See the second review, about halfway down--
from the site :
NorthwestCitizen
The Radical Center and the Outer Limits
Fri, Nov 20, 2009,
Did you every wonder what was really going on
inside the racist right?
Usually caricatured by stereotypes of bed-sheeted
Klansmen and goose-stepping neo-Nazis, the racist right
continually flashes across the political landscape as
disconnected scenes illuminated by lighting flashes of
intolerance, hatred and violence. The Oklahoma City bombing
took the nation by surprise, but the lead up to it had been
playing in the media for nearly a year as a circus of marginal
eccentrics playing soldier in the woods in cammo underwear.
Then suddenly this amusing circus of nut jobs spawned the
largest terrorist mass murder in American history. Pat
Buchannan's presidential campaign seemed like a minor sideshow
of marginal eccentrics and racial nationalists until it
collapsed in splinters by nominating a black woman for vice
president. The resulting upheaval tossed a sizable chunk of
the electorate back into the Republican camp and solidified a
Republican majority to elect George W. Bush to the presidency.
These are only two of the political shocks delivered by the
racist right in the last fifty years. They seem to be always
capable of springing new surprises.
If you want to understand this important sector of the
American political landscape, you will get satisfaction
from the recent release of Leonard Zeskind's book, Blood
and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement
from the Margins to the Mainstream. Lenny spent 15 years
working on a history of the extreme racist right in America.
Among political researchers, this book has been eagerly
anticipated for a long time. I went down to Seattle a couple
of weeks ago to see Leonard Zeskind present his newly
published book at a kickoff party for the new Seattle office
of the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights.
IREHR was founded by Zeskind to combat the worst excesses of
racial extremism. It works by a combination of research,
education, advocacy and organizing. It is one of the premier
models for analytic research as the driving engine for
effective social change. The research effort does not sit
around reading books in libraries. They get much of their
knowledge by getting right into the mix at the field level.
This includes attending extremist gatherings and conventions
to see what is happening at first hand.
The network of pro-democracy researchers who were way out in
front of the wave of domestic terrorism in the 1990s depended
heavily on Zeskind's earlier work in establishing several
research organizations throughout the country. Zeskind's
pioneering work in this area was recognized by the award of a
MacArthur fellowship, the so-called "genius grants."
The research network in the 1990s was very small, growing
from about a dozen in early 1994 and numbering less than two
hundred people at the peak. I was lucky to be able to play a
small role in that network and got to know and respect Lenny
and many of the other key players. The research meetings were
sometimes knock down, drag out affairs, because we knew we
were playing for high stakes. Three meetings in Bellingham,
Issaquah and Portland in 1994-5 brought together the best
minds to confront that problem.
The Issaquah meeting in January 1995, anticipated the Oklahoma
City bombing and made efforts to head off the rising violence
during that period. The majority of the information about the
militia movement made public in the wake of the Oklahoma City
bombing came through that small research network and its
efforts over the preceding 18 months. It was during the late
1990s that we began hearing about Lenny working on a
comprehensive history based on his original and extensive
research.
Zeskind's analytic framework in Blood and Politics contrasts
the parts played by Willis Carto, founder of the Liberty Lobby
and publisher of The Spotlight, with William Pierce,
founder of the National Vanguard and author of The Turner
Diaries and Hunter. The Diaries were
played out in real life by Robert Mathews and The Order, while
Hunter inspired Timothy McVeigh and other "lone wolf"
terrorists.
In a nutshell, Carto was a "mainstreamer" who wanted to
influence the political establishment and Pierce was a
revolutionary who wanted to violently destroy American civil
society. Both were unreconstructed fascists, holocaust deniers
and disciples of Adolf Hitler. This mainstream/revolutionary
framework is very useful in understanding some of what has
been going on over the last fifty years.
Because of his sharp focus on these two aspects in particular,
Zeskind doesn't deal with the entire American racist right,
much less the American right as a whole. The extremist
convergence in the 1990s that produced the militias and
anti-abortion terrorism involved other movements that neither
Carto nor Pierce were directly involved with, so this is a
weak spot in the book. It may be partly due to Lenny's
deference to his good friend and long-time colleague, Daniel
Levitas. Danny wrote the definitive history on the evolution
of the Christian Patriots (aka Posse Comitatus and "militia
movement"): The Terrorist Next Door: The Militia Movement
and the Radical Right.
But the mainstream/revolutionary axis of white nationalism has
never before been explained in such detail. The level of
inside information and the precision of the chronology makes Blood
and Politics both a gripping read and an immensely
valuable tool for understanding a lot of the events on the
extreme right in the last half century. It is comprehensive
and minutely detailed. If you've ever wondered what was up
with The Spotlight newspaper, skinhead rock, Jack
Metcalf's participation in extremist politics, the presence of
neo-nazis in Pat Buchanan's presidential campaign or a host of
other puzzling details, Blood and Politics lays it
down and spells it out.
If, like most people, you heard about this in a vague and
second-hand way, this book will shake you up.
I'm currently re-reading Donald Warren's The
Radical Center: Middle Americans and the Politics of
Alienation. It's a sociological study
done in the mid-1970s and deals with the ideology of
reactionary individualism. I'll be having more to say about
this in the future. About fifteen years ago, I read The
Radical Center on the recommendation of Devin Burghart,
one of Lenny's colleagues who lived in Bellingham for a few
years. The Radical Center was used by Sam Francis and
others associated with American Renaissance to map out a
strategy of white nationalism in the 1990s.
The central thesis of The Radical Center is there is a
sizable chunk of white middle America that is intensely
alienated from most institutions and political parties. These
are the people who backed George Wallace, formed the core of
the Goldwater movement, provided a lot of the troops for Ross
Perot, Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul when those demagogues tried
to carve off the right wing of the Republican Party. They also
formed the core of the "property rights" movement in the 1990s
and continue to play a large role in Second Amendment
politics, anti-immigrant agitation and extremist tax protests.
Most recently, they have adopted a new political guise as the
Tea Party.
Warren's book perceptively argues that much of the framework
for evaluating middle-class reaction is mistaken and that one
has to comprehend the ideology and culture in order to
understand the rejection of institutions in favor of
individualism by that portion of America. All too often, what
passes for political research is just name-calling. It's a
practice that doesn't enlighten anybody, nor lead to effective
means of confronting social and political conflicts. Warren is
perceptive, sympathetic and critical of the group he call
Middle American Radicals. The studies that form the basis of
the book were done in the middle 1970's, but found a deep vein
of social unrest that continues to be very influential in
contemporary American politics.
Lenny's book traces many of the memes again floating to the
surface with the Tea Party to an effort by the Carto
faction to "mainstream" racial nationalism. Very few of the
people who embrace these views today understand how the
underlying ideas were produced and transmitted. In the the
section of Blood and Politics dealing with the Middle
American Radical thesis, Zeskind details how Donald Warren's
work was adapted by the Carto faction to generate a new
strategy of mainstreaming white nationalism by rejecting the
traditional emphasis on crude race-baiting and anti-Semitism.
This strategy of specifically targeting the radical center has
successfully percolated through the American political scene.
It is the initial impetus for the emerging debate on what it
means to be an American. At the core, it is an attempt to
fracture America along racial/cultural lines. The current
furor among the "birthers," immigration reactionaries, and
people who seek the repeal of the 14th Amendment is the
slightly cleaned up work product of hard core racialists.
I'm reasonably certain a lot of people orbiting around the Tea
Party would reject many of these notions if they were
presented in their original form and context. But as the rough
edges get smoothed off of the ideology, what was originally
the propaganda of racial extremists can look like a critique
of political society that explains some of the tensions and
dissatisfactions that beset the right wing of American
politics.
Blood and Politics follows the political careers of two
right-wing racial radicals through the entire arc of their
lives. Both Carto and Pierce are now dead. The portion of the
political margins these two men shaped during their lifetimes
will now take on a different aspect as new leadership emerges
in the future to fill the vacuum left by their presence.
Knowing where they are going depends very much on
understanding where they have been.
For anyone interested in the deep currents that shaped this
uncivil sector of American politics, I can't recommend Lenny's
book too highly. It's an attention grabbing,
keep-you-up-at-night political thriller.
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