September 22, 2010

The fight to stop the right has to come from outside the Washington political system.

A WAVE of anti-Muslim vandalism and violence is the latest sign of an emboldened right wing in the U.S. today--one that feels confident not only in a coming election victory for the most conservative elements of the Republican Party this November, but in inflicting abuse on the oppressed and vulnerable.

The climate of right-wing hate is being stoked by Republican political leaders like Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich--not to mention media celebrities like Glenn Beck--for their own purposes.

But no part of the U.S. political establishment is blameless in the increasing prominence of the right. From conservative Republicans to even liberal Democrats, almost no mainstream political figure will make an unqualified and uncompromised stand on the questions pushed by the right--not even in defense of supposedly "cherished American values" like freedom of religion or equality before the law.

Large numbers of people feel the urgent need to challenge the right wing and its bigotry. But that challenge will have to come from below--through grassroots political mobilizations and struggles--because it certainly won't come from inside the Washington political system.

Those who want to take on the right can't wait for politicians to lead the way--they never have, and they never will. We have to respond to every outrage and instance of bigotry that we can--and build an independent political alternative that offers a different vision for society.

THE SHARP increase in anti-Muslim hate is frightening. The latest trend: In the wake of Florida pastor Terry Jones' abandoned plan to burn Korans on September 11, incinerated remains of the Islamic holy book have been found outside mosques across the country--and not just in conservative rural areas, but liberal strongholds like San Francisco.

The source of this wave of hate is obvious--the toxic right-wing atmosphere in mainstream politics.

That ugly stew of racism and prejudice got a boost last week with another round of victories for Tea Party-backed candidates in several Republican primary elections. The most prominent was Christine O'Donnell, a former Fox News commentator and social conservative who is anti-gay, anti-abortion (even in cases of rape or incest) and anti-tax--though to judge from press reports, she doesn't seem to mind misappropriating campaign funds.

When a few conservatives expressed worries that victories for candidates like O'Donnell would help the Democrats' chances of keeping control of Congress in November, the Tea Partiers went ballistic--and O'Donnell was deluged with $1 million in donations for her campaign in a single day.

These are the fanatics who are setting the terms of political discussion in the "world's greatest democracy." That includes the scapegoating of Muslims--which came to the fore this summer when right-wingers began whipping up a campaign against plans to build an Islamic community center in Lower Manhattan, several blocks from the site of the World Trade Center.

When Jones, the head of an obscure right-wing Christian cult in Florida, seized on the frenzy to promote his plan for an "International Burn a Koran Day" on September 11, a number of conservative figures backed away from him. Sarah Palin, for example, wrote on Twitter: "Koran Burning Is Insensitive, Unnecessary; Pastor Jones, Please Stand Down."

But Palin and Co. shouldn't get off the hook that easily. They have led the way in demonizing the Islamic community center project in New York.

Months ago, for example, Palin called on "peaceful Muslims" to "refudiate" plans for the community center--suggesting, in other words, that any Muslim who didn't join in the "refudiation" must be a violent extremist. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich--who is itching to become the Republicans' 2012 presidential candidate--likened plans for the community center to "putting a swastika on a Holocaust museum."

The wave of Islamophobia this summer has reshaped the character of the right-wing Tea Party movement that has captured the media's attention for the past year.

Despite its charade of representing ordinary Americans, the Tea Party was pushed into the spotlight last year by operatives in the Republican establishment as a way to galvanize the base of a once-demoralized party to oppose any policy put forward by Democrats. Active support for Tea Party rallies was much more marginal than the media let on.

But increasingly, the Tea Partiers have been fused to far-right causes. Starting in the spring, anti-immigrant vigilante groups like the Minutemen began turning up as prominent organizers and speakers at Tea Party events.

And today, the identification of the Tea Party and its leaders with Islamophobia is total--with the consequence that hard-core anti-Muslim racists can speak to a wider audience than ever.

For example, the driving force behind the campaign against the Islamic community center in New York City is Pamela Geller and her "Stop Islamization of America" organization. Geller considers herself a Tea Partier--she spoke at the Tennessee Tea Party Convention in May. She's also an admirer of fascists--praising the far-right English Defense League, as well as Eugene Terreblanche, the deceased South African neo-Nazi who was known for threatening civil war to maintain apartheid.

On September 11, to make the identification complete, Geller and her cohorts organized a rally against the Islamic community center, with far-right Dutch politician Geert Wilders speaking alongside fixtures of the U.S. conservative movement like former United Nations Ambassador John Bolton. Wilders warned the crowd to "draw this line so that New York...will never become New Mecca."

This symbolizes the anything-goes atmosphere in mainstream politics today, where right-wingers feel comfortable pandering to the most vile prejudices in U.S. society.

For example, Gingrich grabbed headlines recently when he started promoting the thesis of conservative ideologue Dinesh D'Souza, who wrote--in a cover article in the respected business magazine Forbes--that Barack Obama's allegedly radical policies are the result of a "Kenyan, anti-colonial mindset."

Confused? According to D'Souza, Obama supposedly absorbed this "mindset" from his father--who saw his son exactly one time after he divorced Obama's mother when Obama was two-and-a-half years old.

Nevertheless, D'Souza rants, in a disgusting reference to Obama's father, "[t]his philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anti-colonial ambitions, is now setting the nation's agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son."

Gingrich took D'Souza's racist premise and ran with it. "Stunning," he told the National Review Online. "The most profound insight I have read in the last six years about Barack Obama."

Of course, it's also a profoundly sleazy way for Gingrich to pander to the "birther" crackpots who claim--against all evidence and common sense--that Obama isn't a U.S. citizen.

Such repeated racist assertions--that Obama is an African Muslim anti-colonialist, rather than a thoroughly mainstream Democrat in charge of the most powerful military in the history of the world--create a climate in which a violent right wing can thrive and spread.

BARACK OBAMA and the Democrats are focusing on the extremists of the Tea Party to try to discredit Republicans going into the November elections.

According to press reports--promptly denied by the White House--party strategists are considering a national campaign of TV ads that would portray the GOP as taken over by a far-right fringe. "We need to get out the message that it's now really dangerous to re-empower the Republican Party," one unnamed Democratic operative told the New York Times.

But if anyone is guilty of "re-empowering" the Republican Party, it's Obama and the Democratic leadership in Congress.

For the past 18 months, the Democrats have controlled the White House and both houses of Congress--and with bigger majorities than either party has enjoyed in a generation. But they've done nothing to fulfill the expectations placed in them.

Obama took office in the aftermath of the 2008 Wall Street meltdown, but his administration adopted the bailout of the biggest banks engineered by the Bush White House. Millions of people now see the Democrats as responsible for putting literally trillions of dollars in the hands of Wall Street, with no accountability whatsoever.

As a result, the Republican darlings of the Tea Partiers--despite their intimate connections to Corporate America--have been allowed to masquerade as opponents of a "big government" giveaway to the banksters.

Likewise, when the right began whipping up anti-immigrant hate during the controversy over Arizona's SB 1070 legislation that enshrined racial profiling into law, Obama met them halfway. His Justice Department filed suit to block SB 1070--but Obama continued to insist on punitive enforcement measures that have led to an increase in the number of people deported annually, compared to the Bush years.

And now, with hate-filled rhetoric about Muslims dominating the right-wing media, Obama's defense of freedom of religion is far from unqualified. One day in August, he supported the right of the Islamic community center project to go forward in New York--the next day, he refused to comment on the "wisdom" of the project.

When Terry Jones was still insisting he would go ahead with his Koran-burning outrage on September 11, Obama denounced the Florida pastor--but on the grounds that this provocation would threaten Americans' "security." "This could increase the recruitment of individuals who'd be willing to blow themselves up in American cities or European cities," Obama said.

This can only bolster the lies about Muslims perpetrated during the "war on terror"--that millions upon millions of people around the world are hate-filled fanatics, bent on causing mayhem and death at the least provocation.

In such circumstances--with the confident voices of hardened right-wingers spewing hate and lies, and the timid voices of the rest of the establishment endorsing much of what they say--it's inevitable that right-wing ideas will gain a wider hearing.

As a result, public opinion can reflect the rightward shift in mainstream politics. A CBS News/New York Times poll released this week found that more than half the U.S. population knows someone with "negative feelings" toward all Muslims as a result of the September 11 attacks--one in five people said they have those feelings themselves.

But there are big contradictions in such surveys. For example, a majority of people have told pollsters they back Arizona's anti-immigrant SB 1070. But among those supporters, fully three-quarters also support comprehensive immigration reform that would allow a path to legalization for the undocumented--a far cry from the hard-line position of the immigrant-bashers.

The truth is that the national political debate is dominated by views well to the right of what most people believe--even after a year of the Tea Party maniacs and the Republicans who speak for them dominating the airwaves and the discussion in Washington.

The bigotry that the right wing stands for--not to mention its un-talked-about pandering to corporate power and the rich--is offensive to huge numbers of people in the U.S.

And among a smaller group--but one that nevertheless numbers in the millions--there is an urgent desire to confront the right.

In this situation, even modest initiatives to challenge bigotry and hate can be a lightning rod for an opposition. Thus, in New York City, socialists and other activists last month began organizing for counterprotests against the rallies held by Stop Islamization of America against the planned Islamic community center. By September 11, the anti-racist counterprotest drew more people than the bigots.

The right wing's domination of the national political discussion--whether in Washington or filtered through the corporate media--can lead a lot of people who hate what they're hearing to draw the pessimistic conclusion that they're on their own in the face of a conservative tide.

Our efforts to counter that climate--whether they come in the form of protests against the bigots or political meetings to expose the truth about U.S. politics and discuss our alternative--are critical to showing people they aren't alone.

WHETHER IT is over or not by official standards, the Great Recession has had a devastating and ongoing effect--its impact centered on working people and the poor, of course, but extending into the middle class.

An economic crisis of this depth creates the conditions for political polarization. The continuous attack on working-class living standards--with the threat of worse to come--can lead to eruptions of struggle and political mobilization. Whether they win or not, whether they lead to sustained movements or not, they show the potential for a left-wing response.

But the right can also grow in the dire circumstances of this crisis--by feeding on the fear and hopelessness felt by people who have seen their lives turned upside down, and by pushing the blame for those conditions onto scapegoats.

Whether the right can capture the bitter discontent caused by the crisis of capitalism depends on whether people see an alternative to the left that speaks to their concerns. In the early stages of this crisis, Barack Obama and the Democrats seemed to represent an alternative. Now, the Democrats are implicated by their role in upholding the system--so the question is what force will take shape to put forward a left alternative.

The U.S. isn't alone in experiencing a rightward shift in national politics and a growth of the forces of the far right, even of Nazis. The process is further advanced in many countries of Europe, where fascist political parties regularly poll in the double digits in elections.

Here, too, the blame for the growth of the right falls on both wings of the political establishment.

In France, for instance, conservative President Nicolas Sarkozy has accompanied his attempt to cut living standards--most recently with a proposal to raise the retirement age for the national pension system--with scapegoating, particularly of Muslims and immigrants. The government's expulsion of more than 1,000 Roma immigrants, for example, is a naked bid to bolster Sarkozy's political standing.

But the right wing's more vicious attacks have been legitimized by France's center-left Socialist Party--which presided over similar anti-immigrant policies when it was in power, and which has gone most of the way to supporting Sarkozy's anti-Muslim scapegoating.

How can this vicious cycle--of an emboldened right wing on the offensive, enabled by the refusal of the mainstream political establishment to challenge it--be stopped?

One way it won't be stopped is by relying on that establishment.

Cooler heads are not going to prevail on the right--leaders of the Republican Party are not going to stand up to the scapegoaters and fanatics, who represent a ticket back to a GOP majority in Congress.

Nor will support for Democrats as the lesser evil stop the right--not when the Democrats remain committed to carrying out the same austerity measures that are fueling popular anger and to defending a system where the gap between rich and poor has grown to grotesque proportions.

The fight to stop the right has to come from outside the political system--in struggles and movements built from the grassroots up.

The first step is to challenge the right and its bigotry at every opportunity. As activists in New York City proved in taking on the Islamophobes--like the immigrant rights activists who sprang to the defense of the undocumented after Arizona passed SB 1070--there are lots of people who want to stand up to the right.

But there's another face to the fight against the right. We also need to provide a political alternative that blames the economic crisis on the Wall Street bankers, corporate executives and political leaders who are actually responsible for it--and the vision of a society that would operate according to different priorities.

Socialist ideas can provide that alternative and that vision. The rebuilding of a genuine socialist movement--not only as a set of ideas, but as a living part of all the struggles throughout society--is a central part of fighting the right.