Well, I'll try.
Down below in the article.
David
"There is no virtue in compulsory government
charity, and
there is no virtue in advocating it. A politician who
portrays himself as
"caring" and "sensitive" because he wants to expand the
government's charitable programs is merely saying that he's
willing to try to
do good with other people's money. Well, who isn't? And a
voter who takes pride
in supporting such programs is telling us that he'll do good
with his own money
-- if a gun is held to his head."--P.
J. O'Rourke
On 8/25/2011 11:46 PM, [email protected] wrote:
David :
My guess is that you could write a damned good critique
of the article.
I know some people who are affiliated with nationalist
types, second order
affiliation, but nonetheless, hence one reason for my
interest. On a number
of specific points they come close to RC as we define it.
But then there's
the rest of their schtick, which is Mussolini
Lite, or maybe not so lite.
The point being that RC has a number of different
manifestations.
Just like many other political philosophies, we, too,
have our fringe.
However, given the bad vibes that Muslims inspire almost
anyplace they go.
which is more then a little understandable, the New
Right, which didn't exist
a decade or so ago, is now on the rise across the map
--at least in Europe,
and some locations here in the USA, Australia, &
Canada.
And, while my view of the Tea Party is that there are at
least two Tea Parties,
one socially conservative the other being fiscally
conservative, maybe a better number
is 3, the other being the hard-Right types the
article talks about. As part of the mix.
I can grant that possibility even if most of the TP is no
such thing. Still, maybe
you have a superior perspective.
So, what sense to make of this phenomenon is anything
but academic.
You know, today the beer hall, tomorrow the whole
brewery.
For one I'd like to read your take on the article, could
be a real eye-opener.
I know some relevant stuff, but there's a lot that is not
in my bag of tricks.
Will make a trade if you are up for the challenge. I will
get busy on the rejoinder to
Dawkins if you will do a critique. Well, maybe this is
cheating. I plan to write the
rejoinder anyway, but just saying........
Didn't get to the Dawkins piece because I wanted to pull
something together today
based on Ferguson, but that is out of the way and with
any luck I'll be able to
get to it soon enough.
Billy
====================================================
There's
more BS in this article than in one of Obama's speeches.
A real achievement.
:-)
These folks on crack or something???
David
"There
is no virtue in compulsory government charity, and
there is no virtue in advocating it. A politician
who portrays himself as "caring" and "sensitive"
because he wants to expand the government's
charitable programs is merely saying that he's
willing to try to do good with other people's
money. Well, who isn't? And a voter who takes
pride in supporting such programs is telling us
that he'll do good with his own money -- if a gun
is held to his head."--P.
J. O'Rourke
On 8/25/2011 10:29 AM, [email protected] wrote:
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.
DRB: Well, the history of the "racist right" is incomplete unless it
goes back to the civil war. The racist right started in the
Democratic Party. In many cases, it is still there. "But the Texas
statewide offices are all Republicans" would be an appropriate
comeback. True, one among them, Michael Williams, is black. He has
held statewide offices for many years as a Republican. One must
remember the words of LBJ after he signed the Civil Rights act back
in the 60s "I'll have those n****** voting Democratic for the next
100 years." And they are, for the most part. The KKK in their
original incarnation were white Democrats. The Oklahoma City bombing
was performed because it was thought that the Clinton Administration
had gone too far against the Branch Davidians (no relation) in Waco.
(More below)
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.
DRB: Of course it had been anticipated among political researchers
and political scientists. I haven't met one of those who was even
slightly right of center. Haven't met any who were only slightly
left of center either. So the book is widely accepted as
"confirmation bias" because it confirms what they thought they
already knew.
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.
DRB: Interesting. So why haven't these co-conspirators been brought
to trial? Don't tell me that the Clinton Administration would not
have been interested in indictments and trials. That I won't buy.
That would make the "Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy" actually, you know,
REAL, or something.
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.
DRB: On the very anniversary of the Waco fire that destroyed the
Branch Davidian (again, no relation) compound. These guys
continually ignore what the perpetrators have said their motivation
was and instead argue in favor of some sort of dark "conspiracy"
that has to do with race. Oddly enough, the Davidians and the
Oklahoma City perpetrators were ALL WHITE, as were most of the
workers in the Federal Building. Why wasn't the OKC bombing done in
a black neighborhood if race is the driving force behind it all??
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.
DRB: I call Godwin's law, they lose.
:-)
Seriously, anyone trying to mainstream Hitler is ready for the
rubber room. No sharp objects, etc.
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.
DRB: The Christian militia movement and the larger militia movement
have overlapping members. The Theonomic Neo-Postmillenialists are
more concerned with their beloved Calvinism than any noticeable
racism. They are only trying to help God and Jesus usher in the
Millennial Reign of Christ (never mind that God and Jesus don't NEED
their help) by taking over the world and reestablishing the Law of
Moses as the Law for the world. They think that they are helping to
usher paradise in. Race hasn't anything to do with that.
If, like most people, you heard about this in a
vague and second-hand way, this book will shake you
up.
DRB: Or make one think that the author is ready for a padded cell
himself.
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.
DRB: Whoa. Goldwater and Perot are demagogues??? Perot is an old guy
who has more money than he has sense, and I'm not going to speak ill
of the dead. Demagogue?? Even Paul supporters don't approach the
previous association with Hitler. Buchanan has never been my cup of
tea, but I'll leave that one alone. And here we go with the "racist
Tea Party" meme again. These folks are really predictable. Never
mind that black comedian Alfonzo Rachel was a keynote speaker at the
Dallas Tea Party. Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell were at others.
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.
DRB: Curiously enough, just about ALL of the racist signs at Tea
Party rallies are planted fakes. Most of the race-baiting is being
done by the left to provoke a reaction. Sometimes they get one,
other times they get folks looking at them as though they were nuts.
Which they are. Some of them have even gotten their signs torn up by
Tea Party attendees. It's real racist to tear up a racist sign. OH,
WAIT........ :-)
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.
DRB: I'll see his "birthers" and I'll raise him "09/11 truthers" and
"Trig Palin truthers" and "George W. Bush AWOL National Guard
service" liars (which cost the job of one Dan Rather). It seems to
me that the nutjobs are fairly evenly distributed, or maybe even
tilt the other way....
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.
DRB: And I am sure that there are a lot of people around the
Democratic Party who would reject the recent endorsement of Barack
Obama for reelection by the Communist Party USA, if they were shown
where the Democratic Party Platform coincides with the Communist
Party USA Platform.
--
Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community
<[email protected]>
Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism
Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org
--
Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]>
Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism
Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org
|
