From Three Way Fight:
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.”
Continue reading here…
January 29th, 2011 | admin
Copenhagen, Wednesday, February 16, 7-10 pm
Politicians, ordinary citizens and some activists like to talk about “us” and “our nation”. They talk about the unquestionable benefit of community and the necessity to make sacrifices for it. Using the nation as justification seems to be so self-evident that almost every political tendency does it: bankers are critiqued for putting themselves before the community, students remind the government how useful they are for the nation and right-wingers have a very principal suspicion that everybody else aims to undermine the nation.
We want to discuss how, in a society where the pursuit of one’s own self-interest is a necessity and encouraged, people galore arrive at the conclusion that their nation deserves appreciation and sacrifice. We also want to discuss why this nationalistic conclusion is a bad one.
The talk and discussion will be held in English.
Organised by: Arbejde og Rigdom, Copenhagen
January 24th, 2011 | admin
New York — Today, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) issued a written appeal to Fox News president Roger Ailes to help put a stop to the increasing threats against progressive Professor Frances Fox Piven, largely incited by Fox News host Glenn Beck. In the letter, co-written by Legal Director Bill Quigley and Executive Director Vince Warren, the CCR asks that Ailes distinguish between First Amendment rights, of which they are “vigorous defenders” and an “intentional repetition of provocative, incendiary, emotional misinformation and falsehoods [that place that person] in actual physical danger of a violent response.”
Beginning in September of 2010, Glenn Beck started branding Piven, a distinguished professor of Political Science and Sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, as an “enemy of the Constitution.” Piven, well known for advocating for the organizational rights of the poor and encouraging voter registration, has since received threatening phone calls and letters, and has become the subject of many death threats left open to the public on Glenn Beck’s website, The Blaze.
Read more: http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2011/ccr210111.html
January 9th, 2011 | admin
We do not yet know what prompted 22-year-old accused gunman Jared Loughner to allegedly shoot Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) and others, including a child and federal judge who died from their wounds.
But critics of Sarah Palin have already drawn a link between the shooting and the fact that the former Alaska governor put Giffords on a “target list” of lawmakers Palin wanted to see unseated in the midterm elections.
In March, Palin released a map featuring 20 House Democrats that used crosshairs images to show their districts. (You can see it here.) Critics suggested at the time that she was inciting violence by using the crosshairs imagery and for later writing on Twitter to her supporters, “‘Don’t Retreat, Instead – RELOAD!’”
Continue reading at CBS.
Update: On Jared Lee Loughner’s links to far-Right group “American Renaissance” here: “American Renaissance: Was Jared Lee Loughner tied to anti-immigrant group?”
Update 01.12: Chip Berlet on “The Becking of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords” on Democracy Now and Possible Racist and Anti-Immigrant Tie to Alleged Arizona Assassin.
Gabrielle Giffords: Tea Party Target
Update: Sarah Palin responds: “Critics Blaming Political Right for Shootings Commit ‘Blood Libel’”
U.S. Jewish leaders slam Sarah Palin’s blood libel accusation
The mainstream tolerance of right-wing extremism
Update: Chip Berlet: “Sarah Palin, the “Blood Libel,” and Jewish Democrats in the Crosshairs”
October 20th, 2010 | admin
Nov. 11, 2010. London.
By the Wine and Cheese Appreciation Society.
The worker’s movement usually considered antisemitism to be the socialism of the fool or a shortened critique of capitalism. On the contrary, we hold that antisemitism is a critique from a nationalist point of view. Antisemitism therefore is not “too short”, but is at odds with a reasonable critique of capitalist social relations.
Antisemites blame Jews for phenomena they consider to be destructive. For instance, they hold that national policies were not made in the service of the citizens, but bent according to “the Jewish will”. With respect to the economy, especially in finance, Jews are denounced with profiteering more than others and doing so without “honest labour” – again to the detriment of everyone else. Furthermore, Jews are accused of dominating culture with “their money” and seducing people into disregarding proper art in favour of “superficial art”.
We want to discuss how these accusations relate to the capitalist world organised in nation states. We want to show that antisemitism is not half a critique, but an ideology hostile towards the abolition of exploitation and domination.
Guest post by Watching the Detectives
One of the more interesting aspects of Anti-semitism is how it often tries to hide itself. For example, some writers like to proclaim things taken directly from the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ while, at the same time, denying that they are Anti-semitic.
Infoshop.org, one of the most popular anarchist websites, has a different take on things: when comments by its registered readers argue that an article is Anti-semitic and it should be removed, the site instead deletes the ability to comment from the article altogether.
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In a debate in the Platypus Review Jerzy Sobotta outline’s “nationalism’s transformation from an emancipatory bourgeois ideology into a civilizational cataclysm.” Here: “On nationalism:
An anti-fascist intervention.” It is a reply to a reply to Sobotta’s original text (Rosa Luxemburg’s corpse: The stench of decay on the German Left, 1932–2009) in the Review, which although extremely short and overly simplistic, covers some of the antisemitic incidents that the German Left, namely the Red Army Faction, participated in in previous decades. Check out Sobotta’s text “On Nationalism.” It’s worth a read!
Nationalism was originally a liberal project advanced by revolutionaries. A democratic nation-state promised the third estate political empowerment and the legal protection of the individual. The creation of the nation was the project of an oppressed majority and constituted its attempt for political emancipation. The 18th and early 19th century liberal nation-states created the foundation for the advancement of capitalism, the mode of production that started to emerge in the previous centuries and which revolutionized the social forms of all of society. As a result, the abstraction and individuation of people changed the way that individuals encountered each other from then on: as legal subjects.
Created as an expression of freedom, bourgeois subjectivity, however, soon encountered its limitations as capitalism itself progressed. The mechanisms of social domination embedded in the economic system bypassed the individual liberties the revolutionaries had fought for. In the first crises of the early 19th century it became obvious that the rules the economy followed were not controlled by a group of people, although they were put in place and constantly reproduced by human beings themselves. Industrialization and the emergence of the working class rendered bourgeois freedom formal at best. Their grim lives and brutal working conditions revealed the coercive character of this social system and the freedom of which it boasted. From the standpoint of the proletariat, as Georg Lukács pointed out in the twenties, it was possible to grasp the inherent antinomies of bourgeois thought and to formulate a practical answer to the problem of capitalism: revolutionary social transformation. With the proletariat established as a class, bourgeois freedom was to be clarified: In Marx’s formula, “the free development of each (must become) the condition for the free development of all.” This could only mean the proletariat seizing power in order to abolish its own existence as a class and with it the capitalist social order.
The contradictions between the bourgeoisie and the working class surfaced in the revolutionary attempts of 1848 which took place, as Leon Trotsky wrote, in one way “too early and in another too late. That gigantic exertion of strength which is necessary for bourgeois society to settle radically with the lords of the past can only be attained either by the power of a unanimous nation rising against feudal despotism, or by the mighty development of the class struggle within this nation striving to emancipate itself.”[3] The bourgeoisie, at that point, experienced an internal friction: while it needed the workers’ support, it was afraid to lose the privileges it already gained. It gave up on the revolution and turned its back on the struggling workers. The proletariat, however, was not yet fully developed as a class. It lacked the organization and experience necessary to carry out the revolution on its own. The outcome of the failure of the Revolution of 1848 was the disintegration of bourgeois liberalism as an emancipatory ideology—and with it, the nation-state as an emancipatory project. As Marx recognized clearly in Louis Bonaparte’s France, nationalism had become a project of the Right. The year 1871 reveals this disintegration of liberal nationalism in two world historical events. The first is Bismarck’s reactionary unification of Germany under Prussian aristocratic supremacy. The second is the Paris Commune, in which the newly emerged working class was able to organize itself as a political force and attempted to seize political power. Both mark, once and for all, the decay of bourgeois ideology as a vehicle for emancipation. It had degenerated into a counterrevolutionary force that stood in the way of any further advancement of human freedom.
The following decades of classical imperialism are the geopolitical and national counterparts of this ideological regression. The nation-state could no longer serve as the site for the advancement of liberal freedom, but could only be critically assessed as a catalyst for the capitalization of backward countries, a necessary evil for the development of the proletariat that inherits the emancipatory potential.
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Excerpt from Democracy and Nature:
One of the most vexing questions that the Left faces (however one may define the Left) is the role played by nationalism in social development and by popular demands for cultural identity and political sovereignty. For the Left of the nineteenth century, nationalism was seen primarily as a European issue, involving the consolidation of nation-states in the heartland of capitalism. Only secondarily, if at all, was it seen as the anti-imperialist and presumably anticapitalist struggle that it was to become in the twentieth century.
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By the Anarchist Federation. Full text here.
Preface
This pamphlet has its origins in a particular time and place, with the impetus behind it coming from the Israeli state’s military campaign in the Gaza strip in late 2008 and early 2009. As the record of atrocities and the death toll mounted, coming to a final stop at around 1,500 dead, large protests took place around the world, with a significant protest movement developing in Britain. This movement took the form of regular street protests in cities, a wave of 28 university occupations around the country and occasional attacks against companies supposedly implicated in the war. There were also, depressingly, actions with clear anti-Semitic overtones.
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Some interesting quotes from the GDR, regarding the positive orientation towards national thinking and it’s role amongst some of the leading communists and policy decisions. In his “On the Character of Hitler-Fascism,” Walter Ulbricht (head of the Communist Party, the Socialist Unity Party, and later the GDR) wrote:
“The fascist rule, which called itself ‘national’ and ‘socialist’, was neither one nor the other” (From “The Fascist German Imperialism.” 1952.).
Meaning, Nazism was not the correct form of nationalism? German fascism was, as Ulbricht explains by recalling the official definition, “the open rule of terror of the most reactionary, chauvinistic, imperialistic elements of German finance capital” (ibid). That is, it was a reactionary movement which was used by the “monopoly capitalists” to preserve and advance their interests by “terroristic” means. In this definition, the nationalist character of German fascism falls away, giving the impression that National Socialism was not really a popular party across the broad spectrum of the population, nor did it speak to nor reflect the population’s desires nor actions. National Socialism, we are told, had nothing to do with Germans. The GDR sought not only to build a socialist society, but also a correctly nationalist one?
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