Politics

Is Bernie Sanders a socialist?

Editor’s note: The following is an extended version of the comments quoted by Damon Linker in the Week. For less sympathetic coverage of Sanders, see Peter Dreier at HuffPo and Michael Kazin at Slate. C-SPAN will air the National Press Club event on Jack’s new book this Sunday at 6:45 Eastern, 3:45 Pacific, but the full video can be found here.

Is Bernie Sanders a socialist? I know from my mother who lives in Vermont that particularly at constituent events, he more often identifies as an “independent” than a socialist. At other times he’ll take advantage of his socialist reputation, such as appearing on an episode of the 2011 C-SPAN miniseries “The Contenders” on Eugene Debs. But of late, it is the media emphasizing the socialist label for Bernie.

In the context of the historic American Socialist movement, Bernie is squarely in the tradition of the Socialist Party politicians elected in the first half of the 20th century in places as far flung as Milwaukee; Schenectady, NY; Butte, MT; Minneapolis; Reading, PA; and Bridgeport, CT – success through delivering on core constituency service and clean government. His first election as mayor of Burlington in 1981 was due to a property tax revolt and the opportunistic support of the police union. In 2013, I attended the annual Fourth of July parade in picturesque Warren, VT, where respectful but modest applause for Governor Shumlin was followed by absolute pandemonium for Bernie (as he is known simply to Vermonters). The two things that have sealed this – and 70% of the vote – are an A rating from the NRA and zeal in securing veterans benefits.

Politically shrewd as he is, I hoped Bernie would decide to marshal his well-earned influence behind a candidate who can better replicate his model of success nationally such as Jim Webb. Maybe I was naïve to think he could do this without first running a campaign himself, and I imagine both Webb and Martin O’Malley are happy to have Bernie deliver the truly rough punches to Hillary. But perhaps what Bernie has been thinking is that he wants to replicate the Ron Paul model of inspiring and leaving a large activist organization in his wake.

This exact thinking is revealed in a blog by the editor of Jacobin (see Counterpunch for the truly nasty anti-Bernie argument on the left). My fear is that such a large opening for a consciously “socialist” politics in America today will inevitably be filled by the uber-PC Jacobin, which has been in the forefront calling for a merger of the various remnants of the Communist Party with the Democratic Socialists of America, along with such ideologues in the professional class of the labor movement who tend to look to the 1930s Popular Front as their usable past.

Here we come to the core arguments of my book: 1) that the reason radicalism has been so painfully irrelevant in the post-9/11 era is because it suffers the same affliction as liberalism, the idolatry of identity politics, and 2) that it was the Popular Front that displaced the historic Socialist Party, of the original middle American radical Eugene V. Debs and the quintessential progressive isolationist Norman Thomas, profoundly committed to the ballot box and to Jeffersonian virtue, with what became contemporary liberalism – the elevation of protest over politics at the expense of democratic virtue.

Yet the real turning point to contemporary liberalism was the civil rights movement and the new left, whose foundation was in the replication of this model by the Trotsky protégé Max Shachtman, whose followers took over the corpse of the Socialist Party at the end of the 1950s and ultimately became a core component in the forging of neoconservatism. The irony is that Bernie Sanders’ political pedigree runs against the grain of all this: beginning in a radical dissenting faction of the Shachtmanite Young People’s Socialist League in the early 1960s, and then squarely situated in the most impeccably small-d democratic segment of the new left, that hoped to revive the possibilities for a new party and a spirit resembling the historic Socialist movement.

I do not expect Bernie to substantially revive the old faith in the ballot – it is true that he is more Swedish welfare statist than Jeffersonian radical. At the same time, it is misleading to say that he would be perfectly at home in a mainstream European center-left party; the example of the 1960s was ultimately adopted by, and profoundly transformed, the European social democratic left and turned upside-down the Cold War-era question of “American exceptionalism.” Indeed, if only by virtue of the necessities of running for president, Bernie’s reliability on foreign policy and the surveillance state have risen substantially.

What Bernie can and likely will do, though it is not necessarily his intention, is pry open the contradictions in contemporary liberalism, as it is led by the force of events to emphasize economic inequality, civil liberty, and responsible government at the ultimate expense of its identity politics zeal. Bernie has made his displeasure with identity politics known in the past – though he may not push hard on a critique of contemporary liberalism, he will certainly provoke the discussion as Elizabeth Warren would not.

I wrote my book because my family background was in the labor movement and the increasingly forgotten non-Communist left, and that the historic Socialist Party denounced by some new left historians as “the left wing of McCarthyism” deserved to be reconsidered on its own terms a generation after the Cold War. The result may have been a book that greets most self-identified socialists in the United States of 2015 as something from another planet. Yet Bernie Sanders represents just enough of a link to that past to raise some interesting if not troublesome questions.

(Image source)

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Lindsey Graham: The neoreactionary candidate

Because democracy is a polite name for anarchy, we men of the right hate to vote. Voting is to power what porn is to sex; both are shameful and to be avoided.

Because democracy is fitful, however, every now and again it presents an opportunity, like a ray of sunlight piercing a violent storm, to restore stable and orderly government. Often this occurs when formerly respected institutions are breaking down, like the rule of law. In Chile, for example, military rule was legitimized by the lower house of their legislature, after Salvador Allende refused to enforce the rulings of the Supreme Court.

Given the current president’s penchant for governing by executive fiat and ignoring the duly enacted laws of this country — such as the fourth and fifth amendments, or immigration law (a full account of the administration’s crimes is beyond the scope of this article) — you should not need convincing that we are in a similar situation.

Only one man appreciates the need to bring military power to bear against feckless politicians, and he is expected to announce his campaign for president on June 1. If your goal is to hasten the demise of degenerate American democracy and bring about government by the strong and the virtuous, there is only one man in the 2016 presidential race for you; that man is Lindsey Graham. The senator is already frustrating other Republican hopefuls’ attempts to make inroads in his domain of South Carolina.

We want government to run like a business. There is only one man who has stated a willingness to sell cabinet appointments; that man is also Lindsey Graham. He let on recently that he may have the “first all-Jewish cabinet in America because of the pro-Israel funding.” It would be shortsighted to allow anti-semitism to get in the way of what would be the largest step in history towards running America like a joint-stock corporation.

His record indicates a capricious authoritarianism worthy of Caligula, and there would be no better pretext for crushing dissent at home than a new war with Iran.

The never-married senator has been hounded about his dainty patois, earning nicknames like “Miss Lindsey” and “Huckleberry Closetcase.” To his credit, he has let the rumors stay rumors, no doubt with an aristocrat’s sense that, no matter how baroque one’s sexuality, best to keep it private and don’t frighten the horses — or in his case, Carolina baptists and a casino tycoon. God may expect better of him; we mortals should not question our betters.

If you harbor lingering doubts about the act of voting, bear in mind that detractors could be punished in the new regime. Consider it an oath of fealty. Those who find him distasteful can be reassured that a man who talks like that won’t last long in a military government.

Vote for a coup, vote Lindsey Graham.

This is the #OfficialNeoreactionaryPosition.

Religious liberty does not apply to conservatives

From the 1660s until the revolution, American colonists burned effigies of the pope yearly. Loyalist officials were accused of promoting “the Popish religion.” Most colonists would have regarded the public display of crosses suspiciously.

There were Catholic signers of the Declaration of Independence, as well as others who spoke out in favor of tolerating them; George Washington himself cracked down on “Pope’s Day” celebrations. But it’s equally important to note that the concept of religious liberty, especially in the context of the Southern colonies, mostly arose from the need for accommodation between the established Anglican Church and dissenting protestants. Religious liberty did not by definition extend to Catholics, because their loyalty to a foreign sovereign was a political matter as much as a religious one.

Many have written about how Catholic toleration during the revolution was due mostly to America’s alliance with France. That and the pragmatic need to put aside differences in a time of war forced New Englanders to moderate their rabid anti-Catholicism, which prior to the outbreak of hostilities used the king’s toleration of French Catholics in Quebec to inflame revolutionary sentiments, a radical point of view encapsulated by the slogan, “No king, no popery.” Even during and after the revolution, full rights of citizenship were not granted to Catholics; after 1776 in Georgia, the Carolinas, and New Jersey they could vote but not hold public office. Elizabeth Fenton has argued that Catholicism was the foil American liberalism needed to develop.

Along the same lines, T.H. Breen identifies anti-Catholicism as one of three major facets of British colonial identity, the others being constitutional monarchism and commerce:

The second element distinguishing the British Empire of the eighteenth century from its European competitors was Protestantism. Religious confession energized national identity. An English person assumed an obligation not only to uphold the constitution but also to resist the spread of Catholicism. Not surprisingly, the seeds of England’s dislike of Catholicism — an emotion that came close to mass hysteria — could be found in the history of the English Reformation. Henry VIII broke with the pope, and then his strong-willed daughter Elizabeth I turned back that Spanish Armada in 1588. The Spanish had intended to root out the religious heresy. Long after the threat of direct attack had receded, the English people still imagined dark conspiracies designed to weaken the Protestant faith. Such notions acquired greater credibility during the seventeenth century, as a succession of Stuart kings either married Catholics, compromised themselves by accepting large subsidies from Catholic nations like France, or, in the case of James II, converted to Catholicism. None of this pleased the ordinary people. In 1688 England’s ruling class sent James II packing — a defining moment known as the Glorious Revolution — and in his place invited William and Mary to accede the throne. The new monarchs’ major appeal was their unquestioned commitment to the Protestant cause.

Eighteenth-century Americans wove anti-Catholicism into their own sense of being British. However deficient in charisma were the Hanoverian kings who for more than a century after 1714 held the British Crown, they defended Protestantism against its continental enemies. In America this commitment translated into a long series of wars against the French. When the British finally emerged victorious from the Seven Years’ War in 1763, the colonists assured themselves that a Protestant God had supported British troops in the battle for Canada. Within this imperial framework it did not mater much whether one attended a Congregational, Anglican, or Presbyterian service, nor to what extent the leveling spirit of evangelical revivalism had swept up an individual or community. All Protestants qualified as proper British subjects. And Catholics were implacable enemies. As the Reverend Jonathan Mayhew explained in a politically charged sermon delivered in Boston in May 1765, “Our controversy with her [Rome] is not merely a religious one … But a defense of our laws, liberties and civil rights as men in opposition to the proud claims of ecclesiastical persons, who under the pretext of religion and saving of men’s souls, would engross all power and property to themselves, and reduce us to the most abject slavery.”

Another relevant line from that sermon is “Popery and liberty are incompatible; at irreconcileable enmity with each other,” which would have been common sense to most of the Founding Fathers.

John Adams took the rhetorical architecture of anti-Catholicism and applied it to the Church of England and the protestant government in his Dissertation on Canon and Feudal Law in 1765, referring to apostolic succession as a “fantastical idea” and praising Massachusetts’ founders for rejecting episcopal delusions. As a New Englander, he rejected bishops for theological and philosophical reasons; a century earlier, Virginia rejected them because a bishop would have threatened the gentry’s hold on parish vestries. The Anglican religion, defined by bishop and king — representing canon and feudal law respectively — has never recovered in America, after a revolution in opposition to both, and the leftward drift of American protestantism has continued unabated, through unitarianism on down to the gingham and well-oiled beards of the “emerging church.”

Religious liberty privileges more progressive-friendly kinds of religion, by design. That is the reason why the ACLU will support Religious Freedom Restoration Acts when they’re applied to Sikhs and Native Americans but not Christian bakers. If orthodox Christians, particularly Catholics, wonder why religious liberty no longer seems to apply to them, a large part of the answer is that it was never meant to.

Update: I’ve been meaning to link this piece by Mike Church about Patrick Henry’s support for the clergy and this seems like a good time.

(Image: A pope night celebration in Boston)

The Socialist Party and the Old Right

The text of my talk last night at the National Press Club is now online over on the Porch, here’s some of it:

Greetings. As the token conservative on the panel, I intend to get to what the Socialist Party has to say to us, but I’d like to begin, true to form, by complaining about the liberal media.

In September of last year, the New Republic released a 100th anniversary anthology with a more insurgent title than the magazine has ever earned, called “Insurrections of the Mind,” curated by their recently deposed editor Franklin Foer. In it he offers a succinct summation of what one might call Crolyism for the 21st Century: “the marriage of welfare statism and civil liberties is essentially the definition of American liberalism.”

In the Baffler this month, the estimable left-wing writer George Scialabba corrected him, noting the marriage in question “has actually been a love triangle,” with interventionist foreign policy as the third leg.

As the New Republic and its counterpart the Nation go through their anniversary retrospections, one in its 101st year and the other in its 150th, both have published long essays taking stock of their past. In the New Republic’s case, we might have hoped for a critical reevaluation of its mostly unbroken century of interventionism, before both World Wars right up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Instead, what we have is an extended mea culpa of a cover story about the magazine’s support for welfare reform and its failure to hire a diverse enough staff. Whatever the merits of this newfound sensitivity, to focus on that to the exclusion of the magazine’s militarism seems like a cop-out. In 2015, to diversify a magazine will earn you plaudits from all corners of respectable society. To question war and empire, on the other hand, usually means sacrificing one’s reputation.

Read the rest here. Photo above courtesy JD Gordon

John Zmirak: On a mission from God to get people to stop reading writers he doesn’t like

This is one of the strangest twitter arguments I’ve been in for a while, going off of John Zmirak’s latest column in the Stream criticizing Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig. Zmirak’s claims are so bizarre and detached from reality that I had to suggest that perhaps there’s a certain careerist imperative behind his constant mendacity toward anyone who won’t get with the tea party Catholic program. I (probably deservedly) earned a block for that, but it really must be said.

Zmirak claims Gabriel Sanchez, of all people, is aligned with the left because he read about Bruenig on his blog:

Nevermind that Sanchez and I have both been rather strongly critical of the Christian socialism she’s peddling. These integralists — I’m not one, for the record, but I find them interesting — are accused of allying with the left:

This isn’t even remotely accurate; a cursory look at their blogging home over at The Josias should yield plenty of evidence of that. Other than dissenting from unrestrained laissez-faire capitalism integralists more or less defend the type of order embodied in the old European monarchies, which leftism arose to destroy.

But if cooperating with the left is an offense worthy of permanent enmity from our brave correspondent, isn’t he guilty of the same thing, as a “liberal”? To say nothing of the irony that he argues in the same way Bruenig does; by hyperbole, smears, and anathemas.

He keeps digging. I think it would be news to every single one of these people that they are “integralists”:

I pointed out that the “Benedict option” and integralism are basically opposites; the latter built on the Aristotelian notion of the body politic, the former a kind of severance from it. That’s not important to him:

Later he calls Deneen a “leftist opportunist wannabe Clinton Vatican ambassador.” Sanchez has responded here:

Zmirak and Hilton’s inability to get a joke is secondary to the more troubling reality that Catholic neoliberals/libertarians seem largely incapable of making fundamental distinctions between principled positions which they happen to have no sympathy for. This became clear to me last night on Twitter when, after alerting me to his article, Zmirak proceeded to conflate Catholic integralists with so-called radical Catholics such as Patrick Deneen, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Artur Rosman. (Rod Dreher, despite being Eastern Orthodox, was thrown into the mix as well.) Had Zmirak taken the time to actually read my Front Porch Republic article, he would have noticed that I set forth all of the distinctions for him. Hilton should have realized it, too, though I have no evidence that she actually read anything beyond Zmirak’s article. Although it is true that integralist and radical Catholics are deeply critical of liberalism, their reasons are sometimes, maybe oftentimes, significantly different.

Pater Edmund Walstein, on the other hand, who blogs over at Sancrucensis, is an integralist, but his reading habits are off the reservation:

This is the defender of liberalism here, telling people who they shouldn’t be reading! Twice, in one conversation, he’s denounced people for their reading habits. I can dig the great books as much as anyone, but this is crazy. Also like Bruenig, there is no good-faith attempt to understand his interlocutors first.

The other big thing they have in common is their vociferous defense of the secular state, and I think it’s at the heart of why these two writers are so vitriolic all the time. Zmirak’s deal, the one he’s built basically his whole career on, is that he’ll police his own camp in exchange for the chance to win in the arena of democratic competition. If, like Zmirak thinks, we can ‘win’; take the White House, cut the corporate tax rate, overturn Roe, and restore the American empire to greatness, then this growing movement of doubters is worse than unenthusiastic, they’re faithless recusants. Of course, it never works out the way he says it will, and the main ones who benefit from this arrangement are the ones making the deal. Unfortunately for him it’s looking less and less fair and less and less appealing. That probably means we can expect the nastiness to get worse. Power, or even the prospect of it, seems to do that to people.

Readers probably don’t need me to tell them that I think the original recusants had the right idea.

*****

It seems appropriate to leave this bit of Maistre here:

… when man works to restore order he associates himself with the author of order; he is favored by nature, that is to say, by ensemble of secondary forces that are the agents of the Divinity. His action partakes of the divine; it becomes both gentle and imperious, forcing nothing yet not resisted by anything.  His arrangements restore health. As he acts, he calms disquiet and the painful agitation that is the effect and symptom of disorder. In the same way, the hands of a skilful surgeon bring the cessation of pain that proves the dislocated joint has been put right.

Frenchmen, it was to the noise of hellish songs, the blasphemy of atheism, the cries of death, and the prolonged moans of slaughtered innocence, it was by the light of flames, on the debris of throne and altar, watered by the blood of the best of kings and an innumerable host of other victims, it was by the contempt of morality and the established faith, it was in the midst of every crime that your seducers and your tyrants founded what they call your liberty.

Guys like Zmirak are all Vendee, no King. And we know how that ends.

Update: Zmirak seems to have deleted all these tweets. Good thing they’re saved here!

Are the 21 Coptic martyrs pro-Israel enough for Ted Cruz?

Amen, senator.

Ted Cruz apparently said at CPAC this week that “the president needs to stand up and defend the beheaded Coptic Christians in Egypt,” and he’s been mentioning them frequently for the last week or so.

At the In Defense of Christians Summit he trolled last September, one of his last lines was, “If you will not stand with Israel and the Jews, then I will not stand with you.”

It’s no secret that the Copts have some issues with Israel, and representative of the Coptic Patriarch was in the room that night. Was he one of the ones Cruz believes was “consumed with hate”?

At the very least, the junior senator from Texas has contradicted himself. Which one is it? Does he stand with the Coptic Church, regardless of its politically inconvenient relationship with Israel, or are the 21 Coptic martyrs simply a useful prop to criticize the administration and call for ever more aggressive military action in the Middle East?

I think we all know the answer, but let us hope we are wrong. Cruz’s IDC line is basically straight out of the John Hagee playbook, who’s said before in interviews that “if you are not for Israel and the Jewish people, you either are biblically ignorant or you’re not a Christian.” They are both Baptists, and as we were reminded last week by a blog post at some Montana hate preacher’s website that went viral, Baptists have significant differences with Coptic Christianity.

There’s some evidence Hagee and Cruz are close; not long after the IDC provocation, Ted Cruz’s father, a twice-divorced former Catholic-turned-Baptist preacher, headlined at the San Antonio-based church of John Hagee, chairman of Christians United for Israel. He also has some odd beliefs about Jesus and the end of the world:

In Hagee’s latest, Four Blood Moons, he advances the theory that a series of lunar events that started on April 2014 means that “in these next two years, we’re going to see something dramatic happen in the Middle East involving Israel that will change the course of history in the Middle East and impact the whole world.”

Hagee keeps saying this stuff; CUFI keeps separating itself from the rapture-ready bestsellers. On Monday I asked David Brog, the Jewish executive director of CUFI, whether Four Blood Moons was informing any of Hagee’s or the activists’ thinking about the crisis in Israel or Russia.

“Absolutely not,” said Brog. “Outside observers don’t give evangelicals credit for being able to hold two different ideas in their heads. There’s often confusion, when it comes to evangelical support for Israel, because evangelicals, like a lot of Jews, believe that we may be living in a messianic time. Of course, in the Jewish case, no one ever says—‘Ah, that’s why you support Israel, you think you’re going to bring the messiah.’ It’s black letter Christian theology that the date of the second coming was set eons ago.”

A politically necessary dodge, to be sure, but frankly it strikes me as complete nonsense given how politically active these people are; ‘We’re not trying to bring about the end times, we just want to bomb Iran.’ Later in November Hagee, and the younger Cruz appeared together at the Zionist Organization of America dinner, where the former called the president “one of the most anti-Semitic presidents in the history of the United States of America.”

Obama can’t be worse than Nixon on that score, but at any rate, it’s far from the worst thing Hagee has said:

Now, before we go any further, let me note that I consider myself a supporter of Israel and believe my record bears that out. I was the first to publish this expose by Edwin Black on the Palestinian Authority vetting acts of terrorism for whether they qualified as martyrdom operations, and had the author on the radio when I was subbing for Mike Church to talk about it afterward. I brought on an Orthodox Jew and Israeli citizen to help edit my section at the Daily Caller, and have published a founder of the Wiesenthal Center. It would be difficult for me to run a more pro-Israel opinion page. Maybe Robert Spencer would say I should stop publishing moderate Muslims too, that would be one way I guess — he goes after me whenever I publish one — but I refuse to do that.

However, I also hew to George Washington’s warning about entangling alliances, and sure am put off by the creepy theopolitics and political litmus tests of Christian Zionists like Hagee and Cruz. What seems beyond question to me is that it is going too far for a professed Christian to claim, in political apologias for the state of Israel, that “Jesus did not come to earth to be the Messiah.” It really says something about the state of the Christian right that a man like Hagee can state what seems to me a clearly heretical idea such as this and still be treated with respect.

As for Cruz, we should insist that he clarifies his position. Does he think the 21 martyrs had it coming, being part of a church that fails to recognize Israel as the hope of Middle Eastern Christians, as he has suggested they should?

Some may object to my bringing this up, that I’m politicizing the murders, or gainsaying both Israel and Ted Cruz at an important time, or that unity and deference are called for in the face of tragedy. Indeed, one could interpret the U.K.-based Coptic Bishop Angaelos’s worries that way, as expressed to TheDC’s own Ivan Plis:

While touched by the “immense amount of concern” he had received for his slain brethren, he said he was “very wary of them being used to make a political point” by those unfamiliar with the Copts and their church.

What Ted Cruz is doing here is trying to make a political point, and the most charitable spin one could put on his IDC provocation is that he was “unfamiliar with the Copts and their church.” To my mind, asking these questions is very much in the spirit of Bishop Angaelos’s concerns.

(Image source)