> The Tucson shooting is fast becoming a Reichstag fire for American liberals
> - a crime perpetrated by a crazy person, employed to pillory those who have
> unacceptable political ideas - in this case, libertarians,
> anti-abortionists, and populists. The actions of a madman are interpreted to
> restore the limits of allowable debate. Standby for the list of unacceptable
> political asseverations in this new McCarthyism.
>
This is bullshit up one side and down the other. McCarthyism, as the brand name for American anticommunism at its most virulent, comprised repression both legal and illegal from the executive branch right down to the lowest cop. It involved deportations, jailings, blacklistings, infiltration, illegal raids, loyalty oaths, political terror dispersed and distributed throughout civil society. It was built on a scaffolding of legislation going back to the Sedition Act of 1918 and, eg, the Smith and Voorhis Acts of 1940. Its social base was the near permanent anticommunist constituency that had been generated in America by the shocking revolt and equally sudden wave of reaction in 1919, a community whose backbone was the suburban lower middle classes, the Chamber of Commerce, the American Legion, the Daughters of the American Revolution, and so on. It was a community not altogether unlike that which comprises the 'Tea Party' today. By contrast, the concerns expressed by liberals over the calculatedly racist, inflammatory language of the American far right (even Palin's latest 'blood libel' bullshit is premeditated dog-whistling) contain no demands for imprisonment or deportation, are based on no repressive legislation, form part of no tradition of civil society repression, and are backed by no power from the executive down.
> Berlet enacts a version of the move neatly described some years ago by
> Walter Benn Michaels in "The Trouble with Diversity." Those calling for
> equality outside the liberal consensus are fobbed off as threats to
> diversity. The real concerns (recognized by Chomsky et al.) of those
> sympathetic to the tea-partiers - a majority, apparently, of the US
> population - are dismissed as fulminations of racists.
This sort of ignorant bullshit is why I hate WBM. He turns people's brains into shit, so that poor saps like you end up believing as a matter of course that the Tea Party is some sort of primitive, misdirected rejection of neoliberalism. Mark his logic: 1) neoliberalism emerged as an attempt to institute equality for gays, women, and African Americans; 2) Because the Tea Party opposes equality for gays, women and African Americans, it is against the "liberal consensus", thus against neoliberalism.
Swallowing this inane crock, you come to believe that the Tea Party are "calling for equality outside the liberal consensus". But the Tea Party itself has never given anyone any reason to think it is an egalitarian movement - quite the contrary. Far from rejecting the tenets of neoliberalism, it has gone out of its way to embrace 'Austrian' principles, the 'free market', and so on. Its abiding hatred is for 'socialism', and the dark-skinned alien usurpers who try to impose it. It is precisely the McCarthyism, the jackbooted movement of repression, that you claim to deplore.
-- Richard Seymour Writer and blogger Email: leninstombblog at googlemail.com Website: http://www.leninology.blogspot.com Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/leninology Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Seymour_(writer) Book: http://www.versobooks.com/books/nopqrs/s-titles/seymour_r_the_liberal_defense_of_murder.shtml
<#> <#> <#> <#>