Racists in the GOP

[Paul Henry Rosenberg]

Nathan Newman wrote:

> Frankly, I think Arianna's only politics are social climbing and
> self-promotion- she's drifted from New Age gurus when that was the zeitgeist
> to trailing Newt to the revolution, then abandoning ship before that wreck
> hit the rocks.  You have to admire her for her sure sense of the wind, and
> if she thinks the wind is blowing in the anti-racism direction, that may be
> a good sign.
> 
> On the other hand, the point of the post is not her self-promotion but the
> documentation of the words and mealymouthed excuses of the racist Right
> leadership.  A liberal probably couldn't have elicited such cold
> documentation.
> 
> --Nathan

My sentiments exactly.  Opportunism *CAN* serve a useful function here
and there -- the point is to exploit it for all it's worth when it
appears, since after all it's exploiting US!  

This is a very significant part of the history of the civil rights
movement -- the disgrace of Naziism, the spread of liberation movements
around the world, the alternative of Communism, the needs of an
industrializing economy all made opportunistic minimalist gestures of
support for the civil rights movement quite appealing.  Again and again,
activists made the most of the openings such gestures provided.  

We're a long way from that situation right now, but the same underlying
principle applies.  However, another one needs more attention precisely
because we're in a different situation.  That situation is the
reformation of a new "high" racism -- meaning a racism that fits the
needs (and hence values) of dominant elites.  

Because the old high racism couldn't work anymore after WWII, AND there
was a broad mass movement against it opportunism opened opportunities
and the momentum favored simply taking maximum advantage of those
opportunities.  

Now, however, Arianna Huffington is a representative of the new high
racism, so a higher level of scrutiny is required, even while we make
use of the quotes she provides.

The new high racism is libertarian, rather than old-line social
conservative.  Easy give-away: Charles Murray, co-author of "The Bell
Curve" and more recently a book on libertrianism itself.  

This is very much in evidence in the responses to my review of *The
Shape of the River* at Intellectual Capital this week
(http://intellectualcapitol.com/bibliotech/rev-012899.asp).  The
ideology of individual acheivement uber alles will allow a few select
spots for exemplary blacks -- Thomas Sowell and Colin Powell have
already been cited in that discussion , while Huffington's current fave
is J.C. Watts (father of 2 illegitimate kids, erstwhile tax cheat, and
mysteriously unindicted government official on the take, a shining moral
example in Huffington's universe...for the moment at least.)  

Huffington's attack on the remnants of the high racism of
yesteryear--the low racism of today--should be seen in terms of this new
constellation which raises a feature of racism past--the exemplary black
as a tool of mass oppression--to a core principle.

Some very good perspective on this can be gained by considering how the
high racism of another era functioned, and how it was challenged and
destroyed.  I refer to the ideology of colonization that arose after the
Revolutionary War, and served to unite Northern and Southern elites
under the fiction of eventual universal emancipation--once all the
blacks could be shipped back to Africa.  

In the recently published posthumous work, *Of One Blood: Abolitionism
and the Origins of Racial Equality*, Paul Goodman describes how this
ideology encompassed varying elite interests of north and south, and
created a comfortable palliative for those more sensitive souls who were
genuinely troubled by slavery.  It was only when the fragmented free
black community began to rally itself and express its unyielding
opposition to colonization that things began to change, followed by the
emergence of biracial abolitionism.  

I believe that libertarianism today functions in an historically
analogous fashion: it organizes seemingly self-evident observations into
a self-congradulatory "moral" framework that automatically
over-simplifies all pressing problems, and explains away even the
possibility of articulating contradictions; it provides a common
framework in which divergent, even antagonistic factions of elite
interest and opinion can find a mutual accomodation, so they can focus
their attentions on what really matters to them; it deligitimizes any
form of criticism that aims at a fundamental AND highly visible
contradiction in its claim to morality, rationality, and human progress.

So, while we should definitely appreciate help from any quarter in
exposing and attacking the old racism, we should be doing our homework
well to become adepts ourselves in exposing and attacking the new.

Last of all, here's the money question for another thread: Can Butler
help shed light on Huffington's role in all this?  And if so, how do you
translate that into an op-ed right alongside Huffington's?

-- 
Paul Rosenberg
Reason and Democracy
rad at gte.net
 
"Let's put the information BACK into the information age!"