Hang on for the ride, folks; this will be a long one.
It isn’t just nostalgia for my younger days that makes me
cynical about contemporary “left/right” politics. Neither is it the old saying, attributed to
Clemenceau, that “He who is not a Socialist at 20 has no heart; he who is not a Capitalist at 40 has no head”
– hell, I was always an Anarchist. No,
it’s a sharp nose for hypocrisy and a clear memory of not-so-ancient history.
When I was in college, never mind how long ago, the
difference between “liberal” and “conservative”, between “socialist” and
“reactionary”, and between “communist” and “fascist” was sharp and clear. (Even then, we noticed that the extremes of
both political directions curled around and met each other, nearly alike in
attitudes and tactics. It’s no
coincidence that this is when the Libertarian movement began.)
In simple terms, the “left” was for civil rights and racial
equality, for feminism and Gay rights and gender equality, fiercely for the
Bill of Rights, for separation of church and state, against anti-Semitism and
pro-Israel, against the war and very suspicious of Russia,
China,
and the Arabs. They also believed in the basic goodwill of government, and
assumed that if they could only persuade a big-enough government to do the
right stuff, all our sociopolitical problems would be solved. They did have a vague notion of “globalism”,
the old Progressive ideal of “All men are the same, the whole world around”,
and that the ideal future would have a happy unified world under a single
benign government, assumed to be the UN.
They didn’t spend too much time with that idea, though, being primarily
concerned with immediate reforms.
When it came to tactics, the “liberals” were meticulous in
keeping what Dr. King called “the moral high ground”. They’d spend hundreds of hours discussing the
ethics, as well as the effectiveness, of their proposed actions – always aware
that everything they did in public was intended to persuade the undecided to the morality of their cause. They were very aware that the further left
anyone got from their position, the less s/he cared about the ethics of
tactics. The “liberals” also had the
advantage of being serious intellectuals who put high value on art – all the
arts – which gave them a tactical advantage on persuasion; they could effectively inject their attitudes
into everything from theater to popular songs.
The “right” then ranged from “conservatives” to shameless
reactionaries, but was undergoing some serious changes thanks to the war, Barry
Goldwater and Ayn Rand.
The reactionaries were blatantly anti-Civil Rights and
distinctly militarist, racist, sexist, and religiously biased – only Christians
allowed, and preferably Protestants. They
were also furiously pro-war, anti-labor-union, plainly class-biased,
hysterically anti-communist-or-anything-like-it, and were very much
pro-government – right up to the point where governments interfered with
businesses. They were also distinctly
anti-intellectual and suspicious of art and artists. Their tactics were fairly simple and
straightforward: entice money from sympathetic oligarchs – particularly in the
military-industrial complex – use it to purchase controlling influence in the
mainstream media, and campaign for likewise-reactionary political candidates. And the occasional lynch-mob or police brutality was carefully ignored.
But there were strong cross-currents running. Rand’s “Atlas
Shrugged”, published in the 1950s, had been a steady best-seller since, second
in sales only to the Bible, and her philosophy of “Objectivism” had quietly
attracted millions – particularly among the young and intelligent. It was at this time that Young Americans for
Freedom – the first nascent libertarian group -- took off on college campuses
across the country. Their inspiration
was about half Rand and half Barry Goldwater, whose “Conscience of a
Conservative” helped redefine “conservatism” in years afterward. Goldwater was called a “maverick” then, but
his definition of “conservative” would have made him a Libertarian just a few
decades later.
Bear in mind that only a few years earlier the southern
reactionaries – “Dixiecrats” – had finally figured out that the Democrat Party
was (a century later!) no longer the opposition to Abraham Lincoln, and they
deserted en masse to the GOP. This had not done the Republicans any good,
for it shifted the GOP severely into the reactionary camp – and its reputation
likewise. That was the real reason that
Goldwater lost the election to LBJ. And
LBJ, despite his own political leanings, signed the historic Civil Rights Act.
The mood of the voters had been shifting away from the
reactionary position ever since World War Two, wherein Blacks, women, and other
minorities had proved themselves in the war effort – in full view of
everyone. The revelations of the Nazi
genocide won national sympathy for Jews (which neo-Nazis and Arabs have
resented ever since), and the scientific advances during the war put
anti-intellectualism in bad odor. The
necessary awareness of other countries involved in the war put paid to isolationism,
as did the growing Red Scare – and the sensible opposition to it. The reactionary right lost ground steadily,
and by the time of the Vietnam War it was a visible minority. The GOP was forced to scramble for a
reasonable position between the dying reactionaries and the perturbing Libertarians. The solution Republicans came to was an
uneasy balance of “socially somewhat Liberal, fiscally Conservative”, which
made them acceptable enough to elect a few presidents in the decades that
followed.
Meanwhile, the Libertarians quietly but steadily gained
ground. They created a formal
Libertarian Party in Colorado,
in 1971, and managed to get it on the ballot in all 50 states by 1981. It has remained the only viable 3rd
party in the US ever since, winning local and occasional state offices, and
struggling against both mass shunning by the news media and repeated
co-optation attempts from the rest of the political Right. When the 2016 election campaigns left many
Americans disgusted with both the major parties, the LP gained enough sympathizers
– and enough votes – that the news media finally agreed to notice their
existence and even give them a few opportunities to air their opinions to the
larger public.
Likewise meanwhile, the political Left had progressed by
quite visible leaps and bounds. The
“counter-culture” of the ‘60s spread to the mainstream culture, mostly through
quality work in the performing arts, all during the ‘70s and well into the
‘80s. Nixon’s scandal did the GOP no
favors politically, and Jimmy Carter’s economic ineptitude did the Democrats no
harm – until the Iran
hostage crisis. Voters elected Reagan
primarily because they knew his militaristic attitude scared the Iranian
government -- into releasing the hostages and backing away from its Jihadist
ambitions as soon as he was elected. His
cunning use of economic warfare ultimately succeeded in bringing down the Soviet Union – which also got Bush Sr. elected on his
coattails – but Democrats reliably took the majority of lesser offices,
particularly at the state level. American
voters clearly wanted enough militarism to keep foreign enemies discreet, and
enough sturdy capitalism to keep the economy healthy, but on all other social
and political matters they liked the Liberal positions, particularly of racial
and religious equality. This was when federal
bureaucracies and various police departments began accepting large numbers of
Black applicants, assorted ethnic holidays became fashionable, and Women’s Lib,
and then Gay Lib, became legitimate and popular. And after one term, voters dumped Bush for
Bill Clinton in ’92.
But something else had also been launched in 1971. Two Alabama lawyers – Joe Levin and Martin
Dees -- impatient with the slow implementation of the Civil Rights Act, founded
the Southern Poverty Law Center for the express purpose of using lawsuits to
enforce civil rights and “fighting hate and bigotry and seeking justice for the
most vulnerable members of society” – according to Levin, who remained a devout
civil-libertarian all his life.
Dees may have had other
motives in mind. He had defended KKK
chapters just ten years earlier, but clearly saw that the power of the
reactionary Right was fading fast and there was no more money in defending
it. When he switched sides to help found
the SPLC, he became the group’s chief fundraiser, gaining financial support
from every Liberal/leftist group he could find.
Recruiting the famed civil rights activist Julian Bond to be president
of the group was a real coup, granting the SPLC fame and respectability enough to
open wallets everywhere, give the SPLC a multi-million-dollar war chest, and
recruit lots of eager young Liberal law-students.
I recall that when I first encountered the SPLC, back in the
late ‘70s, I sensed that there was something ‘off’ about them. Perhaps it was my ex-SDS/IWW sensitivity to
the danger of Parlor Pinks, but I sensed that they were entirely too rich and
too Marxist to have the real interests of the people at heart, and I warned my
fellow Wobblies to keep away from this bunch.
They, having the same sensibilities, did.
To be fair, the SPLC did use their pet tactic well. With crushing multi-million-dollar lawsuits
on behalf of the victims, the SPLC did succeed in ruining a lot of the really
blatant and vicious White-supremacist groups, smashed most of the legal and
economic survivals of the Jim Crow laws, fought landmark cases for equality of
women and Gays and the disabled, and contributed to the near-extinction of the
Ku Klux Klan. Through their well-funded
research, they assembled probably the nation’s biggest list of what they
labeled “hate groups”. This impressed
the FBI, which had not before then made any comprehensive list of its own, and
so came to depend on the SPLC for its identification of “hate groups”.
Unfortunately, the SPLC began defining as “hate groups” (or
just “haters”) as anyone to the political right of Eisenhower (who, being
safely dead by then, couldn’t complain).
That came to include anybody criticizing policies the SPLC liked -- and
with growing victories, money, and prestige, the SPLC’s tastes grew more
demanding and extreme. Former members
began quietly dropping out. Co-founder
Joe Levin retired from SPLC in 2006 and went into private practice, where he
wound up defending three southern universities in turn against federal govt.
desegregation suits, arguing for mitigation of Affirmative Action decrees – and
SPLC denounced their old civil libertarian and
Black academics who agreed with him for “Appeasing the Beast”.
By then SPLC was provably the wealthiest civil-rights group
in America, with reported
assets over $200 million, and the IRS began asking discreetly about what Dees was doing with its wealth – besides purchasing for
himself a 200-acre estate complete with tennis courts, pool and stables. Undaunted, the SPLC expanded its “hate list”
to include anyone criticizing immigration policies, Muslim fundamentalists,
abortion laws, Gay Liberation, federal govt. overreach, and gun control. At one point the SPLC considered adding the
NRA to its list of “hate groups”, but backed off upon finding that the NRA had
more funds, lawyers, and sympathizers than it did.
In expanding its “hate list” the SPLC actively inflated the
numbers of the moribund Ku Klux Klan.
Although the FBI noted that the KKK’s membership was less than 2000
nationwide, with at least 10% of those being police spies, the SPLC loudly
claimed that there are 130 KKK groups in the US – and used this figure to
campaign for funds. In fact, the KKK was
so small and fractured that it could no longer pay the salary of its last
kingpin, David Duke. As a result, Duke
began hiring himself out as a political “spoiler”; for an appropriate fee, he would make
speeches praising various public figures so as to make them look like “White
Supremacists”, tarnish their reputations and hopefully torpedo their
careers. There is no conclusive evidence
that the SPLC ever directly hired Duke for that purpose, but that tactic would
have dovetailed perfectly with their fundraising efforts.
Worse, there is spotty but persistent evidence that “unknown
sources” have been funding KKK and “alt-right” recruiting efforts, as well as
outright hiring of “crisis actors” – if not actual agents provocateurs -- to
play the part of “neo-nazis” in public, so as to make them look more numerous
and dangerous than they really are.
Note that at roughly the same time the FBI had perfected the
ancient tactic of provocateering into an elaborate system, typified by the
CoIntelPro campaign originally aimed at the student civil rights movement. It later used the tactic successfully against
the National Organization of Women, using the “Judas goat” Andrea Dworkin. The SPLC soon became aware of the tactic, and
studied it thoroughly. It has not,
however, made any public comments about the government’s use of that tactic in
the years since. Bear that in mind. Also consider the career of one Jason
Kessler, former “Occupy” activist, who dropped out of sight for a few years
only to suddenly reappear as the organizer of Richard Spenser’s “alt-right”
protest in Charlottesville. I believe we can add to the list of suspects
for funding that elaborate caper.
At another point, according to an unofficial but witnessed
story, the SPLC tried investigating the Libertarian Party as a possible
“anti-government hate group”, but retreated in dismay upon meeting an LP
officer who was an openly Gay pot-smoker -- and learning the LP’s position on
such things. To all accounts, the SPLC
has scrupulously avoided saying anything about the LP since. It has also, I notice, avoided any mention of
the IWW, or any other activist labor groups.
This is worth remembering, since the active labor movement had turned
thoroughly against the Communists, Socialists and any brand of Marxist by the
end of World War II.
But possibly the greatest effect of the SPLC has been
popularizing, and making into law, the concepts of “hate crime” and “hate
speech”, concepts which they have spread world-wide. If you think about it, laws based on these
concepts are blatantly unconstitutional, because they make an emotion criminal
– and thereby they make “thought crime”
legal.
In practice, this means that the nature of a crime is
determined not by the action itself but by a witnesses’, victim’s, or
prosecutor’s subjective impression of
the perpetrator’s thoughts and emotions. Evidence for “hate crimes” or “hate speech”
can be nothing more than a witness’/victim’s claim of hurt feelings. This can lead to such monstrous perversions
of justice as (true case) sentencing a man to 15 years in prison, plus 15
years’ probation, for nothing more than leaving a pound of sliced bacon on the
ground in front of a mosque. “Hate
speech”, legally, is free speech that hurts someone’s feelings, and depends for
its severity on how much that person says their feelings were hurt. This is a very poor basis for legal argument,
and it’s hard to see how any rational adult could believe in it.
Unfortunately, the SPLC made a point of spreading its
philosophy to a large number of sub-rational sub-adults.
The college-student involvement in the reform movements of
the 1960s and ‘70s impressed many with the political effectiveness of college
students, and many were the Liberal political activists who went courting
college students – and their professors – in the decades afterward. Conservative activists tried too, but proved
far less efficient at winning sympathizers.
Libertarian activists had better luck, but their hyper-rational
philosophy had less appeal among the just-barely-legal-age crowd than the
neatly sculpted emotionalism of the Liberals.
Part of this is only natural; kids love to be told that there’s nothing
more important than their own feelings.
However, most of the blame must be laid on the upper-middle-class style
of child-raising, which tended to keep children childish for as long as
possible – to reward emotions, downplay “cold” logic, and even assume that facts are mutable. Between1980 and the present day, college
graduates with these attitudes had flooded the job-markets of academia,
journalism, and even government civil service – simply because other employment
required a basic respect for facts and logic (rather than exciting pictures and
sensational stories), and because a B.A. in any subject (including Liberal
inventions such as “Oppression Studies”) could get you a mid-range job in the
state and federal bureaucracies, particularly Welfare.
The result was a fertile recruiting-field on college
campuses. The SPLC, with its respectable
list of “hate-groups” to target and its promise of lawsuits to back up any
attack thereupon, was certainly not the only political group preaching to eager
undergraduates, but it was among the most influential. By the 1990s the phenomenon of “political correctness”
was widespread and noticeable everywhere.
But power corrupts, and on many fronts – including the
intellect. Even as the old
reactionary-religious Right was withering away to a rich-but-tiny minority,
academic and journalistic standards in America began to sink – and
political standards with them. Regular
surveys showed that a disturbingly large minority of college graduates were functionally illiterate in English, and
total failures in Critical Thinking.
Media outlets reduced their fact-checking to a minimum, and real
investigative reporters became an endangered species. Government bureaucracies became politicized
to the point of sue-able misuse of powers – and funds; the two fastest-growing fields of legal
specialties became civil-rights violations (real or imagined) and forcing government agencies to do their jobs,
regardless of the politics of the recipients.
Meanwhile, families too poor to send their kids to
Liberalized universities sent them to technical “community” colleges – and, if
lucky, high schools – instead. There the
students learned unflinching facts and logic and saleable technical skills,
whereby they could move into the upper working-class or lower
middle-class. Even the military, that
last bastion of guaranteed employment, had become very technically oriented; again, facts and logic and critical thinking
were necessary for job-progress, or even survival.
This difference created an unseen but deep division between
the university-educated emotionally-oriented upper middle-class, whose politics
were reliably left-wing, and the tech-school educated deadly-practical
working-class-to-lower-middle-class, whose politics were all over the map. The growth of the Internet made a wealth of
information available to the latter, who made good technical, economic and
political use of it. Thus, by 2000, the
old standard of class politics had stood on its head; the “bourgeoisie” were now the passionate
Leftists, and the “proletariat” were the coolly practical Right-of-center.
The terrorist attacks of 2001 only increased the political
divide between them. The
practical/working class could see very plainly that Arab culture was the enemy,
that too many Arabs/Muslims adored it, and that war between the two was
inevitable. The passionate Left collectively
threw away its intelligence and pledged allegiance to the poor, misunderstood,
innocent Arabs – on the assumption that they couldn’t possibly be so upset as to commit terrorism if they
hadn’t been “oppressed” beforehand. This
led to some incredible intellectual back-bends (eagerly assisted by assorted
Arab propaganda outlets) – such as opposing all
wars (even those fought for survival) while encouraging civilian violence,
blaming Israel and America for all the world’s troubles, claiming that the
“White race” is inherently evil, hating Jews, fiercely attacking freedom of
speech and the rest of the Bill of Rights as well, giving preferential
treatment to Arabs and other Muslims, and elevating other cultures above
existing law – even when the practices and foundations of those cultures are
directly opposed to the rights and liberties which the earlier Left fought so
long and hard to win.
Eventually even the Left’s bellwether, the SPLC, realized
that it had created a monster that it couldn’t control – organizations like
Antifa, BLM, and offshoots of the Muslim Brotherhood ranting and rioting in
public. In particular, the FBI stopped
using the SPLC as a reliable information source.
At about the time that officers of Black Lives Matter began
demanding in public that all White people should hand over their “car keys and
checkbooks” and then die, the SPLC began adding “Black Separatists” to their
list of “hate groups” – and admitting that there were more Black Separatist
groups than KKKs, or White Nationalists, or “Anti-Muslims”, or even “General
Hate” groups. This is particularly
telling when you see that the SPLC considers that: “All hate groups have
beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically
for their immutable characteristics.”
This is an awfully broad definition, since it would also cover groups
that “hate” child-molesters, sex-traffickers, and other criminal gangs. Also, as the Transgender Movement and the
life and career of Michael Jackson have proved, very few characteristics these
days are “immutable”. It also still
clung to its warning that “Hate group activities can include criminal acts,
marches, rallies, speeches, meetings, leafleting or publishing” – which is
exactly the same list that the more passionate Leftist groups practice. So the damage was done, and shows no sign of
abatement.
This explains such things as the current Left’s adoration of
the vicious Linda Sarsour, the government’s longstanding unwillingness to fight
real wars to a solid conclusion, and the steady erosion of the Bill of
Rights.
It also explains the election of Donald Trump. The practical working class didn’t vote for
him so much as they voted against Hillary Clinton, and her promised continuance
of the elite-Left agenda. It also
explains why the Libertarian Party gained enough popularityu to get increased
attention by the media, and a notable increase in votes, despite its naïve
attitude toward immigration and foreign affairs. The corruption and excesses of what used to
be the American Left have created the very “divisiveness” it now complains
about, exacerbating an unspoken but definite class and cultural war.
Indeed, the so-called Left’s hysterical reaction to Trump’s
election has revealed its present attitudes for all to see, and the picture is
not pretty. Today it’s the so-called
Left which indulges in censorship, slander, biased news, racism, religious
bigotry, hysteria, anti-intellecutalism, and fascistoid mobbing tactics – even
as it calls its opponents “fascist”.
It’s the so-called Right which demands freedom of expression and support
for the entire Bill of Rights, honors Black achievers like Colin Powell and Dr.
Thomas Sowell, demands accurate verification of news media, insists on equal
treatment of all religious groups, respects facts and logic, has developed a
keen appreciation of the arts – including snarky comedians like Milos
Yianopolos, the modern equivalent of Lenny Bruce – and is cautious of its own
political fringes.
Just about the only remnants of their political pasts that
remain are the Left’s now-obsessive worship of “globalism” and the Right’s
respect for the military and the occasional grim necessity of war.
Other than that, the names remain the same but the
definitions under them have shifted almost completely.
--Leslie <;)))><