Aspirational Fascism

William E. Connolly
   Johns Hopkins University
                                                                           
    In an earlier post, entitled What Was Fascism?, I responded to a set of right wing pundits who treat social democracy, liberalism and a welfare state as modes of fascism. The logic behind that equation is simple: unregulated markets promote consummate freedom and rationality; state regulation of markets stifles both and produces irrational intervention in the daily lives of people. One point of my post was to remind people what these revisionist histories seek to forget: Drives to European fascism were triggered above all in the thirties by the advent of the Great Depression; and that Depression was produced by practices of market utopianism. While market utopianism was not itself fascistic, the collapse it fomented helped to spawn fascist movements in several countries and to intensify them in others. Only a few actually succeeded. But the results were devastating.

There were several characteristics of fascism the first time around. It was virulently anti-semitic, propelling death camps in its most extreme version. It also defined social democrats, communists, homosexuals and the Romani as degenerates, deserving to be placed on the dumping grounds of history. Its racism with respect to non-Europeans was virulent. Where it succeeded, it introduced a one-party state, disallowing electoral challenges, to say the least. The success of fascist movements, when they did succeed, was spurred by a dark series of resonances between the state, industrialists and local vigilante groups who spread terror in the streets. These versions of fascism were also capitalistic. Profit and ownership of the means of production were private. Fascist capitalism replaced the myth of market self-sufficiency by one of exclusionary national unity, brownshirts, bellicose militarism, police repression and aggressive war policies.

It is thus a mistake to equate every large state with fascism, as the radical right loves to do under the umbrella of market utopianism. In fact, it is difficult to find a capitalist state anywhere that is not also a large state, though the priorities of such states do vary significantly.

2008 RNC National Convention St. Paul, MN

One critic of that post suggested that I had merely pretended to read Hayek. Hayek, of course, was an early purveyor of the view that regulated markets promote a fascist state, though socialism was his key target. He presents an uncanny mixture of the insightful and the fanciful: a fascinating account of freedom, spontaneity and social processes of self-organization; a utopian view of market processes as the only place such processes occur; and a homogeneous suspicion of any large state, however distinctive in aim, accountability, and organization. He was not a friend of aspirational fascism. A critique of Hayek, joined to a corollary appreciation of his early engagement with complexity theory, could thus be timely. He was, for instance, wary of any association between the state and religious enthusiasm. It is too bad, then, that he confined the play of spontaneity and real complexity to economic markets, setting into motion an ideological movement that denies the role of spontaneity and self-organization to social movements and, indeed, to a much larger host of interacting human and nonhuman domains (See The Fragility of Things). Welcome to the world of under-regulated markets and rapid climate change, Mr. Hayek.

2011 Texas Wildfires Bastrop, TX

What about aspirational fascism today and the possibility of its enactment in America? Its reoccurrence, if it happened, would express some continuities with the past punctuated by a series of significant differences. To detect hints about those affinities and differences, we can listen to Republican, Tea Party candidates such as Michelle Bachmann, Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich; we can heed the expressions of hate and ugliness regularly spouted by an active minority in their audiences; we can recall the Tea Party’s willingness to shut down the government to support the ends of a minority movement; and we can attend to repressive police practices already underway in American cities. Here is what such listening suggests:

1) Neo-Fascism, if it were to arrive, would not take the shape of one party rule. The media, corporations, the state, and vigilante groups together would cow constituencies on the middle and the left. The minority party would offer only weak resistance to the policies of the right, and some sections would collude with it.

2) Anti-semitism, while hovering in the wings, would be displaced by virulent opposition to all Muslim groups, within and outside the country. Gays, feminists, professors, atheists, and union leaders would also be on the list of enemies. The war on terror would morph, as it is always on the verge of doing, into a war on Islam as such. The most right wing tendencies in Israel would be supported enthusiastically, even as calls to make America a more Christian nation intensified. Those two apparently incompatible drives can be sustained in some circles by saying that the first stage of Armegeddon will arrive in Israel, to be followed by the Second Coming in which only Christians are rescued. You don’t need to worry about the devastation of the earth if you are waiting for the Second Coming; you don’t want to if you are committed to a neoliberal image of production, consumption and markets. Such a combination, to the extent it succeeded, would silence a large and growing section within Christianity that eagerly supports a pluralist culture. 

3) Carbon based sources of energy for production, consumption and military operations would be celebrated and extended. The dangers of fracking and nuclear power would be ignored. Climate change would be ridiculed. And imperial operations designed to protect traditional modes of energy would be launched.

Hydro-Fracking Run Off

4) As the effects of climate change foment suffering and disorder in several regions, the United States would become even more of a garrison state, invoking massive state power to barricade its borders and creating a series of wars in vulnerable or oil rich regions.

In Violation of the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act U.S. National Guard 'Lends a Hand' to the Border Patrol and So Called 'Citizen Soldiers'

5) As market utopianism, unlimited corporate campaign money, and state repression grows, inequality of wealth, income and communicative power would become even more extreme. Attempts to protest these developments would foment more intensive modes of state and media repression to disparage and silence them. You might think that the Supreme Court would help here, but its recent drive to give more rights to corporations as “persons” than to living persons is hardly reassuring. The majority of the current court participates in the ideology of market utopianism. 

Crack Down at Wall Street Occupation

6) As the combine of market utopianism and state bellicosity grew, another world wide market collapse would almost certainly occur. It is an open question whether China would escape its effects. The right would draw upon the suffering promoted by that collapse to pursue even more intensely market utopianism. Since a perfectly free market is always a chimera promised for a fanciful future, you can always blame the latest failures on too much market regulation and taxation of “job creators”. 

Chinese Military Trying to Cope with the Sichuan Earthquake. The Earthquake's Devastation Was Magnified by China's Intense Poverty and Urban Density.

6) Vigilante groups, already discernible in this country, would grow in size and type, seeking to silence alternative voices as they infiltrate localities, churches, corporations, and universities. The state and the police would enter into covert alliances with them.   

Such a new type of fascism is certainly not inevitable. It does, however, operate as an aspiration in some circles that already makes a big difference in our politics. It also could occur, if a major terrorist event encountered a Republican President and Congress. It poses a real danger.

In the Immediate Aftermath of Pearl Harbor FDR Interred 110,000 Americans of Japanese Heritage. Although Reparation Were Paid Korematsu v. U.S. Still Affirms the Constitutionality of Racial Internment.

The immediate question is how to criticize market utopianism more effectively as we identify the dangers it promotes, the denials it demands, the suffering it fosters, the unfocussed anger it unleashes, and the repressive, militaristic state it solicits to sustain its fantasies. Above all, how can we awaken a large constellation of “Independents”--who first try to ignore politics as much as possible and then become susceptible to slightly softened versions of right wing sound bites when a crisis emerges. Here Mitt Romney, perhaps, is even more dangerous than Rick Perry, as he exudes a willingness to be the soft voice of a rampant minority movement. The secret of the neoliberal/evangelical machine resides in the way that it promises smooth markets for the future as it feeds off crises of today it helps to foment. 

Barack Obama, for all his eloquence, is not good at exposing these drives and dangers. Paul Krugman, for all his economic insight, does not crack through either. Academic radicals have insufficient reach and connections on their own. Steve Colbert and Jon Stewart show merely a few flashes of brilliance in this regard. What then? Some noble intellectuals in the American Jewish community are now speaking out actively about the American/Israeli/Palestine quagmire. A forthcoming documentary by Bruce Robbins at Columbia University is promising in this regard. Recently, I have begun to wonder whether Rachel Maddow and Elizabeth Warren might provide hope in exposing the insidious character of this machine to a wider audience.

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One thing seems clear, however: it will take enhanced participation by more people in the micropolitics of families, churches, unions, localities, consumption cooperatives, universities, the new media, protests, and corporate exposes to pave the way for the social movements and electoral coalitions needed today. Connections to social movements in other countries are critical too. In these respects protest movements on Wall Street and in Wisconsin, along with militant protests against austerity in England, Greece and elsewhere may be promising.

Baseball, Leisure, and Chocolate Chip Cookies

John Buell is a columnist for The Progressive Populist and a faculty adjunct at Cochise College. His most recent book, Politics, Religion, and Culture in an Anxious Age, will be published by Palgrave/Macmillan in August.

Periodically I fall asleep while watching a late night baseball game from the west coast. I have invested in a Major League Baseball package that allows me to choose almost any game every night, but by far the preferred choice is Dodger games. I am a fan of announcers as much as teams. And the former are more stable than the latter, which have become interchangeable parts on a money- driven merry-go-round. My choice of Dodger games owes nothing to Brooklyn or Los Angeles loyalty but rather to appreciation of and fascination with the voice of the Dodgers, Vin Scully.  

I have been especially attentive to Dodger games this season. Prior to the start of the season, Scully had announced that this would be his last as Dodger broadcaster. The other night, however, Scully surprised us, albeit with a characteristically soft-spoken announcement.

An admirer had a long tradition of sending him chocolate chip cookies, and this year her gift was accompanied by a note that the cookies were a bribe to entice him to return for another season. As I drifted off to sleep, I expected him to thank her and then explain why the time had come to hang up the microphone. His response, that he would return for his 63d season, both jolted me out of my sleep and led to some reflections on age and retirement. Even if he really loves those cookies, Scully is returning to the booth because he is healthy and loves his job. Many older Americans toil on also out of love for the office, even when they could easily afford to choose the golf course. Sadly, however, an increasing number, even in declining health, are forced to keep working due to America's inadequate social protections not out of love for their work; this is where we all as a society strike out.

Scully is both typical and atypical of his generation. As an announcer, he is without equal. For me he almost defines the genre. Unlike any other announcer today, Scully works alone, with no ex- player to provide the 'color' commentary. And hype is not his style. For him, no baseball game determines the future of western civilization. His commentary resembles a quiet, literate conversation with his listeners. The other day he congratulated both Japan and Huntington Beach for their long run in the Little League World Series. Both had played great ball, but only one could win. 'It's a game, after all.'

Scully reminds me of Ernie Harwell, long- time radio voice of the Detroit Tigers and a fixture of my youth. Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson has commented that the LA Dodgers 

boasted sports' greatest, most literate and entertaining broadcaster, Vin Scully. (I've long believed that kids who grew up listening to Scully got at least a 30-point bump on their verbal SAT.) Always the most spatially and governmentally scattered of cities --- there are 88 municipalities in Los Angeles County --- L.A. lacked most forms of common civic identity until half the town began listening to Scully.

Like Harwell's, Scully's commentary is peppered with stories about the players' lives and families. Recently during a scorching Sunday afternoon from Dodger Stadium, Scully regaled us with tales of how players used wet mattresses and cabbage under their hats to cool off in pre-airconditioning times. As with all modern commentators, he has a plethora of statistics upon which to draw, but he does not overwhelm the fan with numbers. I especially appreciate several features that seem unique to his broadcasts. When a runner lands on third, Scully will invariably inform us of the number of wild pitches the pitcher has committed over the season. And when pitchers bat he tell us what percentage of the time they have struck out, a figure that gives a better sense than mere batting average as to whether or not they are klutzes at the plate. My favorite Scully touch is a sixth inning feature, 'This Day in Dodger Baseball,' wherein he tells a story of an event or personality in the long history of the Dodgers, stories often drawn on his own conversations with the players.
  Longevity in the US has increased and seniors are working longer, both out of choice and necessity. Nonetheless, I bristle at the increasingly popular idea that because longevity has increased and many seniors are doing excellent work well into their eighties, it is no big deal if the Social Security retirement age were to be increased from 65 to 67.

I look around my own working class community with its fishermen, boat builders, carpenters. Despite talk of post-industrial society, much work remains physical and is literally back-breaking. (Such service professions as nursing carry enormous physical and emotional burdens.) And increases in longevity, as Dean Baker has pointed out, are heavily class- skewed. Upper class citizens have more control over their work environments, generally do less physically stressful work, and have better and more regular access to quality medical care. Increasing the retirement age is another attack on the wallets and the health of poor and working class citizens, often depriving them of the few years of retirement to which they can look forward.

  Baker also points out that any social security shortfalls, which are exaggerated to begin with, could be alleviated by removing the cap on earned income subject to social security taxation. Much as I like Vin Scully, I believe he and other well compensated professionals working long years at jobs they love should see all of their income taxed, just as is the case for my neighbors, most of whom have few choices about their work.

  In a broader sense, the issue of retirement raises profound questions about modern capitalism.At least as far back as the twenties, capitalism's most outspoken defenders promised a future of both material gains and more free time for all. And indeed, despite US capitalism's frequent failures to tap its full human and technological potential, worker productivity has greatly increased. Yet for a quarter century Americans have seen stagnant incomes, longer workloads and no opportunity to trade any wage gains for increases in leisure or earlier retirements.

Source: The New York Times, Sept 4, 2011

Preserving and lowering the social security retirement age and taxing all earned income would be a small step in the right direction. But for now I am pleased that Vince Scully will stay another year so that I can use my own leisure time to revisit and refashion my memories of the summer game.

News Corporation and American Democracy

John Buell
John Buell (jbuell@acadia.net) is a columnist for The Progressive Populist and a faculty adjunct at Cochise College. His most recent book, Politics, Religion, and Culture in an Anxious Age, will be published by Palgrave/Macmillan in August.

Will Rupert Murdoch's public humiliation end with the indictment of his son and deposing both as leaders of News Corporation? Murdoch is of course a larger than life figure, a modern day Citizen Kane, the movie character based in part on the life of the real media titan of his day, William Randolph Hearst. Hearst built a media empire through yellow journalism and relentless promotion of American empire. Murdoch has helped reshape modern media, not merely in terms of corporate consolidation or political leanings but also journalistic style and redefinition of the nature and limits of political argument. But though he has helped to define the role of media tycoon in the late twentieth and twenty first century, the evolution of capitalism and its political economy has itself reinforced and in turn been buttressed by his performance. Great actors inspire but also depend on engaged and receptive audiences.

Rupert Murdoch did not begin the process of media consolidation. A generation ago, media scholar and critic Ben Bagdikian highlighted the tendency of corporate media empires to achieve a high degree of both vertical and horizontal integration. (See his book, New Media Monopoly.) Diminishing numbers of corporate media controlled most of the market. In Britain, Murdoch has achieved an unprecedented degree of media consolidation.

That success of course owes something to Murdoch's ability to appeal to--and sow--the politics of backlash and jingoism. Murdoch had a cultural climate that proved receptive. The mainstream media of the sixties and seventies did indeed show some sympathy to growing concerns over racial justice and social issues. Radical critiques of corporate capitalism or sympathetic analyses of the plight of working class whites in an era of outsourcing, however, were hardly to be found. Murdoch had a perfect sweet spot to spread his right wing populism.

Murdoch's success has had other drivers as well. Like the large investment banks and defense contractors, he has depended on a symbiotic relationship with major political leaders. John Nichols points out: "Rupert Murdoch has manipulated not just the news but the news landscape of the United States for decades. He has done so by pressuring the Federal Communications Commission and Congress to alter the laws of the land and regulatory standards in order to give his media conglomerate an unfair advantage in 'competition' with more locally focused, more engaged and more responsible media. It's an old story: while Murdoch's Fox News hosts prattle on and on about their enthusiasm for the free market, they work for a firm that seeks to game the system so Murdoch's 'properties' are best positioned to monopolize the discourse." Murdoch is a prime example of the evolution of US capitalism toward a political economy that imposes market discipline on the poor even as it rewards and buttresses the power of the corporate winners and the wealthy.

Source: the Media Reform Information Center.

Nichols also asks if we should care about Murdoch's journalistic triumph. He suggests that the Murdoch scandal "raises huge questions about how news stories are and will be obtained in an era of new media and about the extent to which supposedly personal communications are private." These are certainly valid points, but a ruthless pursuit and exploitation of information about the private lives of its subjects has early precursors within the national security state itself. Think of J Edgar Hoover's accumulation of information about the sexual predilections of political leaders and his shameless deployment of these to bribe his nominal superiors.

Just as importantly, the corporate culture of News Corp reflected Murdoch's broader political ideals and affected its journalistic practices. Murdoch's notorious hostility to unions expressed itself in actions taken after high profile news takeovers at such papers as the New York Post and this in turn affected the editorial product. Michelle Chen comments: "Eavesdropping on voicemail or obtaining call logs was initially a money-saving measure" to get the scoop fast and cheap. That is, pressure to maximize profits contributed directly to the corruption of reporting practices." Reporters were subject to the same sort of speed up that shaped manufacturing assembly lines and still today is, as Harold Meyerson points out, a major driver of corporate profits even in the midst of the great recession.

More broadly, Murdoch feeds but also reflects a politics of demonization not unique to the United States but exceptionally potent here. Thus to a greater extent than in most modern democracies, such questions as whether one inhaled marijuana or had a mistress pass for informed and important political debate.

Fox reflects and amplifies another vital trend in the evolution of our politics. Naomi Klein's provocative Shock Doctrine suggests that the evolution of neoliberal capitalism with its market discipline for the many and rewards and subsidies for the well placed has depended on crisis. Thus 9/11 gave Bush extraordinary opportunities to reshape the economy and the national security state. Yet from my vantage point Klein underplays the role of the media in framing and fostering the sense of crisis. How is it that 9/11 evoked a far different response from the Oklahoma City bombing? A media that glorified Wall Street as the world's financial capital, that demonized Arabs, that viewed human history in Manichean terms played a crucial role.

The role of the media in shaping and defining crisis is even more obvious in the case of the current debt ceiling debate. The notion that the US is broke is absurd. If we are broke now, we were much more broke in the years following WWII. Yet in those years the US growth rate topped that of the Reagan era and the fruits of growth were much more equitably distributed. Nonetheless, Fox has been an amplification machine for the notion that the US is broke and government, just like today's families, must retrench. This analysis is only half right. Middle and working class families are broke, but the Federal Government can borrow money at historically low rates. If it does not borrow--or tax corporate and wealthy savings---and spend, we may be sunk.

Murdoch and his minions may face criminal charges. His singular ability to sense cultural vulnerabilities and ruthlessly to unearth and exploit personal failings or eccentricities has altered the media and political world. But neither our media nor our progressive politicians should indulge in anti-Murdoch vendettas and frame him as symbol and root of our troubles. True, he is an ideal villain and we love villains. But absent much stronger barriers to media consolidation and more opportunities for a diverse, citizen-journalist- and- consumer- directed media, where something other than advertiser dollars are the prime driver and motivation. Murdoch's demise will do us little good. Perhaps the role of the few remaining independent voices like the Guardian in exposing Murdoch and the truly ghastly practices to which News Corporation has stooped will help foster broad media and economic reform. (See http://www.democracynow.org/2011/7/21/murdoch_empire_pummelled_by_phone_hacking).

If progressives' only success is to punish or remove Rupert Murdoch, we may be disappointed. The larger political economy he represents may survive and even grow with his fall. Gwynne Dwyer points out: "There is something called the "Murdoch discount." It is the gap between the market value of News Corporation as it is, and the considerably larger sum that it would be worth without Rupert Murdoch at the helm. (Bloomberg estimates that it would be 50 percent higher.)" But what is good for News Corporation stockholders may not be good enough for us.

Where is Labor’s Voice in Our History?

John Buell

Author of Evil Doers: Demonization and the    

End of Civil Debate in American Politics (NYU Press)

Newly minted Republican governors everywhere seem engaged in a new competition: how best to crush the remaining voices of labor and the left in their states. Attacks on wages, pensions, and benefits of public employees have garnered national attention along with efforts to destroy the unions. Maine has now become the leader of the pack, with our new governor, Paul LePage, now seeking not only to curb unions but also to obliterate labor history itself from our public discourse. His decision to order removal of a labor history mural from the Department of Labor has evoked both local and international attention.

In 2007, a good friend of ours, Judy Taylor, won a competitive commission from the Maine Arts Commission and the Maine Department of Labor to present a visual montage of the history of labor in Maine. . Taylor collaborated informally with Maine’s preeminent labor historian, Charles Scontras of the Bureau of Labor Education at the University of Maine. In personal communication with the artist (and which both have generously shared with me) Scontras highlighted what might serve as an overarching theme for the mural: “Maine is a bit more than the stereotypical romantic images that have become commonplace and marketed by our gift and souvenir shops, i.e., Down-East humor, lighthouses, lobster fishermen, general stores with their pot bellied stoves and crackle barrels, its rock-bound seacoast, the rustic retreat for frustrated urbanites, larger than life lumberjacks, etc. While these things do describe Maine, and I am glad that they form part of our heritage, Maine was not Nirvana. The creative role of dissent, protest, conflict, and the demand for social justice in the workplaces of the state, form an integral part of our historical legacy.”

Judy used her family and friends as models in the 11 panels depicting scenes from Maine's labor history. Thus, the young college- aged daughter of friends became "Rosie the Riveter". Women’s tireless work building tanks, torpedoes, trucks and ships was critical to the war effort and to our final victory in World War II. Our daughter is seen in the panel depicting the Lewiston-Auburn Shoe factory strike of 1937. She is shown screaming with her arms raised as the police and National Guard are dragging the striking immigrant Franco-American women to jail.

My wife is Frances Perkins, whose parents were Maine natives. Frances Perkins, President Roosevelt's Secretary of Labor, was the first woman cabinet member and the longest serving cabinet member in American history. She helped create Social Security, the first Federal unemployment insurance, Federal laws abolishing child labor, standards for workplace safety, the first federally guaranteed minimum wage, and the 40 hour work week. To this day, our families and workplaces would be very different without the protections and programs that Perkins and her colleagues initiated and implemented.

Our governor is unimpressed. He ordered removal of this mural and renaming the department’s Perkins conference room on the grounds that these convey a one-sided view of Maine economic development. If the governor feels that all history and all art reflect a point of view, we can agree with him. The situations portrayed in the mural reflect historical facts but these particular facts were chosen to represent events that working men and women experienced as quantum changes in the quality of their lives. History is not a random collection of discrete facts. Nor is history static. The facts as individuals and as a society that we now choose to emphasize reflect and in turn influence our experience, our sense of right and wrong and our imagination. Art plays an essential role in expressing and amplifyng this creative dynamic.

Business already has more than ample resources to get its views across. There are whole networks, Fox and CNBC, devoted to promulgation of business views. In our increasingly pro-business media, counter arguments are shouted down and opponents demeaned and vilified Following the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, corporations are now legal persons that can spend unlimited sums on political advertising and image creation.

So, Governor Le Page, if we can’t have a mural like this at the Department of Labor, where will we learn about the benchmarks in Maine’s labor history? Why is “balance” limited to efforts to counter the few labor voices while business perspective go unchallenged?

The governor’s actions also reflect and intensify the dismissive, contemptuous style of the modern media. Not content with merely ordering removal of the mural, the governor had it removed over a weekend in the cover of darkness to obviate any public protest. His actions are painfully reminiscent of authoritarian efforts to shape politics through the control of art.

Progressive critics of the governor should advocate more support—including financing for-- art from a variety of political and religious orientations. Business itself should be encouraged to develop its own art, but in the process it might also become clear that business is not a monolith. The US Chamber of Commerce claims to speak for all, but often articulates only the perspective of the largest and most government pampered multinationals.

We should counter the Fox mindset not merely with different politics but with a more respectful, less hubristic political style. We must of course advocate and defend the effectiveness of some immediate reforms. The world is not utterly chaotic and some domains or markets would still respond to fiscal stimulus and simple reforms in relatively predictable ways. But order and stability often make possible new disequilibrium and even harmonious systems encounter disruptions from other complex systems. None is as self-contained or autonomous as some would like to argue. Earthquakes, climate change, and inordinate and expanding bubbles all threaten major disruptions in “self-regulating” markets. (The case for a world that cannot be confined within static and predictable harmonies is lent plausibility, though no proof is claimed, in William Connolly’s AWorld of Becoming, which provocatively expands on and articulates political and ethical implications of recent developments in complexity theory, neuroscience, and philosophy.)

How do we respond to such a world? Cling to ultimate faith in the eventual triumph of the “free market’ or to a providential and all powerful God? Surely these conventional voices deserve their hearing. Some progressives, however, want to “remove religion from politics.” And hope the facts will speak for themselves.This is neither fair nor effective. Even progressives’ short-term reforms are premised in part of some fundamental moral values and facts absent passions or commitments may not motivate.

Progressives and liberal advocates of a more just and inclusive society of all stripes and backgrounds should articulate the fundamental religious and philosophical ideals that influence and inspire their politics even as they acknowledge the inability to fully demonstrate their truth to the satisfaction of all. In the process collaboration among secular liberals, peace and environmental justice groups, feminist organization, immigrant rights groups, native Americans. Civil rights groups, social justice Catholics, liberal Muslims, and Jews can grow through mutual willingness to debate core values and recognition of shared vulnerabilites. At a minimum, this process can strengthen and be strengthened by a commitment to oppose efforts by any group to close debate or suppress protest. More broadly it may facilitate development of shifting coalitions around positive reconstruction of the political economy. 

Broader and more systemic reconstitution of workplaces, the media, and consumption patterns aimed at redressing the complex social, cultural, and economic origins of serious disequilibrium such as huge wealth disparities, massive hunger, unprecedented climate disruption can be suggested.

In the context of such basic changes, however, we should acknowledge the continuing possibility of unintended consequences, new and unforeseen rights claims, and our limited ability to predict and control the future. My faith is that such openness to differing fundamentals, tentative and experimental policy responses, and sensitivity to new claims is the best way to prevent anarchy or tyranny in a rapidly morphing world. My (perhaps utopian) hope is that it might even evoke reciprocal moves among, at least, the less rigid devotees of Fox and the Tea Party.

Right now, however, we must stand firm against censorship and the effort to crush any pro-labor perspective, endeavors that are occurring in many forms across the nation. Rather than expanding debate, these efforts are intended to prevent any labor perspective from arising from the ashes.

Instead of taking Frances Perkins’ name off of a room, we should be erecting statues to honor her and other Maine labor leaders. My wife was proud to stand in for Frances Perkins in the Department of Labor's History of Maine Labor mural. The mural should be returned to the Department of Labor, where it can serve all Maine citizens.

Democracy’s Prisoners of Conscience

Steven Johnston

University of South Florida

The moral and political impoverishment of the Republican and Tea Parties manifest themselves almost daily. How do they respond to political assassination and multiple murders, facilitated by handguns, in Arizona? Celebrate the Second Amendment as a guarantor of American freedom and advocate arming the citizenry with concealed weapons. How do they respond to activist conservative courts that deem unconstitutional even modest health care reform designed to remedy evident injustices? Denounce the evils of government action and hail the decisions as a restoration of American freedom.

If conservatives were as steeped in American constitutional traditions as they believe, they would recognize the absurdity of the first position and the irrelevancy of the second. Freedom and democracy are at risk in the United States and elsewhere, but not because of the specter of gun control or mandatory health insurance (or tax increases, government spending to create jobs, reproductive rights, government regulation, or budget deficits).

The United States, in the first decade of the 21st century, already enjoys two wars to its credit, one patently illegal, the other a miserable failure whose needless, unjustifiable continuation renders it criminal. The country has inflicted great constitutional damage at home and killed tens of thousands of innocents in Afghanistan and Iraq to prosecute these wars. On these questions, however, we hear no protests from the newly installed Republican majority in the House of Representatives. Nor do we hear anything other than bromides about national security from new Tea Party-backed members who prefer to treat the Pentagon budget, which sustains an unprecedented global empire, as more or less untouchable, despite vague pronouncements that everything is subject to fiscal review. Nor do we hear anything from the gun-toting public whose weapons supposedly protect our freedom from government malfeasance.

Once upon a time, a well-armed American citizenry might have opposed national military aggression and aggrandizement. In theory citizen militias resist tyranny at home and refuse imperial aggression abroad. No such convictions inform a professional mercenary army, which the United States deploys (patriotic protestations to the contrary notwithstanding), let alone individual gun owners. The Second Amendment, despite the ideologically-driven decision of an activist Supreme Court, is a collective rather than an individual right. Historically it did bear a certain relation to freedom—but no longer. America is a country awash in guns, but in the last fifty years this didn’t prevent, for example, either Vietnam or Iraq. The Second Amendment signifies nothing more than a consumer’s “right” to satisfy a socially dangerous fetish. The same can be said with opposition to health care, which supposedly relates to the much vaunted freedom of choice in the marketplace.

A democratic notion of freedom lies elsewhere. This is why the dominant responses—ranging from silence to cheerleading to assistance—to Julian Assange’s political persecution are so disturbing. The hysterical diatribes of Joe Biden and Sarah Palin are to be expected; Rachel Maddow’s disgraceful, ignorant December 15 performance on David Letterman and Bill Keller’s nasty, self-serving calumny in The New York Times Sunday Magazine (a friend of the prosecutor brief for the likes of Eric Holder) less so. Of course, The New York Times loves to trumpet its own civic “virtue” and “responsibility,” which Keller does in the Assange piece, perhaps forgetting how the paper marched in lockstep with the Bush Administration’s campaign for war in Iraq in 2002 and 2003. Ironically, The Times and other media outlets are now in the process of establishing their own electronic “drop boxes” for the deposit of classified and confidential material.

As Assange pointed out in a 60 Minutes interview aired on January 30, WikiLeaks’s political and publishing activism fall well within the American political tradition of opposition to established authority. This seemed to escape the sensibility of 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft, who chided Assange for his surprise that the United States would target him for retaliation for WikiLeaks’s exposés, deeming it natural and therefore somehow unproblematic rather than a further abuse of power. Despite America’s (unwarranted) indignation, WikiLeaks opposes illegitimate and abusive exercises of power—corporate or governmental—regardless of country. The idea is to create a more just society, to which freedom contributes, to which WikiLeaks contributes. And democratic freedom is a political phenomenon that finds its finest expression through action-in-concert. One might think here of recent events in Tunisia, abetted by WikiLeaks, or current events in Egypt. 

As for Assange, when the freedom of one is at stake, so is the freedom of everyone. It is the responsibility of democratic citizens to condemn and resist the state when it threatens not just a single citizen’s political rights, but the liberty of us all by focusing its efforts against a single citizen. This is what we owe Julian Assange and the citizen-and-prisoner of conscience that allegedly provided WikiLeaks with information, Bradley Manning. Eric Holder is doing his secretive best to dust off the Espionage Act of 1917, which Woodrow Wilson used to brutally suppress dissent during World War I, and make it work against Assange.

One democratic organization doing its best on behalf of Assange is Anonymous, a protean cross-state, transnational political force armed with a new set of civic skills to intervene effectively (in part, covertly) against corporate and state assaults on freedom. Like Assange and WikiLeaks, members of Anonymous risk arrest, prosecution, and prison as they resist and seek to reverse undemocratic practices and regimes. 

The United States does not enjoy a robust history of living up to First Amendment ideals. WikiLeaks has provided the country with another opportunity to match democratic promise with performance. No doubt Obama will lead the way in blowing it. With luck, he will be a one-term president. The time for the democratic left to oppose his renomination is here. He ought to pay the ultimate political price for his repeated democratic betrayals, both at home and internationally.