Wars and occupations keep coming. The police state expands without pause. Big capital takes all our money and destroys huge chunks of our environment. So why are liberal and progressive leaders telling us to fear grassroots conservatives? Wouldn’t it be better to fight the corporate police state that is doing these things to us?
We regularly hear warnings about militias and tea parties, but for the most part, these people are not the enemy. Although Tea Party leadership has been largely taken over by Republicans of the Sarah Palin school, many of the rank-and-file are potential class allies. Even some of the local leaders are libertarians who oppose war and defend civil liberties.
Militia members may be even more likely to have things in common with honest leftists and greens. The ideology is different, but the class interests are similar. And don’t forget; the government and their mercenaries have plenty of guns, and they’re not reluctant to use them. If the people are to resist, we may need to ally with people who have some, too.
According to Jesse Walker, managing editor of Reason magazine, corporate media and government are conducting a “Brown Scare” against the Right [“Brown” as in Hitler’s brownshirts]. A Brown Scare is similar to a Red Scare and is used for the same reasons, to discredit and divide those opposed to the system, and pave the way to attack them.
“With Brown Scare tactics, serious critiques are delegitimized by being associated with fanatics,” says Walker, while civil liberties are curtailed for everyone.
Leftists should fight government attempts to marginalize the grassroots right. “Brown scares build on red scares and vice versa,” says Walker. “Out of fear of the far Right in the 30s and 40s, lots of people on the left became amenable to civil liberties restrictions they had rejected before, which were then used against them in the McCarthy era. The Tea Parties are now falling under the microscope they supported when it was used against others.”
The rulers use similar violence against Left and Right. For example, the FBI told similar scare stories about the Black Panthers and about the white militias. The Branch Davidians killed at Waco were portrayed as white supremacists, but one third of them were Black and some were Asian. “The Waco massacre parallels the MOVE case [where 11 African-American people were burned to death in a police attack in 1985] in Philadelphia,” says Walker.
Guarding the Guardians
One group that has been singled out for demonization is the Oath Keepers. Founded two years ago by Stewart Rhodes, a lawyer and former US Army paratrooper, Oath Keepers (OK) organizes former and current military and police to resist unconstitutional orders. As a result, they have been attacked by everyone from Bill O’Reilly (who called them “anarchists”) to Bill Clinton (who linked them with “terrorists”). Mother Jones magazine accused them of “treason.”
The “Oath” in Oath Keepers refers to the oath service people and police take to defend the constitution. Rhodes founded OK to help “defend the constitution from its enemies,” most of whom, he believes are in or around government. (Think Goldman Sachs; think Department of Homeland Security.)
Rhodes thinks neither liberals nor conservatives recognize the need to limit government to Constitutional bounds. “Picture a Venn diagram with 2 overlapping circles” he says. “People in each circle only object to what’s going on when they are not in power. But there is a third section that, no matter who’s in power, they care about the constitution and distrust those in power. My goal is to grow that third part of the population.” Among the “consistent Americans,” Rhodes includes feminist author Naomi Wolf, Congressman Dennis Kucinich, and Ron Paul.
Oath Keepers’ home page features ten Orders We Will Not Obey. These include: “We will NOT obey orders to disarm the American people, conduct warrantless searches, detain American citizens as ‘unlawful enemy combatants’ or to subject them to military tribunal, impose martial law or a ‘state of emergency’ on a state, or invade and subjugate any state that asserts its sovereignty.”
Oath Keepers will also refuse to: “blockade American cities; force American citizens into any form of detention camps under any pretext; confiscate the property of the American people, including food and other essential supplies; or do anything that would infringe on the right of the people to free speech, to peaceably assemble, and to petition their government for a redress of grievances.”
Note that many of the things OK members refuse to do are already being done by the military and police, for example after hurricane Katrina, at political protests, and during the drug wars. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather have those guys in my neighborhood than a gang of armed men who will follow orders mindlessly. Better Oath Keepers than Blackwater or the local SWAT team!
Jesse Walker says, “They’re talking about critical thinking. That’s what you want from the police. When victims of hurricane Katrina attempted to flee across the Crescent City Connection Bridge to Jefferson Parish, they were forced back by armed agents of the Gretna, Louisiana police. If there had been some Oath Keepers on the force that day, those refugees might have escaped the devastation.”
It would be even better if soldiers refused orders to do unconstitutional things to non-Americans, and many posters on OK’s web site say so. Refusal to serve in unconstitutional wars might make the Empire’s job much harder. So far, though, Rhodes is not stressing war resistance, saying he wants all service members who support the Constitution to feel welcome, whatever their war views.
Oath Keepers have been vilified as racist militias by the Southern Poverty Law Center, who called them “a particularly worrisome example of the Patriot revival.” I don’t see much evidence for that. Their meeting in San Francisco recently was about 20% people of color, including one of the main speakers. At this point, however, their membership is swelling with an “an influx of Bush supporters,” as Rhodes says. “I have a narrow window of opportunity to deprogram them from the neo-con nonsense they learned and get them thinking about the Constitution.”
Men with Guns
Oath Keepers aren’t a militia, but the actual militia movement is another force the Left should see as potential allies, not enemies. There are some far-right and racist militias, but most are not. As Jesse Walker says, they range from “relatively moderate civic action Republicans, calling for decentralized local government, gun ownership, and civil liberties. At the extreme end you get conspiracy theories, doomsayers. You also have had people on the Left trying to forge links with the militia movements.”
In rural Maine, author Carolyn Chute leads the 2nd Maine Militia, which has a clearly anti-corporate and pro-working class agenda. This includes gun rights. “People around here have guns, both for hunting and to protect themselves,” Chute told Salon.com. “And frankly, we don’t want the government to have guns and not us.” 2nd Maine presents itself as beyond Left and Right, saying we need to focus on the real divide between Up and Down.
We should not be afraid of people on the grassroots right. If leftists don’t reach out, the white working class in this country will have nowhere else to turn. The only points of unity may be non-interventionism, civil liberties, corporate bailouts and the constitution, but considering how extreme the corporate state has become, those things may be revolutionary. Just enforcing the Bill of Rights, respecting international treaties and restoring Congress’ war powers would be huge changes.
Author Chris Hedges thinks the American Left’s terrible move was from looking at government as part of the class enemy, to seeing it as something we could employ to make things better. Marx and Lenin both warned against this. They wrote that the state was organized by one class to suppress other classes and couldn’t be reformed. But the American Left abandoned the class struggle (to be fair, most American workers did, too). As Hedges says, “The Left became identity-based, culture-based and lost our grounding in class struggle. We lost our voice and became part of the corporate structure we should have been dismantling.”
We need to find ways to ally with the grassroots right, whether in tea parties, militias, or elsewhere. As Hedges says, “Hope in this age of bankrupt capitalism will come with the return of the language of class conflict.” Yes, there are some uglies out there in the white working class. There are some racists, but racism been the issue for the working class in America since the beginning.
Former congresswoman and Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney told Hedges, “I am a child of the South. [Head of DHS] Janet Napolitano tells me I need to be afraid of people who are labeled white supremacists, but I was raised around white supremacists. I am not afraid of white supremacists. I am concerned about my own government. The Patriot Act did not come from white supremacists, it came from the White House and Congress. The Citizens United decision [granting corporations full political personhood] did not come from white supremacists; it came from the Supreme Court. I am willing to reach across traditional barriers that have been skillfully constructed by people who benefit from the way the system is organized.”
Most militias, oath keepers, and tea partiers are not white supremacists. If McKinney can work with the far right, we can work with our class brothers and sisters who oppose what are our rulers are doing. Walker suggests the Left forming its own Tea Party chapters. That may not be the best tactic, but it may well point in the right direction.
