>I have to say I strongly support this remark
>by AC, though not so much its focus on
>Henwood:
>
>"Apropos my supposed enthusiasm for the right, I think, Doug, your
>problem is that you rarely advance into the American hinterland west of the
>Hudson, and regard it as a place of terror infested with fundamentalists,
>militia men and other demons of the polite liberal metropolitan imagination
>inflamed by hysterical fundraising letters from Morris Dees. . . . "
Ok, here's what I wrote in LBO a couple of years ago, when militia fever was at its height. I don't think the patriot ftp site exists anymore.
Doug
----
Trouble
Since the Oklahoma City bombing, many liberals and leftists have been quivering at the sight of armed rebels in the heartland. Both the New York Review of Books and Against the Current used the same photo from a Kalamazoo militia rally to decorate articles that were more thoughtful than the image. But no doubt the image expresses the editors' guts. There's a long tradition on the left of treating the white American masses as whiny bigots, and this new insurgency is taken as the armed, bigoted whining of the people without color.
Who are "the militias"? According to Chip Berlet, surveyor of the far right, there are 40,000 militia members, and maybe 5 million sympathizers with the broader "patriot" movement who don't don fatigues but share some beliefs with the armed brigades. We know little of their composition -- their class, gender, and racial makeup. No doubt some of them are scary -- violent white supremacists and other ejecta of the American political landscape, but that's not the whole story.
Much of their ideology is out of American radical populism -- anti-statist, individualistic, petit-bourgeois. Unlike fascists, they don't eroticize the nation - state. A visit to the Patriots' Internet site <ftp://tezcat.com/patriot> takes one to a world very different from crypto-fascism. Their economics is classic populist (except for their love of a gold standard, because gold is non-state money); their politics, Jeffersonian and decentralist; and they study the ruling class with obsessive contempt. They claim to renounce racism.
Their America is a story of usurpations; some originally pure vessel is perpetually besmirched by elitists and centralizers. In their eyes, the 14th amendment created a new federal citizenship, superseding the primacy of the state kind; the New Deal and Great Society further increased federal power; persistent scheming by an elite of lawyers and financiers has cheated the people. Capitalism is evil when it operates internationally and financially, but angelic when it operates locally and concretely. Isolationists, they literalize and personalize ruling class power by stressing the power of certain organizations (the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bilderbergers) in themselves -- but they are right that a global elite is forming itself quite snugly. They hate the Fed, and only some of them because of its imagined control by British Jews. Patriots are adamant that the proper form of government is republican, not democratic; in a democracy, the masses run a powerful state, but in a republic, individuals are sovereign. Rights come from God, and individuals should cede power to the state reluctantly if at all. Central power is bad, and decentralization is good. But in America, one of the most decentralized societies in the First World, decentralization typically has a way of protecting privilege -- say setting up suburbs relieved of any fiscal responsibility for the neighboring poor. Gingrich shares a lot of this ideology, but so does Jerry Brown.
Still, it's worth talking to and listening to these folks instead of demonizing them en masse. It's also worth noting that there are plenty of would-be rebels of another sort. The latest survey from the Times Mirror Center for People and the Press reports that the heavily promoted "independent" voters aren't Perotian rightists, but "a new third force -- left of center." The Center reports that the Republican agenda is deeply unpopular, and that Gingrich is even less loved than Clinton -- all despite relentless propaganda to the contrary. This should be wonderful news.