Following release of the results of a recent Fairleigh Dickinson
University
poll showing 29% of registered voters in the U.S. believe armed
revolution to ‘protect liberties’ may be necessary the
self-appointed political ‘center’ went into full conniption in
defense of the established order. Visions of shotgun wielding Tea
Partiers were trotted out, racists no doubt, storming the Capitol to
roll back the radical progress President Barack Obama and a
blameless Congress have made to save ‘our fledgling democracy’ from
the predations of empire, the corrupting influence of money in
politics, the growing and conspicuous divide between haves and
have-nots, the murderous militarism of the war industry and the
oppressive machinations of a militarized police. Accurate
descriptions of official policies to which the citizenry might
legitimately object were prominent in their absence.
Framed as reaction to the ascendance of America’s first black
President and the ‘liberal agenda’ he studiously paid lip service to
while factually acting in the service of his rich campaign
contributors and the corporations they own, missing was where this
‘movement’ fits into recent American history. On the political right
the ‘Militia’ movement of armed defenders of American ‘liberties’
arose in the mid-1990s. The economic context was a prior decade of
de-industrialization of the heartland attributable to Federal
Reserve efforts to ‘tame’ inflation (high interest rates raised the
value of the U.S. dollar making industrial exports uncompetitive),
military cuts following the end of the Cold War that
disproportionately affected the rural middle class and the savage,
largely gratuitous mass layoffs by corporate America that were the
fashion between 1990 – 1995. While poorly understood and often even
more poorly articulated at the time, the ‘New World Order’ against
which the Militias were preparing to fight was a rough proxy for the
factually ascendant plutocracy now patron and sole beneficiary of
official Washington policy.
Unmentioned out of apparent residual embarrassment are left wing
revolutionaries, a/k/a ‘terrorists,’ long known to enthusiastically
object to economic predation, historical and current police violence
against their persons, colleagues, families and communities, wanton
militarism in the interests of imperial capital and the class
predations of reigning plutocracies—all the policies good liberals
support when a credentialed guy in a $3,000 suit explains in
liberal-speak the policies of the radical right are ‘liberal.’ To
the ongoing humiliation of said professional left, South American
Marxists / Leninists and homegrown anarcho-collectivists impede, or
at least have in the not so distant past, their corporate fund
raising and networking efforts at the annual con-fabs held at
five-star hotels in exotic locales where they no doubt
enthusiastically discuss the locale and menu of the next year’s
con-fab. As anyone receiving a paycheck from the responsible left
could tell you, ‘working within the system’ is the only way to ‘get
a seat at the table.’
The basis of the current charge these would-be revolutionaries are
from the radical right is that over twice as many registered
Republicans (44%) as Democrats (18%) claim to be ready to take up
arms (27% of Independents join them). Having apparently declined to
ask the economic status of the respondents, economic class was
pre-determined to be irrelevant to both the poll questions and
liberal discussion of them. Beyond this, it seems a reasonable
assumption a racist, reactionary right composes some proportion of
those ready to take up arms, just as it is represented in the police
forces of major U.S. cities, in the military, in senior management
positions in large corporations, is regularly welcomed at White
House functions and serves on the Boards of Directors of prominent
cultural institutions. While the apparent liberal fear is of heavily
armed trailer park rednecks swilling beer while trying to reclaim
the Ku Klux Klan from the FBI and local police forces, the facts of
the existing political economy suggest the revolution of the radical
right was won some decades past. So what exactly is it bourgeois
commentators are defending?
The ‘centrist’ tale told is of a once dominant culture displaced by
history that is now desperate to reclaim its right– the ‘Leave it to
Beaver’ world of white privilege being ‘stolen’ by Spanish speaking
immigrants, Affirmative Action receiving ‘minorities,’ and feckless
academics promoting the interests of ‘others’ over their own
heritage and culture. The tale not being told is of a political
economy re-dedicated some decades back to capitalist accumulation at
any cost that has resulted in wildly skewed income distribution,
stagnant incomes for most of the population, regular and large scale
unemployment, widespread and increasing economic insecurity,
predation by large corporations now exempted from laws and
accountability, the diminishment of public institutions and a
national state wholly dedicated to serving the tiny elite who now
control the country. The liberal tale needn’t be wrong to be
irrelevant— while the ‘feelings’ of racist right-wing reactionaries
may be strong; there is little possibility they would have actual
effect without the wholesale economic dispossession now under way.
One aspect missing in the debate over gun control– the back-story of
the Fairleigh Dickinson poll, is gun control advocates only look at
the civilian side of the issue. Coincident in recent decades with
increasing concentration of political-economic power has been the
militarization of the police; the massive build out of incarceration
and prisons as capitalist enterprises, the erosion of legal
protections from illegitimate state and commercial power, the growth
of intrusive surveillance technologies and a shift to formal race
and class-based strategies of police repression. On the one hand gun
control advocates argue the fear of growing state power is lunatic
paranoia while on the other there is no apparent interest on their
part in disarming the increasingly militarized state against who the
claims of outsized power are being made. This contradiction,
combined with the articulated fear of an ideological right
accompanied by implicit acceptance of the institutional right,
points to the class basis for liberal fears. While ideological
right-wing reactionaries are the perceived threat to bourgeois
liberals, the facts of daily existence posed by institutional
racism, the ‘legal status’ machinations used to exploit the
manufactured immigrant underclass, and the rapidly and visibly
growing class divide supported by state policies and enforced with
state power, affect the lives of more people far more dramatically.
Put another way, it is the reaction of the growing underclass
bourgeois liberals fear, not the diminishing material conditions
faced by it. But the diminishing conditions are not fact of nature,
but of policy. In but one example, Mr. Obama’s assorted efforts to
solve the ‘foreclosure crisis’ his administration inherited were
unwaveringly designed to screw ordinary citizens, both black and
white, for the benefit of outlaw banks. Even so, residual anger over
the bank bailouts would have diminished if wages and employment had
recovered from depression levels. But wages for most Americans
remain well below where they were six years ago and unemployment and
underemployment remain at historically high levels. Were this not
coincident with the full restoration of the fortunes of the reigning
plutocracy at the expense of the broad citizenry these facts could
be attributed to ignorance of basic economics on the part of
establishment Washington. But this is not the case. The fortunes of
the people ‘who matter’ were effectively restored—the economic
mechanics for doing so are understood. It is entirely reasonable to
conclude Mr. Obama and liberal Democrats (and Republicans) are tools
of a predator class not just indifferent to the well being of most
Americans, but one that actively benefits at their expense.
Congressional Republicans may more publicly promote economic and
political predation under the guise of libertarian ‘freedom,’ but it
is Democrats since President Bill Clinton (Jimmy Carter actually)
who have more effectively promoted them. And therein lies at least
part of the reason for current political angst. Beginning in 2006
when the Democrat majority was returned to Congress to the election
of ‘liberal’ Democrat Barack Obama to the Presidency in 2008, the
American electorate offered a rebuke of the murderous overreach and
increasing plutocratic control of the George W. Bush era. And with
it, the opportunity arose, in theory at least, to repudiate those
excesses and chart a different course for the nation. Congressional
Democrats immediately abdicated leadership under the conspicuous lie
they needed a super majority to govern and Barack Obama set about
codifying the most far reaching abuses of governmental power
established by the Bush administration while demonstrating
unwavering fealty to the reigning plutocracy. By describing his own
policies as ‘moderate Republican’ Mr. Obama made it clear the
electoral choice is between degrees of Republican—in contemporary
terms the establishment Party of the radical right. When the
possibility of affecting political change through the ballot box is
removed, no other choice remains but to use other means to do so.
On a number of specific policy issues the feared non-establishment
right may be inarticulate but may still have a point. By putting
forward a conspicuously inadequate economic stimulus program when he
entered office Mr. Obama ‘proved’ to a citizenry more concerned with
just getting by than with the arcana of macroeconomic debates that
Keynesian remedies don’t work. (Mr. Obama was loudly and repeatedly
warned of this outcome at the time). Mr. Obama’s health care program
forces financially strapped citizens to buy expensive private health
insurance from for-profit companies with little redress for
legitimate claims denied and with unchanged probability of economic
ruin from exorbitant health care costs. To the Tea Party point, when
associated with the increased militarization of the police, mass
incarceration and diminished civil rights, this joining of state and
corporate interests satisfies Italian fascist Benito Mussolini’s
definition of fascism as the ‘corporate state.’ And in contrast to
educated, connected, bourgeois liberals, those on the receiving end
of illegitimate searches, arrests and incarceration, illegitimate
foreclosures, predatory student loans from scam private educators
and various and sundry state and commercial predations, have no
other choice but to act collectively outside of ‘official’ channels
if recourse is to be had. In other words, the question of whether
the existing order is worth maintaining depends very much on where
one exists within it.
The remaining charge is the existing political order represents the
democratically chosen will of the citizenry and efforts to change it
outside of (highly controlled) elections are necessarily to force
the wishes of an aggressive minority onto the broader citizenry. But
the consistent distance between poll results of Americans asked what
policies they favor and official government policies belies this
claim. From bank bailouts to environmental policies to government
works programs to raising taxes on the wealthy to increased funding
for education and social insurance, Americans are consistently far
to the left of official Washington policy. And the direction of this
distance is important—the conceit that calls for radical change are
from a loutish right contradicts the reality the greatest distance
between actual and desired policy is from the left.
The tactic of official Washington is to misrepresent policies as
being in the broader interest while making largely empty gestures on
social issues like gay rights. And even this formulation ignores the
highly developed technologies for manufacturing consent by ‘private’
media acting for private interests under the guise of faux
‘adversarial’ politics by the one Party state. Far from repudiating
George W. Bush’s extra-legal grab of executive power, Democrat
Barack Obama has achieved the most radical extensions of it in
American history. And as liberals railed at Mr. Bush’s kowtowing to
his wealthy constituents, it is this same constituency that is the
sole beneficiary of Mr. Obama’s time in office. These are
specifically, visibly and unequivocally the policies of the radical
right integrated into Western political institutions by ‘both’
political parties over the last forty years. And from those who
bothered to ask, this is not the will of the people that is being
represented. So again, what is it that liberals are defending?
It is a virtual certainty professional liberals and progressives
were sitting behind their office desks only last year when the NYPD
(New York Police Department) and Oakland police were beating the
crap out of Occupy, firing projectiles into faces at point blank
range and parking their motorcycles on the legs of NLG (National
Lawyers Guild) observers for daring to protest the ‘liberal’ state /
plutocrat nexus. This was in marked contrast to Federal and local
police respect for the ‘rights’ of Tea Partiers to carry loaded
weapons at rallies for their political ‘opposition.’ FBI and local
police infiltration of Occupy, including illegal ‘pre-emptive’
kidnappings and all manner of dirty tricks, was immediate, intense
and had the desired effect of creating paranoia and mistrust. And
those efforts tie historically to the COINTELPRO facilitated murders
of black leaders and radical disruption of the legal and
constitutionally ‘protected’ rights of (real) leftist and anti-war
organizations trying to affect substantive political change in the
1960s and early 1970s. But the grassroots Tea Partiers aren’t
responsible for the different treatment they received– the
institutions of the radical right in Federal and state government
working in the interests of their ruling class patrons are.
By framing the Fairleigh Dickinson poll results in Democrat /
Republican and left / right terms bourgeois liberals left unstated,
purposely or not, the joined class interests that are at a minimum a
relevant aspect of widespread political disaffection. Ironically,
Wall Street is well ahead of the professional left in understanding
this—any regular reader of the financial press would find many
titans of finance incredulous at how narrow, and potentially
politically destabilizing, the class interest represented by
official Washington, and in particular by corporate Democrats, has
become. And straightforwardly, domestic victims of Washington’s
plutocrat-friendly policies of recent decades, the unemployed,
underemployed, fraudulently indebted, illegitimately foreclosed
upon, impoverished and fraudulently arrested and incarcerated,
weren’t victimized based on major political Party affiliation– they
were victimized based on class. Put another way, middle and lower
class Tea Partiers may have more interests in common with inner city
socialists, communists, anarcho-collectivists and undocumented
immigrants than they have with wealthy Republican patrons of the Tea
Party. That this possibility hasn’t already been offered to them is
a challenge for the left. And likewise, through unwavering support
for corporate Democrats, even if from near-total ignorance of their
actual policies, liberals and the bourgeois left promote the
interests of the very rich against all who aren’t, including in most
cases their own.
Rob Urie is an artist and political economist in New York
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/05/10/the-radical-center-and-armed-revolution/