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From: dhenwood@panix.com (Doug Henwood)
To: PROGRESSIVE SOCIOLOGISTS NETWORK <psn@csf.colorado.edu>
Subject: militias: tools of the devil?
Apologies for the multiple postings, but I think this is important.
Maybe it's just the onset of summer heat, but I feel an urge to be
perverse. Lots of folks on the left, from liberals leftward, have expressed
great alarm about the growth of "right" populism of the sort that finds its
most extreme expression in the militias.
Now of course many of these people are truly scary. But are we right to
condemn them all? I had Jeff St Clair - former union organizer now radical
enviro, editor of the Wild Forest Review, co-author of pieces in this and
next week's Village Voice (with Ridgeway), and collaborator with and source
for Alex Cockburn - on my radio show the other night. St Clair argued that
"we" (the left, whatever that is) would be making a terrible mistake by
writing lots of these folks off, or worse, calling the FBI out on them.
Take the example of the ranchers, with their subsidized grazing lands.
Urban elitists, me once among them, treat them with scorn. But St Clair
points out that most of them are very marginal, economically, laboring
under big mortgages that they attempt to service with meager cash flows. If
their grazing fees went up, they'd be ruined. The land would then fall into
the hands of oil and gold interests, who would rape and pillage it. St
Clair says the ranchers could be important allies for enviros - they're
people with a deep attachment to the land who would take care of it far
better than American Barrick, the Canadian-based gold company. The right
courts them; the "left" demonizes them; and the elite enviro establishment
would like to put them out of business and turn the whole area into a park.
The latter preference is a symptom of the elite enviros' fundamental
Malthusianism. It's ironic that much of the big enviro organizations are
funded by fortunes made in oil (Rockefeller, Pew, W Alton Jones); they're
taking their billions made from wrecking the earth and its atmosphere and
are mounting the moral high ground with it.
More broadly, St Clair says, the politics of lots of the "populists" is
anti-corporate and anti-authoritarian. Because most of what they hear is
from vile agitators, their instincts are often channelled in boneheaded
anti-government and anti-Semitic directions. If instead of demonizing them,
the "left" tried to talk to them, then that might change.
The worst attitude is that expressed by Michael Kelly in his New Yorker
piece last week - patronizing contempt for what he called "fusion
paranoia," a label he applied to anyone who thought that there's a
political/business/media ruling class that essentially runs things despite
the outward appearance of democratic rule and is willing to do treacherous
things to sustain their rule. Certainly there's plenty of low-rent
conspiracy theorizing around that infects both left and right, but there's
a core of truth to it that Kelly can't see, lap dog of the ruling class
that he is.
Doug
--Doug Henwood [dhenwood@panix.com] Left Business Observer 250 W 85 St New York NY 10024-3217 USA +1-212-874-4020 voice +1-212-874-3137 fax Prof. Chris Chase-Dunn Department of Sociology Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, MD. 21218 USA tel 410 516 7633 fax 410 516 7590 email chriscd@jhu.edu