Archive for category: #Fascism #Elections #Bonapartism

President Joe Biden on September 1 delivered a roughly 25-minute primetime speech from Independence Hall in Philadelphia about Trumpism’s threat to US democracy. Primetime, that is, for the two major US television networks that aired it live: MSNBC and CNN. The others—ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox—opted not to carry the address, because they deemed it “political” (Washington Post, 9/2/22).

Across the Atlantic just over a week later, King Charles III addressed Britain and the world about his 96-year-old mother’s death and his preparations to take over the solely symbolic role of British monarch. ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox all presumably found it more newsworthy than the President’s remarks, because they carried it live (MediaMatters, 9/9/22). (CNN and MSNBC carried both Biden’s and Charles’ speeches.)

Biden’s speech urgently named MAGA Republican ideology as an imminent threat to democracy, rejected violence and extremism, and condemned conspiracy theories. The “political” speech took an explicitly bipartisan tone, with Biden repeatedly claiming that Trumpism doesn’t represent the majority of the Republican party, and appealing to the American public regardless of political affiliation to defend democracy.

“I’m an American president—not the president of Red America or Blue America, but of all America,” he said.

Charles’ speech, on the other hand, was essentially a eulogy. He waxed poetic about Queen Elizabeth II’s public and private lives, praising her “warmth” and “humor” and the “sacrifices” she made to uphold her “duty.” It was appropriately vague and inoffensive for a figurehead whose job is to be apolitical.

Despite the President of the United States’ speech being patently more relevant to the American people than the symbolic figurehead of another country’s address, the latter had not only more networks airing it, but nearly as much analysis and coverage in the 48 hours surrounding it as the former: A Nexis database search of ABC, CNN, NBC, MSNBC, CBS and Fox transcripts the day of and the day after each of the respective speeches turned up 113 mentions of Charles’ speech and 116 of Biden’s.

The networks varied widely in the relative amount of coverage they gave to the two speeches. ABC and NBC had roughly twice as many segments on Charles’ speech compared to Biden; Fox and MSNBC had closer to twice as many segments on Biden’s speech. CBS and CNN had roughly similar numbers of segments on each speech.

‘Politically charged’

However much time they gave it, each of these networks characterized the president’s speech as inflammatory, ignoring much of its content, and “balancing” it with a chorus of Trump-aligned politicians.

Unsurprisingly, on Fox News’s Hannity (9/2/22), fill-in host Tammy Bruce whined that Biden “bashe[d]” Republicans in his “rage-filled speech” that she later described as a “dark and depressing” “diatribe.” But this same right-wing indignation could be heard across network news, regardless of their presumed political leanings.

ABC’s World News Tonight anchor Mary Bruce (9/2/22) called the remarks “scathing,” saying the speech “slam[med]” MAGA Republicans. The segment quoted Republican former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who served as UN ambassador for Trump: “It was one of the most unbelievable things I’ve seen in a long time. It’s unthinkable he would be so condescending and criticize half of America.”

Putting aside that Haley’s own history of opinions about Trump are mixed—“He went down a path he shouldn’t have, and we shouldn’t have followed him, and we shouldn’t have listened to him,” she said after January 6—the segment did not bring up Biden’s repeated clarifications:

• “Now, I want to be very clear up front: Not every Republican, not even the majority of Republicans, are MAGA Republicans. Not every Republican embraces their extreme ideology.”
• “There are far more Americans—far more Americans from every background and belief—who reject the extreme MAGA ideology than those that accept it.”
• “Democrats, independents, mainstream Republicans: We must be stronger, more determined, and more committed to saving American democracy than MAGA Republicans are to destroying American democracy.”

Reporter Craig Melvin on NBC’s Today show (9/2/22) described the speech as “politically charged,” and anchor Peter Alexander called it “blistering,” including derisions from Republican California Rep. Kevin McCarthy, without including any voices of those who found Biden’s condemnation of Trumpism necessary. The segment also described the speech being delivered in front of a “military backdrop”—that is, two Marines standing behind Biden. (Marines have been present at other debatably “political” presidential speeches, including Trump’s at the RNC in 2020.)

CBS Morning News’ Bradley Blackburn (9/2/22) chose the word “sharp.” And though CNN opted to air the remarks in primetime, they included the opinion of former Trump White House official Gavin Smith, who posited that threats to democracy are not a priority to discuss in a 25-minute speech, and that Biden should have spoken instead about rising prices (CNN New Day, 9/2/22). (To her credit, anchor Brianna Keilar pushed back against this statement.)

MSNBC’s The Beat (9/2/22) took Biden’s speech more seriously, with anchor Katie Phang calling out the irony of the GOP labeling a speech about the GOP’s divisiveness as divisive. “There’s so many Trump supporters,” she said:

They’re screaming about how Joe Biden now has promoted this divisiveness. But you know, the reality is, they’re not looking in the mirrors, right? There’s this hypocrisy that seems to be the currency that these Republicans are trading in.

Believers in the ‘storm’

Instead of engaging in handwringing over Biden’s tone, these outlets could have investigated the truth of his claims that MAGA ideology—regardless of what percentage of the Republican party subscribes to it—is a threat to democracy. Beyond the deadly January 6 insurrection itself, polling backs up Biden’s assertions that there are  widespread anti-democratic tendencies within the Republican Party.

In February, a PRRI report found that a quarter of Republicans consider themselves believers of the QAnon conspiracy theory. When polled on the three central delusions of QAnon, 16% completely or mostly agreed that  media and economy are run by a Satan-worshiping cabal of child sex-traffickers; 22% completely or mostly agreed that a coming “storm” will wipe away these elites and restore the country to its rightful leaders; and 18% completely or mostly agreed that violence may be necessary to save the country.

Additionally, the Washington Post (9/18/22) recently questioned 19 GOP candidates running in gubernatorial and Senate races about whether they’d accept the results of the upcoming elections. Twelve either refused to commit or declined to respond. All 19 Democratic nominees committed to accepting the results of the elections.

Sowing distrust in legitimate democratic processes—and resorting to violence in an attempt to prevent them—is certainly dangerous to democracy.

‘A very significant event’

Of course, Charles’ address the day after the queen’s death served a much different purpose than Biden’s: celebrating and remembering a figurehead, versus warning against a rising domestic threat to American democracy. While comparing the content of these two addresses would be comparing apples and oranges, networks’ attitudes toward each are telling.

On Chris Jansing Reports (9/9/22), MSNBC’s British historian Andrew Roberts called Charles’ speech “very significant.” CBS Evening News’ Norah O’Donnell and Charlie D’Agatta (9/9/22) called it “historic.” On CNN’s Erin Burnett Outfront (9/9/22), CNN International diplomatic editor Nic Robertson foreshadowed the upcoming ceremony that marked Charles’ official ascension to the throne, also calling it “perhaps a very significant event.”

While the death of the 96-year-old queen and ascension of her son might be significant for royalists—and the pomp, circumstance, anachronism and celebrity of the monarchy might be entertaining and appealing to many Americans—it has almost no political implications for the world. That’s because the British monarch’s role is ceremonial, and, as the constitution dictates, apolitical.

But the British monarch is also inextricably linked to the British Empire and is a living symbol of that imperial legacy, as well as of an extreme elitism based on nothing more than the privilege of birth (Economist, 9/15/22). Elizabeth’s death spurred significant conversations about Britain’s brutal, bloody legacy of colonialism around the world and abolishing the monarchy—all of which was left out of the above segments, and the majority of network news coverage.

US news networks instead largely discussed the queen’s death as if everyone agreed on her legacy. “The world mourns the death of Queen Elizabeth,” said CBS Mornings’ Anne-Marie Green (9/9/22), who described the late monarch as “one of the most beloved women in the world.”

‘We need to examine that history’

The entire world was not, in fact, mourning the death of Britain’s queen. On Democracy Now! (9/13/22), Amy Goodman discussed the possibility that “British Overseas Territory” (read: colony) Antigua and Barbuda might cut ties with the British monarch. When asked to respond to the queen’s death, Dorbrene O’Marde, chair of the Antigua and Barbuda Reparations Commission, said:

I’m under no obligation, I think, to be mourning her death. And that is simply because of, I think, my understanding of history, my understanding of the relationships of the British monarchy to African people and Asian people, but to African people certainly, on the continent and here in the Caribbean. And so that my response is perhaps to recognize the role that the queen, Queen Elizabeth II, has played, how she has managed to cloak the historical brutality of empire in this veneer of grandeur and pomp and pageantry, I guess, and graciousness. But I think that at this point in time, we need to examine that history a lot more closely.

The British Empire committed many atrocities during Elizabeth II’s reign (Liberation News, 9/9/22):

• The “Malayan Emergency” (1948–60) was a guerilla war fought between Britain and the Communist Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA) after the territory sought independence from British rule. During this 12-year-long war (of which eight years were fought under Elizabeth), British forces set fire to homes and farmland of those suspected to be affiliated with the MNLA, sent 400,000 people to concentration camps and destroyed crops with Agent Orange. 6,700 MNLA fighters and more than 3,000 civilians were killed.
• The Mau Mau rebellion (1952–60) took place in Kenya when the Mau Mau rebels launched an uprising against colonial powers, white settlers and loyalists in the country. The British launched a counterinsurgency campaign, sending more than 100,000 people to detainment camps where they were tortured, interrogated and abused. The Kenyan Human Rights Commission estimated 90,000 Kenyans were killed, maimed or tortured, and 160,000 were detained in camps.
• The Covert War in Yemen (1962–69) cost an estimated 200,000 lives. After the death of Yemeni King Ahmed in 1962, Arab Army nationalists backed by the Egyptian army seized power and declared the country a republic, with popular support. Britain claimed it would not intervene, but supplied fighter jets and weapons to royalist forces.
• Bloody Sunday (January 30, 1972) was just one incident during the Northern Irish Troubles, a 30-year fight for independence from Britain. Marchers in Derry, in British-occupied Ireland, were protesting against British legislation that allowed suspected Irish nationals to be imprisoned without trial; the British military opened fire on them, killing 14.

Even though Elizabeth II had no legislative abilities, this colonial violence was enacted to uphold the empire she helmed (Vox, 9/13/22).

‘They know nothing about colonialism’

Fox specifically scolded those criticizing the monarchy, claiming colonized countries should be grateful for the image of stability Elizabeth upheld, arguing she led the decolonization process. Contributor Douglas Murry claimed on Hannity (9/9/22):

They know nothing about colonialism. They clearly know nothing about the decolonization process. They know nothing about the late queen’s extraordinary work with the commonwealth countries. If the queen would preside over this, was it a genocidal empire? Unbelievable. There’d be nobody alive if it had been a genocidal empire. And they smear her with this total lack of knowledge.

There are a handful of scholarly and international legal definitions of genocide. “Everyone has to be dead” is not one of them.

Other programs may not have engaged in this kind of royalist admonishment, but they still delighted in the royal corgis (ABC’s Nightline, 9/9/22), swooned over Charles’ “emotion” (CNN Newsroom, 9/9/22), admired his handshaking with the crowd (Fox Special Report, 9/9/22) and saluted his promise of a “life of service” (NBC Nightly News, 9/9/22), with little space given to substantive critique of what the monarchy represents.

As noted, none of the aforementioned TV segments that effusively memorialized the queen and relished in the pomp and circumstance of the monarchy addressed colonialism. In fact, of the total 113 segments on network TV that mentioned Charles’ speech, only 29 mentioned—even in passing—Britain’s colonial legacy or calls to abolish the monarchy. Fifteen of those were from CNN, five from MSNBC, four from NBC, three from Fox (all of which condemned criticism of the monarchy), one from ABC and one from CBS.

CBS’s mention denied that there was any movement for change: “There is no current, no modern, serious movement to abolish the monarchy,” journalist and royal-watcher Tina Brown said on CBS Mornings (9/9/22).

That depends on what you define as “serious.” In Australia, thousands marched for abolishment, shutting down streets in Melbourne on the country’s National Day of Mourning for the queen (Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 9/22/22). #AbolishTheMonarchy trended on social media (Forbes, 9/9/22). Pro-republican campaigns in Australia, New Zealand and Canada are expected to gain traction now (Wall Street Journal, 9/11/22).

Many shows repeated the term “colonial past” (e.g., NBC’s Today, 9/9/22; CNN Newsroom, 9/9/22), as if British colonialism is not ongoing. Today, British companies still own $1 trillion of Africa’s gold, diamonds, gas and oil, and an area of land in the continent about four times the size of Britain itself (Guardian, 4/17/18).

Other legacies of colonialism still reverberate: In 2013, Carribbean heads of governments established the Caricom Reparations Commission (CRC) to demand reparations for Britain’s genocide, slave trade and apartheid in the region, citing illiteracy, physical and mental health issues and generational poverty as modern-day effects of British rule and slave trade.

Suffice it to say, worldwide opinion about the British monarchy, the death of Queen Elizabeth and the rise of King Charles is far from unanimous, despite US television news framing Charles’ speech—unlike Biden sounding the alarm over the threat to democracy—as something we all could agree on.

The post King Mourns Mother? Breaking News. Democracy Under Threat? Not So Much. appeared first on FAIR.

The Spanish civil war of 1936 becomes more relevant every day. That’s because it was a war against fascism in its pure form. In case you wonder what form that is, amid the poisonous, weedy varieties sprouting up globally these days, it’s fascism, exercised through corporate control of government, against and thus persecution of leftists, More

The post The Global Fight Against Fascism appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

In 1302, the island of Arwad, off the coast of Syria, fell to Mamluk forces….

The U.S. Supreme Court will be examining two cases having to do with voting rights, and both of them are from southern states: Moore v. Harper from North Carolina, and Merrill v. Milligan from Alabama. The High Court will begin hearing Merrill v. Milligan on October 4, and both cases, according to Politico’s Zach Montellaro, “could reshape the 2024 election.”

“One lawsuit out of North Carolina could have broad ramifications, with Republicans asking the Supreme Court to revoke the ability of state courts to review election laws under their states’ constitutions,” Montellaro explains in an article published on September 29. “The reading of the Constitution’s Elections Clause that underpins the case — called the ‘independent state legislature’ theory — has gotten buy-in from much of the conservative legal world, and four Supreme Court justices have signaled at least some favorability toward it.”

Montellaro continues, “The decision in the case could upend American elections. And another case out of Alabama that will be heard on Tuesday, (October 4) involves a challenge to the state’s congressional map — and whether Black voters’ power was illegally diluted. The result could kick back open congressional redistricting in several states two years after the entire nation went through a redraw.”

READ MORE: Robert Reich warns of Supreme Court case that could give GOP-led states ‘total power over our democracy’

The most severe form of the “independent state legislature” theory argues that state legislatures alone should determine how elections are run in a state — not judges, not governors, not state supreme courts.

“Practically, the results of the cases could open the door to even more gerrymandering by legislators around the country,” Montellaro notes, “and they could also give legislatures even more power within their states to determine rules for voting — including how, when and where voters could cast their ballots…. In both cases, Republican litigants are looking to reverse lower court orders — a federal court in Alabama and the state Supreme Court in North Carolina — that threw out political maps drawn by GOP-controlled legislatures.”

Rick Hasen, a University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) law professor known for his election law expertise, told Politico, “This term has the potential to be a blockbuster term in terms of election law, but it really depends on how far the Court is willing to go.”

Eric Holder, who served as U.S. attorney general under President Barack Obama and now chairs the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, believes that both cases have huge implications for the wellbeing of U.S. democracy.

READ MORE: How GOP-controlled state legislatures could pull off a coup in 2024: journalist

Holder told Politico, “You cannot look at these cases objectively, without acknowledging the fact that taken together, they could determine whether or not the United States remains as the democracy that we have come to love. I think, unfortunately, we take for granted a democracy that fulfills the promise of one person, one vote.”

READ MORE: Experts warn Supreme Court supporting this ‘dangerous’ GOP legal theory could destroy US democracy

Eric Blanc holds that the Marxism of the Second International in its classical years (1889–1914) remains the latest and highest stage of Marxist political theory, exemplified by the work of Karl Kautsky (1854–1938). In contrast, the Marxism of the Third International in its classical years (1919–24) was, by and large, an alien, purely “Russian” import, its Bolshevism rooted in and responding adequately to political struggles only in archaic, feudal, or quasi-feudal societies with “autocratic” regimes. Blanc concludes, logically, that Leninist strategy in advanced capitalist societies with bourgeois-democratic states was—and remains—irrelevant because it is inapplicable. Any attempt to universalize the Russian experience, or to use it as a model, can only bring disaster. This is Blanc’s central thesis. It was also Kautsky’s. In the last twenty years of his life, Kautsky shed his (ostensibly) “fatalist” and “deterministic” politics in favor of a relentless, activist crusade against the so-called Red Menace.

As a consequence, Blanc, like Kautsky, is unable or unwilling fully to address the limitations of Second International political strategy laid bare by the experience of the (initially) successful Russian Revolution in 1917, on the one hand, and the tragic, gut-wrenching failure of socialist revolution in the West in 1918–1923, on the other. For the fact is “revolutionary social democracy”—Blanc’s synonym for Kautskyism—maintained its counter-revolutionary hegemony over the working class movement everywhere in the advanced capitalist West—the very area where Kautsky’s political strategy was supposed to bring victory. The reasons for that hegemony were not self-evident and required analysis. The very best representatives of the Communist, pre-Stalinist alternative to classical social democracy—Vladimir Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, and Leon Trotsky—offered such an analysis. But Blanc will hear none of it.

Blanc’s Revolutionary Social Democracy: Working-Class Politics Across the Russian Empire (1882–1917) is mistitled. For Blanc shows, in chapter 10, empirically, that the only social democracy in the Russian empire worthy of being called revolutionary—not just in words but in deeds, not just in times of revolution but in non-revolutionary times as well—was that of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP). The party was founded de facto in 1902. Its revolutionary, Bolshevik wing, led by Lenin, emerged only in 1903.

Only Lenin’s partisans and those willing to follow their lead proved to be truly revolutionary, dedicated to achieving victory, at all times and everywhere. Those who did not, the social democratic parties that remained faithful to pre-1914 Kautskyist orthodoxy, turned out to be counter-revolutionary. Blanc shows this to be the case everywhere in the land of the tsars. It is the signal merit of his contribution. His book deserves the widest audience for that reason alone.

At the same time, Blanc unwittingly destroys the very foundations of his argument: he proves that post-1914 “revolutionary social democracy” was, in practice, counter-revolutionary. It is a contradiction that lies at the heart of his account that no dialectical legerdemain can resolve into a superior synthesis. Fortunately, the contradiction exists only in Blanc’s head, subjectively, owing to an incoherent analysis. However, the kernel of truth lying at the center of Blanc’s account can only be extracted by historical materialist analysis. But Blanc largely refrains from using contemporary Marxist categories of analysis because many of those categories were developed and refined—sometimes created ab ovo—only after 1914 and especially after 1917. These forms of understanding came out of the need to study the “miraculous” creativity of the international working class movement in 1917–22, to quote Lenin—not in the fideist sense, but in the sense that the “natural” potentialities of working creativity were far greater, richer, and multifaceted than Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg, and other Marxists had earlier thought possible. For them, if not for Blanc, there was something new under the sun.

What is the “bourgeois-democratic” revolution? What is the socialist revolution?

The category “bourgeois-democratic revolution” only makes cameo appearances in Blanc’s work. It appears most often under other names, usually the “democratic revolution.” This term abstracts from the difference between bourgeois-democratic and socialist revolutions, together with forms of party-political organization and strategies specific to each—distinctive forms and strategies that only a critical study of the 1917 Russian Revolution revealed. Whenever Blanc, like his mentor Lars Lih, abstracts out of his analysis these specificities by using the category “democratic revolution,” it is impossible to tell what kind of revolution he is talking about.

Blanc, again following Lih, holds that Kautsky’s political strategy could simply be modified or adjusted to Russian conditions so that “revolutionary social democratic” politics could be deployed to destroy the feudal or quasi-feudal tsarist state and replace it with a capitalist state. “On the whole, the approaches of imperial Russia’s radicals reflected an implementation and development of orthodox Second International Marxism far more than a break from it. The roots of 1917 lie firmly in revolutionary social democracy.” (p.11.)

But how can this be? Does Kautsky’s strategy cater only to Western conditions of political struggle, as Blanc insists, or does it encompass non-Western conditions, as well, so that Kautsky becomes the “architect” of the October Revolution, with Lenin’s Bolsheviks using Kautsky’s political writings as guide? It must be one or the other but not both. For no social democrat conceived of Kautsky’s strategy so expansively and so abstractly as to cover both feudal or semi-feudal Russia and the capitalist West. Kautsky, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg, and just about every pre-1917 social democrat thought far more concretely, recognizing qualitative differences between the two, whereas Blanc’s account, like Lih’s, gets lost in abstraction.

Blanc’s argument regarding a democratic road to socialism is largely based on the short-lived experience of the Finnish Revolution and civil war of 1918. Photo, by Herald Netvig,  shows a White Guards firing squad in Länkipohja.

For pre-1917 revolutionary social democrats—Kautsky, Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky— the specificities of Russian society and its autocratic state could not be deduced from an analysis of capitalist society and the capitalist state. It required fresh study. Kautsky was certainly the most read foreign Marxist theoretician among Russian social democrats but he had little to say about Russia beyond broad sociological assessments. The most read Russian Marxist among Russian social democrats was Georgi Plekhanov. But Blanc ignores his contribution to the Marxist analysis of tsarist Russia, developed in opposition to the Populist alternative that dominated Russian revolutionary thought in the 1880s and 1890s.

Plekhanov sketched out the basics, later endorsed by Kautsky. In tsarist Russia, the “democratic revolution” was an anti-feudal one, whereas in the West it was an anti-capitalist one. So, in the West, democratic revolution meant something completely different: it directly meant socialist revolution and building socialism, whereas in tsarist Russia it directly meant the bourgeois-democratic revolution to overthrow the feudal state, establish a capitalist state, ideally a democratic republic, thereby offering the working class the best possible political conditions under which to advance and defend its class interests over and against those of Russia’s emergent capitalist class. This is how all social democrats understood matters; it was the key to understanding what social democrats were doing, or thought they were doing.

Kautsky, the so-called pope of Second International Marxism, spelled out in many books, encyclicals, and articles how social democratic parties in the West could use the already existing capitalist state, specifically its legislative arm, in its various forms—parliament, Congress, chambers of deputies, the Knesset, and so on—to bring the working class to power by winning a majority in these bodies. The party would then pass legislation to expropriate the capitalists and socialize production.

In tsarist Russia, however, there was no capitalist state and no parliamentary road to establish. First because there was no parliament (Duma) until 1906. Even then, after 1906 and given the continued presence of autocratic rule, Russian social democrats split over whether the Duma was a real parliamentary form, as the Mensheviks believed, or an illusory one, as the Bolsheviks held. Yet, defying all evidence, Blanc’s “democratic revolution” is, apparently, a revolution against “capitalism” in the West and tsarist Russia. Again, how can this be?

Revolutionary social democrats thought the material premises of socialism and, consequently, of socialist revolution, were only present in the “advanced” West and not in “backward” Russia. It followed that virtually no revolutionary organizations… set themselves the programmatic goal of a democratic revolution that was socialist…

Of the seventeen ‘revolutionary social democratic’ parties, tendencies, sects, and micro-sects that rose and fell between 1882 and 1905, (p. 3) only one, the short-lived Proletariat Party, vaguely advocated socialist revolution against capitalism in 1882. It is easy to understand why the others did not. Revolutionary social democrats thought the material premises of socialism and, consequently, of socialist revolution, were only present in the “advanced” West and not in “backward” Russia. It followed that virtually no revolutionary organizations, even non-social democratic ones—and certainly those with significant links to and influence over the organized working-class movement—set themselves the programmatic goal of a democratic revolution that was socialist (“anti-capitalist”), as Blanc holds. On the contrary, it would be objectively pro-capitalist. In other words, the bourgeois-democratic revolution would allow the “modernization” then developing in imperial Russia—which Blanc takes to be capitalist modernization, as if it were self-evident and conceptually unproblematic—to develop fully and freely, without the feudal or semi-feudal tsarist autocracy standing in the way. In short, Russia needed to go through, and complete, the capitalist “stage” of socio-economic development.

However, in 1917–19, peasants and workers took the path of permanent revolution in Russia and the borderlands, threatening to abolish landlordism, as well as private and state ownership of industry. Faced with this anti-capitalist movement, all revolutionary social democratic political organizations that had not broken with pre-1914 social democracy stood in their way, crushing them whenever possible. They rationalized their counter-revolutionary stance not in violation of pre-1914 revolutionary social democratic doctrine, or Kautskyism, as Blanc maintains, but in full accord with it. For orthodox social democrats, Kautsky above all, thought and wrote that none of the national components of the tsarist empire was “ripe” for socialism and, consequently, for a working-class, socialist, anti-capitalist revolution.

All social democrats agreed that the material premises of socialism were lacking in Russia. What are the analytical roots of Blanc’s misconception?

Blanc draws a purely political contrast between the tsarist state and the capitalist state, dividing states into those with political freedom, with parliament and civic liberties, and those without— that is between non-autocratic states of the West and the uniquely autocratic tsarist state. He cannot help doing so because Blanc abstracts from the very different relations of class and property that prevailed in the West and in tsarist Russia, together with the very different states dominant in each—a difference in kind, as the Bolsheviks held, not in degree, as the Mensheviks insisted. In this regard, Blanc has done a terrible injustice to Kautsky and Second International Marxism.

Kautsky understood the Marxist ABCs of political economy far better than Blanc. Like all social democrats, revolutionary or not, Kautsky determined the “ripeness” of society for socialism on the basis of its level of socio-economic development, not its political order taken in isolation from the class and property relations underlying it. But Blanc has little use for Marxist categories of analysis. Blanc is explicit: “a systematic analysis of the interaction between social structures and political orientation lies beyond scope of this project” (p. 19). He is true to his word.

The course of the Russian Revolution in 1917

Blanc reproduces Lih’s account of the Russian Revolution and of the RSDLP’s role in it virtually verbatim. I have dealt with Lih in other work, most relevantly “International Social Democracy and the Road to Socialism, 1905–1917: The Ballot, the Street and the State,” and will not repeat my analysis here. I will confine myself to exposing a contradiction in Blanc’s analysis that shipwrecks historically the politics of his intervention.

Though Blanc lists an array of books in his Bibliography, not one agrees with Lih’s unique notion that Kautsky was the architect of the October Revolution, that Lenin and the Bolsheviks followed Kautsky’s Erfurtian strategy not just before 1914 but right through 1917, ostensibly establishing a seamless continuity in Bolshevik politics lasting nearly fifteen years. To be sure, being a minority of one does not invalidate an interpretation. But one has at minimum to come to terms with the competing alternatives. Lih does nothing of the sort—and neither does Blanc. Blanc just accepts whatever Lih says, without critical reflection, on faith.

Blanc lauds Kautsky’s Erfurtian strategy as ideally suited to work in conditions of political freedom and not where those conditions are absent, as in autocratic Russia. But the February Revolution destroyed the autocracy. Workers, along with workers and peasants in soldiers’ uniforms, created the freest, most democratic conditions of political struggle in the world—freer and more democratic than in the freest and most democratic capitalist states. At last, Blanc’s revolutionary social democracy would finally get a chance to show what it could do in these ideal conditions. Correlatively, it would also show that Bolshevism would find itself completely out of its element, unable to function freely, and doomed to political irrelevance in the new non-autocratic conditions.

The Bolsheviks took full advantage of the freedoms created spontaneously by a popular uprising…It is the Bolsheviks who won the support of the working class..it is the Bolsheviks alone who called for the transfer of “All Power to the Soviets” permanently …it is Lenin’s partisans who led the democratic revolution to victory…

But nothing of the sort happened. The Bolsheviks took full advantage of the freedoms created spontaneously by a popular uprising in February. It is the Bolsheviks who won the support of the working class, using the mechanism of a new state, the Soviet; it is the Bolsheviks alone who called for the transfer of “All Power to the Soviets” permanently and not, as everyone else did, provisionally; it is Lenin’s partisans who led the democratic revolution to victory, establishing a workers’ state.

Meanwhile, Blanc details how the representatives of revolutionary social democracy—the Mensheviks—did everything in their power to prevent this outcome. And so, Blanc shows, despite himself, that Bolshevism could work in both autocratic and non-autocratic conditions, where political freedom exists and where it does not, in states with bourgeois parliaments and those without.

Kautskyism without Kautsky

Kautsky’s strategy has long outlived Kautsky, as the recent examples of Syriza, Podemos, and the Corbynite left of the Labour Party show. Even so, Kautsky’s political writings, we are told, are relevant to socialists today in ways that Lenin and the Bolshevik, “insurrectionary, ” non–social democratic road to socialism, via the October Revolution, could never be. As proof, critics invoke the Stalinist outcome of the Russian Revolution, ostensibly resulting from Leninist vanguardism and disregard for workers’ interests. But that outcome proves nothing of the sort.

Kautsky spoke for all social democrats—regardless of political tendency, revisionist or orthodox, reformist or revolutionary—when he held that the working-class movement was ripe for socialism only in the West because the capitalist mode of production prevailed only there. However, tsarist Russia formed a category apart. Unlike the West, the capitalist mode of production was not dominant there. Consequently, there was precious little material basis for socialism—no matter what kind of political order prevailed, whether dictatorship, parliamentary republic, constitutional monarchy, Rechtsstaat, or autocracy.

To grasp quickly and straightforwardly what went wrong in post-1917 Russia, one must recall that, with its huge peasantry of 100 million and miniscule proletariat of 3 million, the country that gave birth to soviets was still not ripe for building socialism. This must be the starting point for all serious discussion about the ultimate fate of the October Revolution, not a “deficit”’ in Bolshevik “democratic political theory,” as Samuel Farber argues in Before Stalinism: The Rise and Fall of Soviet Democracy. The solution is not, as Michel Löwy asserts, quoting Rosa Luxemburg, “unlimited democracy,” as a substitute for the missing material basis for socialism, overcoming all problems. Such interpretations only rehash fossilized, post-1917 Kautsky, just as Blanc does in the book under review here.

Featured Image Credit:  Photo of Vorwarts newspaper, 1902, by Julie Wolfthorn Image modified by Tempest.

Heather Cox Richardson’s wildly popular Substack newsletter, Letters From an American, achieves what historical studies do at their best: shed light on the politics of the moment by telling parallel stories from the past. As often as the word “unprecedented” comes up in modern political discussions, the comparisons it conjures are usually limited to living memory—which historians know to look beyond. In this episode of How to Save a Country, hosts Michael Tomasky and Felicia Wong talk with Richardson, a professor of nineteenth-century American history at Boston College and the author of six books, about today’s polarization, the last time anti-democratic forces threatened to take hold of Congress, and the unique dangers democracy faces now.

“We actually have people within our government
who are working against our democracy, and that is a whole different kettle of
fish than we’ve ever had to deal with before,” Richardson says. “Taking back our
country into our own hands is the first step, I think, to changing our
democracy.” Later, Richardson digs into the difference
between freedom from and freedom to, and explains why democracy and
capitalism are not interchangeable.

How to Save a Country is a production of the Roosevelt Institute, The New Republic, and PRX. Generous funding for the podcast was provided by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and Omidyar Network. Views expressed do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of its funders.

Reading Recommendations:

• Check out the books talked about in this episode: How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the
Continuing Fight for the Soul of America and To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party.

• Much has been written lately about
Reconstruction’s legacy in our democracy. The hosts of How to Save a Country recommend The Second Founding: How the
Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution, by Eric Foner; Ta-Nehisi Coates’s We Were Eight Years in Power, which connects Reconstruction to the
Obama legacy; and “The Equality That Wasn’t
Enough,” an article by Jamelle Bouie that was published the New York
Times.

• For more analysis of how the
neoliberal regime conflated capitalism and democracy, see Suzanne Kahn’s More than Consumers: Post-Neoliberal Identities and Economic
Governance.

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Michael: I’m Michael Tomasky, editor of The New
Republic.

Felicia: And I’m Felicia Wong, president
and CEO of the Roosevelt Institute. 

Michael: This is How to Save a Country, our podcast on the
ideas and the people contributing to a
new political vision and a new economic vision for the United States. We
connect the economy, democracy, and freedom …

Felicia: Because progressives need a common purpose and a common
strategy to win.

Michael: Our guest
today is Heather Cox Richardson. You may know that name already if you’re one
of the hundreds of thousands of subscribers to her daily Substack newsletter.
It’s called Letters From an American, and it’s a guide to the politics of the
moment with prior context drawn from Heather’s work as a professor of nineteenth-century American history
at Boston College.

[Excerpt of Heather speaking]: I’m not Bruce
Springsteen. You know, I’m somebody who is voicing what a lot of people think.
I’m the voice of what I think is a political moment and a political movement.

Felicia: You know, I think we should say something right up top here in
this interview. Heather often jumps
around from talking about the nineteenth century to talking about the present day, which is
amazing but can be a little confusing. So as a reminder, the Republican Party of 150 years ago, which she refers to, that was the party of Lincoln. And after the North won the
Civil War, it was the Democratic Party that clung to the Confederate cause and
even promoted it within the halls of Congress, which we’ll get into. 

Michael: What I enjoyed so much about this conversation is that every time we ask
her about this or that aspect of modern politics, she would give of course an
astute diagnosis of the current situation, but
then she would also turn around and rewind things and find a comparison to some
of the wheeling and dealing that went on in this or that decade of the nineteenth
century, and it’s just fascinating stuff.

Felicia: And as for why we wanted
to have her on this program now, you know, she’s particularly good at
explaining polarization. Heather has studied some of our nation’s most divided
times—the Civil War, Reconstruction—and so she has great insights about today’s divisions too.

Michael: Coming right up, it’s our interview with Heather Cox Richardson. Heather Cox Richardson, welcome to How to
Save a Country.

Heather:
Oh, it’s such a pleasure
to be here.

Michael: We’re thrilled to have
you. I want to start with a broad and rather grim question. How much trouble is this
country in right now? 

Heather: A lot. Would you like me
to elaborate?

Michael: Please.

Heather: We are in
a unique moment because we have, certainly in our past, had plenty of times
when there were people who did not believe in the democratic experiment and who
were trying to impose an oligarchy or some form of a hierarchical government.
But this is the first time in our history that those people who wanted to do that have a
significant footprint within our government. We actually have people within our
government who are working against our democracy, and that is a whole different
kettle of fish than we’ve ever had to deal
with before.

Michael: It’s different even, I believe, from the
late 1850s. Would you agree? Worse. By different, I mean worse. 

Heather: Well, there are a lot of
similarities. That is, during the 1850s, the large enslavers from
the American South did in fact take over the government. They took over the
Supreme Court, they took over the Senate, they took over the presidency, and it
really looked as if they were going to be able to take over the House of
Representatives as well and force their system of a hierarchical government, really an
oligarchy, on the rest of the country by spreading their system of enslavement
across the American West, and by simply outnumbering the number of states that
emphasized free labor. So it really did look as if that were going to be the
case, but when, in fact, Americans elected
Abraham Lincoln to the presidency in 1860, those people took their marbles and
went home. So Americans were able to redefine American democracy during those
early years of the 1860s without
there being a group of people who were actively trying to destroy that
democracy. Now there was a moment in 1879—

Michael: After the
war, right?

Heather: Yes, when, in fact, former Confederates did stay in the government and did try to destroy
it from within, and they were quite thoroughly put down by the American people.

Michael: Indeed, a few
years after the Civil War and the defeat of the Confederates, that is the Democrats, the party threw up further resistance
from inside the federal system that they had just rejoined basically. Talk a
little bit more about that moment. What happened exactly? 

Heather: At the
time it was a huge deal and most people, of
course, haven’t even heard about today. But what happened was that in 1874, the
Democrats take back over the House of Representatives, largely because there was an economic depression in 1873, and they were mad at
the Republicans about that, but the former
Confederates took that as a sign that in fact, Americans did not want to have Black rights, they did not
want equality, they did not want the
Republican program that was designed to help the American economy, that they
wanted to go back to the years before the Civil War. Then in 1878, the Democrats take
over control of the Senate as well, and what
that meant was when Congress was seated in 1879, they had Congress and they
decided literally to defund the government until the president, who was Rutherford B.
Hayes, did what they wanted—that is, removed
all the troops from the South—and at the time,
people recognized that that was essentially the resurgence of the Confederacy
within the government itself. And in fact, Democrats said so. They said, you know, “We were stupid to actually secede. We should have stayed here and did what we wanted all
along.”

When that happens, there is a real movement among Americans
to say, “No, this is just the Confederacy by
another means,” and this becomes this huge
popular moment. There are cartoons and there are poems and there are songs, and there are
articles in newspapers, and everybody’s saying, “Hey,
we fought this war once. We’re not going to
fight it again. We’re gonna put these people down.” The president, Rutherford B. Hayes, vetoes those demands, bills that went
through five times. The Confederates end up backing down, recognizing that there is an upcoming election in 1880 and
that they look like complete idiots.

Now, that was a long way to tell a really, to my mind, cool story,
but one that most people may not be as interested in as I am. But on
the heels of that catastrophe, if you
will, the Confederacy trying to take over the
government from within, the Democratic Party split, said, “We got a problem. We have to throw these former Confederates
overboard.” It’s at that moment that the
Democratic Party starts to focus on urban
workers, urban people of color, and tries to move the
country forward as an urban party. It’s a moment that looks quite a bit like
where we are, I hope anyway, today.

Felicia: Right, you see a
lot of this debate also amongst conservative, Republican-aligned thinkers. So are
you going to see, I think of it as, either a softer safety net, the kind of
family protections that Mitt Romney is arguing for? Are you going to see the kind of public investments that Marco Rubio is arguing for?

Heather: Well,
right, that’s the $64,000 question. The Republican Party coming out of the 1850s was
a true conservative party, and it took its cues from people like Edmund Burke,
although not deliberately name-checking him, with the idea that the government should protect instruments of stability. So
the idea of returning to sort of conservatism
within the Republican Party is a real mouthful
because the current-day Republican Party is no
longer a conservative party.

The Republican Party in the middle of the twentieth century really stood for that— Planned Parenthood, for example—to strengthen the ability of the family to plan its own future, and to strengthen churches, and to strengthen the ability of
people to feed their children, and all the sorts of things that one would associate with a Burkean conservatism in the twentieth
century. The modern-day Republican Party has gone quite far from
that. What has happened since the rise of
Donald Trump, who’s a symptom by the way, not
only a cause, the
Republican Party has really focused on their
base voters, and the base voters are being turned out by racism, anti-immigrant
sentiment, misogyny. They’re really the kinds of themes that people like [Prime
Minister] Viktor Orbán have pushed in Hungary, and they’re themes that frankly are what
helped the Nazi parties to rise not only in
Germany but also in other places in Europe and that people focused on in
America in the 1920s and the 1930s as well. Those are not things that will
attract that famous suburban woman, which is
what the Republican Party so desperately needs.

Felicia: I wanna ask about the Fourteenth Amendment,
which guarantees people equal protection under the law. It’s come up a lot in recent politics, especially
after the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
So what do you think? Is it alarming or encouraging that we are still talking about equality and equal
protection at this most basic level. 

Heather: You know, I joke
sometimes that I stop people in the supermarket to talk about the Fourteenth
Amendment, but there’s a reason that the Fourteenth Amendment matters as much as it ever has at this moment.
After the Thirteenth Amendment
becomes part of our Constitution in 1865, the end of human enslavement except for punishment
for a crime for which somebody has been duly convicted, the Southern states
remand formally enslaved people to a system that is not exactly slavery, but it
definitely is second-class citizenship. What
happens then is a real revolution in the way they think about the American
government and the relationship of the states to the federal government. And what the Fourteenth Amendment does is it says that no state can take away
equality, no state can violate the equal
protection of the laws, that every American
citizen has equal protection of the laws, and that their rights cannot be taken
away from them without due process of those laws. So it puts the federal
government in charge of guaranteeing that no state can take away rights from
anybody within those states, any citizen within those states, and that becomes part of the U.S. Constitution in 1868.
Then, in 1870, Congress
establishes the Department of Justice to make sure that’s going to be the case.
Now that plays forward in the twentieth century, after people start to look away from what the
Fourteenth Amendment should be able to do, and there’s a couple of Supreme Court cases that say that in
fact, so long as discrimination is done by individuals, that the federal
government can’t step in to change that, but of course by the early twentieth century, we have a system
in which African Americans and Mexican Americans and Hispanic Americans are
living under systems of Jim Crow and Juan Crow laws that relegate them to a
second-class citizenship. The Supreme Court under Justice Earl Warren begins to use the Fourteenth
Amendment to protect the rights of individuals within the states, and of course
it is those laws that now the current-day Supreme Court, under the radical
control of the Republicans that have been really put over the top by the three
new justices appointed by Donald Trump, are dismantling. They’re saying that, in
fact, that is not something that the Fourteenth Amendment should be doing and that
they will not use the Fourteenth Amendment to
protect individuals from discrimination at the state level.

We’re
really at a moment that looks very much like a period in which the
Confederates are gaining the upper hand. That
is, they are concentrating power at the state level and essentially
ignoring the Fourteenth Amendment. We’ve taken it
for granted, and it’s time to reassert what that actually means and why our
ancestors put it in our fundamental law, into
our Constitution.

Felicia: You know, one of the things that I think is distressing to everyone that I know or speak to is just how much appetite
there seems to be for conspiracy theories, fact-free
conversation, wild speculation everywhere in our politics right now, but let’s be honest, particularly on the right, the far
right. Is there any precedent for this much craziness in any political party? I know there’s a long history in American politics of
anti-intellectualism and leaning toward being attracted by conspiracy, but why
is it so
intertwined with one of our major parties right now?

Heather: Those are two different
questions. One, has there ever been a major political party that adhered to conspiracy theories and basically
lies the way we have now? And the answer to that is no. We’ve certainly had
plenty of politicians who were opportunistic
and told their followers things that weren’t true, but they were not major
political figures,
with the possible exception of Joe McCarthy, who of
course has a direct line to people like Donald Trump. Why is it so deeply
rooted in our society today is a really more
interesting question, and that is, first of all, like I say, the Republican Party, since at least 1986,
recognized that it needed to convince its followers of something that was not
true. Actually you can go back all the
way to Nixon, but really it was Ronald Reagan who tried to sell people on a
narrative that was not rooted in reality. If
you look at when Reagan was the governor of California, the reporters covering him
kind of thought he was a joke. For example, he
talked about how many lives he had saved when he was a lifeguard, and all the other lifeguards on the beach were like, “You know, the rest of us have been here and we’re not saving
anybody, nobody needs us.” And they thought it was just sort of a joke really, that
he would tell these stories that were creating a narrative of heroism, that were
not true. So you could push it all the way back to that.

You can see it in a number
of candidates nowadays, but certainly what
springs to mind is Donald Trump’s “American carnage” speech, when he took the oath of office, in which he described an America
that was just a hellscape. And similarly, the idea
that in the summer of 2020, there were
literally cities that had been burned down, that
was just simply not true. So I think part of it is the bread and butter, at this
point, of the Republican Party.

Felicia: All right, we’re gonna
take just a quick break, and don’t forget that Michael and I will talk between ourselves about this interview
later on. Stay tuned.

Michael: And we’re
back with Heather Cox Richardson on How to Save a Country. Heather, I want to ask you a question about a word. The
word is freedom. You wrote a book called
To Make Men Free: A History of
the Republican Party, an excellent book and a
very fair and judicious book. You chose
that word in the title for a reason, and I’m guessing you, if you’d written the history of the Democratic Party,
you might not have used the word “free.”

Heather: Let
me just explain first of all why I used “to make men free” as the title of that. That was a bit of a tweak, if
you will, at the Republican Party because it’s a line from Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle-Hymn of the Republic:” “As he died to make men holy, let
us die to make men free.” “The Battle-Hymn of the Republic” has been played at the Republican National Convention
every year until the year I wrote that book. I haven’t checked since. I did not
hear it at Donald Trump’s, but it was the song for the Republican Party,
and of course what they did is they made men free. Of course she wrote
that, she was up to something else when she wrote that. And since the rise of
Reagan, I believe that the Republican Party has very much worked to get rid of the idea of
universal human equality and replace it with an idea of a heteronormative
cowboy dad in charge of his women and children, and hence the focus on getting women back into the home, out of professional settings, even things like the prairie dresses that became so popular in the
1970s and into the 1980s, and by the way, are back today.

Felicia: I was going to say they’re back. The
prairie dresses were back.

Heather:
Which is, wow.
Fully shipped. Do you react the same way I do to those? 

Felicia:
I do, yes. The ruffles are back.

Heather: Yeah.

Michael: Yeah,
holy smokes. But here we are in a situation: The Republican Party owns
this word freedom and owns this concept. It’s completely associated with the
Republican Party. They have their Freedom Caucus. They have freedom: this liberty, that. Yet their
definition of freedom is utterly perverse: the
freedom not to wear a mask and to cough on somebody in the supermarket and get
them sick. I think the Democrats have a real
failing here in having ceded this word, this
concept that is cherished by Americans, that Americans are taught to cherish
from the time they can cherish any idea. The Democrats have been very derelict
in letting the Republicans have that word and not having their own definition of freedom. I think in fact that these economic ideas have to do with the democratic
vision of freedom. These ideas, these programs, these supports, these
investments, will give people more freedom to fulfill their potential as human
beings and to live better lives. So this is a
pet peeve of mine about our contemporary political discourse and culture. What
do you think?

Heather: Well, I hate to do this
to you, but you sound very much like a nineteenth-century Republican.
That is precisely what Abraham Lincoln and Theodore
Roosevelt would’ve said. I will suggest, though, that there is embedded in the
concept of freedom a really important distinction between the freedom from
something and the freedom to something.

Michael: Sure.

Heather: And that
is one that I think the Republicans have exploited, the current-day Republicans, and I think that’s an
important distinction to make. The current-day Republicans, since the Reagan
revolution, are really very different than
traditional Republicans that they have celebrated with the freedom from
regulation, the freedom from having to share
civil rights with anybody who is not—fill in all the blanks—white, heteronormative, male, et cetera, but they haven’t talked about exactly what you’re talking about, the fact that both Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, for
example, but then later on, FDR and Eisenhower focused on the fact that an
active federal government actually worked to create a world in which
individuals had the freedom to do things: to
be creative, to have jobs that would support their families, to travel, to be
healthy, to do all sorts of things that are part
of a definition of freedom that is far more inclusive than being a person of
privilege who has the freedom from things, but rather has the freedom to
things.

Felicia: I think that one of my hypotheses
about how the left lost the freedom narrative is that the
libertarian neoliberal, if you will, economists took it over, and freedom in the late ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s came to mean the freedom to transact, the freedom to hold
property, et cetera, narrowly, and therefore the left
lost the freedom that was part of the abolition movement, the freedom that was
part of the women’s liberation movement. The
activist in me, the earnest person in me, thinks that that means that freedom
is there again, to be expanded as a political
concept and recaptured, but it’s gonna take a lot of work to do that.

Heather: Well, I think we made a
terrible error, as well, after the fall of the Soviet Union, grabbing hold of the idea that democracy and capitalism
were interchangeable. The focus on capitalism
and the rise of capitalism standing for democracy, which was something of
course that had been pushed as far back as Reagan, and certainly before that: the Powell memo in 1971 and all the way, of course, back to William F.
Buckley in God and Man at Yale in 1951. That idea that as
long as you had capitalism, you would have democracy
has come home to haunt us because, of course, we now have proof that you can have capitalism and not have
democracy. You need to look no further than China and look at the rising forms
of capitalism there. At the same time, we very deliberately don’t have
democracy, and you have people thinking along those lines and trying to redefine
democracy as having stuff. That’s a real loss
because, of course, the whole concept of democracy and our democracy, American
democracy, is that all people are created equal and, crucially, that they have a right to consent to the government under
which they live. They’re allowed to have a say, and that idea of having a say we seem to be tossing over at a frightening pace, and you really can’t have the
one without having the other. I have a
theory about that.

Felicia: What’s
your theory?

Heather: My theory
is when Americans talk about socialism, they
think they’re talking about international socialism, which really takes form after 1917, but they’re not.
They’re talking about Black voting, and that
took place in 1871. Opponents in the South,
former Confederates, say, “Well, all they’re
doing is they are creating socialism. They’re turning this country into a
socialist country.” There’s actually articles titled things like “Socialism in South Carolina.” People in the nineteenth century put race and class together when
people started to talk about socialism, basically saying that if you let Black people vote, they would vote for things like roads and schools and hospitals, and that would cost tax
dollars, and since white people were the only
ones who had property to tax in the post–Civil
War South, that meant a redistribution of
wealth from white people to Black people.

You still see that nowadays when people talk about how the Democrats are dangerous, radical leftist socialists. I mean, it’s kind of a list of buzzwords there. But I
got thinking last year, I was teaching a course and wanted to talk about the rise of international capitalism, and I
thought, “When did Americans start
talking about capitalism?”
because Lincoln talked all the time about capital. In fact, during the 1860s, Lincoln and
people like him talked about capital and defined it quite literally as pre-exerted labor. They believed it was a product of labor. But
while they talk about capital in the 1860s and the 1870s, they start to talk
about capitalists, they don’t talk about
capitalism. So I actually did a word search and discovered that they talk about
capitalists as people who have money. It’s not an economic system, it’s an identifier of who people are who have money. So if
they’re talking about, for example, in New York City, a law that would help
people with money, they say the capitalists like it. 

And then they start to use the word capitalism in America to stand
against the idea of socialism, socialism
being the poor people voting, immigrants in
New York is what they’re worried about, but Black
people in the American South, they start to say, “We don’t want a system of socialism. We want a system of
capitalism,” and
by that they mean that people with capital should be the ones who determine the
political system. If you think about
capitalism in the American context, not as being about an economic system but
rather thinking about it as a political system, it changes the entire way you think about the relationship between
democracy and capitalism.

Felicia: I want to turn now to talking a little bit about you, because
your work and frankly your popularity are kind of fascinating, so tell us a little bit more about your project, Letters From an American. How did it start? And say a little
bit about what you think your popularity means about the kind of political
analysis, historical analysis, that everyday people are really looking for
right now.

Heather: I’m
not Bruce Springsteen. I’m
somebody who is voicing what a lot of people think. I’m the voice of what I
think is a political moment, and a political movement in that people want to
have a government that works and that they feel proud of and that reflects them, and they are decent human beings. They’re also
talented human beings. I hear from a
lot of people, and there’s extraordinary talent in this country. I am literally just holding up
a mirror to America at this moment, and it’s a
mirror that I really like. I like the people I’m dealing with, and I think
people are eager to have a say in their government and to be able to
participate in it, and that’s really what I
do. 

Michael: The show is called How to Save a
Country. So Heather Cox Richardson,
give us a couple ideas, concrete ideas for how to
save the country. 

Heather: It’s worth
mentioning here that I am an idealist, by which I mean, I think ideas change
the way people behave. What I always tell people is the way you change this
country is you change the way you talk about it. You change the way you think about it, and you make it known that you feel that way and that you think that way,
and that you include people in your vision of the world to make it the way you
want it to be. So for example, if you
look at the rise of the John Birch Society, which was a right-wing society that really got its teeth in the country after Brown v. Board of
Education, the way the Birchers organized was literally by going out and talking to
people. That idea of changing our country by
talking to people about what this country could be, what you want our
government to do, whether or not it’s what I want our government to do, taking
back our country into our own hands is the first step to changing our democracy.

Then
there’s the other things, of course, that everybody talks about: Run for office, vote,
give money to causes, stand up for things you believe in. All those things are
part of participating in our political system. But the first of those to me is
speak up: Speak up to your neighbors, speak up to your local
newspapers, speak up to The Wall Street Journal when you don’t like
what it’s doing, take back oxygen from those radical
people who are trying to destroy our country. People tend to forget that when
in fact we embraced civil rights in this country in the 1950s, first with the
Civil Rights Act of 1957 and then in the 1960s, those were white men who voted for the changing laws, and they
did not do that because they suddenly saw the light and thought it would be a
great thing for them to give rights to Black
women, for example. It’s because people like the NAACP and the organizers with
them and Black Americans spoke up and said,
“This is not the kind of country we want to live in.” They were able,
as I say, to push that incredibly heavy boulder uphill. So we have precedent,
we have hope, and the way you participate in that
is simply by stepping up and starting to do it. 

Felicia: I want to thank
you, Heather Cox Richardson, for your time on
this show. We have so appreciated learning from you today and learning from you
every morning at 3:00 a.m. or whenever I
receive your newsletter.

Heather: Thank you for having me. It’s been a real
pleasure.  

Michael: Pleasure was
ours. Thanks so much.

Felicia:
Michael, what did you think? 

Michael: I guess one of the main
things that I take away from this is the idea that political parties change. The
Democratic Party changed in that time
quite dramatically over the course of a couple of decades, and I don’t want
to overstate my optimism here, just the mere fact that it has happened in our history
means that it can happen again.

Felicia: Really what we’ve been
talking about this whole episode is about party instability. The optimist in me hopes that instability will actually lead to
realignment. But today the question for me is who
is going to be in what part of this
realignment? I really wonder how Black Americans and Latino Americans and Asian
Americans end up aligning with what party.

In my
perfect world, both parties would have the economic policies demonstrating that
they’re competing for the votes of people of color, kind of race to the top. That
is not what we’re seeing right now. And instead, our politics of race are
ugly within one party, and they’re at risk of being
somewhat dismissed by the other party. I hope that’s not going to happen, but I could imagine that happening. So instead, I
really fear a kind of race to the bottom, around
race, and whether that can flip is part of what
we’ll be discussing with the next two guests
on How
to Save a Country, Dorian Warren …

[Excerpt of Dorian Warren speaking]: There is
something really going on across the spectrum
in terms of one’s class, background, racial and gender background. This is actually an
exciting time for the labor movement.

Felicia: And Deepak Bhargava …

[Excerpt of Deepak Bhargava speaking]:
So why not
awaken the best parts of our national
identity, which admittedly we rarely live up to, but they’re there, of being a welcoming country. 

Felicia: We’re happy to have them
joining How to Save a Country,
which is a production of PRX in partnership
with the Roosevelt Institute and The New Republic.

Michael: Our associate producer
is Alli Rodgers. Our lead producer is Pierre Bienaimé. Our executive producer
is Jocelyn Gonzalez. 

Felicia: Our theme music is courtesy
of Codey Randall and Epidemic Sound with
other music provided
by APM. How to Save a Country is made possible with support
from Omidyar Network, a social change venture
that’s reimagining how capitalism should work. Learn more about their
efforts to recenter our economy around individuals, community, and societal
wellbeing at omidyar.com.

Michael: Support also comes from
the Hewlett Foundation’s Economy and Society Initiative, working to foster the development of a new common
sense about how the economy works and the aims it should serve. Learn more at hewlett.org. 

Felicia: If
you’re not yet subscribed, please do it. 

Michael: As you’ve
heard, on just about every podcast, yes, rating and reviewing us would definitely help the show. Thank you.

Felicia: Bye, Michael.

Michael: Bye, Felicia.

Michael: Yeah, and I love the fact that I
sound like Lincoln.

Felicia: Oh
yeah, Michael likes it even more than Baby Joe Biden would.

Book bans across the nation. Christian fundamentalism ascending. White supremacy running rampant. These are symptoms of a rising fascist politics in America. Reactionary political actors seek to reinforce white supremacy by erasing from public discussions any recognition of people of color, LGBTQ identities, and their struggles. One way this happens is through book banning, which More

The post Christian White Supremacy Rising: The Fascist Connection appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Public hearings by the House ​select committee investigating the Jan​. 6, 2021, insurrection have given Americans a much clearer understanding of all the ways ​then-President Donald Trump and his allies tried to keep him in power by overturning the results of the presidential election. Another public hearing is scheduled for Wednesday, Sept. 28, with the committee’s final report expected to be released later this year.

One force driving much of the effort to keep Trump in power, one which has not been explored publicly by the Jan. 6 committee but has drawn the attention of many journalists, scholars, and activists, was the political ideology of Christian nationalism. Christian nationalism is grounded in beliefs that the United States was founded by and for Christians, that being a “Christian nation” is central to national identity, and that it’s the job of activists and government officials to keep it that way. Under Trump, this ideology has woven its way into the broader religious-right movement and Republican Party, while far-right and white nationalist activists have made it a cornerstone of their movements.

Ahead of the insurrection, Christian nationalists promoted the belief that Donald Trump was chosen by God and that his opponents were opposing God in a spiritual war between good and evil—providing some insurrectionists with the belief that their storming of the Capitol was a righteous act.

Trump and Christian Nationalism

​To understand Christian nationalism’s role in the efforts to overturn the election results, we need to first look at how Trump made it to the White House.

Conservative evangelical Christians are an essential part of the Republican Party’s base. When Trump became the GOP nominee in 2016, he knew he needed to address skepticism about his character and record. Trump allies gathered hundreds of religious-right activists for a meeting at which Trump offered them a deal: If they made him president, he would make them more powerful. And he would give them the Supreme Court of their dreams, one that would let them overturn Roe v. Wade.

Religious-right leaders took the deal. They told their followers that Trump was anointed by God, and that controlling the Supreme Court was more important than any concerns they might have about his character or positions on other issues. And it worked. Conservative white evangelicals turned out in force for Trump in 2016.

As ​president, Trump gave Christian nationalist leaders more power and access to power than they had ever had before. Federal agencies implemented the religious right’s anti-choice and anti-equality agendas. ​Trump gave televangelist Paula White a White House job that she used to promote Christian nationalist ideology—and his reelection.​ He gave them the kind of judges he promised and a Supreme Court that this year overturned Roe.

The 2020 Campaign: Trump’s Reelection Prophesied

Religious-right leaders and right-wing Christian media outlets did everything they could to get Trump reelected. Self-declared prophets announced that God had promised Trump a second term. Trump’s reelection was portrayed as the key to the nation’s spiritual revival. Megachurch pastor Jentezen Franklin said that Trump’s loss would mean the end of freedom in America. Paula White denounced Trump’s opponents as demonic.

When Trump started to rage against state election officials’ plans to increase mail-in voting so that people could vote safely during the COVID-19 pandemic, religious-right leaders joined his attacks on that expanded access. Six months before the election, the leader of the pro-voting-restriction group True the Vote told a group of pro-Trump “prayer warriors” that the push to expand vote-by-mail was “from Satan” and that they were involved in a “spiritual battle” for “control of the free world.”

Millions of dollars were spent to get conservative white evangelicals to turn out for Trump—and they did, in even bigger numbers than in 2016. When he lost anyway, many of them threw themselves into his effort to overturn the election.

In God’s Name: Promoting the Big Lie and Fomenting Insurrection

As soon as it became clear that Trump would not accept his loss and would try to overturn the election results, his religious-right allies signed on to the Big Lie. They told supporters that Trump won the election by a landslide and that corruption​, voter fraud, and the forces of Satan were trying to steal it from him.

For two months, Trump Republicans waged a campaign to overturn the election. Inside Trump’s team, lawyers and politicians plotted to sabotage the constitutional process for affirming the will of the voters. Meanwhile, far-right activists waged a “Stop the Steal” campaign to spread Trump’s Big Lie and pressure state officials and members of Congress to betray voters and keep Trump in power. Christian nationalists were at the heart of these interconnected schemes.

The multi-layered legal effort to overturn the election included Jenna Ellis, a Trump attorney and loyalist who once wrote a book arguing that “divine law” is “the only legitimate basis for constitutional authority.” On one of dozens of online prayer calls mobilized on behalf of Trump’s effort to keep power, religious-right author and radio host Eric Metaxas noted that the campaign to reverse the election was being led by “born-again believers” and “serious Christians” like Ellis, “Kraken” attorney Sidney Powell, and ​Trump team lawyer ​Lin Wood.

Meanwhile, so-called Stop the Steal events were rife with spiritual warfare rhetoric and threats of physical violence. Less than two weeks after the election, ​the so-called Stop the Steal campaign brought together members of Congress​, conservative movement leaders​, and Trump supporters​ ​for a large rally in D.C.; at night, violent rhetoric turned into violent skirmishes between far-right groups and counter protesters. The next month, in December, under the banner of Stop the Steal and Jericho March, a “prayer rally” on the National Mall united dominionist evangelicals, Catholics, and Orthodox Christians to promote the Big Lie and demand that Trump stay in power. “We’re marching for God,” declared event organizer Ali Alexander. “We are in a spiritual battle for the heart and soul of this country,” said former ​national ​security ​adviser Mi​chael Flynn, who urged Trump to declare martial law rather than admit defeat. “God gave us Donald Trump,” screamed conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, adding that satanic forces were trying to steal the greatest victory since 1776.

Also in mid-December, the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins and other ​leaders associated with the secretive Council for National Policy signed a letter urging state legislators to override voters. “There is no doubt President Donald J. Trump is the lawful winner of the presidential election,” the letter declared. “Joe Biden is not president-elect.” We now know, thanks to the Jan. 6 committee, that current and former FRC officials were involved in the effort to get coup-promoting attorney John Eastman an audience with then-Vice President Mike Pence  to pressure Pence to stop congressional affirmation of President Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory.

​At Trump’s request, on the eve of the insurrection, as MAGA activists poured into Washington, D.C., Stop the Steal activists and others gathered for an hours-long rally near the White House. There, Christian nationalism mingled with conspiracy theories, threats of violence, and calls for war. “We’re here to serve notice because this is a demonic attack from the gates of Hell!” said South Carolina pastor and current congressional candidate Mark Burns. California pastor Ché Ahn, a leader of the dominionist New Apostolic Reformation, told the crowd that “we’re gonna rule and reign through President Trump and under the lordship of Jesus Christ.”

The Insurrection

On Jan. 6, Christian nationalist pastor and White House aide Paula White opened Trump’s rally near the White House with a prayer, calling for God to give the assembled MAGA activists “holy boldness” and praying that “every adversary” would be “overturned right now in the name of Jesus.”

On the grounds of the Capitol, religious imagery ​was impossible to ignore, often mingled with fanatical devotion to Trump. “Jesus is my Savior, Trump is my President,” proclaimed one flag. “Trump is President. Christ is King,” read another banner. Proud Boys knelt in prayer before members of the far-right group​ headed into the Capitol.

After insurrectionists had successfully battled police to break into the Capitol​ and members of Congress had been evacuated, insurrectionist Jacob Chansley led a prayer from inside the Senate chamber. He concluded:

Thank you for allowing the United States of America to be reborn. Thank you for allowing us to get rid of the communists, the globalists, and the traitors within our government. We love you, and we thank you. In Christ’s holy name we pray! Amen.

The Cover-Up

After the insurrection failed, Christian nationalist leaders and media outlets​, including figures like Michele Bachmann and Lance Wallnau​ and programs like “Flashpoint” on Kenneth Copeland’s Victory ​Channel, began contributing to the cover-up almost immediately. “Prophet” Mario Murillo claimed on the evening of Jan. 6 that he knew “for a fact” that none of the insurrectionists were Trump supporters. Among the false claims presented to Victory Channel viewers as “confirmed” news: the insurrection was led by antifa activists who had been bused in by the FBI to infiltrate a peaceful rally.

Not everyone was on message: The morning after the insurrection interrupted but failed to stop congressional certification of Joe Biden’s election, the Dove Christian television network’s morning news program featured hard-right activist John Guandolo telling viewers that the insurrectionists showed “restraint” by not executing the “traitors” in Congress.

A month after the insurrection, the conservative American Enterprise Institute released survey data showing that white evangelical Protestants were far more likely to believe QAnon conspiracy theories, Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, and false ​claims that anti-fascist activists, not Trump supporters, were responsible for the deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. About half of white evangelical Protestants “said the antifa claim was completely or mostly true.”

Religious​-right leaders supported Trump Republicans’ efforts to prevent a congressional investigation of the events leading up to the insurrection. “What’s the point?” ​FRC’s Tony Perkins​ asked last year.

The Big Lie as Excuse and Voter Suppression

Christian nationalists have played an essential role in keeping Trump’s Big Lie alive, claiming in spite of all evidence that he was the legitimate winner of the election as many of them had prophesied. And many have rallied around a wave of voter-suppression legislation pushed by Trump Republicans around the country—legislation that disproportionately targets voters of color—and whose proponents justify it by pointing to the Big Lie’s success at sowing mistrust about election results.

Danger Ahead

By portraying the election as a spiritual war between good and evil, and claiming that the defeat of God’s favored candidate—Trump—would mean the end of religious liberty and the criminalization of Christianity, religious-right leaders fostered the sense that the end justified any means to keep Trump in power. Trump Republican officials, their political allies, and far-right activists from former White House aide Steve Bannon to white nationalist Nick Fuentes, invoked Christian nationalist language to fire up their followers.

This fall, Christian nationalists have rallied around candidates like Doug Mastriano, the Republican nominee for governor of Pennsylvania. The have embraced Dinesh D’Souza’s widely debunked “2000 Mules” movie and its claims to “prove” widespread voter fraud, and they have embraced the voter suppression and intimidation efforts that have been inspired by that propaganda.

It is important to note that many Christians, including some conservative Christians, reject the political ideology of Christian nationalism and the ways it has been enfolded into Trump’s MAGA movement.

Scholars have documented that Americans who hold strongly Christian nationalist views are also more likely to support authoritarianism and to believe that violence may be justified in the pursuit of political goals. That explains why Samuel Perry and Philip Gorski, authors of “The Flag and the Cross,” describe Christian nationalism as “a fundamental threat to democracy.” And it is why People For the American Way’s Right Wing Watch continues to document the threats posed by Christian nationalism, sound the alarm about the potential for future right-wing coup attempts, and give people tools to defend democracy, pluralism, and freedom.

The post How ​Christian Nationalism Fueled the Insurrection and Threatens Democracy appeared first on Right Wing Watch.

From Fox News’ Tucker Carlson to Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas to former President Donald Trump, MAGA Republicans have been claiming that Democrats are undermining the U.S. military by trying to make it as “woke” as possible. Cruz, in a May 19, 2021 tweet, praised the Russian military for not being “woke” and “emasculated” — a tweet that received a scathing response from Sen. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois.

But the MAGA narrative claim that Democrats and so-called RINOs (Republicans In Name Only) are harming the U.S. military by making it “woke” persists. And Never Trump conservative Max Boot, in a September 26 opinion column for the Washington Post, argues that some disturbing motivations are behind this MAGA narrative.

“Donald Trump Jr., for example, claims a ‘militant female’ can become an admiral or general in today’s military ‘for no other reason other than they’re probably female,’ or “if you can say: Hey, I’m trans,’” Boot explains. “Tucker Carlson asserts: ‘It has been one calculated humiliation after another for the U.S. armed forces: vax mandates, anti-White ideology, sex changes, drag shows. Whatever is necessary to telegraph to the United States military you are worthless.’”

READ MORE: Fact checker shreds Trump Jr.’s claim about 6 million military hours being spent promoting the ‘woke’ agenda

Boot continues, “Needless to say, these fanciful descriptions from bomb-throwers who never served in uniform bear no relation to reality. The U.S. military remains one of the most conservative institutions in America, with traditions dating back centuries. That the military now welcomes African-Americans, women and LGBTQ people — all groups that were kept out in the past — only strengthens an institution that needs to draw on the talents of the whole country to defend it. So, why are cartoonish inhabitants of the Fox News Cinematic Universe caterwauling about a ‘woke military?’”

The conservative columnist answers his question by arguing that the “MAGA brigades want to populate the military with far-right officers who will do whatever Trump or a Trump mini-me commands, no matter how illegal.”

Boot notes that Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “became anathema to Trump & Co. not by embracing ‘critical race theory,’ but by making clear that the military would place loyalty to the Constitution above loyalty to Trump.”

“All of these attacks against the military for being too ‘woke’ should be seen as part of the MAGA strategy to harness the armed forces — ‘the guys with the guns,’ as Milley put it — to advance their authoritarian agenda,” Boot warns. “Blake Masters, the ultra-MAGA Republican Senate nominee in Arizona, has even advocated firing all the generals — ‘they’re left-wing politicians’ — and replacing them with ‘the most conservative colonels.’ Unfortunately, there would be little to stop a President Trump or a President Ron DeSantis from doing precisely that as long as the Senate confirms their new generals. A MAGA president could even summon back to active duty loony retired generals such as (Gen. Michael) Flynn or Don Bolduc, the GOP Senate nominee in New Hampshire, and appoint them to senior commands as long as the Senate consents…. The growing chorus of MAGA complaints about the ‘woke military,’ nonsensical as they are, indicate that the challenges will only grow. A homegrown extremist movement that has already captured control of one of the two major political parties is now trying to bend the armed forces to its supreme leader’s malign will.”

READ MORE: Paul Krugman: Ted Cruz’s ‘dumbed down’ comments show how little he understands war’s ‘technical’ realities