As to your comments about how I consider anyone to my left on a particular issue a lunatic, the record right here on LBO-Talk simply does not bear you out. I happen to believe that Cornel West and Barbara Ehrenreich were wrong about supporting Nader in the election, as I said here, but I have no problems with how they took that position, because as vigorously as they advocated their position, they did not stoop to the sort of rhetoric we saw here, where support for a Bush defeat and Gore victory was condemned, in ad hominem terms, as a position which could only be taken by unprincipled people, by betrayers of left principles. Nor did they advocate the defeat of Gore and other progressive Democrats and the destruction of the Democratic Party. And despite the fact that the Communist Party ended up with a position a great deal closer to mine on this election, my politics are immeasurably closer to Cornel and Barbara on virtually every other question. So the issue here is not so much the position on the election -- although one should expect vigorous debate about such an important question -- but the way in which those who took up the Nader position here on LBO-Talk did so by engaging in ad hominem attacks on folks with a different view. Further, it was not support for Nader per se that was characterized as ultra-left and sectarian, at least from this quarter, but the notion that it was essential to defeat Gore and progressive Democrats and destroy the Democratic Party.
Now let us talk about this act of "red baiting" which I supposedly perpetrated against you in my response to your attack. This is illustrative, I think, of the extraordinarily careless way this term "red baiting" is cast about in certain sections of the left to prevent any substantive challenge to, criticism of and discussion of politics. I take it that my response to being characterized as a "neo-conservative," where I said that this type of discourse seemed "sectarian, dogmatic and ultra-left," supposedly constitutes "red baiting." In point of fact, they are political characterizations of your position which, in normal debate and public democratic discourse, one either accepts or disputes, providing evidence and argumentation. And mind you, it is quite easy to be sectarian, dogmatic and ultra-left without even being a red; most anarchists fit the bill quite well, and I could introduce you to a number of social democrats who are as sectarian and dogmatic as the shrillest Trot. Indeed, it was the sectarianism and dogmatism of a Max Shachtman that led him away from an entirely correct rejection of Communism and Stalinism as anti-democratic to a position that embraced anti-democratic, right wing elements in the struggle against Communism and Stalinism.
But the term "red baiting" is largely employed to prevent substantive discussion of politics, and to avoid taking responsibility for one's political beliefs and actions. I first learned this when I was 14 years old, and attended a meeting of the Student Mobilization Committee To End The War, where the charge by an individual that the organization was controlled and dominated by the Socialist Workers Party -- what I later discovered was widely known throughout the left -- was met simply with the response that it was "red baiting." When I was in college and the "New Communist Movement" was on its very brief wave of ascendance, I was instructed that it was "red baiting" to characterize attempts to shout down and physically intimidate others in political meetings as "Stalinist." In the UFT, I was informed that it was "red baiting" to challenge Progressive Labor types to defend their public statements, made at Delegate Assemblies, of advocacy for "communism" and defense of Stalin, when they ran for union office. And one must never mention that the reason why there are three different opposition caucuses is because the CP, the third worldist Maoist types and the Trots hate each other more than they hate the social democratic leadership. A few weeks ago, when someone on a Marxist list characterized the IAC as a front for the Workers'
World Party, this was condemned, once again, as "red baiting."
Now I happen to think that a pretty simple rule should operate here. Communists and Marxist-Leninists of various types and persuasions should have the same democratic rights as everyone else: full political participation in the public realm, the right to vote and run for public office, the right to free expression and freedom of belief, freedom of association and due process. And like everyone else, when they enter into the public world and advocate a political position, everyone else has the same right to criticize them for their politics as they do to criticize others. This notion that some political positions should be free from scrutiny and debate, that criticism of certain politics constitutes an unacceptable "red baiting," is profoundly anti-democratic. It is not surprising that it comes most regularly from those who have no respect for democratic norms, those who think that the rights of political participation accorded to them should be denied to others. I make no apologies for differentiating myself quite clearly from that type of
authoritarian politics. What you do, and how you choose to present your politics, is up to you. But don't expect that putting my criticisms of what you say into the category of "red baiting" is about to silence them.
In any case, there is the little irony here that in the midst of these charges of "red baiting," you employ the well known McCarthyite technique of "guilt by association" with someone I don't even know, never met and sincerely doubt that I have that much political agreement with. All that I can gather is that he and you have crossed swords over who gets to be the media expert on right wing extremists, and so now you project him unto everyone "on your right" who gets in a political dispute with you.
Finally, I don't know where some folks on this listserv got the idea that they have some sort of proprietary interest in the legacy of Frederick Douglass, that they should have the right to pass on whether or not someone else can identify him/herself with Douglass' politics and ideas. But it is a piece of intellectual private property I certainly do not recognize. Transmogrify Douglass into John Brown, a white man with a savior and martyrdom complex, if you want, but it is not a reading that I, nor very many Douglass scholars, find the slightest bit convincing. His words -- with or without the pedantry of deprecate vs. depreciate, since the one letter clearly changes the meaning not one iota -- are ones I identify with and I will contine to use them.
Leo Casey United Federation of Teachers 260 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10010 [212-598-6869]
===== Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who eant crops without plowing the ground. They want run without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. -- Frederick Douglass
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