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n desperate times we strain to find something to celebrate. T h ere is an understandable tendency to rom anticize the oppressed, and to grasp at anything that looks like alterna tive politics.Hence the recent, disturbingly knee-jerk reactions within the left to such disparate phenomena as the militia movement and the Mumia Abu-Jamal case.
I was surprised by the letters in The Nation and The Progressive from readers who were affronted by negative coverage o f the militias in each magazine. I’ve heard the same kind o f position taken in con versations with people I know personally who identify with the left. T he substance o f this ostensibly progressive defense o f the militia movement goes something like this: the militia supporters are by and large working class; they often are recruited from especially de pressed local economies; their membership expresses their alien ation from politics-as-usual; therefore, we shouldn’t dismiss their populist frustrations.
It is true that militia members want to curtail the repressive power o f the state and complain about the predatory power o f large corporations. T hey oppose N A F T A and want to assert popular, community control o f government. But defending them on these grounds is naive and short-sighted, and reflects a broader, perhaps more insidious tendency— including a kind o f accentuate-the- positive bias toward whatever looks like autonomous, populist ac tion. This is the same tendency that willfully inflates any sort of apparently group-conscious activity— for instance, youth fads— into the status of political movements.
On the militia issue, the first problem is that class origin, or for that matter class identity, isn’t an adequate criterion for making judgments about political positions. T he principle that if it comes from the oppressed, there must be something O K about it, is not only simplistic; it can have truly reactionary implications. This kind of thinking has too often led down the road to complete accommo dation to the worst strains arising from working classes. In fact, it’s
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almost routine now that calls for sympathetic understanding of working-class history— “We need to recognize the genuine fear of loss of control of the family, traditional values, close-knit neighbor hood, jobs, way o f life, etc.” — are the first steps down the road to full-scale retreat from commitment to equality and social justice. Think about the Democratic Leadership Council.
There is a long history of rationalizing working-class nativism and racism. It helped sanitize the regime o f terror that was the Southern Redemption, restoring unadulterated white-supremacist rule after Reconstruction. T he architects o f that restoration’s ideol ogy characterized the racist putsch in the South as a revolt o f the common people against a corrupt elite that cynically used blacks to further unpopular aims.
T h e same mindset counseled sympathetic understanding for la bor’s rabid anti-Asian racism in the West in the nineteenth century, and tolerated the New York draft riot o f 1863, anti-feminist and anti abortion activism, and whites’ anti-busing riots. One version even sympathized with official resistance in Yonkers, New York, to court-ordered remediation of a lengthy, nefarious history o f racial discrimination. Yonkers, the line went, was being penalized as a working-class/lower-middle-class suburb that can’t afford to use exclusionary zoning to keep blacks and Hispanics out.
O f course, most leftists who have a warm spot for the militia movement would not support these positions. But the differences are more o f degree than o f kind. Today, we hear arguments that we should focus on common class interests like living-wage jobs for all rather than affirmative action, and “ universalistic” rather than “ race-based” social policy. In his book, Turning Back: The Retreat
from Racial Justice in American Thought and Policy, Stephen
Steinberg discusses how this ostensibly farther-reaching alternative often masks a retreat from the struggle for equality within the work ing class. Sometimes, he notes, it yields a racial trickle-down argu ment that the best way to fight racism or sexism is to direct benefits to whites and men.
Racist and fascist movements always have some popular, working-class base. Mussolini came out o f the Italian Socialist party, and National Socialism sought actively to compete for the
hearts and minds o f politically unsophisticated German workers disposed to authoritarian, conspiratorial, and scapegoating theo ries. In both cases, the movement drew energy from the same kind of superficially anti-capitalist rhetoric that the militias project— complete with their versions o f “ black helicopter” fantasies. The Nazis also pioneered, in their conspiratorial mythology about Ger man defeat in World War I, the “ stab in the back” theory that un derlies the PO W /M IA lunacy running through the ideological pools in which the militia movement swims. And, as with their pre cursors who imposed the segregationist regime in the American South, their appeal to a bigoted and politically unsophisticated popular base was combined with ruthless suppression o f populist and working class forces that presented more substantial progres sive, egalitarian alternatives.
And, besides, their anti-statism really isn’t the same as ours, or it shouldn’t be anyway.
But confusion on this score points up another problem in the left. We often aren’t clear enough about distinguishing opposition to the actions o f particular governments and regimes from hostility to the actions o f government in principle. As a result, we sometimes over value anything that looks like an insurgency against concentrated power.
It’s easy, for instance, to paint ordinary Not In My Back Yard politics at the local level as something grander and more progres sive. Mobilization by residents o f a threatened neighborhood to stop a corporate development project can be a very good thing. But the visions that support such mobilizing aren’t necessarily progres sive; they can rest on the same kind of parochial territorialism that prompts demonstrations against housing desegregation. In fact, op ponents o f open housing routinely see themselves as the victims of oppressive government and evil realtors. Even the slow-growth movement in local politics isn’t unambiguously democratic or anti corporate. Often enough it simply represents the efforts of those who arrived last week to keep anyone else from arriving next week. We have to recognize such struggles’ ambiguity if we are to realize their best tendencies.
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We have to recognize that not every popular mobilization is pro gressive just because it arises from the grassroots. Having experi enced the underside of populist rhetoric in segregationism and opposition to civil rights, I’m perhaps especially sensitive to the fact that a lot o f nastiness can lie under labels like “ the people.” Lynch mobs were, after all, a form of popular, direct action.
No matter what Alexander Cockburn says, I haven’t seen any thing to suggest that I shouldn’t judge the militiamen by the com pany they keep politically. Nor have I seen any signs among them of a substantive vision for political and economic reorganization that would allay my fears.
I confess, as well, to being toward the statist end o f the left, at least among those o f us whose politics were formed in the 1960s and after. I’m always uneasy when we get fuzzy about the distinction between our objections to actions taken by those who control the American state and a more general objection to the State as an ab straction. Yes, government is ultimately a means o f coercion. Therefore, it needs to be accountable to the citizenry. At the same time, government needs to be insulated from the whims o f fleeting, potentially tyrannical majorities.
T he experience of being black in the United States highlights the dangers o f a simplistically majoritarian notion o f democracy. Decentralization o f public authority in the name o f popular democ racy— from “ states’ rights” to the “ new (and newer) federalism” — has been a rallying cry o f opponents of black civil rights for more than a century and a half.
T h e state is the only vehicle that can protect ordinary citizens against the machinations o f concentrated private power. Even though it does function as an executive committee o f the ruling class, the national state is the guarantor o f whatever victories work ing people, minorities, gays, women, the elderly, and other con stituencies we embrace have been able to w in — often enough against the state itself. And this applies both to formalizing those victories as rights and using public policy to redistribute resources that make them practical reality.
T he public sector is the area o f the economy most responsive to equal-opportunity employment. And the national state— ours as
well as others— is the only entity powerful enough to control the activities o f piratical multinational corporations. That’s what the fights against N A F T A and G A T T (and now W T O ) are all about— preserving the state’s capacity to enforce social, economic, and en vironmental standards within its own territory.
And that’s just the defensive side of the struggle. We need to press for a more active use of the state in international economic and foreign policy to combat the multinationals’ depredations across the globe.
It always seemed to me that our struggle, to rehearse a long- outdated slogan, wasn’t really to smash the state, but to seize it and direct it to democratic and egalitarian purposes.
I don’t get a sense o f anything compatible with this perspective from the militia movement. Empty cliches such as, “ T he govern ment is the child o f the people and has to be spanked when it gets out of line,” don’t inspire confidence. W ho do the militiamen have in mind when they evoke the image of “ the people” ? What do they consider appropriate uses of public authority?
As Chip Berlet and others pointed out in The Progressive, there’s not much reason to think that the militia movement’s politics are anything other than paranoid proto-fascist. T o say that they’re not all racist, sexist, or xenophobic is both bizarre and beside the point. Organizationally and ideologically they’re plugged into the most vicious, lunatic, and dangerous elements o f the right. No matter that some individuals may think, or want to think, or want gullible jour nalists to think that they’re just out playing a more strenuous version o f Dungeons and Dragons.
So what if this puts me on the same side as the Justice Depart ment? We’re also on the same side when we demand enforcement of voting rights or redress from Ku Klux Klan violence or prosecution o f corporate criminals. And, even if I weren’t a former object of C O IN TELPR O -era surveillance and harassment, I would have no illusions about the really existing law-enforcement authorities— at whatever level o f the federal system— being dependable allies. I grew up in inner cities where municipal police were clearly an oc cupying force. I lived through the civil-rights movement when the
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state police and FBI worked hand-in-hand with the Klan. Neverthe less, it’s important for us to recognize that in principle at least the state belongs to us as much as to any other interests in the society, and part of our fight must be to make it responsive to us.
The issue o f our relation to the criminal-justice system highlights another problematic tendency in the left, one that appears most topically in the Mumia Abu-Jamal support movement. We often have trouble keeping straight that being a victim o f injustice has no necessary relation to the quality o f one’s politics or character. A friend in Atlanta, in the aftermath of Wayne Williams’s conviction in the city’s missing-and-murdered-children case that drew national attention in the early 1980s, observed that the state probably had just railroaded a guilty man. We have to recognize that that is always
a possibility in the messy world o f social experience.
This is true o f organizations as well as individuals. Members of the M O V E cult in Philadelphia certainly should not have been bombed by the city, but it was reasonable to evict them after years o f their neighbors’ complaints o f harassment and public-health violations.
I don’t presume to pronounce on Abu-Jamal’s guilt or inno cence. At this moment only three issues should concern us: that there are very persuasive reasons to believe that he didn’t receive a fair trial, quite likely for political reasons; that his freedom o f speech had been violated; and that he is an atypically visible victim of the barbarity of capital punishment. We must avoid the temptation to exalt him as a symbol of progressive politics. All that most of us know about his politics, apart from his speaking out against police brutality, is that he has some connection to M O V E — a group with pretty wacky ideas. Certainly he is an activist, but there are a lot of activists, some o f whom have bad politics. Being victimized by the state should not in itself confer political stature.
First o f all, the evidence to which we have access leaves open a possibility that Abu-Jamal could actually be guilty o f the crime with which he is charged. Second, whether he’s guilty or innocent, his ordeal doesn’t indicate anything about the substance o f his politics. It’s certainly right and important to rally and organize to support his
case. But we must take care neither to rush to make him a hero nor to let his appeal as an individual divert us from broader, more com plex concerns.
Norma McCorvey (Jane Roe o f Roe v. Wade), in her conversion to Operation Rescue’s brand of holy rolling, should give us pause about loading too much significance onto individuals whose per sonal circumstances momentarily embody larger political concerns. Some o f us can recall as well the case o f Joanne Little in the 1970s. Little’s was an especially tragic story o f an impoverished young woman from a small North Carolina town. While incarcer ated on a breaking-and-entering charge, she escaped from jail after killing a white jailer who allegedly attempted to rape her in her cell. T he state declared her an outlaw, which amounted to a shoot-on- sight order. Little became a cause celebre for the women’s move ment in particular. But she was in far over her head as a celebrity. Her subsequent forays into petty criminality left the movement with egg on its face.
Even under the best of conditions a movement built around a single individual can go only so far. This approach trades on the imagery o f martyrdom; yet its goal is to ensure that the putative mar tyrs are rescued. Rescued martyrs, however, are always a potential problem because they live on as fallible human beings.
T h e difference between James Meredith, who integrated the University o f Mississippi and was later shot on a solitary march through the state, and Martin Luther King and Malcolm X is in structive. Unlike the others, Meredith survived and went on to fol low the twists and turns of post-segregation politics in increasingly pathetic and perverse ways, bottoming out as an aide to Jesse Helms. Martyrs work best when they’re dead.
T he cause celebre phenomenon, like fuzzy-mindedness about the militia movement, reflects a romantic, almost opportunistic ten dency in the left. It is part o f a soothing, “warm-bath” politics, a politics that is counterproductive because it imagines a specious, quick-fix alternative to the tedious, frustrating work that we most need: building support by organizing to create a base for a concrete, coherent political program.