Charlie Pierce harshs on the New York Times today:
This is, without question, the flat-out dumbest piece the NYT ever has published. Not even those Sunday style people about designer mayonnaise on the upper West Side come close. https://t.co/5scaYosAkQ
The article in question is Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web by Bari Weiss 05/08/2018. To put in generously, it's a puff piece about various people who count as conservative intellectuals because they can regularly string together two grammatically correct sentences in a row.
In an earlier long-read opinion piece (We’re All Fascists NowNew York Times 03/08/2018), she also mentioned two of the characters discussed in the new one, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Christian Hoff Sommers. So it's not like she's a novice encountering rightwing ideologues for the first time in the new piece.
This shebeen largely has stayed out of the tiresome troll-war concerning the unruly reception that some speakers have received on various college campuses. I wish folks could be more civil and welcoming, because I am a gentle fellow with a fairly well-known taste for temperate rhetoric, but I also wish that there weren’t so many people making nice bank on insulting people and then driving nails into their own palms when the people they deliberately have offended talk back to them.
Professional martyrdom of this kind is not impressive when it comes with book deals. And with genuine Nazis assaulting people with automobiles on the campus of Mr. Jefferson’s university—and, I would add, with other weapons elsewhere—I choose not to accept as a national crisis the fact that some 20-year-olds throw the word “fascist” around too loosely. But, then again, I am not an “opinion editor” at The New York Times the way that Bari Weiss is.
In this latest one, Bari quotes one after another of these self-style conservative rebels recounting their road-to-Damascus conversion where they suddenly realized the horrible nature of the "left," in which we can safely assume anyone to the left of Joe Manchin is included. And they whine about how the Mean Libruls are pickin' on them. Mostly by criticizing the Social Darwinist and misogynist crap they regular generate, albeit in a more highbrow manner than we normally hear on Republican hate radio.
A couple of things that this sort of profile really should include in the way of research and fact-checking. One is to look at whether, say, Social Darwinism, is a fresh new perspective. Or check out whether trash-talking Muslims can reasonably be described as bold innovative thinking. Or take into account the fact that rightwingers have been suspicious of colleges since, well, since colleges and rightwingers first started co-existing. Ask the Rev. Ezekiel Bittery.
Secondly, it's a common marketing device for some rightwingers to talk about all the death threats they are supposedly getting. That also deserves a bit more probling in cases like this, i.e., whether they have had occasion to file police or FBI reports over those.
A number of piece commenting on Bari's work came out around that time.
It's unfortunately a commonplace assumption among American fundamentalists that they are a persecuted minority and quasi-martyrs for the faith, even without any actual, you know, martyrdom. MacKinnon gives his own paranoid version of that posture:
Ironically, in some very real and ominous ways, it’s as if we are being transported back to ancient Rome.
Will we soon have to meet with fellow Christians in secret? Will we have to whisper our beliefs from the shadows? Will those Christians with “traditional” beliefs lose their jobs and livelihoods if discovered?
He complains about his own personal cross to bear, "I continue to be ridiculed for writing and speaking about a vision I had regarding the 40 days after the resurrection."
Ironically, the non-Pentecostal brands of the Protestant fundamentalism are very suspicious of claims of present-day visions. I suspect he might be getting more criticism on that quarter for his vision than from mainstream Christians or more secular people, because the latter two groups wouldn't be taking his vision particularly seriously, anyway.
He has a book about it, The Forty Days: A Vision of Christ's Lost Weeks (2016).
He also has had a column at the frivolous but venomous rightwing site, Townhall.
I started doing an anti-neo-Confederate daily series of posts during April, back in 2004, the first April after I started blogging. This year makes the 15th year I've been doing it. Neo-Confederate groups promote April as Confederate Heritage Month and it has often been officially proclaimed in some states as Confederate Heritage Month. In Texas, for instance, the state legislature in 1999 established it as a recurring designation. (Bryan Register, Texas perpetuates myths with Confederate Heritage MonthAustin-American Statesman 03/29-30/2018)
The neo-Confederate ideology and its public symbols, like the Confederate battle flag and statues honoring Confederate leaders who betrayed the United States by engaging in an armed revolt to defend and extend human slavery, have been actively contested in many places over the last year. Most notably and tragically in Charlottesville in August 2017, where neo-Nazis and white supremacists marched in support of a statue of Robert E. Lee chanting, among other things, "Blood and Soil" (one of the most famous German Nazi slogans, "Blut und Boden) and "Jews Will Not Replace Us." That incident ended, of course, with the murder of Heather Heyer and the injury of 19 other counter-protesters by one of the pro-Confederate protesters showing his Honor and Courage by ramming his car into a crowd. (Joe Heim, Recounting a day of rage, hate, violence and deathWashington Post 08/14/2017)
Speaking in the lobby of Trump Tower at what had been billed as a statement on infrastructure, a combative Trump defended his slowness to condemn white nationalists and neo-Nazis after the melee in central Virginia, which ended in the death of one woman and injuries to dozens of others, and compared the tearing down of Confederate monuments to the hypothetical removal of monuments to the Founding Fathers. He also said that counter-protesters deserve an equal amount of blame for the violence.
“What about the alt-left that came charging at, as you say, at the alt-right?” Trump said. “Do they have any semblance of guilt?”
“I’ve condemned neo-Nazis. I’ve condemned many different groups. But not all of those people were neo-Nazis, believe me,” he said.
“You had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists,” Trump said. “The press has treated them absolutely unfairly.”
“You also had some very fine people on both sides,” he said.
Despite the weasel-words ("I’ve condemned neo-Nazis"), Trump was clearly defending the neo-Confederates and their ideology, and refraining from a straightforward condemnation of their violence and anti-Semitism or the Nazi slogans they were chanting.
This story shows in a vivid way the role that symbolism and the narratives attached to them can play in current politics. I've wondered to what extent Trump's identifying himself with Nazis, or at least refused to unequivocally condemn them and the murder associated with their demonstration, has contributed to his unpopularity among everyone but his hardcore 35%. Because Americans have seen an endless series of movies, TV programs, documentaries, articles, and pictures in which the German Nazis are depicted as Evil Incarnate. If any symbolism is identified in America as a symbol of Evil, it would be the swastika and other images particularly associated with the Nazis.
There's a bit of a perverse kind of internationalism in neo-Nazis choosing a Confederate symbol as a rallying point and even a motive for murder. In Germany and Austria and some other European countries, overt Nazi symbolism is illegal to display publicly. So at least by the early 1990s and probably earlier, the Confederate battle flag was used by rightwing extremists as substitutes for the swastika. I remember in the 1990s visiting in the German tourist area of the Spanish island of Mallorca and seeing a door of what appeared to be a shop that had a Confederate battle flag draped over it. I knew immediately it was a symbol of far-right politics.
Facts matter. And the neo-Confederate ideology is a significant kind of pseudohistory in the United States. It originated with post-Civil War efforts by Southern planters and white leaders to minimize the seriousness of the Confederate rebellion and specifically to dissociate it from the cause of slavery. Northern whites disliked slavery prior to the war, and many hated it. Some supported it. But white supremacy was pervasive in the North as well as the South, though clearly in a more intense, toxic, and treasonous form in the Confederate states. Even intense opposition to slavery could and did co-exist with white racism against blacks.
By the end of the Civil War, not only had the consequences of slavery proved to be excessively deadly and destructive to white people. But many soldiers from the North had seen slavery and slave plantations and fugitive slaves live and in person. So the prewar justifications of slavery as benevolent and necessary had been effectively completely discredited in the North. Anti-Reconstruction white Southerners recognized that they needed to distance themselves from the cause of slavery in order to have any effective credibility even among Northern conservatives.
The revisionist narrative of the history of slavery began immediately after the war and soon acquired the lable "Lost Cause." Historian Caroline Janney writes (The Lost CauseEncyclopedia Virginia 1999):
The term "Lost Cause" is not a product of today's historians; rather, it appears to have been coined by Edward A. Pollard, an influential wartime editor of the Richmond Examiner. In 1866 Pollard published The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates, a justification of the Confederate war effort, prompting the popular use of the term.
Today, "Lost Cause" and "neo-Confederate" can be used interchangeably to describe the same apologetic view of the Civil War and the white supremacist ideology and narrative that was always an integral part of it.
Janney summarizes the Lost Cause/neo-Confederate view of Civil War history as based on six claims:
The most heroic and saintly of all Confederates, perhaps of all Americans, was Robert E. Lee.
Southern women were loyal to the Confederate cause and sanctified by the sacrifice of their loved ones.
Neo-Confederacy incorporates the Lost Cause view of history but is a broader ideology. The SPLC describes the Lost Cause narrative this way (Neo-Confederate n/d, accessed 03/31/2018):
The term “Lost Cause of the Confederacy” refers to a collection of political and historical myths that form the bedrock of many notable neo-Confederate slogans. “Heritage not hate” and “states’ rights” have shared roots in the post-Reconstruction effort to revise the indisputable fact of why the South seceded from the union in the 1860s: slavery.
They define neo-Confederacy this way:
“Neo-Confederacy” refers to a reactionary, revisionist predilection for symbols of the Confederate States of America (CSA), typically paired with a strong belief in the validity of the failed doctrines of nullification and secession — in the specific context of the antebellum South — which rose to prominence in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Neo-Confederacy also incorporates advocacy of traditional gender roles, is hostile toward democracy, strongly opposes homosexuality and exhibits an understanding of race that favors segregation and suggests white supremacy.
An overall conservative ideology, neo-Confederacy has made inroads into the Republican Party from the political right and overlaps with the views of white nationalists and other more radical extremist groups.
In this regard, neo-Confederacy is best viewed as a spectrum, an umbrella term with roots dating back as early as the 1890s. It applies to groups including the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) of the 1920s and those resisting racial integration in the 1950s and 1960s. In its most recent iteration, neo-Confederacy is used by both proponents and critics to describe a belief system that has emerged since the early-1980s in publications like Southern Partisan, Chronicles and Southern Mercury, and in organizations including the League of the South (LOS), the Council of Conservative Citizens and the Sons of Confederate Veterans.
The SPLC article goes on to note that the Lost Cause/neo-Confederate view of history is still influential well beyond the circle of those who would identify with it so closely as groups like the CCC or the SCV. When thinking about groups involved in promoting that worldview, it's important to remember that sectarianism is rampant on the far right and is fought out over slogans and issues that may seem indistinguishable to those not following them closely.
I've generally tried to focus on debunking the pseudohistory aspect of the neo-Confederate narrative in these posts. One recent book I'll be discussing this year is From Oligarchy to Republicanism (2017) by Forrest Nabors, which looks at the ways in which the slavery system, known to opponents at the time as the Slave Power, was perceived by Americans as being in opposition to the basic republican form of government established by the American Revolution and the Constitution. The only Americans who enjoyed full citizenship included voting rights in 1860 were, of course, essentially white men, though free blacks, women, and even slaves were making their demands for citizenship and equality in very significant ways.
Nabors in his Introduction defines the project of his book:
The purpose of this book is to recover how the Republicans in the Reconstruction Congress understood the prior national struggle that decisively shaped their understanding of their task. The premise of this book is that long ago, we, the American people, ceased to be fully aware of what the Republicans believed the cause of their party was and what they resisted when dark clouds gathered above the nation and then when the storm broke. We remember slavery, the principal theme of those days, but we no longer remember how they saw the political conflict at its deepest level and in its most general sense that shook the nation for decades. [my emphasis]
Slavery was at the center of the controversies that led to the Civil War. But in early America and antebellum times, that conflict manifested itself in particular ways and the understanding of it by slaveowners and their opponents evolved from existing understandings of the country and the American political community. Understanding that share a lot with the understandings of 1865 and even 2018. But our time is also separated from there's by radical transformations.
Jordan Peterson is a Canadian intellectual that never much registered on my consciousness before the last couple of days. Sam Seder and his team talk about Peterson just after 14:00 in the 03/19/2018 edition of The Majority Report:
Peterson is celebrated as an "anti-PC" person who offers self-help suggestions with a bit of a professorial touch. providing with pronouncements dressed up with esoteric-sounding acadamic-ese. His guest, Nathan J. Robinson, talks about Peterson in the context of the divide between the academic press and the popular press, such that academic experts are often unfamiliar with the "popular intellectuality" in their field. Seder uses Sam Harris as someone who is widely known as a neuroscientist but not actually a familiar figure among academic specialist in subject areas for which Harris is well know.
Peterson is even profiled in the prestigious New York Review of Books by Pankaj Mishra, Jordan Peterson & Fascist Mysticism 03/19/2018. Nishra describes him as "a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, ... a YouTube sensation and a bestselling author in several Western countries." Mishra explains "insists that gender and class hierarchies are ordained by nature and validated by science, [and] has suddenly come to be hailed as the West’s most influential public intellectual."
Whoever is hailing him as such, should I be embarrassed that I really have not paid much attention until today to "the West’s most influential public intellectual"?
I haven't seen anything so far that makes me thinks I should be. Mishra himself places Peterson's kind of work in a line of romantics with authoritarian tendencies dating back to the 19th century. He says that Carl Jung, Mircea Eliade, and Joseph Campbell. He gives particular emphasis to Peterson's celebration of traditionalist-authoritarian notions of proper gender roles.
Mishra provides this guideline to the kind of ideology which he understands Peterson to be promoting:
Peterson himself credits his intellectual awakening to the Cold War, when he began to ponder deeply such “evils associated with belief” as Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, and became a close reader of Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. This is a common intellectual trajectory among Western right-wingers who swear by Solzhenitsyn and tend to imply that belief in egalitarianism leads straight to the guillotine or the Gulag. A recent example is the English polemicist Douglas Murray who deplores the attraction of the young to Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and wishes that the idea of equality was “tainted by an ideological ordure equivalent to that heaped on the concept of borders.” Peterson confirms his membership of this far-right sect by never identifying the evils caused by belief in profit, or Mammon: slavery, genocide, and imperialism.
The question of what role a scholar's or scientist's politics should play in evaluating their ideas and intellectual conclusions of their work is a complicated one. Mishra is focusing in this short article on how a strain of thought contributed in some ways to reactionary attitudes and ideas. In the case of Jung, Eliade, and Campbell, their work is still taken seriously in itself, which doesn't mean that their approaches are mainstream now. jung's notion of the "colleective unconscious" is mostly not take seriously today in a medical or scientific sense. Yet there are still Jungian psychologists and others influenced by pats of his work.
But what Misha notes about those three here is important:
The “desperation of meaninglessness” widely felt in the late nineteenth century, seemed especially desperate in the years following two world wars and the Holocaust. Jung, Eliade, and Campbell, all credentialed by university education, met a general bewilderment by suggesting the existence of a secret, almost gnostic, knowledge of the world. Claiming to throw light into recessed places in the human unconscious, they acquired immense and fanatically loyal fan clubs. Campbell’s 1988 television interviews with Bill Moyers provoked a particularly extraordinary response. As with Peterson, this popularizer of archaic myths, who believed that “Marxist philosophy had overtaken the university in America,” was remarkably in tune with contemporary prejudices. “Follow your own bliss,” he urged an audience that, during an era of neoconservative upsurge, was ready to be reassured that some profound ancient wisdom lay behind Ayn Rand’s paeans to unfettered individualism.
The President of the United States looms large in the news because of the power and influence of the office. With a narcissist running a seriously dysfunctional Administration in the White House, the number of Presidential incursions into the daily news can get exhausting. Susie Madrak recounts Joe Scarborough's lament about information overload in Scarborough: So Much News, It's Hard To Know Where To BeginC&L 03/01/2018.
But taking a break from the current Presidential professional-wrestling spectacle, I ran across a journal article about an interesting moment in the public ministry of Billy Graham, who this week lay in state in the Capitol Rotunda as though he were a departed head of state.
The period in question is the early 1970s, when Graham most clearly and publicly identified politically with a President, Richard Nixon at the time. At this same period, he took a new interest in youth evangelism. This was part of what is sometimes called the Long Sixties. And one feature of the times was the prominent presence of a kind of alternative-lifestyle brand of evangelical Christianity, which the national press hyped as the "Jesus movement," a label with which participants identified.
One notable instance of that tendency was led by Francis Schaeffer, whose son and one-time heir apparent in his ministry now regularly criticizes the Christian Right and it's authoritarian Christian dominionist politics. The elder Schaeffer establised what later came to be called an "intentional community" called L'Abri in Switzerland, a kind of fundamentalist Christian commune. A biographical sketch in the conservative evangelical magazine Christianity Today by Michael Hamilton ("The dissatisfaction of Francis Schaeffer" 41:3 03/03/1997) described his intervention in American evangelical culture this way:
... this was no ordinary fundamentalist preacher. He and his wife, Edith, had lived for ten years in a student commune they had started in the Swiss Alps. When he lectured, he wore an alpine hiking outfit--knickers, knee socks, walking shoes. By 1972 he had added to his already singular appearance long hair and a white tufted goat's-chin beard. Most curious of all, he seldom quoted from the Bible. He was more apt to talk about the philosophical importance of Henry Miller (then regarded as the most pornographic writer in American letters).
During the next two decades the Schaeffers organized a multiple-thrust ministry that reshaped American evangelicalism. Perhaps no intellectual save C. S. Lewis affected the thinking of evangelicals more profoundly; perhaps no leader of the period save Billy Graham left a deeper stamp on the movement as a whole. Together the Schaeffers gave currency to the idea of intentional Christian community, prodded evangelicals out of their cultural ghetto, inspired an army of evangelicals to become serious scholars, encouraged women who chose roles as mothers and homemakers, mentored the leaders of the New Christian Right, and solidified popular evangelical opposition to abortion.
The Schaeffers left an imprint on the wildly diverse careers of Jesus People organizer Jack Sparks; musicians Larry Norman and Mark Heard; political figures Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Jack Kemp, Chuck Colson, Randall Terry, C. Everett Koop, Cal Thomas, and Tim and Beverly LaHaye; and scholars Harold O. J. Brown, Os Guinness, Thomas Morris, Clark Pinnock, and Ronald Wells. Strange bedfellows, indeed, and this is part of the puzzle of Francis Schaeffer. Clues to its solution are spread across a half-century and two continents--from Westminster Seminary, the art galleries of Europe, and an English boarding school to the Mayo Clinic and the U.S. Supreme Court. And in the end, when the pieces of the puzzle are all assembled, the life of Francis Schaeffer gives us a picture of a side of evangelicalism quite at odds with the trajectory of the modern world. [my emphasis]
As the list of famous Christian Right figures who saw him as a major influence shows, despite the "hippie" and intellectually highbrow image he struck, his contribution to evangelical culture landed heavily on the side of the Christian Right and dominionism. We can't blame Schaeffer for what his self-proclaimed followers may have done. But it's worth noting that Randall Terry was not only the leader of the militantly anti-abortion group Operation Rescue. He was also an important player in getting the violent Patriot Militia movement going. HIs now liberal/progressive Christian son Frank has emphasized what a major role his father played in promoting the anti-abortion cause.
It's probably worth mentioning here that "evangelical" in the American usage is not a blanket term for Protestant, as it is in parts of Europe including Germany. The American usage refers to theologically conservative Protestants, including but not limited to fundamentalism. People not immersed in the politics of that world may find it difficult to see a distinction between fundamentalists and their non-fundamentalist fellow evangelicals. But participants in denominational politics and theological polemics are keenly aware of the differences. Billy Graham is particularly known for appealing to both "evangelicals" and "fundamentalists," which gave him a more moderate image than a closer familiarity with his faith and politics might justify. Francis Schaeffer, too, bridged that gap while planting his feet in conservative American Republican politics. As Hamilton writes, "Schaeffer created for himself a highly independent place in the public world of evangelicalism. He had wide appeal to students with countercultural leanings, but also to conservative politicians. He remained in touch with but aloof from the other leading figures of American evangelicalism."
Graham continued to cultivate a more moderate image, while Schaeffer became more and more radicalized in a rightward direction. Hamilton writes:
In trying to assess the meaning of Francis Schaeffer, it is instructive to compare him to Billy Graham. Both reached the peak of their influence at about the same time, and both had an immeasurable impact on American evangelicalism. Graham in many ways represents the moderate middle of evangelicalism--defusing controversy, wishing the best for everyone, friend of both Republicans and Democrats, slow to disturb middle-class conventions willing to cooperate with anyone who will let him preach the gospel. As historian Grant Wacker once wrote, "When Graham spoke, middle America heard itself." It was just as natural to see Graham and the President on the fairway together as to see Graham on a platform with a Bible in his hands. [my emnphasis]
Larry Eskridge looked at Graham and the Jesus People circa 1970 in "'One Way': Billy Graham, the Jesus Generation, and the Idea of an Evangelical Youth Culture" Church History (March 1998). At that time, there was a big growth in interest in evangelical organizations like Campus Crusade for Christ that focused their evangelizing efforts on young adults. Eskridge points out the demographic element of Baby Boomers producing a bump in the numbers of people in that age cohort, calling it "the 'pig-in-the-python' effect of the Baby Boom."
Billy made magical thinking mainstream. He shaped an evangelical movement that then became as political as he was in his Nixon-supporting years and unlike Billy, this movement never repented of trading Jesus for politics. Full circle: Billy Graham sought to forge a movement that was distinct from the Southern racist fundamentalism of his day, yet that is precisely what today’s evangelicalism has become again.
Magical thinking isn’t a very good basis for policy or politics. “I believe Donald Trump is a good man,” Franklin Graham said on CNN, last month. “He did everything wrong as a candidate and he won, and I don’t understand it. Other than I think God put him there.”
Graham’s converts from the 1950s to 1990s (my generation, old, white, and tired) lined up to support not only Trump but Roy Moore. One of their very own, Sarah Huckabee, stands up every day and knowingly lies for Trump, covering for his multitude of sins on everything from racism to his lies about paying off porn stars, to abusing scores of women and denying that the Russians attacked our democracy to help get him elected.
Graham and the neo-evangelicals, as they called themselves, tried to create religious revival in the United States. Fifty years on what they got instead was Trump and Roy Moore, climate change deniers, white nationalism and the NRA’s lock on the party evangelicals uniquely empower.
There's enough spiritual and moral power in this stadium tonight that could change the nation. And change the world. If we begin to march for Jesus Christ. Young people all over the wold are marching for every cause in the world. And tonight I believe the time has come to declare ourselves and stat marching in earnest for Jesus Christ. ...
Well, our hope is not in Communism. Our hope is not even in democracy. Our hope is in Jesus Christ, the Kingdom of God. [my emphasis]
1972 was the year that Graham endorsed Richard Nixon for re-election as President.
It doesn't require especially careful listening to tell that in that sermon, he presents the political manifestations of young people becoming engaged as a menacing development, darkly invoking the supposed similarities with the period leading up to the Second World War in which millions of people perished," in which "blood splattered across this planet, as it's never been splattered in history."
He pronounces "fascist" as "fash-e-ist."
When he say that young people of "this generation" are being deceived by Satan, his listeners in 1972 mostly understood that he was not talking about people being deceived by the power of concentrated wealth or by propaganda for an unjust war. In fact, he quotes "the Devil" as saying, "All you need is security from the cradle to the grave and you'll be happy." The welfare state is part of Satan's trickery! And people who aspire to a world in which all being have "security from the cradle to the grave" are promoting a Satanic goal! Wait ... what?!
The evangelical rhetorical context here has to do with evangelicals' attitude toward political issues, which can be remarkably flexible. In the kind of Protestant Christianity Graham represented, proselytizing is seen as a central task of the Christian believer. The task is understood as saving peoples' souls from burning in Hell for eternity, a task of some obvious urgency. So any Good Samaritan type ideas of social solidarity are considered distinctly less important, unless they are embedded in proselytizing or missionary efforts.
So for social or political causes with which the evangelicals reject, they can argue that secular efforts will ultimately be ineffective. Only getting a large enough number of people saved by Jesus, i.e., recruited into that brand of Protestant Christianity, can resolve those problems. Think of it as the "thoughts and prayers" position. This feature of fundamentalism in particular often leads observers to assume that this attitude would result in political withdrawal, or quietism.
But the flexibility reveals itself over social-political causes which the evangelicals support. In those cases, active involvement in lobbying, protest, and various kinds of political activism is seen as very much part of the Christian's mission on earth. This is framed in religious terms by which those kinds of political engagement are an expression of the higher religious values of the believers. So while conservative evangelicals may think "thoughts and prayers" are the best that can be done when it comes to reducing gun proliferation, urgent action is required to get abortion outlawed.
Those positions may look contradictory or hypocritical. And, often enough, they are. But its also a cultural narrative - maybe "culture war" narrative is a better term for it - to identify among themselves which causes are godly and therefore legitimate and which are bad, or evil, or Satanic. Dogmatism and authoritarianism also come into play here and encourage evangelicals to feign respectful listening to people associated with the bad causes only in order to establish credibility with them to convert them from their ungodly beliefs. If saving souls from eternal damnation is a primary mission in life, developing effective sales techniques is essential.
Eskridge describes Graham's marketing approach to young potential converts this way:
,,, his larger approach to the youth problem in his national ministry, [involved providing] a tolerant, openhanded response that was at variance with much of the hard-line rhetoric that secular and religious conservatives used in denouncing the younger generation in general, and the counterculture in particular. Indeed, Graham saw in the Jesus Movement a cadre of young prodigals who - rejecting the counterculture - had metaphorically come home to their parents' America via the bridge of an old American tradition: evangelical religion. [my emphasis]
Eskridge also declares somewhat grandiloquently of this outreach to long-haired and disaffected youth, "In supporting this uniquely evangelical spin on youth culture, Graham and the BGEA's [Billy Graham Evangelical Association's] efforts to legitimate the Jesus Movement were yet another example of evangelicalism's uncanny ability to harness popular forces and movements for the furtherance of its mission."
This is part of what the late Billy Graham had a moderate image, despite the conservative nature of his theological conceptions, his politics, and social attitudes.
Megachurch pastor Rick Warren spent a few years in the early 2000s trying to cultivate a similarly moderate image. Maybe he wasn't as skilled at doing it as Billy Graham. That ploy ended with Warren pretty abruptly dropping it with his hosting of a joint appearance at his Saddleback church with Presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain in August 2008. Just after the event, he trashed Obama for not having been sufficiently anti-abortion. (Michelle Vu , Rick Warren: Obama's Abortion Answer Not Clear EnoughChristian Post R08/19/2008) He didn't endorse either candidate. And Obama generously invited Warren to give a public prayer at his first Inaugural. But that was pretty much the end of Warren's posture as a moderate, based on his concern for issues like gay rights and environmental "stewardship."
In fact, Warren's position on abortion was largely indistinguishable from that of the most hardline fundamentalists. Even including the fanatical label of abortion rights as perpetrating a "holocaust," a label that validates the most violent antiabortion fanaticism while tossing in anti-Semitic dog-whistling in the mix. (Nia-Malika Henderson, Evangelical Pastor Rick Warren on abortion, sexuality and ObamaPolitico 11/29/2009)
On abortion, which has become central to the health care debate, Warren takes on Obama's idea that abortions should be rare, suggesting that stance essentially supports that life begins at conception.
"We've had 46 million Americans who aren't here. Those who could be here since Roe v. Wade, who are not voting. I think that innocence is a holocaust. I really do," Warren said. "Now, I think that we have to get beyond the name calling and find common ground to work on these issues. Now, I don't understand the idea of it should be rare and less. Well, either you believe it's life or you don't....why would you believe it should be rare?....If a baby, a fetus is not a life, then why restrict it?"
In 2012, Warren was echoing the phony Christian Right complaint about the Mean Libruls violating the religious freedom of good Christian white folks who think it's God's will that they discriminate against gays, loose women, black people and other categories of sinners. (Jaweed Kaleem, Rick Warren, Saddleback Pastor: Obama Has ‘Infringed’ Upon Religious LibertiesHuffpost 12/28/2012)
Similarly the "Jesus movement" of the early 1970 left few distinctive "countercultural" elements in evengelical culture. Though it has been observed fundamentalist and Christian Right networks do form a kind of subculture that sees itself in a "culture war' with the mainstream American culture.
Eskridge seems to think the main surviving contribution of the movement to present-day evangelicalism was a musical style:
For the long term, in countenancing the union of evangelical youth with the popular style of the Jesus People, Graham gave his blessing to a manner of coping with American youth culture that became characteristic of evangelicalism in the late twentieth century. By the 1990s, evangelical youth cultures that paralleled "the world" were an assumed part of the subculture's landscape and proliferated in as many guises as their secular counterparts. While still not accepted by some sectors of the evangelical community, the strategy took hold, backed by a continually growing "Contemporary Christian Music" industry and marketing infrastructure. The groundwork for this change was laid in the late 1960s and early 1970s by the success of the Jesus Movement. The Jesus People did disappear as a movement, but they were not killed off by a lack of interest. It is more accurate to say that they were gradually replaced as a new cohort of young people, infatuated by the evolution of new musical styles and affected by the ever-increasing segmentation of the youth market and the subcultures and group identifications that accompanied these trends, took their place. [my emphasis]
And the quality of the contemporary Christian music is itself questionable. I know better than to make a blanket criticism of a whole musical genre like that. But ... There are good Christian contemporary songs. The brilliant folksinger and songwriter Kate Campbell, for instance, has a number of songs that could count as Christian contemporary. But much of fits into what is called 7-11 music: seven words repeated eleven times. Traditional hymns feature more complex music and more sophisticated lyrics. And it generally doesn't come close in quality of emotional intensity to the African-American spirituals.
Another exercise in evaluating a claim when you don't have the time or specialized knowledge to research it in detail yourself. Which is, after all, how most claims about most anything come to us.
I decided to click on a YouTube selection because I was thinking, oh, it's been a while since I listened to a TED talk. It was MEETING THE ENEMY A feminist comes to terms with the Men's Rights movement, presentation by filmmaker Cassie Jaye for TEDxMarin 10/18/2017. The title is more of a marketing hook than a good description of the talk, because at the end she says she no longer considers herself a feminist:
Jaye made a documentary called The Red Pill, released last year. She describes it in the talk as starting out as being an expose of the notoriously anti-feminist and generally hard right "Men's Rights Movement" (MRM), whose adherent like to call themselves "men's rights activists," or MRAs. They are most known in the US political scene as part of the so-called "alt-right" movement, particular via the crassless misogynistic Gamergate bruhaha. And for disparaging liberal, left or feminist women online as SJW's, or "social justice warriors," which in their view is clearly a bad thing to be. (Geez, back in the day even fascist-minded Catholic rightwingers claimed to stand for a warped version of "social justice.")
What Jaye presents in this 15-minute talk is a conversion experience, although she shrinks from claiming to be an advocate for the MRM, picturing herself instead as an open-minded seeker of truth who learned to listened to the misunderstood whiny white guys that the dogmatic, close-minded feminists say mean things about. She describes her documentary work as traveling North America - apparently meaning she did one shoot in Canada - "meeting the leaeers and followers of the men's rights movement.
My initial take on this was that she actually was advocating for the MRM, if in a passive way. Why did my (apparently hopelessly closed) mins think that? Well, for one things it's because I know about Gamergate and at least a fair amount about the Radical Right in the US. I also grew up in Mississippi, so I have a lifetime's experience in listening to whiny white guys whine about how they're bein' picked on. Then there's the fact that she cites some statistics used by the MRM to illustrate about how us pore persecuted white guys are bein' oppressed by wimmin, without any indication that she had verified or analyzed the factual claims. And her self-presentation of her film project sounded an awful lot like the endless stream of reports we've had from journalists and the occasional scholar on their bold forays into Trump country to listen to the Trump supporters who are tired of them thar Mean Libruls from the Coasts lookin' down on them.
It also sounded discouragingly similar to the much-cited and much-quoted study by UC-Berkeley sociologist Arlie Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (2016), about how she learned to sympathetically listen to white folks in a deeply Republican section of Louisiana gripe about how the blacks and the gubment were messin' them over and the Mean Libruls just don't want to listen to salt-of-the-earth white folks like them. Hochschild was doing serious scholarly work, despite its faults, much more so than anything I've heard about Jaye's foray among MRM fanboys, so I don't want to put them in the same category. But I suspected from her TED talk that she might have fallen into the same trap I've criticized Hochschild for falling into, of implicitly treating claims from her target study population at face value on how they acquired the attitudes they did, without sufficiently investigating how soundly rooted they were in reality.
Her talk left me with the strong impression that she's marketing herself as a young, pretty, blonde women who is willingly giving validation to the MRM and their ideas. Around 4:15, she explains the insight into her formerly intolerant feminist ways by saying that in interviewing the MRAs, "I would often hear an innocent and valid point that a men's rights activist would make, but in my head I would add on to their statement a sexist or anti-woman spin, assuming that's what they wanted to say, but didn't."
That's a red flag in itself. Politics 101: political advocates try to make their messages sound reasonable to their audiences. (Actually, that's more like Politics Kindergarten.) But different political currents often develop their own particular vocabulary, sometimes in a way that is almost cult-like, so that they are using familiar words, but using it to mean something different than what most people hear. That's especially true of more militant and extreme groups. And someone investigating them seriously needs to be aware of what are coded meanings. If you're talking to, say, a Christian Right activist who says that defending freedom of religion is one of their main priorities in their politics, there's a 95% or better chance that what they mean is not that they want to see Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and rival Christian denominations have full freedom to practice their religion. It's more likely they mean, "Store owners shouldn't have to serve no queers 'cause our religion says thay're perverts who are all goin' to Hail."
It's not just a matter of words. It means having a nuanced and realistic understanding of the social milieu of the activists. The New York Times recently took some very well-deserved criticism for its sloppy and uncritical report on an Ohio Nazi activist. The Times' response by Marc Lacey (Readers Accuse Us of Normalizing a Nazi Sympathizer; We Respond 11/26/2017) very grudgingly conceded that they told the story "imperfectly," which is about the mildest imaginable kind of self-criticism. But the paragraph containing that sentence starts with, "We regret the degree to which the piece offended so many readers." Also a sentence that may require some translation. It's common meaning in American English is "We regret that some people were such pathetic jerks that our wonderful story offended them, get over it, you wimps!" Kind of like the Southern, "Bless your heart!" Which also requires some translation.
Jaye presents as a lesson in her enlightenment fielding the rhetorical question from an MRA, "Where is justice for the man who was falsely accused of raping a woman?" And the feminists or politicians or political groups out there who are advocating imprisoning men on false accusations of rape include ...? [Crickets]
I'm giving her TED talk probably more attention than it deserves. But I'm describing my initial judgment of her presentation from the kinds of indicators I've described.
So I watched the documentary itself, which is currently available on YouTube with Spanish subtitles, The Red Pill Subtitulado Español 12/06/2017.
The film does come off as more-or-less a propaganda pitch for the MRM, presented as a more-or-less disinterested account. In fact, her TED talk uses the same basic framing as the film, in which she started off as an earnest feminist who, in talking to those nice folks in the MRM, renounced her feminist delusions. At the end, she says, "There are so many perspectives on gender. And I believe they're all worthy of listening to. However, the conversation is being silenced. [Presumably by Mean Librul feminists.] ... I don't know where I'm headed. But I know what I left behind. I no longer call myself a feminist."
I can't promise that anyone not already inclined to enthusiasm for the arguments of the MRM will find it particularly interesting. In the world of propaganda films, this is a long way from Leni Riefenstahl levels of quality.
Jaye says in the TED talk filmed 44 MRAs total. But the interviews she includes in the film are heavily focused on prominent leaders in the MRM, i.e., people who are skilled and experienced advocates for their cause. She sets up a large part of the context to be framed by Paul Elam (founder of A Voice For Men) Fred Hayward (Men's Rights PAC), grief counselor Tom Golden, Dean Esmay, and Harry Crouch (President of the National Coalition for Men). The leader who comes off as the least dubious of this group is Warren Ferrell.
Elam's persona in the film features what can reasonably be described as a bug-eyed stare, which I suppose is a congenial look for some people:
The pro-MRM speakers are partially "balanced" by much shorter segments showingscholarly critics of the movement, who are mostly shown making mostly general, carefully qualified comments, contrasted to the relentless advocacy of the MRM spokespeople.
The film is replete with unchallenged slams at the women's movement. "Feminists have spent the last 50 years demonizing men," says Paul Elam (1:35:00). "Stop pretending that you're oppressed and that men are you oppressors. It's a lie. And it's a hurtful lie, and it's a hateful lie, and it's wrong," insists Esmay, with his eyes closed in what is a apparently an attempt at a deep-thinking pose. (31:00)
The film itself is structured into sections, one presenting spokespeople presenting the general case for the MRM, which among other things features what sound to me like labor issues (working long hours) as discrimination against men to the benefit of women. Then there are sections focusing on custody issues in divorce battle, wrongful paternity claims ("paternity fraud"), domestic violence, a general comparison of how the women's movement is much more prominent that the MRM, and a concluding summary section in which Jaye unveils her conversion experience at the end.
The section dealing with men's grievances over child custody may be the most interesting, beginning around 41:00. It begins with a 7-minute segment of Fred Hayward telling an emotional story about what he describes as a 14-year custody battle for his son after a divorce. The film allows Hayward to tell his story with no indication that Jaye attempted to independently verify anything about it. I would say that it plays like something his divorce attorney might have put together, except that he tells a story that sounds suspiciously like manipulating his son against his mother in an unethical way that an attorney might not have preferred to have described that way.
Warren Ferrell (43:40) provides what might be described as a tell: "Many men's rights activists come into being men's rights activists as the result of getting a divorce, wanting to be equally involved with the children and realizing that women have the right to children and men have to fight for children."
In other words, a lot of middle-aged men get divorced and are not pleased to discover that their wives have legal rights enforceable by the courts. And so they seek out narratives, including those provided by divorce attorneys, about how women are selfish bitches who have all the rights.
At just after 53:00, Jaye interviews Michael Messner, a professor of gender studies. I would say that this is the closest the film comes to providing any kind of realistic critical perspective. He addresses some entirely sensible and plausible reasons why women generally do better in child custody fights. But it's a brief presentation, and a general one, compared to the much lengthier presentations by MRM leaders that prominently feature anecdotes of individual cases for which the film doesn't provide any independent validation. It's no secret that anecdotes have a greater emotional appear than statistics. So that's exactly what someone making an explicitly advocacy movie might be tempted to do in presenting that case, i.e., putting guys passionately telling anecdotes up against a shorter segment of a professor carefully presenting his (more informative) side of the story.
That section segues into one on "paternity fraud," featuring what to an unsympathetic observer might be inclined to describes as some fairly blatant woman-hating with a generous mixture of white racist contempt for black women in particular. But Jaye would probably write such an interpretation off as an unwillingness to listen on the part of Mean Libruls influenced by deceptive feminist propaganda.
Don't miss the segment featuring, Karen Straughan, a strangely androgynous "Honey Badger" (female supporter of the MRM) at 1:23:00 who makes an obviously confused defense of the Boko Haram terrorist group kidnapping girls. She repeatedly says that "they" wanted attention, but "they" for her seems to be a vague mixture of feminists, terrorists, Muslims, Nigerians and black people. People who have listened to Republicans complain about people who "just want attention" will detect a familiar sound in her comments. She also describes Boko Haram as "chivalrous." (?!?)
I suspect that among the many people that Jaye reports interviewing for this project, she probably gathered quite a bit of footage from MRAs and Honey Badgers who displayed the kind of garbling narrative that we see in the Straughan segment. Because even though most of her MRM adherents in the film who are experienced spokespeople at least seem to be making a coherently logical (if factually challenged) argument, even they display some fairly obvious signs of dogmatic rigidity.
One of the strangest moments comes near the end, after 1:45:00, when the viewer is apparently meant to believe that infant male circumcision may make it impossible for the circumcised boy to have kids later on. Jaye describes anti-circumcision as a very common position among MRAs. Someone with a little more familiarity with the far right might have wanted to dig into that aspect a bit deeper, given the Jewish ritual of circumcision. You have to pay attention to threads like that when dealing with Radical Right groups.
The Morning Joe crew today were shocked, shocked to discover the Republican Party is more concerned about tax cuts for the wealthy than the safety of 14-year-old girls. (I'm officially adopting Charlie Pierce's version of the program's name, the Morning Zoo.) GOP Strategist Susan Del Percio On Roy Moore Support: You Are About To Lose MeMSNBC 12/05/2017
I mean, conversions are fine. But what did they think the Republican Party has been the last 25-30 years?
I remember when the new "Gingrich Revolution" members elected to Congress in 1994 declared junkie bigot Rush Limbaugh an honorary member of Congress for his service in getting a Republican House elected.
Maybe Joe Scarborough, also elected to Congress for the first time that year, missed that shindig. Because you'd think he might have remembered things like this (Katharine Seelye, Republicans Get a Pep Talk From Rush LimbaughNew York Times 12/12/1994):
"You will never ever be their friends," the talk-show host warned most of the 73 Republican freshmen at a dinner here tonight. "They don't want to be your friends. Some female reporter will come up to one of you and start batting her eyes and ask you to go to lunch. And you'll think, 'Wow! I'm only a freshman. Cokie Roberts wants to take me to lunch. I've really made it!' " The audience laughed.
"Seriously," he added. "Don't fall for this. This is not the time to get moderate. This is not the time to start trying to be liked."
The freshman class, which included not a single "femi-Nazi," one of Mr. Limbaugh's favorite epithets for supporters of women's rights, whooped and applauded, proving itself one big fan club of the man it believes was primarily responsible for the Republican avalanche in November. [my emphasis]
Limbaugh reminded the Republicans about how a fine fellow he is:
Mr. Limbaugh said President Clinton's new nominee for surgeon general would be Pee-wee Herman. He also said he had a copy of the White House drug test -- a multiple-choice examination. "Complete the following verse," he read. "I am the walrus. A: You are the taxman. B: La la la la la la. C: Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? D. Koo-koo-ka-choo."
In closing, he asked his audience to "leave some liberals alive" as artifacts so that "we can show our children what they were." [my emphasis]
Pee-Wee Herman was the comic persona of Paul Rubens, who was arrested in 1991 for public exposure when he was caught masturbating in a porno theater. (Mark Harris and Ty Burr, The Pee-Wee Herman scandalEW 08/16/1991)
Rush Limbaugh's commitment to "traditional values" also came into question later when he got into trouble because of his oxycontin habit. (Jarrett Murphy, Rush Limbaugh Arrested On Drug Charges CBS/AP 04/02/2006) That same year, he also got some bad publicity over some mis-labeled Viagra pills found in his possession on a trip to the Dominican Republic. (Rush Limbaugh's Dominican Stag PartyThe Smoking Gun 07/06/2006) Some Mean Libruls called attention to the Dominican Republic's reputation at the time as a sex tourism destination. (Evan Derkacz, Rush Limbaugh, sex tourist?AlterNet 06/27/2006) Bad libruls, bad!
As for that bit about leaving "some liberals alive," why, that was just a joke, doncha know? Lighten up, libruls!!
As the Times reported, the newly-elected Republican Congress members "whooped and applauded" for the tasteful comedian. And his bloviating raving against Mean Libruls is still popular among Republicans today.
Golly gee, how could a nice moderate party of honorable gentlemen (and the occasional lady like Michelle Bachmann or Sarah Palin) have morphed suddenly (?!) into the part of Donald Trump and Roy Moore? The Morning Zoo crowd are very distressed trying to understand the deep mystery.
She has this to say about his ideological perspective:
As Koch was building his company into the behemoth it is today, he never stopped reading. Among his favorite authors was Ludwig von Mises, who, like Ayn Rand, wrote of entrepreneurs with reverence, treating them as the greatest heroes in human history. That sense of intellectual and even ethical superiority to others may help explain why Charles Koch bypassed the also libertarian but more empirically and practically minded economist Milton Friedman to make common cause with the more uncompromising [rightwing economist] James Buchanan. Koch referred to Friedman and the rest of the post–Hayek Chicago school of economics he led, as well as to Alan Greenspan, as “sellouts to the system,” in the words of journalist Brian Doherty. Why? Because they sought “to make government work more efficiently when the true libertarian should be tearing it out at the root.” They actually tried to help government deliver better results, which could only prolong the disease. Koch believed that only in its “radical, pure form,” without compromise, would the ideas “appeal to the brightest, most enthusiastic, most capable people.” (Is it any wonder, then, that his allies would now rather bring down the government than improve it?) [my emphasis]
Some people were no doubt surprised by Steve Bannon's description of himself as a Leninist. But it's not unusual in the far-right milieu for activists to style themselves as a mirror image of what they imagine the Enemy to be. Charles Koch's father Fred was a founding member of the John Birch Society. Who made a great deal of his fortune doing oil deals with the Soviet Union during Stalin's rule.
The JBS tried to style its operations around what they understood to be the Communist Party's mode of operation. Magnifying the tiny US Communist Party into a massively effective agent of Soviet influence that somehow dominated the federal government through both the Democratic and even Republican parties, they set out to imitate their image of the CP.
And since the JBS was the mothership of conspiratorial rightwing conspiracy theories in the US for decades after its inception. And so this practice of imagining themselves as a mirror image of what they consider to be the practice of the left was a common posture of far-right figures. This obviously offer a lot of opportunities for psychological projection on their part. Even today, it's worth keeping in mind that what Republicans are saying about the evil intentions and deeds of The Left may be a large clue to what the Republicans themselves are doing or intend to do.
McLean explains how a revered figure among the "paleocons," Murray Rothbard (1926-1995), who also indulged in "Leninist" posturing. And who much impressed Charles Koch:
It was Rothbard who explained to him how small numbers could effect big changes. Rothbard suggested that Koch study Lenin.
“I grew up in a Communist culture,” Rothbard later said of the extended “family, friends, [and] neighbors” in the New York City milieu he rebelled against. Even as he despised their goals, he took from their heated discussions in the 1930s and 1940s, as well as his own wide reading in the original sources, a deep appreciation of the strategic and tactical genius of Vladimir Lenin, who led a revolution in a place where others said it simply could not be done. A champion of “uncompromising libertarianism,” Rothbard, like Lenin, believed that government was “our enemy.” He admired Lenin’s daring leadership, but most of all he saw that some of his techniques could serve a wholly opposite purpose: namely, to establish a kind of capitalism purer and less restrained than the world had ever known.
In 1976, over a weekend of discussion as Koch’s guest in Vail, Colorado, Rothbard explained to his host how a Lenin-like libertarian strategy might work. The Russian revolutionary had once said of the ranks of the revolutionary party, “Better fewer, but better.” To create a sound, disciplined movement, Rothbard explained, preparing a “cadre” must be the top priority. What his admiring biographer [Justin Raimondo of Antiwar.com], a foot soldier himself, summed up as “the general flakiness and counterculturalism” of so many libertarians had had its day, Rothbard told Koch. The survivalist-like stocking up on beans and science fiction novels to last years of exile, with backpacks at the ready to rush for the hills if the statists came, the visions of colonizing remote islands or even of other planets: all that had to go. A new seriousness was needed. It was time for the revolutionary cause to orient itself to Middle America. [my emphasis]
Amanda Robb has done an excellent article on the "Pizzagate" fake news and accompanying panic that is a great example of fact-based debunking, Anatomy of a Fake News ScandalRolling Stone 11/16/2017.
The Pizzagate story could never have been taken as seriously as it was or gotten spread to the extent it did if everyone were applying one of the most basic rules of reality-testing: extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Claiming the Hillary Clinton was running a pedophile lesbian child prostitution ring out the basement of a pizza parlor qualifies as an extraordinary claim. Alex Jones ranting about it on YouTube or a chain email from your goofy cousin do not count as extraordinary proof.
The "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof" is one that the Skeptical Inquirer journal has long promoted in debunking pseudoscience. They generally don't emphasize political topics except when its unavoidable in critiquing some crackpot pseudoscience notion like "creationism" or climate-change denial. But their investigations and takedowns of various ghost and UFO stories and alternative-medicine frauds is both informative and entertaining. Their articles give the reader a sense of how easy it can be to be taken in by a bogus claim and also some basic techniques people can use to judge claims on the news and in popular gossip when they deal with events or subjects with which the reader has no first-hand knowledge or expertise.
One of the social processes that affect the acceptance of all claims, not just "fake news," is confirmation from people around you. As the linguists and philosophers building on their work tell us, the formation and refinement of knowledge is very much a social process. And in practice, that means that for much of what we believe we know in daily life is based on whether people we know and trust believe the claim and how intensely they believe it.
I'm not making an argument that all our knowledge is subjective. Reality has an unpleasant way of imposing itself on us when we ignore it.
One very notable thing about Robb's article and the related podcast it that they focus on how important Breitbart and FOX News are to rightwing fabricated "alternative facts" that get magnified by partisan online dissemination, not all of it from engaged individuals. Yes, there are Russian bots out there.
And they also call attention to how people who have been thinking in tune with the rightwing media environment will take contrary reporting from the mainstream press as confirmation of the claims being refuted. When you let FOX and Breitbart and the like rewire your head, strange things can happen. That's also the topic of Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse's tweet:
Just heard Bill McKibben say: “If you'd been marinating in Rush Limbaugh for thirty years, you'd be impervious to reason too."
David Neiwert's Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump, was published early this month. The author has been covering that scene as a journalist for decades now. He is currently the Pacific Northwest correspondent for the the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). He has written extensively on the far right and hate groups in the United States, including the books And Hell Followed With Her: Crossing the Dark Side of the American Border (2013), with a Faulknerian narrative touch, and Death on the Fourth of July: The Story of A Killing, A Trial and Hate Crime in America (2004).
Alt-America looks at the evolution of the far right over the last decade, leading up to its distinct influence on national politics in the 2016 election. The book ends its account in the early days of the Trump Administration. Events involving the Radical Right have continued to influence American politics, as Dave himself recounts in White supremacists have been marching in President Trump’s name. Literally.Washington Post 09/14/2017.
His book takes the reader through a tour of Radical Right groups, individuals and concepts, some of which have unfortunately become far too familiar in American politics. Patriot militias. Three Percenters. Steve Bannon. Gamergate. Oath Keepers. White nationalists. White supremacists. Milo Yiannopoulos. Alt-right. "Cultural Marxism." Richard Spencer. Men's rights activists (MRAs). Alex Jones and Infowars. Neo-Nazis.
But the book is not a collection of encyclopedia entries. It describes the evolution and mutual interactions of what we might a call "diverse" groups of characters and political trends. Because it's important to recognize that the far right is a fractious, quarrelsome bunch. Not just because, like with any political groups with limited resources and influence, there is often not much in the way of prestige or material rewards to hand out to supporters. So competition is intense and rivalries often bitter. It's also because the far right is particularly attractive to those who Dave describes as authoritarians (or rightwing authoritarians, RWAs) and "social dominators," terms he takes from the work of psychologist Robert Altemeyer. (John Dean also draws heavily on Altemeyer's work in his columns and his 2006 book, Conservatives Without Conscience.) RWAs and social dominators are inclined to find a lot of people to hate and to use intimidation and violence to act out their hatreds.
Altemeyer is quoted, "When social dominators are in the driver's seat, and right-wing authoritarians stand at their beck and call, unethical things appear much more likely to happen. True, sufficiently skilled social dominators served by dedicated followers can make the trains run on time. But you have to worry about what the trains may be hauling when dominators call the shots and high RWAs do the shooting." These are not people who put playing well with others as a high priority.
The "diversity" of these groups can also be misleading. The notorious segregationist Citizens Council (aka, White Citizens Council) was re-founded as the Council for Conservative Citizens (CCC), as recounted in the book. But most people would have a hard time distinguishing the ideology of the present-day CCC from its predecessor. Different branding or labeling doesn't always mean a difference in the "product," which in this case is a set of anti-democratic political ideas. And the John Birch Society, formed in the 1950s and until fairly recently the mothership of rightwing conspiracy theories, still casts a long shadow on the far right.
Dave describes in the book how people who identified with sectarian trends like the "Patriot" militias or "sovereign citizens" or neo-Confederates infiltrated Tea Party groups early after they formed in 2009. (Formed with some well-funded assistance from wealthy Republican donors and a fortune in free publicity from FOX News.) The boundaries between infiltrating, supporting and taking over in groups like this can often be cloudy. And in the process, the difference between deception and tailoring their messages can also be unclear. As he writes of the more recent online incarnations of the Radical Right, "The alt-right's memes and other cultural markers ... can be inscrutable to outsiders, and have served as a kind of secret handshake for alt-right cognoscenti."
For a variety of reasons, the language can also be coded. Something similar happens in cults, and some of the far-right groups can be very cult-like. So when a Three Percenter talks about "liberty," he likely means something different than what most Americans think when they hear the word. Another example comes to mind from the manners of segregation in the South in the 1950s and 1960s, manners which often could be elaborately neurotic. For example, white people who viewed themselves as respectably middle-class considered it rude and low-class to use the n-word. "Nigra" or "colored people" were the more polite terms. Although it was never clear to me whether one of those two was supposed to be marginally more acceptable than the other. However, considering the n-word to be low-class did not mean the people who considered it so were any less committed to maintaining segregation than their "redneck" neighbors.
So among far-right groups, some may be overt advocates of pseudoscientific or religion-based white racism. Others may insist that they are not racist, they are just concerned about the deficiencies of black "culture." Milder examples of this also pop up in things we hear in informal conversation, like when someone starts a sentence with, "Now I'm not a racist, but ..." You know immediately what's coming next is going to be something obnoxiously prejudiced. Sometimes it's hard to tell whether they are using that technique to try to make you think they really aren't racist because they are embarrassed of the label, or whether they are just mocking anyone who might think they aren't.
This has an interesting historical parallel in the Reconstruction period, during the time when Klan terrorism against blacks and white Republicans in the South was particularly intense from 1867 to 1872, violence well-documented in Congressional investigations of the time. But defenders of the Klan, including by northern Democrats hostile to Reconstruction, denied that such groups existed. Elaine Frantz Parsons wrote about this a few years ago. "The idea of the Klan as a fundamental threat to the nation coexisted in tension, throughout the Klan's existence, with the idea that the Klan was simply a product of overheated imagination." (Klan Skepticism and Denial in Reconstruction-Era Public DiscourseJournal of Southern History 77:1;Feb 2011)
Today's very bad media habit of coding far-right terrorist acts committed by white perpetrators as the product of "lone nuts" serves a very similar function. Glenn Greenwald flagged a particularly egregious manifestation of this in 2010, Inside the mind of Newsweek on “terrorism”Salon 02/23/2010.Alt-America is especially good at describing this problem and its pernicious effect of leaving the impression that "terrorism" in the US is primarily something perpetrated by Muslims with an Islamist ideology. It's not. It's currently mostly a problem of white, Radical Right terrorists.
And the book illustrates how it requires some effort for law enforcement and the press to ignore white supremacist terrorism. Dylann Roof, who murdered nine African-American participants in a Bible study group in Charleston in 2016 had immersed himself in white-nationalist dogma from sources like the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer website. John Russell Houser shot up a crowd of movie-goers in Lafayette, Louisiana, in 2015, killing two people and wounding nine; he suffered from mental health problems and also identified with white-supremacist and neo-Nazi ideology. The book includes the story of Jerad and Amanda Miller, who in 2014 ambushed and murdered two Las Vegas police officers in a pizza shop. They laid a swastika flag on one of the bodies. The couple later killed another man in a Wal-Mart, where they also died in a shoot-out with police. They had also made a detailed plan to kill public officials in a courthouse. The two had been part of the "defenders" of the Bundy Ranch, where armed civilians faced off with the Bureau of Land Management over rancher Cliven Bundy's illegal misuse of public lands. They left a "manifesto filled with classic anti-New World Order rants."
Dave doesn't focus in particular on Christian Right groups in this book, though Christian dominionism and Christian Identity are persistent influences of the violent Radical Right. Christian Right groups have have been more broadly covered by people like Frederick Clarkson of the Political Research Association, Adele Stan, Sarah Posner and Jeff Sharlet.
While much of the book is devoted to relating the history of the various groups and trends, there are also sections devoted to a more analytical treatment of issues relevant to understanding the Radical Right and how it has successfully mainstreamed many of its ideas. He also provides some insight into how online recruiting for violent rightwing groups functions and how young white guys in particular are drawn into it. Even by targeting players of the Pokéman Go game popular in 2015. The transgressive style of being "politically incorrect" is a big draw. He cites the work of Keegan Hankes of the SPLC, who says, "people are first exposed to alt-right ideas via wildly over-the-top jokes that celebrate Nazis or other kind of ugly behavior designed to attract attention by the craziness."
In the final chapter, he looks at the danger that current trends could lead to a more authoritarian or fascist brand of government in the US via the acceptance of "eliminationist" attitudes toward hated groups, a concern with developing a "pure" community and glorification of violence against the less powerful, and hypernationalism. Unfortunately, these tendencies currently have friends in high places:
Eliminationist rhetoric is the backbone of Trump's appeal. His opening salvo in the campaign - the one that first catapulted him to the forefront in the race, in the polls, and proved wildly popular with Republican voters - was his vow, and subsequent proposed program, to deport all 12 million of the United States' undocumented immigrants (he used the deprecatory term "illegal alien") and to erect a gigantic wall on the nation's southern border. The language he used to justify such plans - labeling those immigrants "criminals," "killers," and "rapists" - is classic rhetoric designed to dehumanize an entire group of people by reducing them to objects fit only for elimination.
This book doesn't wade into the current controversy in the Democratic Party over whether economic concerns or racial and gender prejudice are drawing people to radical right politics. He does note that local political swings to voting for Donald Trump in 2016 were heavily correlated with a recent increase in ethnic diversity, particularly with increases in the Latino population. And he notes, "Such demographic shifts related to race and ethnicity have a long history of also being powerful predictors of interracial violence and hate crimes." Which doesn't settle the complex question of the interaction of economic distress with xenophobic, racist or misogynist attitudes. But it is yet another reminder that motivations in political behavior are complex and determined by multiple factors interacting.
Dave encourages people to have actual conversations with people who have different political views, including with people who buy into some far right ideas. "One healing conversation at a time," he thinks can be helpful. But he also provides some useful advice in dealing with fanatics and hardcore haters: "There's really no point in trying to reach out to people who will only return your hand as a bloody stump."
In the United States, the Nazis for decades have been the villains in countless numbers of movies, TV shows, radio dramas, comic books, documentaries, even musicals (The Sound of Music). If any group is generally identified among Americans as evil - even among people who know little about the actual history of Nazism in Germany - its Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party.
So when the "alt-right" and other white supremacists staged their murderous presence in Charlottesville in August, it created a very negative impression, even among a lot of people who share many of their hatreds.
From Kirkland's report:
The racist far-right has been flailing since descending on Charlottesville, Virginia, in August for a rally that participants deemed a success for its huge turnout — until it turned deadly. Groups plan events and then cancel them in rapid succession, and people point fingers on Twitter at who they perceive to be leading the movement astray. An event intended to “Unite the Right” ended up doing the exact opposite.
“If this was initially seen as a victory for the movement, it’s actually been one of abject devastation,” Heidi Beirich, expert on extremism at the Southern Poverty Law Center, told TPM. “Look at the infighting that came in the wake of the event over whether it was the right tactics, if they should have been there in the first place, the groups that came, and the violence, obviously.”
“It was very painful to them and there’s a lot of reticence to go down that road again,” Beirich added. “They certainly don’t want to have a Charlottesville 2.0.”
The "alt-right" brand went from being an attempt to create a happy face for far-right white supremacist ideology to being widely identified with murdering Nazis:
Movement leaders of varying stripes all are saddled with the baggage of having attended an event where Ku Klux Klan leaders flew their banners, and where an ideological sympathizer rammed a car into a group of peaceful protesters, killing counter-protester Heather Heyer and injuring many more. The damage is particularly great for the so-called “alt-right,” a loosely defined group of white nationalists, anti-Semites and online trolls whose project has been putting a presentable, buttoned-up face on racism.
“The concept of the alt-right is to create a sort of mainstream version of an old hatred,” said Oren Segal, director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism. “When violence occurs at their events, it does undermine their effort to try to recruit and attract people to their cause as if it was somehow mainstream.” [my emphasis]
Kirkland also describes factional fighting in the alt-right spectrum. While factional fighting and jealousies petty and grand are part of all politics, they take particular forms for fringe groups. For one thing, people a fighting over a relatively small slice of political "territory" in such groups, and they generally lack the kind of incentives and resources large political parties have.
And white supremacist, Klan-style groups also tend to attract people not particularly distinguished for their "people skills."
"At the heart of the problem is that when it came to what conservatives were willing to believe and act on, 2016 was simply an exaggerated version of what had come before."
Paul Waldman has that and other valuable observations in a nevertheless overly cynical column, Democrats' Unsolvable Media ProblemThe American Prospect 09/17/2017:
There's a doctrinal basis to conservative media that makes it fundamentally different from liberal media, that makes Rush Limbaugh most definitely not the mirror image of a liberal radio host and Sean Hannity not the mirror image of Rachel Maddow. It's not merely about the conservatives' and liberals' respective adherence to truth or penchant for ugly demonization of their opponents, though they differ in that too. It's that an argument about the larger media world is the foundation of conservative media. Conservative hosts and writers tell their audiences over and over again that nothing they read in the mainstream media can be accepted, that it's all twisted by a liberal agenda, and therefore they can only believe what conservatives tell them. It's the driving backbeat to every episode, every story, and every rant.
Liberals complain about media coverage of one story or another all the time. What they don't do is tell their audiences that any news source that is not explicitly and exclusively devoted to their ideological agenda cannot be trusted. But conservatives do.
Where I think Waldman goes wrong is that he effectively concludes that this gives conservatives a decisive advantage that liberals can never overcome.
And yet, somehow Hillary Clinton, the Democratic candidate dearly hated by the right, won a clear majority in the 2016 Presidential election.
I don't say that to minimize the magnitude of the Democratic political disaster in 2016. It was genuinely historic.
But it shouldn't be used to justify cynicism, no matter how sophisticated the packaging. Cynicism in politics for most people is virtually the same as conservatism.
Did we think the charlatans and the con-men and the false prophets who have long dotted our history wouldn’t revisit us, once again prop up the immigrant as the source of all our troubles, and look to prey on the hopelessness and despair that has grown up in the hollowed-out cities and towns of Ohio and Michigan and Pennsylvania and the long-forgotten rural stretches of West Virginia and Kentucky?
We have fought this battle before—but today we have a special challenge.
Today we have an American president who has publicly proclaimed a moral equivalency between neo-Nazis and Klansmen and those who would oppose their venom and hate.
The discussion on political violence in the US has been particularly cramped for a long time. Not that it was ever as clear as one might have wished.
Ordinary statecraft involves the application of violence, particularly through the police, the national security agencies and the prison system. This is considered legitimate violence when done in accordance with established law. This is the "state monopoly on violence" that is used to mark the difference between functioning national governments and "failed states." André Munro calls it "the concept that the state alone has the right to use or authorize the use of physical force. It is widely regarded as a defining characteristic of the modern state." (State monopoly on violenceBritannica Online; accessed 08/23/2017)
Use of the police power is a general attribute of modern states and is usually not seen as political violence. But since political decisions involving class and other group conflicts set the legal parameters of legitimacy, there is something political even about legitimate state violence. Black activists in the United States have often argued that many if not all black prisoners were in a real sense political prisoners because of the ways in which the political system has excluded them from substantive contribution to political decision-making and because of racially biased policing. But since not only Democrats or Republicans but presumably nearly all splinter parties in the US would be in favor of banning armed robbery, police coercion in arresting an armed robber is not commonly regarded as political violence.
Political violence in the usual sense of using violence of some kind to achieve partisan or policy goals has been some part of American life since the beginning. The American Revolution was certainly an act of political violence, as were the Whiskey Rebellion, slave revolts, the localized civil war in "Bleeding Kansas, John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, the Confederate rebellion. The resistance to Reconstruction democracy in the South commonly involved violence as did the post-Reconstruction segregationist Jim Crow regimes. Sometimes the violence was superficially legitimate in that it enforced discriminatory laws aimed at African-American citizens. Sometimes it was law enforcement acting with de facto approval from their superiors in taking illegal action. Organized terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan were certainly part of the violence, as were mobs incited by public officials like the one in the Ole Miss (University of Mississippi) riot over integration in 1963.
There was also plenty of violence applied against labor organizers over the years, certainly not all of it "legitimate." (FYI, that's meant to be an obvious understatement!)
Political Violence After the Second World War
Unofficial political violence in the US - violence not undertaken by organs of the state - has been largely a monopoly of the Radical Right for decades. Not entirely, of course. Urban riots in the 1960s, political in at least a general sense, were widely perceived as acts by black people on the left. Unlike the largest urban riot in American history, the New York Draft Riot of 1863 which manifested overt pro-slavery, pro-Confederate and anti-black racist aims.
And some organized lelft groups undertook violent actions with political motivations in the 1960s and 1970s, of which the Weather Underground, the Black Guerrilla Army and the bizarre Symbionese Liberation Army are some of the best know. The Black Panthers advocated "armed struggle," though in theory and largely in practice they emphasized their right to exercise defensive violence against abusive authorities. The Black Panther Party's 10-point program of 1966 included, "We believe we can end police brutality in our Black community by organizing Black self-defense groups that are dedicated to defending our Black community from racist police oppression and brutality. The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States gives a right to bear arms. We therefore believe that all Black people should arm themselves for self-defense."
Given the success of the firearms lobby in loosening gun laws in recent years and in enacting "stand-your-ground" laws that make it easier for people to legally get away with murder, and the way in which gun proliferation advocates emphatically argue that people in the US in the present day need to keep firearms to defend themselves against tyrannical government, it may seem weird that during the 1940s and 1950s, people associated with the American Communist Party were arrested, prosecuted, deported and imprisoned for advocating the overthrow of the US government by "force and violence."
Actually, the US Communist Party of that period, like the German Social Democratic Party supported by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels during their lifetimes, advocated taking power via electoral means with the determination to use legitimate government police power to suppress any attempt at a violent revolution against any such duly elected left government. A series of Supreme Court decisions related to such cases drew clear distinctions between talking about the violent overthrow of the government in the abstract and advocating and preparing for immediate action toward that end, including Schneiderman v. United States (1943), Yates v. United States (1957), and Noto v. United States (1961).
Do I even need to mention that the evidence against the defendants in those cases was far less serious than what the Bundy Ranch crowd did in 2014? (Julie Turkenwitz, No Guilty Verdicts in Bundy Ranch Standoff TrialNew York Times 08/22/2017)
The question of political violence and "armed struggle" was heavily influenced in the 1960s by the dispute between the Soviet Union and China over the national liberation movements of the time. The Second World War was followed not only by the victory of Mao Zedong's Communists in China but massive decolonization in Asia and Africa. The independence movement in India and the successful violent revolt in Algeria against French control made a huge impression on European publics. The USSR and China had a major division in the late 1950s over various issues, not the least of them Mao's seeming indifference to the idea of a nuclear third world war. The two powers vied for influence among the emerging independent nations and among insurgent movements, with Vietnam being the most significant because of the US military intervention there.
One upshot of this was that Mao and his partisans insisted that "armed struggle" was always necessary to establish the goal of socialism, while the Soviets stressed that a "peaceful transition to socialism" was possible and desirable in many places. In Latin America, the example of Cuba and the advocacy by Che Guevara for "one, two, many Vietnams" had a great deal of influence. Juan Perón encouraged a broad-based political resistance in Argentina, which included but was by no means limited to sabotage and guerrilla resistance. On the radical left in Western countries, that larger world environment heavily influenced the way in which political conflict was discussed. So a lot of elaborate arguments over the role of violence in politics were elaborated on the left. And while Western conservatives tried to use law-and-order rhetoric and policies in response to domestic unrest and guerrilla violence in other countries, the center-left walked a line between supporting reform and decolonization, on the one hand, and opposing social violence, on the other. In the United States, the Democratic Party was particularly split over the American Cold War policy of active counterrevolution in Vietnam and elsewhere (Brazil, Chile, Argentina, the Dominican Republic, Indonesia, etc.)
The violent Radical Right in the US in Recent Decades
The Patriot Militia movement of the 1990s was a significant development on the violent right. The Oklahoma City bombing of 1995 dramatically demonstrated how deadly the Radical Right could be in the United States. Bill Clinton's speech commemorating the dead in that attack is widely considered one of his finest moments as President. He delivered a message that aimed at comforting the victims and their families but also sought to deligitimize the far right cause as destructive and godless and something that should be taken seriously (Remarks at a Memorial Service for the Bombing Victims in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma 04/23/1995):
To all my fellow Americans beyond this hall, I say, one thing we owe those who have sacrificed is the duty to purge ourselves of the dark forces which gave rise to this evil. They are forces that threaten our common peace, our freedom, our way of life. Let us teach our children that the God of comfort is also the God of righteousness: Those who trouble their own house will inherit the wind. Justice will prevail.
Let us let our own children know that we will stand against the forces of fear. When there is talk of hatred, let us stand up and talk against it. When there is talk of violence, let us stand up and talk against it. In the face of death, let us honor life. As St. Paul admonished us, Let us "not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good."
Yesterday, Hillary and I had the privilege of speaking with some children of other federal employees -- children like those who were lost here. And one little girl said something we will never forget. She said, "We should all plant a tree in memory of the children." So this morning before we got on the plane to come here, at the White House, we planted that tree in honor of the children of Oklahoma. It was a dogwood with its wonderful spring flower and its deep, enduring roots. It embodies the lesson of the Psalms -- that the life of a good person is like a tree whose leaf does not wither.
Deborah Lauter and Mark Pitcavage recall the federal response in the following years in a 2015 retrospective (Homegrown extremist threat remains 20 years after Oklahoma City bombing CNN 04/19/2015):
The attack's aftermath saw a storm of media coverage with themes such as "attack on the heartland" and America's "lost innocence." In fact, the bombing took the country by surprise. It wasn't simply the scale of the tragedy that drew attention, but the fact that the bombing exposed something new: American citizens targeting their own government with a deadliness hitherto unseen.
The public became aware of the true danger of the extreme right. Reports connected McVeigh and his accomplice Terry Nichols to anti-government ideology movements, such as the militia movement, as well as to white supremacist causes.
Law enforcement also played catchup. The Federal Bureau of Investigation's 1994 annual report on terrorism had given short shrift to the extreme right. Its coverage of domestic terrorism focused on the activities of Puerto Rican radicals and animal rights and environmental extremists.
In contrast, the report spent only a paragraph describing the threat from right-wing extremists. It ignored the rapidly growing militia and sovereign citizen movements ...
When it comes to domestic terrorism, federal officials have too often been blind in the right eye.
After Oklahoma City, everything changed. The FBI shifted its priorities, hiring new agents and reassigning staff to work on domestic terrorism cases. It significantly expanded the number of Joint Terrorism Task Forces and went to Congress with a lengthy "want" list.
The effort actually paid off. Increased scrutiny of right-wing extremists resulted in a flurry of arrests for everything from terrorist plots to hate crimes. Though it had paid a high price to do so, it seemed that the United States had recognized the dangers that right-wing extremists posed.
Since the 9/11 attacks in 2001 and with the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen, Muslim terrorism has become a bigger concern compared more secular ideological ones. But in the US, domestic far-right terrorists have been more responsible for more terror attacks than Muslim extremists since 2001. We should be careful about the distinctions we're making, though. Muslim extremist terrorist are generally hard right theocrats in their politics. And many American far-right groups are heavily influenced by radical right Christian ideas, often stemming in some way from the Christian Identity movement.
Daryl Johnson was with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) when Obama became President. He was warning then about the growing danger of far-right terrorism, as he describes in I warned of right-wing violence in 2009. Republicans objected. I was right.Washington Post 08/21/2017:
Eight years ago, I warned of a singular threat — the resurgence of right-wing extremist activity and associated violence in the United States as a result of the 2008 presidential election, the financial crisis and the stock market crash. My intelligence report, meant only for law enforcement, was leaked by conservative media.
A political backlash ensued because of an objection to the label “right-wing extremism.” The report also rightly pointed out that returning military veterans may be targeted for recruitment by extremists. Republican lawmakers demanded then-Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano rescind my report. The American Legion formally requested an apology to veterans. Some in Congress called for me to be fired. Amid the turmoil, my warning went unheeded by Republicans and Democrats. Unfortunately, the Department of Homeland Security caved to the political pressure: Work related to violent right-wing extremism was halted. Law enforcement training also stopped. My unit was disbanded. And, one-by-one, my team of analysts left for other employment. By 2010, there were no intelligence analysts at DHS working domestic terrorism threats. [internal links from original not included]
Johnson also appeared in a Netroots Nation panel earlier this month which Dave Neiwert organized: The White Face of Domestic Terrorism: How Islamophobia Distorts the Reality of Terrorist Violence in America 08/12/2017 (scroll down to locate at the link). He expands on the subject and recent developments in that talk. As it happened, this panel started a few minutes after the news broke about the fatal attack that killed Heather Heyer in Charlottesville.
Both Sides Do It?
With Trump and his loyal followers now holding up the "antifa" protesters as justification for far right violence, it was inevitable that we would start to see more media coverage of them. "Antifa" is a word taken from German, a short form of "anti-fascist." German and Austrian protesters against the far right have been known by that name for years. The name is used as a generic term. It's not a reference to any party or any particular political program or ideology other than activist opposition to the far right. Though Trump in his Phoenix campaign speech Tuesday used it in a way that may soon become another Republican cuss word for Mean Libruls. Cenk Uygur notes just after 3:20 that Trump used "An-TI-fa" as a carnival barker type call (Trumpamania Running Wild In Phoenix, Brotherrr!The Young Turks 08/23/2017):
Michael Shure and Nomiki Konst in that segment also note that Trump's supporters listening to the speech were probably not familiar with the term "antifa" yet. Which is why it could now morph into another Republican version of Mean Libruls.
Before we get into Republican and liberal-concern-troll versions, it's worth taking a look at Dahlia Lithwick's column in which she quotes participants in the pro-democracy counter-protests in Charlottesville describing how some protesters defended others from attacks by the white supremacist/KKK/Nazi goons, Yes, What About the “Alt-Left”?Slate 08/16/2017. One Charlottesville resident relates:
I stood with a group of interfaith clergy and other people of faith in a nonviolent direct action meant to keep the white nationalists from entering the park to their hate rally. We had far fewer people holding the line than we had hoped for, and frankly, it wasn’t enough. No police officers in sight (that I could see from where I stood), and we were prepared to be beaten to a bloody pulp to show that while the state permitted white nationalists to rally in hate, in the many names of God, we did not. But we didn’t have to because the anarchists and anti-fascists got to them before they could get to us. I’ve never felt more grateful and more ashamed at the same time. The antifa were like angels to me in that moment.
A minister gives this description:
Out of my faith calling, I feel led to pursue disciplined, nonviolent direct action and witness. I helped lead a group of clergy who were trained and committed to the same work: to hold space on the frontline of the park where the rally was to be held. And then some of us tried to take the steps to one of the entrances. God is not OK with white supremacy, and God is on the side of all those it tries to dehumanize. We feel a responsibility to visibly, bodily show our solidarity with the oppressed and marginalized.
A phalanx of neo-Nazis shoved right through our human wall with 3-foot-wide wooden shields, screaming and spitting homophobic slurs and obscenities at us. It was then that antifa stepped in to thwart them. They have their tools to achieve their purposes, and they are not ones I will personally use, but let me stress that our purposes were the same: block this violent tide and do not let it take the pedestal.
The white supremacists did not blink at violently plowing right through clergy, all of us dressed in full clerical garb. White supremacy is violence. I didn’t see any racial justice protesters with weapons; as for antifa, anything they brought I would only categorize as community defense tools and nothing more. Pretty much everyone I talk to agrees—including most clergy. My strong stance is that the weapon is and was white supremacy, and the white supremacists intentionally brought weapons to instigate violence.
It's helpful to look at accounts like these of the particulars in the protest events. They involve specific decisions about risks and assessments of danger in a given moment. Organizers have a responsibility to be clear with participants about known risks, especially in cases like those the minister describes in which violence against the participants is anticipated. The same is true of "antifa" groups who plan to defend other protesters against violence from armed militants. That risks includes the reality that police and prosecutors often are "blind in the right eye" in such situations and may accuse them of crimes for even purely defensive actions.
It's important to remember that there's nothing wrong with protecting someone against acts of violence. And there's nothing wrong with defending oneself from a violent attack. The kind of Ghandian militant pacifist resistance described by the minister is a particular kind of strategy in given situations. Taking such an approach may not involve a purely pacifist outlook. And even the few people who are genuine pacifists would generally not consider personal self-defense in the face of a violent attack to be wrong in all circumstances.
It's also a well-established tradition on the center-left to take any and all opportunities to distinguish themselves from the dirty hippies who actually organize and demonstrate for progressive causes and against reactionary ones. Good liberals are supposed to be polite and not ruffle too many feathers. It was such liberals that Martin Luther King, Jr. addressed in his Letter From Birmingham Jail.
Those responses sometimes spill blood. Since antifa is heavily composed of anarchists, its activists place little faith in the state, which they consider complicit in fascism and racism. They prefer direct action: They pressure venues to deny white supremacists space to meet. They pressure employers to fire them and landlords to evict them. And when people they deem racists and fascists manage to assemble, antifa’s partisans try to break up their gatherings, including by force.
Such tactics have elicited substantial support from the mainstream left. When the masked antifa activist was filmed assaulting Spencer on Inauguration Day, another piece in The Nation described his punch as an act of “kinetic beauty.” Slate ran an approving article about a humorous piano ballad that glorified the assault. Twitter was inundated with viral versions of the video set to different songs, prompting the former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau to tweet, “I don’t care how many different songs you set Richard Spencer being punched to, I’ll laugh at every one.”
The violence is not directed only at avowed racists like Spencer: In June of last year, demonstrators—at least some of whom were associated with antifa—punched and threw eggs at people exiting a Trump rally in San Jose, California. An article in It’s Going Down celebrated the “righteous beatings.”
Yes, even-the-liberal Peter Beinart agrees with Trump that "antifa" is a danger to good Christian white folks!
Anarchists are know for being an unruly bunch, though stereotyping them as particularly inclined to violence would be unrealistic and unfair. And the press is known for carelessly labeling people "anarchists" who may not identify themselves that way at all. That said, I've never had a particularly high regard for the group (or groups) of anarchists who show up in the San Francisco Bay Area to protests wearing black masks and displaying a penchant for fighting, throwing rocks through windows and minor arson. As I recall, I first noticed them in Oakland during some protest during the oughts. They didn't seem to have any distinct or coherent message. And one of my first thoughts was, masked people who show up out of nowhere to commit vandalism during protests: a perfect vehicle for official and unofficial provocateurs. A group like that strikes me an extremely likely target for police or homeland security agents seeking to entrap people in "terrorist" plots.
But nothing is safer for pundits and liberal concern-trolls than "both sides do it!" And Beinart happily goes there:
A similar cycle has played out at UC Berkeley. In February, masked antifascists broke store windows and hurled Molotov cocktails and rocks at police during a rally against the planned speech by Yiannopoulos. After the university canceled the speech out of what it called “concern for public safety,” white nationalists announced a “March on Berkeley” in support of “free speech.” At that rally, a 41-year-old man named Kyle Chapman, who was wearing a baseball helmet, ski goggles, shin guards, and a mask, smashed an antifa activist over the head with a wooden post. Suddenly, Trump supporters had a viral video of their own. A far-right crowdfunding site soon raised more than $80,000 for Chapman’s legal defense. (In January, the same site had offered a substantial reward for the identity of the antifascist who had punched Spencer.) A politicized fight culture is emerging, fueled by cheerleaders on both sides. [my emphasis]
Yes, who can argue with that? On one side, we have white supremacist militants being actively encouraged and incited by the President of the United States. On the other, there are some masked anarchists with zero actual political influence. Both Sides Do It!
I won't try to fact-check all the claims in Beinart's piece. I'll just note here that he doesn't always make it clear just who is doing the violence in incidents for which he blames antifa.
I don't want to encourage people to break windows just for the heck of it. But it's probably time to recall the discussion in "the Sixties" in the US and Germany and presumably other places as well about the difference between "violence against things" and "violence against people." Yes, it's very rude, against the law and probably unnecessary in nearly all cases to toss a rock through the window of a Walgreens. But neither the law nor any sane system of values considers breaking a store window as morally or practically equivalent to deliberately ramming a group of people with a car. The latter, we should note, being a practice that Republicans in several state legislatures are attempting to decriminalize.
The editorial board of the Wall Street Journal got into the act earlier in August with A Berkeley ‘Escape Hatch’ 08/09/2017 with a snotty editorial about UC-Berkeley not taking a more law-and-order approach toward protesters. That was one of St. Reagan's favorite themes in his successful first campaign for California Governor in 1966.
Michelle Goldberg takes a more sober approach to reporting on what the antifa movement is all about The Public Face of AntifaSlate 08/22/2017:
After the riot in Charlottesville ... antifa is suddenly making headlines. The term antifa refers to a loose network of militant left-wing activists who physically square off against the far right, and often try to prevent those they deem fascists from speaking publicly. Antifa is sometimes used as a synonym for black bloc anarchists — the scruffy kids in black bandanas or balaclavas known for smashing Starbucks windows — but while the movements overlap, they’re not identical. ... The movement appears to be growing rapidly under Trump, though it’s impossible to put hard numbers to it; there are no membership rolls.
Michelle's article is a good overview that tries to deal seriously with the practical situation presented by aggressive white supremacist demonstrations. I'm impressed that she avoids any kind of simplistic "both sides do it" false equivalence. She's not doing the kind of liberal concern-troll criticism that Peter Beinart presents.
