[Peace-discuss] Fwd: Anti-Empire Report, May 12, 2010

[C. G. Estabrook]

...This brings us to the American class system, which Russell Baker once
beautifully defined in terms of access to lawyers. Having a lawyer on permanent
retainer "is the very essence of richness." That's the upper class. Those in the
upper middle class hire a lawyer when they feel they need one to handle wills,
contracts and so forth. Middle-class people know they ought to employ lawyers
but can't quite afford them. Members of the lower middle class believe they can
defend themselves better than any lawyer, and can't afford one anyway. To
lower-class folk, public defender and prosecutor look identical.

The lower middle class is what we're focusing on here, the people who own auto
repair shops, bakeries, bicycle shops, plant stores, dry cleaners, fish stores
and all the other small businesses across America - in sum, the "petite
bourgeoisie," stomped by regulators and bureaucrats while the big fry get zoning
variances and special clause exemptions. The left always hated the petite
bourgeoisie because it wasn't the urban proletariat and thus the designated
agent of revolutionary change. Today's left no longer believes in revolutionary
change but despises the petite bourgeoisie out of inherited political
disposition and class outlook. Ninety-five percent of all the firms in America
hire fewer than ten people. There's your petite bourgeoisie for you: not
frightening, not terrifying and in fact quite indispensable.

And the petit bourgeois are legitimately pissed off. Whatever backwash they got
from the stimulus often wasn't readily apparent. They can't afford health plans
for themselves or their employees. They're three or four payrolls away from the
edge of the cliff, and when they read about trillions in handouts for bankers,
trillions in impending deficits, blueprints for green energy regs that will put
them out of business, what they hear is the ocean surge pounding away at the
bottom of that same cliff.

The conventional parties have nothing to offer them. The left disdains them. But
here comes the tea party, whose spirit is very well caught by David Barstow, the
Times reporter whose long piece on February 16 prompted [Frank] Rich's mad
column[s].

Rich refers to Barstow's "chilling, months-long investigation of the tea party
movement," as though the reporter had gone undercover, watching Klan rituals
through binoculars somewhere in a cow pasture. This is a silly
mischaracterization of Barstow's perceptive and rather sympathetic account of
tea partydom, in which he significantly doesn't quote the SPLC but pops in,
right at the end, an obligatory quote from an Idaho lawyer who sued the Hayden
Lake Aryans into extinction.

Of course, there are many flavors in the tea party blend. There are nuts and
opportunists, as in any political formation. You can trace some of its ideology
back to the nineteenth-century Know-Nothings, a typical platform of which, in
1841, called for extending the term of naturalization to twenty-one years,
restricting public office to the native-born (there's your birther movement),
keeping the Bible in schools and resisting "the encroachment of a foreign civil
and spiritual power upon the institutions of our country." Back then this meant
the Vatican; today it's Davos, Bilderberg, the UN, the IPCC.

At this point leftists invariably start quoting Richard Hofstadter's 1964 essay
"The Paranoid Style in American Politics." They should put aside that snotty
essay and reflect on their own dismal failures. Under the leadership of
Obama - cheered into office by 99.9 percent of the left - and a Democratic
Congress, we have a whole new war and no antiwar movement of any heft; a bailout
for Wall Street; an awful health bill connived at by both parties; the prospect
of loan guarantees for new nuclear energy plants; a huge hike in defense
spending, particularly nuclear weapons; and, at least at the rhetorical level,
an impending onslaught on Social Security. Constitutional abuses endorsed or
instigated by the White House continue in a straight sequence from the Bush years.

Response from the left? No twitch in the morgue. The AFL-CIO was bought off from
resistance to the health bill by getting relief on its Cadillac health plans.
Because of alleged anthropologically prompted global warming, the green movement
has sat on its hands, hopelessly split on nuclear power, whose real, baneful
effects have been irrefutably demonstrated, starting with nuclear waste. There's
been near total silence on the huge nuclear weapons budget boost (the largest
for Los Alamos since 1944). Total silence on the Patriot Act, reauthorized
February 27. What to do? Rally round the flag and scaremonger about the right,
where's there's actual political ferment.

[That's Alex Cockburn on class and the tea party.  Where do you belong on the
class scale by Russell Baker's calculus, Mort?  --CGE]


On 5/12/10 9:41 PM, Brussel Morton K. wrote:
> I would suggest a) that there are similar aspects to the current situation
> and what has passed before, but there are also differences too, as always —
> Blum brought out similarities; b) he did not infer or say that /*all*/
> people are stupid (or ignorant), but there are plenty of them and they come
> out of the woods periodically. This was his point I think, and people should
> understand it.
>
> As for Chomsky's mistaken? remark: I would say there are /*some*/ grievances
> which are legitimate, clearly not all, and it is unclear to me that those
> motivating the current movement are legitimate. You can pick and choose
> (socialism? government? Obama's birth?, immigration? taxes? bailouts?…).
> Mostly, they seem to be missing the boat.
>
> I think a degree of contempt is justifiable, but one should certainly not
> dismiss them as a "movement", however illformed and ill informed it is.
>
> You mean by "petit bourgeois" that they are mostly shopkeepers, small
> business, "middle-class" people? Or are they salaried or unemployed? How
> many union people join them? Immigrants? I suspect that there are even fairly
> well off Repubs among them, those who hate Dems, Obama and other despicables
> who want to spread their wealth.
>
> Sometimes contempt is appropriate, but, again, one should try to enlighten
> and organize for better ends as much as possible. I'm not optimistic here,
> but good luck. (Admission: I hung out with them once with flyers showing
> that their precious tax dollars were being diverted to killing, and was
> ignored for the most part.)
>
> --mkb
>
> On May 12, 2010, at 8:11 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
>
>> I think it would be a mistake to include either (a) there's nothing unique
>> about the current political situation or (b) it's all because people are
>> stupid. There certainly are parallels between anti-communism and
>> anti-terrorism - but that's because they were both massive propaganda
>> enterprises of the American ascendancy.
>>
>> Chomsky's comments have certainly been misinterpreted. He makes two
>> points, both correct it seems to me: (a) the grievances motivating the
>> teaparty movement are real; and (b) the Left in this country has allowed
>> the Right to offer (mad and dangerous) interpretations of those
>> grievances.
>>
>> Simply ridiculing the teaparty movement - or dismissing it with contempt
>> as simply low-class racism - is also mad and dangerous. A flood of (quite
>> legitimate) popular distress - dammed up by liberal indifference and
>> denied a political spillway - will burst through in crazy and far more
>> dangerous ways.
>>
>> Of course the tea party movement is not a working class uprising. The
>> teapartiers are, in classical terms, mainly petty bourgeois - but with
>> substantial appeal to the working class, as the Nazis were. The crucial
>> point about them is that, while they amount to about 18% of the population
>> (according to a NYT survey), 48% of the population sympathize with their
>> attitudes and beliefs (as compared with 44% for Obama).
>>
>> What the left should be doing is what it did in the 1930s, when there was
>> also a very dangerous nativist movement, but it was countered by working
>> class organizing - not contempt for the stupidity of the masses. --CGE
>>
>>
>> On 5/12/10 6:19 PM, Brussel Morton K. wrote:
>>>> ... *Anti-Empire Report *May 12, 2010 William Blum www.killinghope.org
>>>> <http://www.killinghope.org> <http://www.killinghope.org/>
>>>> *Terminally-dumb people have always been with us of course. It can’t
>>>> be that we’ve suddenly gone stupid.* ... If you shake your head and
>>>> roll your eyes at the nonsense coming out of the Teabagger followers
>>>> of Sarah “Africa is a country” Palin and other intellectual giants
>>>> like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh ... If you have thoughts of moving
>>>> abroad after the latest silly lies and fantasies like “Obama the
>>>> Marxist” and “Obama the antichrist” ... If you share Noam Chomsky’s
>>>> feeling: "I have never seen anything like this in my lifetime” ... keep
>>>> in mind that the right wing has long been at least as stupid and as
>>>> mean-spirited...

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