Comments interspersed. Aside, first off. Abrams went to the same school in NYC, that Angela Davis did in the late 50's. Radosh, mentions this in Commies. And, look back at issues of Commentary and the New Leader, from the 70's. Abrams is there. Michael Pugliese
----- Original Message ----- From: "Chris Lowe" <clowe at igc.org> To: <asdnet at igc.topica.com> Sent: Sunday, July 08, 2001 10:37 PM Subject: RE: [ASDnet] Social Democrats USA]
>
> I was fascinated by the idea of Elliott Abrams being in SDUSA in 1989.
> After poking around that connection a little I don't find any direct
> evidence of it continuing at present, although there are some
> associational things that may be relevant to his new appointment to the
> National Security Council as Special Assistant to the President and
> Senior Director for Democracy, Human Rights, and International
> Organizations.
>
> But the poking has also made me think that seeing this all through the
> lens of Max Schactman & the SPUSA split is problematic, possibly as much
> so as if one were to interpret DSA that way.
>
> A biographical snippet in a paper on a website connected to _Vietnam
> Generation_ says that Abrams came from a liberal family and at Harvard
> in the late 1960s had anti-New Left politics that had him in loose
> association with social democrats and socialists; the author suggests
> that at bottom he was a Humphrey liberal. Anybody know anything about
> the SP at Harvard in that period, & its relationship to that split?
Steven Kelman, YPSL at Harvard, graduated 1970. See his acct., "When Push
Comes To Shove: The Escalation of Student Protest, " Houghton-Mifflin,
1970'ish.
>
> Anyway, we know he was a staffer for Henry Jackson
As was , Richard Perle. "The Prince of Darkness, " for Reagan. Perle, in an issue of New America, the SPUSA, later SDUSA newspaper, was announced as a speaker at a conference in the early 70's with Walter Laqueur.
& that he was
> involved with the Committee on the Present Danger.
See Jerry Sanders book from South End Press on the CPD.
Now my question is,
> which way does the connection to SDUSA run? Is it that Abrams was a
> (Schactmanite?) SPer, or that his links to the Henry Jackson wing of
> Cold War Democrats & their AFL-CIO allies brought him into connection
> with the pro-union, anti-communist SDUSA?
>
> I am guessing the latter, and this also leads me to wonder about the
> Reagan-era AFL-CIO/SDUSA connection further. E.g., was Lane Kirkland in
> the SP in the late 60s or early 70s?
Doubt Kirkland was formally a member. Though Paul Buhle, in his recent book for MR Press on Meany & Kirkland, may know or say more. Haven't read it yet.
Or does his connection with SDUSA
> come AFTER the SP split? My understanding about AIFLD and related
> AFL-CIO Cold War operations was that they were headed by people with
> Lovestoneite backgrounds going back to ca. 1960 at least.
AIFLD (heh, see a book by New Left Radosh on American Labor & Foreign Policy...) was run day to day administratively by Irving Brown, who had been with Lovestone since the mid-30's. At Bolerium Books in S.F. they have an issue of Labor Age, the Lovestoneite paper of the Communist Party (opposition) from the late 30's with a piece by Irving Brown. More on Lovestone see the recent bio. Another source on Lovestoneite's by Robert J. Alexander, "The Right Opposition, " Greenwood Press.
Is that
> wrong? Were those people in the SP and then SDUSA? If so, were they
> Schactmanites?
>
> Or is this more connected to often-Catholic, pro-union, anti-communist
> politics, which certainly had its presence within the SP, but also
> outside, throughout the Cold War and even under the New Deal?
Association of Catholic Trade Unionists. Ryan. Social Gospil. Anti-Communist. I'm sure my Italian relatives who worked in Steel knew of them. BTW, John Cort still active? (Religion & Socialism Commission. Has a book on Christian Socialism from Orbis Books. Was active, I think, in ACTWU.)
>
> Again, I wonder if there was a process in the late 1970s in which people
> in SDUSA circles came together with people coming out of a pro-labor,
> anti-communist background, often Catholic-influenced, that wasn't SP
> affiliated?
>
> Returning to Elliott Abrams, clearly the SDUSA connection to the AFL-CIO
> was of great interest and use to Reagan-era foreign policy, perhaps
> particularly in Poland and other parts of eastern Europe, and in Abrams'
> bailiwick, Central America, e.g. on the Kissinger Commission. It both
> gave Reagan policy "bi-partisan" claims and served as a wedge in pealing
> off Democratic voters. Given Abrams' apparent liberal background,
> maybe he came to join a pro-union group straightforwardly enough.
This is gonna sound wild but...some good info on Iran-Contra and the AIFLD and SDUSA and Lovestoneites network, I gleaned from a report by the LaRoucheites. I'll dig it up for anyone interested!
>
> But SDUSA's positions as stated on their website do not make for as
> obvious an alliance with post-Soviet Union conservatives, or even New
> Democrats. Kirkland's AFL-CIO may have been anti-communist, but they
> weren't free traders, and SDUSA aren't either, apparently.
>
> A possible new basis for alliance may lie in religion. Since his
> conviction and pardon, Abrams apparently has been President/Executive
> Director of something called the Ethics and Public Policy Center,
EPPC.Very good website, actually. Founded by acolyte of R. Niebuhr, fellow named Lafever, who Reagan wanted to be State Dept. Human Rights desk replacement for the effective Carter admin. appointee Patricia Derian. Lafever was rubbished in the Senate hearings.
Returning to religion, is the Institute for Religion & democracy still out there? 60 Minutes had an infamous red-bait of the National Council of Churches during Reagan, based on IRD info from SDUSAite Philip Jessup.
which
> promotes "Judeo-Christian" values in specific areas, (particularly
> science & medical ethics [anti-abortion, birth-control & probably
> genetic engineering], marriage law [anti-gay & lesbian marriage], and
> foreign policy [esp. promotion of religious freedom, though implicitly
> perhaps esp. defense against persecution of Christians]) as a means to
> coordinate activism by conservative Catholics, Jews and Evangelical
> Protestants. The chair of EPPc's board is Jeanne Kirkpatrick, & it
> includes Fr. Richard John Neuhaus
Neuhaus was active even earlier in Clergy & Laity Concerned against the Vietnam War. See a book of his with Peter Berger, circa 1970. Revolution is in the title.
(who edits _First Things_ & apparently
> once was Lutheran before becoming a conservative Catholic).
>
> The most recent association I have found between his name and SDUSA's is
> on a letter signed by officers of a wide range of groups, mostly
> religious but also including anti-slavery groups as well as EPPC and
> SDUSA, to President Clinton about religious persecution of Christians in
> the Sudan.
Big issue. We should look for info on Sudan ourselves. Maybe the website of Foreign Policy In Focus, the project of IPS and the Inter-Hemispheric Policy Cntr. has some good data.
>
> The other point of interest here is that Abrams wrote a review of a book
> by another EPPC board member, Mary Ann Glendon of Harvard Law School, on
> Eleanor Roosevelt and the International Declaration of Human Rights, for
> the journal _First Things_ (again, devoted to promoting conservative
> religious values in public life) that speaks respectfully, without
> obviously agreeing, of the Catholic Church's continued social teachings
> against unrestrained market forces.
>
> Abrams' recent political appointment is "to the National Security
> Council as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for
> Democracy, Human Rights, and International Organizations." It is
> tempting to remain stuck on the ironies of his running a center on
> ethics in public policy, and the obscene implications of the defender of
> Salvadoran death squads holding the title he will hold.
>
> But I think the appointment means more than that a significant force for
> morally obtuse opportunism on human rights will have a major say about
> policy on them in the Bush government. It also seems to me to signify
> another evidence that Bush, Jr. was a stealth hard-religious-right
> candidate, whose "compassion" is not at all a code-word for moderation
> as it was portrayed, but for evangelical zeal. Just as SDUSA and the
> AFL-CIO gave "liberal" cover to Reaganite foreign policy, it looks like
> Abrams role will be to bring coordinated, "ecumenical" religious cover
> to Bush foreign policy.
>
> As Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema observes, the right faces internal
> contradictions on some of these points, whether it is conflicts of
> neo-liberal market values with family ideologies and Catholic social
> mutualism teachings, or Protestant evangelism against Catholicism in
> Latin America. I'm guessing Abrams' role is going to be to play point
> in managing those contradictions in the foreign policy arena.
>
> Somehow I don't think his probably former SDUSA ties will mean criticism
> of Nike for subcontractor abuses in Vietnam, or promotion of ILO
> equality with the World Bank and WTO, despite apparent SDUSA support for
> those positions on their website. They also link to the DNC, but not
> the Republicans. They may have been connected with the CPD way-station
> to the RP for neocons in the 70s and 80s, but that's a long time ago.
> Who are they now? Don't know.
>
> Chris Lowe
Michael Pugliese