I almost always agree with the fabulous Avedon and I certainly agree with her here that none of the rightwing crazy is new (a point she notes Bob Somerby also makes). But, IMO, it goes back much further than the 1990s or, hell even the 1970s. This goes back 300 or 400 years to before we were a nation and a bunch of rich white folks found themselves badly outnumbered by enslaved Africans and poor, white servants, who had much more in common with each other than they had with the rich white people who exploited them.* The only way to deal with the situation and ensure the rich stayed rich and everyone else stayed poor was to enact a series of authoritarian measures and inject a heavy dose of racism. Sound familiar?
Here we are 400 years later and the same shit is still going on and it still works. In part, because none of our leaders or the media, which is owned by corporate interests, has any incentive to stop it. Name one leader of the Democratic or Republican party who would be in power if the bottom 80% of the population united politically? There isn't one. They all - from McConnell to Reid, from Boehner to Obama - essentially represent wealthy corporate interests and not the interests of the people. They just hide it using different techniques.
And that's why the GOP continues to race bait even though it's a "losing" electoral strategy.** And that's why no matter what offensive thing some GOP senator says, the Dems will continue to treat that person as a respected part of the Village
. It's also why the Dems so often respond to the GOP crazy, not with sanity, but with classist bullshit that doesn't heal the divide, but only encourages it in a different way. Our leaders' primary interest - their joint claim on power over the rest of us - is the same and trumps everything else.
As for why the GOP sounds crazier right now, I suspect it has little to do with Obama's healthcare plans (which are a corporatist's wet dream) and more to do with the economy.*** We are in the midst of an economic meltdown that blows away the smokescreen covering at least 30 years of robbing from the poor to give to the rich. As a result, these are very dangerous times for our elite rulers. The anger of the poor and working class may get aimed in the right direction for a change. They can't have that. So we get even more crazy than usual.****
I should note that I don't think this is all a giant conspiracy in that a bunch of people sit in a room and decide on all of this. I think it's more simply that each person acts in his or her own interest and since so much of the elite has the same interest, these acts often end up reinforcing and complementing each other over time.
And, yes, all of this is a gross simplification and there are more factors at play, but sometimes I think it's helpful to step back from the day-to-day mudslinging and try to see the bigger picture. I'm also sure that I'll regret having posted this since usually anyone who brings up race is immediately assailed as a racist, which, if you think about it, is a terrific way to keep this entire dynamic working.
* Of course, they also found themselves on a continent with natives who were a constant threat. The trick was to play all three groups off of each other.
** None of which is to say there aren't genuine racist assholes in the GOP. Not surprisingly, an elite class who depends in part on racism to maintain its status ends up with a fair share of racists among it.
*** The economic meltdown may also explain, in part, Obama's apparent embrace of authoritarianism and his growing love of non-transparency.
**** Accompanied, of course, by the silencing of people who aren't crazy, like single payer advocates. Can't have anything that might unite the masses discussed seriously. That's seriously dangerous.
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"Joint claim on power"
I think that's a very important point. I remember the left rolling their eyes when the right talked about the scary socialist left, with their liberal media trying to take over the world for some "New World Order." Now we have the left saying very similar things about the right.
I think this exposes that the current party structure needs to rely on painting the enemy as evil and dangerous. This allows them to maintain power even though they continue to screw over the people. "Look at how scary *they* are. Who else are you gonna vote for?"
I reject this frame since it empowers those who are in power. For every Correntian who talks about the danger of the right's ploys, you have at least as many on the right saying the same thing. This weekend I saw a sign comparing Obama to Hitler. Then I come here and see Correntians in thousand word treatises comparing the right's tactics to, well, you know...
Four Hundred Years?!
In 1609 there was just barely a Jamestown settlement, and Henry Hudson was exploring up the river. Manhattan (and large hunks of Connecticut and New Jersey) was run by the Lenni Lenape (check out this very cool National Geographic photo-reconstruction)
Most of these very early European settlers who did manage to make it to North America in the 1600s were low on the economic totem pole themselves--why else risk death to come over? (and death was mostly what happened to these people, either on the way over or soon after they arrived.)
Three hundred years is probably a better time frame for your argument.
Yes, 400 years (or close to it)
I was going by the date slaves were introduced into the United States, which was 1619. I grant you that's ten years shy of 400 years ago. And during the decade before that indentured white servants started arriving.
"Do what you feel in your heart to be right -- for you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be damned if you do, and damned if you don't. " - Eleanor Roosevelt
400 years
"First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win." -- Mahatma Gandhi
MsExPat has a point
Throughout most of colonial American history the dynamics of class, race, gender, religion and, of course, nobility played out differently than they did after the Revolution.
That said, I am in agreement with your post and I hope I'll have time to add a long comment here before the thread grows stale.
(I'm not familiar with this source but the text is along the lines of what I wanted to paste here:
I Look Forward To It, CMike
And I agree that Colonial times were different in many ways, including that all of the colonies were being exploited by the British even as richer colonists exploited poorer ones. Moreover, to get support for the fight against the Brits and the founding of a new country, the elite had to essentially give an ownership stake to a broader section of (white, male) society at the beginning of the Republic.
But I think the seeds were sown very early on to divide poor white and black, the decision to "import" cheap labor whether it be African slaves or indentured servants almost guaranteed the landowners were going to have problems down the road. By the mid- to late 1600s there were a number of rebellions, including violent ones in which white servants and slaves joined together.
I look forward to reading your comment, CMike. Please post it no matter how "stale" the thread gets.
"Do what you feel in your heart to be right -- for you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be damned if you do, and damned if you don't. " - Eleanor Roosevelt
Just file this under "glad I missed it"
In Eric Foner's The Story of American Freedom, he writes:
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[p. 10] Even among the white male population, it is sometimes forgotten, many varieties of partial freedom coexisted in colonial America, including indentured servants, apprentices, domestic laborers, transported convicts, and sailors impressed in the Royal Navy. Freedom in colonial America existed along a continuum from slave, stripped of all rights, to the independent property owner, and during a lifetime an individual might well occupy more than one place on the spectrum.
Indentured servants who voluntarily surrendered their freedom for a specified time, comprised a major part of the non-slave work force throughout the colonial era. As late as the early 1770s, nearly half of the immigrants who arrived in America from England and Scotland had entered into contracts for a fixed period of labor in exchange for passage. Indentured servants often worked the fields alongside slaves. Like slaves they could be bought and sold, were subject to corporal punishment, and their obligation to fulfill their duties... [p. 11] was enforced by the court.
"Many Negroes are better used," complained one female indentured servant in 1756; she went on to describe being forced to work "day and night...then tied up and whipped." But, of course, unlike slaves, servants could look forward to freedom from their servitude.
...Nonetheless, by the time of the Revolution, the majority of the non-slave male population were farmers who owned their own land. With the household still the center of economic production, the propertyless were a far smaller proportion of the population than in Britain and wage labor far less prevalent. Among the free population, property was more widely distributed than anywhere in Europe.
[p. 40]...By narrowing the gradations of freedom among the white population, the Revolution widened the divide between free Americans and those who remained in slavery. Race, which had long constituted one of many kinds of legal and social inequality among colonial Americans, now emerged as a convenient justification for the existence of slavery in a land committed to freedom as a natural right...By the nineteenth century, the idea of innate black inferiority, advanced by Jefferson as a suspicion, would mature into a full-fledged ideology, central to many definitions of American nationality itself.
[p. 41]...Gender, too, formed a boundary limiting those entitled to the full blessings of American freedom...
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That Is a Cool Site
Thanks! I'm a sucker for those kind of things.
"Do what you feel in your heart to be right -- for you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be damned if you do, and damned if you don't. " - Eleanor Roosevelt
Yelling "fire" in a crowded theater
I've been away, largely, for four days because of some crazy RL circumstances, but had a chance to browse the blog for a few minutes three or so of those days.
While I was away I was a bit shocked and disappointed in some of the things I was reading, particularly and essentially the creation of a false moral equivalency between the right and the left. I've made note of this before, but I sometimes get the feeling some are so incredibly caught up in what others are saying, or to go even further what others think will be said of them, that they lose their common sense or ability to speak through candid framelessness.
What the right has been doing in particular, recently, is nothing more than shouting "fire" in a public place. For whatever the left has been lacking, and boy are they lacking in a lot, there simply isn't any kind of real and important equivalency between keeping the current way of things going, and expediting the process of the corporatist Big Give by inciting rhetorical riots, stampedes, and panics with purposefully irresponsible and illogical language and tactics (i.e. Obama's a racist, Obama's trying to kill old people, Obama's health care plan in plain evil, ect...) There was even a kind of debate, here, to my surprise, about how 'smart' Obama was, the other day. It's something I thought we all kind of decided wasn't relevant to much of anything we have to discuss, here.
There is a real and impotant difference between even the right and the fauxgressives, the GOP and Democrats. The latter has shame and a conscience that can be appealed to with reason, or at the very least a measurable wing that can be shamed into doing the right thing. That's the line. So, while I forceully criticize, and rightfully so, appeasement and apologism by the Democrats and fauxgressives, I don't ever forget that their redeeming quality(ies), (potentially) redeeming enough, in fact, that I don't subscribe to the "2% less evil" theory. There is a difference between forceful, full-throated criticism and pedestrian, bitter criticism. The two sides are not equally dangerous; they just aren't.
We must be more thoughtful; that's what attracted me to this place in the beginning. We're more fair and responsible than most in our critiques of things, but I'd really like it to stay that way, and I fear some are drifting to the really easy, but really tasteless and lazy, end of things, lately.
But, we've always been at war with Eastasia...
Not really moral equivalencies
The right is a dwindling fringe group. So is the extreme wing of the GOP. Look at what's happened over the last two elections: 15 Senate seats, >50 House seats, and the presidency. Such a massive rebuke of the ideas of a group (conservatives, including Republicans) is not very common in the history of this country. Fewer and fewer people are wanting to accept the right's ideas and more and more are seeing them as fringe.
Since they have an increasingly dwindling acceptance, I find it hard to accept them as some sort of "serious" threat. One thing that is so important to what you say is "rhetorical riots"--rhetorical. I remember when Obama supporters were talking about rioting if Obama didn't get the nomination (remember that?) and kinda rolling my eyes. I didn't see much to worry about then, it was a way to try to intimidate but could be ignored because the keyboard brigade doesn't strike me as the type to get that involved, and I don't see much to worry about the scary right now. I know folks in law enforcement dealing with the anti-government groups, and those are folks you have to worry about, not really the dittoheads. And they've been around for a while.
So these folks on the right that so many are worried about don't worry me much. Further, their ideas are increasingly going out of favor. Its the Democrats who control government and using the right as a scapegoat to downplay the Democrats acceptance of the corporatist control of the country is more dangerous, IMO, than them scary ol' right-wingers. To me, I see the right as small and weak and the Dems as the one's in charge (funny how paranoid folks on the left and right are scared to death of the opposition no matter who is in charge...). Its like the Dems are the Pittsburgh Steelers and the right are a Pop Warner team. If you're in the NFL, you need to worry about the Steelers, not the 10 year olds.
I can hardly blame folks for overlooking the right since the right controls fewer and fewer seats of power than three years ago--and that goes for the feds as well as state legislatures. But the point of this post is that it is that the ruling elite often stay in power by dividing the people. Race is one division. Anti-american or anti-democratic "enemies" are another way. Notice how the left is sounding more and more like the paranoid right these days? That's how the ruling elite will stay in power. The real threat to this country are the people in power, but so much effort here is focused on the delusional few on the right. That's not by accident, which I think is the point of the post.
"dwindling fringe group"
Your entire arguments, here, over the past few months rests on the naive belief, which I'm not sure if you actually believe it or use it to downplay the threat, that the right is a "dwindling fringe group". I don't much want to get into the debate or whether they are or not. As I've made clear, I don't believe they are, at all, anywhere near becoming a "dwindling fringe group" if even they are obviously shrinking. Regardless, anyone with any honesty can see that they don't have to be in the seat of power at the national level of government to be a real and constant threat and danger. That is, unless someone actually believes that the national-level public sector holds all or most of our nation's power. Pretending that the right doesn't matter at all, anymore, is just as much a tool as fauxgressives pretending the right's craziness is the only thing that matters.
BTW, I think you're missing my point. Your example of the grumblings about a riot if Obama didn't win is not what I'm hitting at, at all. When I say rhetorical riots, I mean rhetorical riots. The right is killing policy (good, bad, an otherwise indiscriminately) by launching concerted rhetorical panics and frenzies based in flat-out lies of which I gave examples of. Apart from any physical threat (which I do see as something that needs to be kept an eye on by the left), my main point is that they are firing with abandon at anything the Dems or liberals propose. This kind of bomb throwing they have always been better at than the left is dangerously reckless. They don't care how many people and good policies they destroy in their wake. There is no more "sane wing" of the Republican Party left. They also happen to be dangerous in how they interact with the more conservative wing in the Democratic Party while we're trying to appeal to conscience and reason of the sane wing of the Democratic Party, which actually exists.
Again, some need to stop joining in the game of 11-dimensional chess by always looking over one's shoulder worrying about whether they are being led or not. This is the what absolutely kills honest and candid critiques. Eventually, one goes beyond candid critiques of bad policy and drifts slowly into "let me find another way to disagree with (fill in the politician, organization, etc...) so as to (appear) to maintain independence."
But, we've always been at war with Eastasia...
Thoughtful comment
Damon, I would be really, really interested to see some on-the-ground or at least local material from you on MI about how all this is playing out there. I feel in a lot of ways we're flying blind relying on the press and the blogosphere (or I don't know where in the blogosphere to look).
My view is that although the shirts and the skins are not the same they are undoubtedly part of the same self-reinforcing system.
My view is also that the party leadership is not equal to the party, the party is not equal to the bloggers, the bloggers are not equal to the organizers and the organizers* and the bloggers are not equal to the people, though of course party and bloggers and organizers all claim to represent the people.... And at the bottom of it all is people's fear. Justified fear -- though it's expressed often in unjustifiable ways -- which the shirts (or is it the skins) are exploiting in immoral, even evil, ways. As they always have.
"First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win." -- Mahatma Gandhi
I Second the Request
I've been very curious about Michigan, which in many ways is the epicenter of the financial meltdown, and would love to hear what's going on there on the ground. It seems a ripe place for organizing. Unfortunately, it seems the left has gotten out of that business, relying on party politics instead, which, as you can probably guess is something that I think is a mistake.
"Do what you feel in your heart to be right -- for you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be damned if you do, and damned if you don't. " - Eleanor Roosevelt
I'm A Bit Confused
as to how your comment relates to my post. Certainly the GOP has been the ones running around stirring up class resentment and racism in the last thirty years and, as I note in my post, there are genuine racist assholes in the GOP.
But using racism didn't start in the 1970s, nor has it historically been limited to the GOP. And there's a reason why, IMO, that politicians never pay much of a price with each other for using race. Lindsay Graham can treat Sotomayor like shit during her Senate confirmation, he's not going to lose his respected public leader standing in the Village
, not even among Democrats. Not so much because a lot of Democrats agree with him on race, but because they have other things in common and want to work together.
As for whether the Democratic Party is evil or not, I don't know. What I do know, is that since coming into power in January, they haven't done much to stop evil. In many cases, Obama has taken steps to affirmatively hide the evil, making it easier to continue it.
"Do what you feel in your heart to be right -- for you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be damned if you do, and damned if you don't. " - Eleanor Roosevelt
BDBlue
My post was in response to your your thread, really. I probably should have made it more clear by directly quoting what has been depressing me. It was in fact a response to quite a few of the first responses to this, and particularly to gqmartinez whose delusion about the political and social threat of the right is out of lazy convenience. The right and left are not equal in their threat to society. They never have and, in fact, can never be.
But, we've always been at war with Eastasia...
Thanks, Damon
Being a liberal, it won't surprise you that I agree the right is much more of a threat than the left. I'm just not sure that the Democratic Party as a whole (as opposed to some of its members) represents the left anymore. I think it represents the right, just maybe not as far right as the GOP, which leaves us in a quandry.
But that's not really intended to be the theme of my post. My post is aimed more at the issue that Avedon raised, which is why the GOP continues to sell racist crap and the MSM and Democratic Party continue to essentially let them. And the underlying dynamic, I think, is a very old story that pre-dates any of our current palyers and goes more to class politics than ideology (which of course is affected by class politics).
Also, I should've pointed out early on that I do say 300 or 400 years, not just 400 years because I don't think you can pinpoint exactly when this dynamic started emerging. But it's very old. And I think the best way to deal with it, FWIW, is to not rely on our ruling class to fix it because they won't. This is something that can only be fixed at the grassroots level.
"Do what you feel in your heart to be right -- for you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be damned if you do, and damned if you don't. " - Eleanor Roosevelt
400 is good
If you don't ignore the fact that the English weren't the only people who established colonies in what is now the US. St Augustine, Florida has been continuously occupied since its founding by Spain in 1565. The French were also active in the area, and neither was adverse to the removal of native populations, nor their enslavement. There was nothing democratic about their colonies.
It is unfortunate that the lesser nobility that led most of these expeditions have no use for other classes of people, and treated them the same way they treated the peasants in the their own countries - like dirt.
As long as politicians believe they need corporate money to finance campaigns, corporations will wield undue influence on the system. It is in the best interests of those in power, and those who aspire to power, not to rock the boat over much.
A note
While I don't think any European colonizers were equitable with the indigenous peoples of this land, I would like to make note that there were varying degrees of positive interactions and to such a degree that one can certainly distinguish between the colonizers. I'm speaking specifically for the French who saw the native population as far more equal (if still not actually an fully equal) than say the British who mixed with the native population as rarely as they could. The Spanish were also far more cognizant of the importance of the native peoples than the British, who largely saw them as something to be eradicated.
I take my own city's history (Detroit) as an example. The French had been living at Detroit for a century relatively peacefully and equitably with the local Ottawa before the British came in and changed the entire relationship which instantly became adversarial and tense. This isn't the only city were this happened as the French were pushed out of the old West/Northwest.
But, we've always been at war with Eastasia...