contested terrain

Liberalism’s Limits: A review of Burghart and Zeskind’s Tea Party Nationalism
by Matthew N. Lyons

The Tea Party movement erupted largely as a backlash against Barack Obama’s election as president. Starting in February 2009, a series of local and then national protests invoked the anti-tax Boston Tea Party that foreshadowed the American Revolution. They denounced Obama and other Democratic leaders for promoting irresponsible government spending, high taxes, and government intrusion into people’s lives. A loose-knit network of Tea Party organizations quickly came together, oriented toward the right wing of the Republican Party. The new movement was fueled by anger at big government but also, as many liberals and leftists pointed out, anger at the election of the first black president of the United States, who was vilified on some Tea Party signs as an African witch doctor, a Muslim foreigner, or a monkey. Despite Tea Partiers’ denials, their movement was very much about race.

The October 2010 exposé Tea Party Nationalism represents both the strengths and the weaknesses of liberal anti-racism. The report offers valuable information about widespread racist tendencies within the Tea Party and how these tendencies relate to the movement’s origins, structure, and factional differences. But in focusing on Tea Partiers’ ties with white nationalist and Patriot/militia politics, the report presents racism as an ideology associated mainly with the political fringe – not as a core structural feature of U.S. society.

Tea Party Nationalism: A Critical Examination of the Tea Party Movement and the Size, Scope, and Focus of Its National Factions was written by Devin Burghart and Leonard Zeskind of the Kansas City-based Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights (IREHR). Both Burghart and Zeskind have been studying and writing about white nationalism and related right-wing movements for many years. Zeskind, a 1998 MacArthur fellow, is also the author of the 2009 book Blood and Politics: The History of White Nationalism from the Margins to the Mainstream.

The report Tea Party Nationalism was published by the NAACP, which three months earlier had publicly called on Tea Party leaders to repudiate racist elements within their movement’s ranks. In a Democracy Now! interview about the report, NAACP President Benjamin Jealous claimed that Tea Party groups had responded to NAACP pressure by throwing out one racist and one anti-gay bigot. “And we’re saying, ‘Good. Those are good first steps. Keep on going. You’ve got to clean house. If you do so, you won’t just make this country better, you’ll make your own Tea Party better.”

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Last November Platypus hosted a roundtable discussion between Alan Goodman from The Revolutionary Communist Party USA, and Richard Rubin from Platypus entitled “Marxism and Israel: Left Perspectives on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict” at Hunter College in New York City. Panelists were asked to speak on the role the Left has played in the development of Israel, the Left’s analysis of the role of American intervention in the Middle East, and what a critical Marxian approach to the conflict currently looks like, compared to what it might look like. What follows is an edited transcript of the event. Full audio of the event can be found at: <http://www.archive.org/details/MarxismAndIsraelLeftPerspectivesOnTheIsraeli-palestinianConflict>.

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“Richard Rubin: My esteemed teacher and friend, the late Eqbal Ahmad, who was himself a close friend of Edward Said, once remarked many years ago when speaking on the difficulty of addressing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, that the first thing one must bear in mind is that one is dealing with two communities of suffering. Furthermore, each is a symbolic representative victim of two great crimes. The Jews, although by no means the only victims of Fascism, are the archetypal victims of Fascism. The Palestinians, although by no means the only victims of colonialism, or even the worst victims, have also, like the Jews, with their particular fate, become the archetypal representative of a colonized people for many around the world. The intersection of these two communities of suffering leads to many pitfalls of discourse. I will not be addressing such issues here, however, and you must take my sympathy for all victims of oppression for granted. Rather I will address, as much as is honestly possible, the question of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Marxism. This is by no means a self-evident perspective, and it is one that is generally avoided even by professed Marxists who, when they speak on the issue, usually say things that are identical to what many non- and anti-Marxists say. So is there, then, a Marxist perspective on the Israel-Palestine conflict?

To begin to address this question, I will draw your attention to two articles that both purport to offer such a perspective, although they come to radically different conclusions. One is an article entitled “Bastion of Enlightenment or Enforcer for Imperialism?” that appeared recently in Revolution, the newspaper of the RCP USA, which we were just hearing about. The other is an article entitled “Israel and Communism” that appeared in the Platypus Review in issue 28, written by Initiative Sozialistisches Forum.3 The latter, which is a translation from a German article that appeared in 2003, will strike most American readers as by far the more exotic and strange of the two. Indeed, to many it will seem not a document pertaining to the Left at all, but rather a manifestation of neo-conservatism. The deep origins of the Antideutsch current, from which the “Israel and Communism” article is written, are in German Maoism. The article is premised on an acceptance of Marxist categories and written in a Marxist language close to jargon. While superficially the “Antideutsch” article and the Revolution article appear to be polar opposites, I would like to claim that they actually stem from a similar methodology and misconception of the Left”

Read the article here: Marxism and Israel: Left perspectives on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict