[Peace-discuss] Fwd: [sf-core] Rise in Right-Wing Extremism

[C. G. ESTABROOK]

As inequality grows apace under neoliberalism, the Tea-party rank and file have 
expressed quite legitimate grievances.  The left should be championing them, not 
  leaving it to the Republicans "who have been largely funding and pushing the 
Tea Party efforts."

We've been through thirty years with real wage stagnation. That's never happened 
before. Before the 2008 crash, there was substantial economic growth and a sharp 
rise in productivity, but the effects have gone into very few pockets. For a 
majority of the population, it's been a bad period. Stagnation, sometimes 
decline, reduction of benefits, higher working hours, a lot of breakdown of 
social structure - it's hard for people to deal with, and the tea-partiers are 
saying so.

Obama was hired to pacify them - as he understood well - but he's having 
trouble.  His employer is basically business and the wealthy, who desperately 
want to divert attention from tea-party grievances by condemning them as "racist 
populists."

I don't think it's going to work.  --CGE


Morton K. Brussel wrote:
> This is all beside the point rationalization. The Republicans who have been
> largely funding and pushing the Tea Party efforts are hardly underclass! And
> the underclass is not always right in their political or racial or societal
> positions, as you yourself recognize! However, you still fall into an
> ideological trap when you try to frame everything as class inspired, and
> where only one class counts or has the virtues.   In fact there are many
> classes in today's America, and they have mixed priorities.
> 
> If the Tea Partyers would stand for economic egalitarianism, justice, and
> social benefits for all (but then there would have to be tax increases (which
> they largely seem to oppose—we do need the facts, even if progressive) and
> against U.S. imperialism, corporatism, plutocracy, racism and liberté,
> égalité  et fraternité, they might be a vital effort. I don't see much
> evidence of that. It could turn out like the aftermath of the Weimar
> republic. Again, I'd like to know where most of them stand on a variety of
> issues as against a general expression of hatred and malaise. I'm unaware of
> a factual analysis yet.
> 
> If they would scare the major parties for the right reasons, that indeed
> would be a good thing, but, again, that is not apparent so far as I can see
> from who appears on their grandstands.
> 
> --mkb
> 
> On Mar 9, 2010, at 10:46 PM, C. G. ESTABROOK wrote:
> 
>> I think perhaps the most interesting thing about the Tea-party movement is
>> that it scares our political class* - represented by the 'major' parties -
>> to death.
>> 
>> La Grande Peur received magisterial expression in a column by Frank Rich in
>> the Sunday NYT on 2/28, "Axis of the Obsessed and Deranged." It was brought
>> to the attention of the peace-discuss list by Awareist David Green, and
>> Alex Cockburn rightly described Rich's effort as "vibrant with class
>> hatred."
>> 
>> Class, the issue that the American political establishment wants at all
>> cost to suppress, is raised by the Tea-partiers. That is their unforgivable
>> sin, and for that right-thinking pundits of the Right and the Left are
>> frenziedly trying to cast them outside the the brightly-lighted limits of
>> allowable debate.
>> 
>> I mean of course class in an economic sense, as the term has been employed
>> for almost two centuries.  Class is one of the notions "over against which
>> we are rightly critical, but without which we cannot do" (to quote the
>> critic Erich Heller from memory). It denotes a common role in the process
>> of the production of the necessities of life - food, clothing, shelter.
>> It's fairly easy to distinguish slaves from slave-owners in the ancient
>> world, and serfs (who were not slaves) from feudal lords in the medieval -
>> but it gets more difficult in the modern world (in part because the
>> mechanisms of capitalism are occult, unlike earlier processes of
>> production).
>> 
>> James Madison, its architect, said that the purpose of the 1787
>> constitution was to protect the minority of the opulent against the
>> majority.  The genius of the American system is not to let on - and the
>> Tea-partiers are about the blow the gaff! (a phrase I've always wondered
>> about: what's a gaff?).
>> 
>> There's some suggestion it's already well under way. Last month a Rasmussen
>> poll  showed that just 21% of voters nationwide believe that the federal
>> government enjoys the consent of the governed, while 70% believe that the
>> government and big business typically work together in ways that hurt
>> consumers and investors; and those with lower incomes overwhelming reject
>> the notion that today’s government has the consent from which to derive its
>> "just authority" (as Jefferson said).
>> 
>> As inequality increases at an accelerating pace in America, the comparisons
>> to Weimar Germany are not wrong. An ever-increasing number of Americans are
>> coming to realize that they are being conned by a political elite whose
>> interests are not only different from but directly opposed to theirs.
>> That's what's happening to the Tea-partiers, I think, and - as in Weimar -
>> the outcome could go in quite different directions.
>> 
>> _____________ * "The concept of political class is a classical notion in
>> political sociology. From its invention by Gaetano Mosca - who used it
>> largely synonymously to 'ruling class' - to the present day it has been
>> used in a variety of theoretical contexts, with slightly different meanings
>> and vastly different implications. Also it has been much more widely used
>> in some countries (especially in Southern Europe) than in others where it
>> is largely unknown (in the Anglo-Saxon countries and in Scandinavia)." My
>> first approximation for the present-day US is those who've gone to good
>> colleges - the "tertiary [i.e., not secondary or high-school] bourgeoisie"
>> - about 20% of the population. --CGE
>> 
>> 
>> Morton K. Brussel wrote:
>>> There are many assertions in this piece by Wolf, but there is no data on
>>> just who composes and funds the Tea Party, and who runs the show. Is it
>>> Ron Paul or heroine Sarah Palin (a female Ronald Reagan?)? Without facts,
>>> Wolf is simply whistling in the dark, hoping. Ignoring the obvious racist
>>> aspect of the Tea Party (anti-immigrant strands) is not a minor omission,
>>> either. It is a populism leaning well to demagoguery. Perhaps T-Partyers
>>> should be polled on whether they want a government-run health system,
>>> whether they are for women's freedom of choice, whether they want
>>> offshore and on shore drilling and mining on public lands, support of the
>>> national parks, where they stand on Israel-Palestine, etc., etc. . There
>>> are strong regressive libertarian strands here as well as some one may 
>>> sympathize with. It needs better analysis then what is presented here. 
>>> --mkb One thing does seem factual in her piece:
>>>> This is also why the Republicans are seeking to capture the Tea Party 
>>>> movement’s energy for partisan purposes, overrunning it with well-paid 
>>>> operatives, particularly from former Representative Dick Armey’s 
>>>> fundraising and advocacy organization. Moreover, Tea Party gatherings
>>>> have increasingly become a platform for Republican candidates seeking
>>>> the support of a highly mobilized electoral base.
>>> On Mar 8, 2010, at 1:32 PM, C. G. ESTABROOK wrote:
>>>> [Wayne Johnson of AWARE forwards a commentary from Naomi Wolf. --CGE] 
>>>> "Indeed, those who deride and dismiss this movement do so at their
>>>> peril ... If you actually listen to them, instead of just reading
>>>> accounts transmitted through the distorting mirror of the mainstream
>>>> media, you hear grievances that are profound, as well as some proposals
>>>> that are actually ahead of their time ... [tea partiers] believe that
>>>> Congress is utterly broken and regard faith in either of America’s
>>>> major parties as naïve. They view the Democrats and the Republicans
>>>> alike as obstacles to change, drowning out the voices of the people as
>>>> they kowtow to special interests. They are concerned about concentrated
>>>> Federal control, spiraling debt, and the loss of individual rights." 
>>>> Tea Time in America Naomi Wolf 2010-02-26 NEW YORK – Ever since the
>>>> first “Tea Party” convention was held last month in Nashville,
>>>> Tennessee, with Sarah Palin as one of the keynote speakers, America’s
>>>> political and media establishments have been reacting with a 
>>>> combination of apprehension and disdain. The Speaker of the US House of
>>>>  Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, has called the Tea Party adherents
>>>> Nazis, while the mainstream media tend to portray them as ignorant and
>>>> provincial, a passive rabble with raw emotion but little analytical
>>>> skill, stirred up and manipulated by demagogues to advance their own
>>>> agendas...

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