[Peace-discuss] Hysteria over tea-partiers

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Doug Henwood of Left Business Observer seems to me to have it just right here. 
  All those Republicans and Democrats who check under the bed each night for 
tea-partiers do have something to worry about - an aroused public, who might 
realize that their interests are not only different from but diametrically 
opposed to those of the American elite, for whom both parties toil. --CGE]


Doug Henwood: I'm still mystified by the curiosity about - I'm deliberately not 
saying obsession with - the risks of incipient fascism in the U.S. I have two 
questions I'd love some clarification on:

1) How is today's threat a significant departure from more than a century of 
American political violence? To say that the Klan is some kind of incipient 
fascist movement is to drain the term of any specific meaning. But over the last 
100-150 years, we've had savage repression of labor through public and private 
means, like national guard units, cops, and Pinkertons. We had lynching. We had 
serious suppression of civil liberties during and just after World War I. The 
Panthers were essentially wiped out with death squads. I can understand why 
mainstream liberals don't want to admit that U.S. history is full of repressive 
crimes, and want to see George W. Bush or Sarah Palin as some kind of scary 
departures, but that doesn't characterize [intelligent liberals], does it?

2) Why should we worry more about the fascist threat than some real, imminent 
dangers like (a) a turn to fiscal and monetary tightening (Obama's deficit 
commission, which could give him cover to cut Medicare and SS; the Fed's 
signaling that it's ready to begin withdrawing its extraordinary stimulus) that 
could sink us back into recession; (b) Obama's friendliness towards offshore 
drilling and nuclear power; (c) the incapacity of the U.S. political system to 
do anything at all about climate change, even something as corp-friendly as c&t; 
(d) escalation in Afghanistan, and with it an enormous increase in civilian 
deaths; and (e) tightening the screws on Iran, possibly leading to some sort of 
utterly mad military strike. These are all initiatives either led or supported 
by a Democrat president and Congress, not some scary possibilities that some 
possible future Republican president and/or Congress could perpetrate. Doesn't 
all the worrying distract from those realities?

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