues in the neocon press are half right. There is no neocon network of scheming masterminds - only a network of scheming blunderers. As a result of their own amateurism and incompetence, the neoconservatives have humiliated themselves. (my emphasis)

Tags: michael lind, neoconservatives

Pat's paranoia - and bigotry

One of the more notable manifestations of Christian Right conspiracy theorizing was Pat Robertson's book The New World Order (1991). In it, he described a conspiratorial theory of Western history in which dark forces have been working against God and his Christian people since the French Revolution or so.

Michael Lind reviewed this tract in 1995 for the New York Review of Books: Rev. Robertson's Grand International Conspiracy Theory 02/02/95 issue (the online version is available only in the subscription archive). It's a shame the Review doesn't make this essay freely available on the Web, because it's a very good description of the dark side of the Christian Right brand of Christianity.

Robertson's book is a collection of favorite far-right tales about the centuries-long conspiracy. If there are "classics" of such things, this could probably be considered a classic of what Richard Hofstadter famously described as "the paranoid style in American politics."

And, as Lind points out, Robertson's brand of it, along with the organizational clout of his Christian Coalition group, has attracted some respectable Republican admirers (or at least panderers):

Among the conservative politicians and polemicists who have addressed the Christian Coalition's "Road to Victory" conferences are Bob Dole, Newt Gingrich, Jack Kemp, Oliver North, William Bennett, William Kristol, Jesse Helms, David Brock, and Dinesh D'Souza. Not only do mainstream conservatives avoid criticizing Robertson and his movement, they rush to their defense in print. When the Anti-Defamation League, in 1994, issued a report critical of the religious right, conservatives like William Bennett, Irving Kristol and his son, William, and Midge Decter denounced the supposed "anti-Christian" and "anti-religious" bias of the ADL and of the media in general. Bennett, for example, has written that "Christians active in politics are now on the receiving end of an extraordinary campaign of bias and prejudice."

William "I love Vegas" Bennett's comment about the "bias and prejudice" against Christians is one of the endless examples of the victimization whining by white Christian Republicans that is not only an example of the "paranoid style", but incredibly tedious as well as amazingly callous toward Christians in countries like Saudi Arabia or china where they really are persecuted.

But, oh, what a Faustian bargain the country-club Republicans have made with Christian Right:

The chief motive for conservative appeasement of Robertson and the religious right is strategic; as the editor of a leading conservative magazine explained to me in 1992, "Of course they're mad, but we need their votes." Such conservatives are so impressed with the political power of the Christian Coalition that they even refrain from criticizing the religious right's "biblical" economic proposals, like the banning of usury and the abolition of debts in a periodic "year of jubilee." In addition, many Jewish neoconservatives value fundamentalist support for American military and economic subsidies to Israel. Writing in Commentary in 1984, Irving Kristol called on American Jews to recognize that American Protestant fundamentalists are "strongly pro-Israel." Excusing an evangelical leader who said that God does not hear the prayers of Jews, Kristol wrote: "Why should Jews care about the theology of a fundamentalist preacher?... What do such theological abstractions matter as against the mundane fact that this same preacher is vigorously pro-Israel?" (my emphasis)

In fact, the "pro-Israel" position of the Christian Right normally translate into support for the settler movement (the biggest obstacle to a Middle East peace), advocacy for the hardlines positions of the Israeli Likud Party and bitter opposition to any meaningful atttempt by an Israeli government to achieve a practical peace agreement with the Palestinians. But, in fact, the fundamentalist Christian supposed love for Israel is based on very traditional Christian attitudes toward Jews. Attitudes which historically have borne some very poisonous fruit.

Lind quotes the Rev. Robertson's book:

Indeed, it may well be that men of goodwill like Woodrow Wilson, Jimmy Carter, and George [H.W.] Bush, who sincerely want a larger community of nations living at peace in our world, are in reality unknowingly and unwittingly carrying out the mission and mouthing the phrases of a tightly knit cabal whose goal is nothing less than a new order for the human race under the domination of Lucifer and his followers.

This Luciferian conspiracy to bring peace to the world began, in Robertson's view, with a group called the Illuminati, which successfully took over the Freemasons. Hofstadter credits the Anti-Masonic Party with being the first organized manifestation of the paranoid style in politics in the US. And how did peace on earth, good will to men and all that become a Hellish goal?

With funding from Jewish financiers, the Illuminati/Masons caused the French Revolution. As Robertson describes it:

The slaughter that followed was not merely an assault on the king and the aristocracy - what was called the ancien regime - it was an assault against everyone, even the leaders of the Reign of Terror that followed on the heels of the revolution. The satanic carnage that the Illuminati brought to France was the clear predecessor of the bloodbaths and successive party purges visited on the Soviet Union by the communists under both Lenin and Stalin.

Then the Illuminati/Masons - with Jewish money, of course - incited the European revolutions of 1848.

The Revolutions of 1848 are not that well known in the US, but those revolutions came close to sweeping away much of the old monarchical order in continental Europe. Even the Habsburgs had to abandon Vienna to the democratic revolutionaries for a while. These revolutions are one of the most important milestones in the history of democracy, in Europe and the world. To Robertson, they were a Luciferian plot bankrolled by Jewish money.

In this paragraph, Lind points out one of the standard slimy verbal tricks of the Radical Right, one to keep an eye out for if you are ever trolling around the sewer to far-right ideology:

Marx and Engels, though, were given direction by another Jew, who happened also to be one of the early advocates of a Jewish state: "The precise connecting link between the German Illuminati and the beginning of world communism was furnished by a German radical named Moses Hess" (p. 69). (Note Robertson's use here, as in his descriptions of other Jews later, of the adjective "German" rather than "Jewish." This does not necessarily mean much, since the adjective "German" or "European" frequently refers to Jews in the American literature of anti-Semitism.) Just as the Rothschilds presided over the marriage of Illuminism and Freemasonry, so Moses Hess, the secret Illuminist, is the true father of world communism. This is the first mention in Robertson's book of that longstanding anti-Semitic myth, the Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy. It is not the last.

One of the more vomit-inducing aspects of Robertson's account of the American struggle with this Jewish conspiracy is that he tries to make Andrew Jackson (who was a Mason, by the way) and Abraham Lincoln heroes of the fight against the Jew/Mason/Illuminati plot.

Lind elaborates:

What was the goal of these international bankers who were controlled, ultimately, by Satan, through the invisible but powerful Illuminated Freemasons? Robertson's answer comes close to endorsing one of the gravest anti-Semitic slanders of all - the claim that wealthy, cosmopolitan Jews incite wars in order to make money as war profiteers.

And he quotes Robertson on this topic:

The money barons of Europe, who had established privately owned central banks like the Bank of England, found in war the excuse to make large loans to sovereign nations from money that they created out of nothing to be repaid by taxes from the people of the borrowing nations. The object of the lenders was to stimulate government deficit spending and subsequent borrowing. War served that purpose nicely, but from 1945 to 1990 the full mobilization for the Cold War and the resultant massive national borrowings accompanied the result just as well without a full-scale shooting war. [p. 122, emphasis added]

Yes, according to Robertson, even the Cold War was part of the Big Jewish Plot.

Well, you get the drift. The Council on Foreign Relations, one of the stock bogeymen of the John Birch Society crowd, figures in Robertson's theory as one of the main instruments of the grand conspiracy, which unites international (Jewish) banking to Communism and war profiteering. Quoting Robertson again:

In fact, is there not a possibility that the Wall Street bankers, who have so enthusiastically financed Bolshevism in the Soviet Union since 1917, did so not for the purpose of promoting world communism but for the purpose of saddling the Soviet Union with a totally wasteful and inefficient system that in turn would force the Soviet government to be dependent on Western bankers for its survival?

Are you following this? Yes, this is how one of the most influential Christian Right leaders in America sees the grand sweep of history.

It's worth listening closely whenever Christian Right types start talking about Jews. In The New World Order, Robertson says that the Holocaust was a warm-up job by Satan for what he intends to do to Christians in America, a process Robertson thought was well under way in the US in 1991. This would be back when Old Man Bush was president.

And the apocalyptic notions promoted by the Christian Right - based on a reading of the Scriptures that is anything but "literal" - is often the vehicle for some of their most appalling notions. Lind:

In his book The New Millennium, published in 1990, Robertson explicitly set forth his views about Jews and Israel. In the rapidly approaching Last Days, Israel will be destroyed: "That tiny little nation will find itself all alone in the world. Then according to the Bible, the Jews will cry out to the one they have so long rejected...." The destruction of Israel will only be possible, however, because of American acquiescence: "One day a vote against Israel will come in the United Nations when the United States neither abstains or uses its veto in the Security Council to protect Israel."

The US will abandon Israel, it seems, because American Christians, despite warnings by their leaders against anti-Semitism, will turn in wrath against the "cosmopolitan, liberal, secular Jews" who want "unrestricted freedom for smut and pornography and the murder of the unborn." Robertson writes of "the ongoing attempt of liberal Jews in America to undermine the public strength of Christianity" and notes that "the liberal, wealthy Jews voted for Democratic candidates Carter, Mondale, and Dukakis, not Reagan and Bush." ...

Robertson's argument is that the destruction of Israel in the near future, though ordained by God, may be hastened if "wealthy" and "cosmopolitan" Jews foolishly provoke America's Christian majority, which is represented today, it must be presumed, by Robertson's own Christian Coalition.

And Lind also observes about fundamentalist apocalyptic thinking:

Apart from its emphasis on the United States rather than Nazi Germany, Robertson's elaborate conspiracy theory of world politics differs from populist and fascist conspiracy theories in one significant respect: it does not resort to overt anti-Semitism. This last reflects the influence of premillennial Protestant fundamentalism, which holds that the reestablishment of the State of Israel is the prelude to the Last Days, when most Jews will be destroyed and when the remnant will convert to Christianity. But the conservative Jews who defend Robertson in Commentary apparently do not realize that fundamentalist support for Israel is not incompatible with dislike and resentment of American Jews, especially liberal Jews, of a kind that Robertson has repeatedly expressed. (my emphasis)

I would say that "not incompatible", which certainly accurate is a mild description of the relationship of this theory to anti-Semitism. In fact, it comes from the aspect of Christian tradition that was most deeply hostile to Jews and Judaism. As the highlighted passage just quoted shows, this fundamentalist view assumes that God has designed an End of Days scenario in which "most Jews will be destroyed." It's safe to say than any view that looks forward to the day when "most Jews will be destroyed" is a fundamentally anti-Semitic theory.

Lind in his review compares at some lenght parallel claims about the Jewish conspiracy in history to that of William Guy Carr in a book called Pawns in the Game, which Lind calls "a post - World War II defense of Hitler and fascism." Although Robertson doesn't explicitly defend the latter, Lind shows with long quotations how much Robertson embraces the same lines of argumentation.

And Lind's concluding paragraphs are well worth noting:

The evidence most relevant to the question of whether Robertson is an anti-Semite is found in the details of his conspiracy theory as set forth in The New World Order. Between the Illuminati and the Freemasons the link is the Frankfurt branch of the Rothschild family. "Lord Rothschild" - presumably Nathan Mayer Rothschild, who became a peer in 1885 - was the key link connecting the Judeo-Masonic conspiracy with the British Empire, through the Milner circle and Cecil Rhodes. Between world Freemasonry and world communism, the critical link is provided by Moses Hess. Between the Judeo-Masonic-Bolshevik "European bankers," the Ivy League American establishment, and Lenin's revolutionary Bolsheviks, the key links are two Jews, Paul Warburg and Jacob Schiff. Not only does the "octopus" control everything, but many of the major "tentacles" turn out to be Jews.

Robertson's theories about Jewish bankers and Jewish revolutionaries are central to his conspiracy theory, which in turn is central to his vision of his own destiny, his movement, and his ambitions for the American Right and the Republican party and the United States of America. Not since Father Coughlin or Henry Ford has a prominent white American so boldly and unapologetically blamed the disasters of modern world history on the machinations of international high finance in general and on a few influential Jews in particular. And not since Huey Long, with his Share Our Wealth movement, has there been a radical populist movement as powerful in American politics as Robertson's Christian Coalition.

Much has been written in the American press about neo-fascist movements in Italy, Germany, Japan, and France. But the United States is the only industrial democracy in which a far-right political leader in one of only two major parties has created a base of support so powerful that conventional politicians and intellectuals in his party feel they must defend him from charges of anti-Semitism. They have so far managed to ignore the fact that his best-selling book purveys the Illuminati–Freemason–Communist–High Finance conspiracy theory of world history familiar from generations of anti-Semitic propaganda. What would such conservatives, particularly Jewish neo-conservatives, be saying if Louis Farrakhan had written a book that made the New York Times best-seller list and claimed that Jewish financiers like the Rothschilds, Paul Warburg, and Jacob Schiff were leaders in a two-century old Freemason-Communist-Banker conspiracy to exploit American taxpayers and the members of the armed forces in America by stirring up deficit-funded wars?

Pat Robertson has written such a book. He has not repudiated a single word of it. Ralph Reed and the conservatives who dominate the newly ascendant Republican party would prefer that we continue to ignore it. (my emphasis)

That description of Robertson's poisonous ideology is a good one to remember the next time you hear some OxyContin Radio jock ranting about anti-Semitism in Europe, pretending to be against it.

Anyone who ignores this deep strain of ugly religious bigotry in the Christian Right is just closing their eyes to reality.

Tags: anti-semitism, authoritarianism, christian fundamentalism, christian right, christianism, michael lind, pat robertson