The other 'Path to 9/11' lie

While most of the attention regarding ABC's The Path to 9/11 "docudrama" has focused on the bogus scene in which Clinton officials are depicted as letting Osama bin Laden go despite having him in their clutches -- a truly mendacious bit of right-wing propaganda -- there's another scene, apparently in the film, that deserves every bit as much attention and careful scrutiny.

That's the sequence described in the Salon review of the program:

Meanwhile, Condoleezza Rice gets that fated memo about planes flying into buildings, and makes it very clear to anyone who'll listen just how concerned President Bush is about these terrorist threats -- despite the fact that we're given little concrete evidence of the president's concern or interest in taking action.

"That fated memo" in question is, of course, the August 6, 2001, Presidential Daily Briefing memo that became the subject of extensive wrangling between the 9/11 Commission and the White House, which was intent on keeping it from being made public.

The purported scene in Path to 9/11 (which may turn out to be among the sequences the network is currently scrambling to correct) is in fact contradicted directly by Rice's own testimony:

Rice told the commission Thursday that the briefing included mostly "historical information" and that most of the threat information known in the summer of 2001 referred to overseas targets.

Perhaps more to the point, there was clear testimony that Rice and Bush both largely ignored the memo:

Former counterterrorism aide Richard Clarke had testified two weeks before that the White House had ignored warnings about bin Laden's terrorist organization. Clarke said the Bush administration, including Rice, was aware of al Qaeda threats but did not treat them as "urgent."

In other words, rather than treating the memo with any urgency, Rice, Bush, and Co. all viewed the memo as ranting from Clarke, who had been demoted when Rice arrived as National Security Adviser in early 2001.

Rice's focus, in fact, during weeks leading up to Sept. 11, was on promoting a missile defense system, not terrorism. She had been prepared the morning of the attacks, in fact, to deliver a speech on "the threats and problems of today and the day after, not the world of yesterday" -- which was focused almost solely on a missile system.

What did the memo say, exactly? Well, it was titled "Bin Laden determined to strike in U.S." and read thus:

Clandestine, foreign government, and media reports indicate bin Laden since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the US. Bin Laden implied in U.S. television interviews in 1997 and 1998 that his followers would follow the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and "bring the fighting to America."

After U.S. missile strikes on his base in Afghanistan in 1998, bin Laden told followers he wanted to retaliate in Washington, according to a -- -- service.

An Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) operative told - - service at the same time that bin Laden was planning to exploit the operative's access to the U.S. to mount a terrorist strike.

The millennium plotting in Canada in 1999 may have been part of bin Laden's first serious attempt to implement a terrorist strike in the U.S.

Convicted plotter Ahmed Ressam has told the FBI that he conceived the idea to attack Los Angeles International Airport himself, but that in ---, Laden lieutenant Abu Zubaydah encouraged him and helped facilitate the operation. Ressam also said that in 1998 Abu Zubaydah was planning his own U.S. attack.

Ressam says bin Laden was aware of the Los Angeles operation. Although Bin Laden has not succeeded, his attacks against the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 demonstrate that he prepares operations years in advance and is not deterred by setbacks. Bin Laden associates surveyed our embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam as early as 1993, and some members of the Nairobi cell planning the bombings were arrested and deported in 1997.

Al Qaeda members -- including some who are U.S. citizens -- have resided in or traveled to the U.S. for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks.

Two al-Qaeda members found guilty in the conspiracy to bomb our embassies in East Africa were U.S. citizens, and a senior EIJ member lived in California in the mid-1990s.

A clandestine source said in 1998 that a bin Laden cell in New York was recruiting Muslim-American youth for attacks.

We have not been able to corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting, such as that from a ---- service in 1998 saying that Bin Laden wanted to hijack a U.S. aircraft to gain the release of "Blind Sheikh" Omar Abdel Rahman and other U.S.-held extremists.

Nevertheless, FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.

The FBI is conducting approximately 70 full-field investigations throughout the U.S. that it considers bin Laden-related. CIA and the FBI are investigating a call to our embassy in the UAE in May saying that a group or bin Laden supporters was in the U.S. planning attacks with explosives.

Those last two paragraphs utterly demolish Rice's claim that the information was purely "historical" and did not specify potential threats.

In fact, here's how Rice described the White House's assessment of the memo in her commission testimony:

The briefing item reviewed past intelligence reporting, mostly dating from the 1990s, regarding possible al Qaeda plans to attack inside the United States. It referred to uncorroborated reporting that from 1998 that terrorists might attempt to hijack a U.S. aircraft in an attempt to blackmail the government into releasing U.S.-held terrorists who had participated in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. This briefing item was not prompted by any specific threat information. And it did not raise the possibility that terrorists might use airplanes as missiles.

What was the White House's response? Well, here's how Rice described it:

Despite the fact that the vast majority of the threat information we received was focused overseas, I was concerned about possible threats inside the United States. On July 5, chief of staff Andy Card and I met with Dick Clarke, and I asked Dick to make sure that domestic agencies were aware of the heightened threat period and were taking appropriate steps to respond, even though we did not have specific threats to the homeland.

Later that same day, Clarke convened a special meeting of his CSG, as well as representatives from the FAA, the INS, Customs, and the Coast Guard. At that meeting, these agencies were asked to take additional measures to increase security and surveillance.

Throughout this period of heightened threat information, we worked hard on multiple fronts to detect, protect against, and disrupt any terrorist plans or operations that might lead to an attack. For instance, the Department of Defense issued at least five urgent warnings to U.S. military forces that al Qaeda might be planning a near-term attack, and placed our military forces in certain regions on heightened alert.

The State Department issued at least four urgent security advisories and public worldwide cautions on terrorist threats, enhanced security measures at certain embassies, and warned the Taliban that they would be held responsible for any al Qaeda attack on U.S. interests.

The FBI issued at least three nationwide warnings to Federal, State, and local law enforcement agencies, and specifically stated that, although the vast majority of the information indicated overseas targets, attacks against the homeland could not be ruled out.

The FBI also tasked all 56 of its U.S. field offices to increase surveillance of known or suspected terrorists and reach out to known informants who might have information on terrorist activities.

The FAA issued at least five Civil Aviation Security Information Circulars to all U.S. airlines and airport security personnel, including specific warnings about the possibility of hijackings.

The CIA worked round the clock to disrupt threats worldwide. Agency officials launched a wide-ranging disruption effort against al Qaeda in more than 20 countries.

However, in reality, as we later determined, Rice's testimony was at best misleading if not downright fallacious:

Rice, testifying before the Sept. 11 commission Thursday, said that those 70 investigations were mentioned in a CIA briefing to the president and satisfied the White House that the FBI was doing its job in response to dire warnings that attacks were imminent and that the administration felt it had no need to act further.

But the FBI Friday said that those investigations were not limited to al-Qaida and did not focus on al-Qaida cells. FBI spokesman Ed Coggswell said the bureau was trying to determine how the number 70 got into the report.

... [Rice] said the briefing memo disclosed that the FBI had 70 "full-field investigations under way of cells" in the United States. And that, Rice said, explained why "there was no recommendation [coming from the White House] that we do something about" the flurry of threat warnings in the months preceding the attacks.

But Coggswell Friday said that those 70 investigations involved a number of international terrorist organizations, not just al-Qaida. He said that many were criminal investigations, which terrorism experts say are not likely to focus on preventing terrorist acts. And he said he would "not characterize" the targets of the investigations as cells, or groups acting in concert, as was the case with the Sept. 11 hijackers.

In addition to these investigations, Rice told the panel that FBI headquarters, reacting to alarming but vague intelligence in the spring and summer of 2001 that attacks were imminent, "tasked all 56 of its U.S. field offices to increase surveillance of known suspected terrorists" and to contact informants who might provide leads.

That, too, is news to the field offices. Commissioner Timothy J. Roemer told Rice that the commission had "to date ... found nobody, nobody at the FBI, who knows anything about a tasking of field offices." Even Thomas Pickard, at the time acting FBI director, told the panel that he "did not tell the field offices to do this," Roemer said.

So let's review the entirety of the Bush administration's real-life response to the memo:

-- The problem is handed off to Richard Clarke (if anyone in the White House could have been accurately described as warning everyone they knew of an imminent attack, it was Clarke).

-- The intelligence agencies involved send out a handful of warnings and the State Department beefs up security abroad.

-- The FAA sends out some warning fliers.

-- Rice prepares her missile-defense speech.

-- Bush takes nap, clears brush, remains resolutely on vacation. Finally ends vacation and returns to his leadership role by reading My Pet Goat to Florida schoolchildren.

Somehow, I don't think that's going to be depicted very accurately in Path to 9/11 either.

A Bush, Bush world

Now that ABC has become a full-fledged propaganda organ for right-wing ideologues, I think it's fair to assume we'll be seeing similar changes throughout its parent company, Walt Disney.

Imagine, if you will, some of the new rides at Disneyland:

-- The Clintonhorn (as your rollercoaster descends the slightly crooked penis-shaped mountain, scary Bill Clintons with glowing red eyes jump out at you).

-- Space Media Mountain (another rollercoaster, this time with a dizzying array of meaningless media feeding frenzies -- O.J. Simpson, Natalee Holloway, JonBenet Ramsey, Brad and Angelina, Tom and Katie, J-Lo and Ben -- come whirling past in a mind-blowing rush).

-- Haunted White House (while the ghosts of presidents past hover approvingly over a George W. Bush lookalike, the phantoms of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky come popping out of various hiding places, leaving semen stains in their wake).

-- Terrorists of the Middle East (as your Hummer guides you through a desert wasteland, various brown terrorists with gleaming eyes and boxcutters clenched in their teeth come jumping out at you).

My favorite, though, will probably be the ever-charming boat ride into "It's A Bush World," wherein an array of little brown terrorist puppets, clutching bombs and guns, representing countries from around the world, threaten ridegoers as they endlessly sing:

It's a world of terror, a world of fears,
It's a world of death, and a world of tears
There's a reason we care
To make sure you are scared
It's a Bush world after all

[chorus]
It's a Bush world after all
It's a Bush world after all
It's a Bush world after all
It's a Bush, Bush world

There is just one scapegoat for every ill
It's that president whose name was Bill
When the world hates your guts
Blame it all on his putz
It's a Bush world after all

[chorus]

Personally, I'm looking forward to getting an autograph from Hillary the White Witch.

[Hat tip to Tom Tomorrow for the Bush image.]

Saving whales, losing humanity

Last month, a tragedy occurred in these waters when a traditional tribal canoe participating in the annual ceremonial greeting of the tribes in Seattle capsized en route, resulting in the drowning of a tribal chief named Jerry Jack.

Chief Jack was head of the Mowachaht-Muchalaht First Nations, which resides largely in the Nootka Sound area of western Vancouver Island, B.C. He had previously been involved in the efforts to protect the young killer whale Luna, who was killed this spring by a tugboat propellor.

It seems that the boat that capsized in heavy chop near Dungeness Spit was the same canoe used by the Makah Tribe of Neah Bay in its gray-whale hunt of 1998-99, which I reported on for Salon. And though the report was filed before the Makahs did finally succeed in killing -- and essentially wasting -- a gray whale, I did observe that the situation was being aggravated by the high-handedness of the environmentalists involved, most notably Paul Watson's Sea Shepherd Society.

At one time, I very much admired Watson, particularly his bravery in confronting industrial whalers around the globe. But observing him up close -- particularly the cultlike self-righteousness with which he envelops himself -- led me to reassess that. It seemed to me that Watson, in the pursuit of his Higher Cause, had lost his grip on his humanity; like most ideologues, his ideas -- and evidently, the whales themselves -- has become more important than people. His subsequent activism against immigration, including an attempted takeover of the Sierra Club, only deepened that judgment.

So it was with sickened unsurprise that, as I was perusing the Sea Shepherd site recently, I found this commentary from Watson regarding the death of Chief Jack:

"What goes around apparently comes around," said Captain Paul Watson. "In my opinion that boat was cursed the moment the harpoon left it and entered the body of the whale. There was nothing traditional about that kill."

"We do extend our sympathies to the family of Chief Jerry Jacks," continued Captain Watson. "His death was a tragedy and a loss to his people. Unfortunately, the traditional hunt went hand in hand with the loss of Makah whalers. Both whales and men died in the days when the hunt was a necessity for the Makah. The sea has now claimed a life for the one that the Makah whalers took. The Buddhists would call this karma; the whales would call this justice."

Justice? Really? A chief of a non-whaling tribe largely unaffiliated with the Makah dies, and that's Watson's idea of justice? Does Watson believe all Native Americans need to pay for the death of that whale?

Watson's lip-service "sympathy" for Chief Jack's family rings nothing but hollow in the company of the remainder of his commentary -- commentary that tells us much more about Paul Watson than it does the whale hunters.

Fortunately, at least, the tribal members themselves were able to find deeper meaning in the death of Chief Jack. By contrast, you almost have to feel some pity for those people who, like Watson, could only respond with the meanest, hardest parts of whatever soul they possess.

Projecting fascism

[Image courtesy of Old American Century, with a hat tip to Max.]

Donald Rumsfeld's Aug. 29 speech to the American Legion was a real watermark for the Bush administration, since it finally made official the government's embrace of the "war critics are treasonous appeasers" theme that has been circulating in the right-wing bloodstream for the past several years.

But it was also noteworthy because it became the launching pad for the administration's open embrace of the term "Islamofascism" as a way not only to describe the terrorist threat these officials use to justify every one of its monstrous policies, but to smear the good citizens whose consciences lead them to oppose those policies. As if on cue, the rest of the administration -- including Bush himself -- and their amen chorus in the pundit class began using it endlessly in media appearances, though they had actually been circulating it for some time.

The tactic, beyond its mere scurrilousness, reeks of desperation, and most of the public can smell it. And some of the left-wing response -- perhaps most notably Keith Olbermann's -- has been exactly what this kind of gutter tactic deserves.

"Islamofascism" is also, as I've pointed out a couple of times, a generally inappropriate term. This is especially so because fascism, as we have known it historically, only arises from a democratic state in a state of decay or crisis. Indeed, fascism, as I've explored in some depth, is a specific pathology constituted of a constellation of certain traits, only some of which are described by Islamic radicalism, and some of which are specifically repudiated by it. Perhaps they intend "Islamic totalitarianism," which would be accurate; but fascism is a very specific kind of totalitarianism, and what we see in the Islamic world today does not fit the description.

As the New York Times' Alexander Stille pointed out awhile back, regarding the contention by Bush apologists like Christopher Hitchen and Paul Berman that Al Qaeda's attacks of Sept. 11 are comparable to Hitler's threats against Czechoslovakia:

This interpretation does not sit well with most experts on Islam. "Fascism is nationalistic and Islamicism is hostile to nationalism," said Roxanne Euben, a professor of political science at Wellesley College. "Fundamentalism is a transnational movement that is appealing to believers of all nations and races across national boundaries. There is no idea of racial purity as in Nazism. Islamicists have very little idea of the state. It is a religious movement, while Fascism in Europe was a secular movement. So if it's not what we really think of as nationalism, and if it's not really like what we think of as Fascist, why use these terms?"

It's clear that the administration, in this regard, is simply embracing ideas that have been circulating on the right for awhile. But it also goes deeper than that.

The most astute observation regarding this I've seen comes from John Dean, commenting at Firedoglake on Sunday while discussing his excellent book, Conservatives Without Conscience. Someone asked Dean where the administration cooked up "Islamofascism" at "just about the same time you proved to the world that we are enduring proto- fascism?" He replied:

I suspect that they market tested it and found it worked. But a more sinister thought that has occurred to me is that by using the "F" word to describe the enemy they may be trying to immunize themselves. (But that is a thought only, and I have no evidence -- at this time -- that that is the case.)

Dean has hit on exactly what we've been observing about movement conservatives and their increasingly ugly tone in recent: it is part of a sometimes conscious strategy to project their own ambitions onto their opponents:

In other words, for a number of the right's leading rhetoricians, the projection appears to be perfectly conscious: it is a strategy, designed to marginalize their opposition and open the field to nearly any behavior it chooses.

And it is extraordinarily successful precisely because projection, as a trait, is so deeply woven into the right-wing psyche. Those who engage in it consciously set off waves of sympathetic response from their audiences because it hits their buttons in exactly the right spot.

The deep-seatedness of this trait can make it diffidcult, at times, to discern whether the behavior is conscious or not. But it also lends to a certain predictability: One of the best indicators of where the right is heading, I've noted previously, can be found in the very things of which it accuses the left.

So when it starts to accuse its opponents of coddling fascism, you can rest assured that the American right is embarking on precisely that path itself. And considering what we know about fascism historically, this shouldn't be a surprise.

After all, as George Seldes noted, it was Huey Long, "a very smart demagogue," who observed the following:

"Sure we'll have Fascism here, but it will come as an anti-Fascism movement."

This raises the possibility that, in America at least, fascism could arise not the classic European way, that is, through an outside party that gradually gathers strength, but rather, as I've previously suggested, through "the transformation of an existing party into a fascist entity from within -- not necessarily by design, but by a coalescence of political forces already latent in the landscape."

This possibility, actually, is raised by the fact that, as [Robert O.] Paxton describes in detail [in The Anatomy of Fascism], fascism is not so much an ideological "ism" but a constellation of traits that takes on a pathological life of its own. And these traits, as he details, are very much present, historically speaking, in American political life.

In fact, this very mechanism was raised by the one of the significant American fascist "intellectuals" who arose in the 1930s. His name was Lawrence Dennis, and in 1936 -- a year after Lewis' novel -- he wrote an ideological blueprint titled The Coming American Fascism.

Dennis predicted that, eventually, the combination of a dictatorial and bureaucratic government and big business would continue exploiting the working middle class until, in frustration, it would turn to fascism. What's especially noteworthy were the kind of conditions he foresaw for this to happen:

Nothing could be more logical or in the best political tradition than for a type of fascism to be ushered into this country by leaders who are now vigorously denouncing fascism and repudiating all that it is understood to stand for...

And, needless to add, these principles would mean the replacement of the existing organizational pattern of public administration by that of a highly centralized government which would exercise the powers of a truly national State, and which would be manned by a personnel responsible to a political party holding a mandate from the people. This party would be the fascist party of the United States-undoubtedly called, however, by another name...

Yet how infinitely better for the in-elite of the moment to have fascism come through one of the major parties of the moment than to have it fight its way to power as the program of the most embittered leaders of the out-elite. ...

This description has an ominous ring in an era in which the dominant party in power in America is frenziedly declaring war on "Islamofascism" while itself taking on many of the traits of fascism itself. It's unlikely that Dennis' thinking guided any of the intellectuals in today's mainstream conservative movement, though it is worth noting that his work is enjoying a renaissance in the paleo-conservative movement, particularly in such places as The Occidental Review, the far-right publication sponsored by William Regnery.

Rather than being guided consciously (and there certainly is no evidence whatsoever for an ideologically fascist conspiracy), this transformation is occurring almost spontaneously, as the forces that fascism comprises gradually come together under their own gravity.

Chief among the traits driving this phenomenon are A) the utter willingness of movement conservatives to believe whatever their leaders and leading pundits say, and B) the utter willingness of those leaders to say anything, including the notion that their fellow citizens are among "the enemy." They form a symbiosis in which propaganda in defense of the regime is an end unto itself, forming a kind of ideological bubble within which all True Believers may reside, resisting the tug of reality.

Of course, this was a significant component of Conservatives Without Conscience: identifying the right-wing authoritarian impulse within the conservative movement; further distinguishing between the authoritarian followers who fill their ranks, and the manipulative, somewhat sociopathic personalities who lead them; and examining the symbiosis of their complementary impulses.

Much of this analysis was built out of the work of Bob Altemeyer, the University of Manitoba psychologist who specializes in authoritarian personalities. At the FDL salon, Altemeyer added this to Dean's observation:

I just want to add my agreement to what John Dean and others have said about the administration's calling Islamic terrorists "fascists." The first thing I thought of when I read Rumsfeld's speech to the American Legion on August 29th, where the phrase was first used, was "John Dean's book has smacked these guys right in (a very vulnerable place)." It is an old technique in propaganda -- going back to the Big Lie in WWI -- that when you are completely and undeniably skewered, you just take everything that people have pointed out about you and say it's your enemies who are like this. You don't even bother to deny anything; you simply go on the offensive and holler as loudly as you can. Conservatives Without Conscience of course says the Bush administration is taking us down the road to fascism, so the administration sticks the fascism label on America's enemy to try to keep it from sticking on them, and make it seem they are our defense against fascism rather than its very carriers. In this case it is an absurd lie, because whatever you want to say about Islamic terrorists, they certainly are not fascists in any of the various ways the word has been distinctly used in history. But that won't matter at all to the choir of high RWAs for whom the administration made up the charge. If they hear later that someone says President Bush is a fascist-like leader, they'll think "Nonsense. The man's defending us against this."

The recognition of this likelihood is one of the reasons, I suspect, that movement conservatism's growing adoption of fascist traits is discussed so little on the left: we understand, from experience, that right-wing True Believers not only will never concede that it's occurring, they'll simply project any recognition of its truth right back onto the left. It is, almost certainly, a fruitless conversation to be having with folks on the right.

But it is almost certainly a conversation we need to be sharing among ourselves, because it's critical for coming to terms with what we're up against.

Tunnels and Bridges: A Short Detour

by Sara Robinson

Rules Lawyers
This is a sort of detour off the series -- a side road that opened up while I was writing the seventh part. I'd been picking at this subject for the past week or so; then, interestingly, the same topic popped up in the comments. I finally realized that what I had here was serious omission to Part II, "Listening to the Leavers," which was a field guide to the reasons people finally leave fundamentalist religions. There was one important subgroup I didn't address (perhaps due to my overfamiliarity with it). It merits a closer look before we move on any further.

Commenter Splash filed the first field report:

Im not sure I see much in the way of authoritarians wanting to be like others, wanting to fit in. That may be true for some, but there is a contrarian type who fancies himself a victim of liberal culture, and will resist all the more when he perceives that prevailing norms reflect that liberal culture. They turn contrarianism into a "hip" rebellion and latch onto the conservative "counter-culture." For this type especially, things must happen to them and the shell has to be cracked by circumstances that bring forth both a cognitive dissonance and a way out of the dissonance that is different from, and more attractive than, the contrarian default position.

That default position is the positiion that they have cornered the market, so to speak, on morality - and the smartest of these always seem to cite Kant for support. If time permits i will try to get an analysis of Kant up but if anyone has any thoughts on this, id love to see. Kant seems to be the most widely cited philosophical support for the "objective source of morality is eroded by liberal culture" meme. "We have discovered the very structure of human consciousness, you see, which is the source of all objective morality, and liberals pushing moral relativism are the enemies of Western Civilization." On top of this, for those more disposed to fancying themselves victims, being an outsider is a virtue.

Kant needs to be refuted because his thought provides the intellectual excuse to be contrarian in the face of empirical evidence. My sense is that the smarter RWAs can be tricked into empirical thinking once their Kantian rationalistic attachments have been seriously challenged by factual reality.

And I replied:

I've known way more than my share of these guys, since Silicon Valley is one of their primary native habitats. And my take is that they're at least as driven by their burning desire to fit in as any other RWA. In fact, their feelings of victimization may be rooted in the belief that they were promised an acceptance in liberal intellectual circles that they intensely wanted but never really found.??The most extreme ones were frighteningly bright and well-read, and usually also from very religious family backgrounds. Those two qualities alone guaranteed that it was going to be hard to find a niche among the better-rounded, more secular big city liberals. So they decided that, if they were going to be outcasts anyway, they could at least claim moral superiority. I may be a nerd, but I am RIGHT -- the possessor of Ultimate Truth! -- and that's what really matters in the end.

Kant, yeah. And Aristotle. Also Ayn Rand, for the less evolved sorts. I'm no philosopher, but if you can marshal arguments against the nasty intellectual habits Kant justified, I'd love to hear them.

Having actually dated a few of these in my younger years, I speak from experience: Beware the black-and-white thinker with a high IQ. Fortunately, we are talking about a very small (probably >1%) sliver of the RWA population -- a rare but fascinating subspecies.

It's much too flip, but not altogether inaccurate, to say that what these guys (and they were all guys) needed most was the love of a good woman. In almost every case I can recall, the very best and most healing challenge to their Kantian rationalistic attachments turned out to be the factual reality of marriage and parenthood. There's nothing like the day-to-day -- and often irrational and non-linear -- reality of caring for other people to teach you to take life as it is, and not as you think it ought to be.

My husband is a lifelong board, paper, and computer gamer. This same personality type appears so often among gamers (though, mercifully, not at my house) that there's actually a term for them. They call them "Rules Lawyers." This is the guy (and it's usually a guy -- female versions exist, but they are truly rare) who has memorized every rule in the book, and comes to the game prepared to explore every loophole, argue every detail, and punish every infraction. (Can you say "anal retentive?" I knew you could.)

A lot of very bright people are drawn to fundamentalism and other authoritarian systems because they're committed Aristotelians, on a similar lifelong search for Ultimate Truth. Fundamentalist literalism offers just the kind of hard-and-fast, black-and-white "here's the book -- now go live by it" pre-packaged Truth they're looking for. Their intense fear of ambiguity motivates these people to become tremendous scholars, giving hours a day to their studies. Over the course of years, they absorb the system chapter and verse, can quote it at length, and know all the standard (and even some esoteric) defenses against those who might question their interpretation. The more knowledge of the closed system they have, the more secure they feel.

Those of us who've spent a long time in Blogtopia have run across the secular versions of these guys -- for instance, the hard-core free market True Believers who've read their Strauss (all too well) and their Adam Smith (not nearly well enough). If you get into an argument with them, they'll give you a wild ride -- and you might even learn a thing or two, before you finally walk away shaking your head and wondering how somebody so obviously smart could possibly misunderstand so much about how the world really works.

The interesting thing about these guys is that, committed as they are, their beliefs are often quite brittle, making them uniquely susceptible to change. The day always comes that they trip over a particularly intractable contradiction in their belief system -- the one that cannot be studied, rationalized, or willed away no matter how hard they try. And, because they accepted the system in the first place with the assurance that every word of it was true, finding even one untruth in the mix is all it takes to make their faith in the whole edifice crumble. They were promised perfection. If even small imperfections are found, the whole thing must be scrapped, and something Even More True must be found to replace it.

While these people almost never return to an authoritarian belief system once they've left it, their burning desire to find Ultimate Truth may not leave them for years, if ever. In the meantime, they'll be extremely susceptible to latching on to other authoritarian systems that promise them the certainty they seek. Those '60s radicals who made the leap from Communism to neo-conservatism may look like they've made a 180 -- but, in reality, they were simply exchanging the comfort of one all-encompassing ideology for that of another. They're still True Believers; they're just reading different books now, and wearing different clothes. One common story is the former fundie who declares his atheism, makes a meticulous study of logic and the scientific method, and embraces radical skepticism as the New True and Only Way. New ideology; same dogmatic mental habits.

When they finally come vaulting over the wall (and it happens fast for this group -- their preferred mode of transport seems to be the trebuchet), greeting them with a gentle "We told you so" isn't totally out of place -- in fact, they expect it, and almost welcome it. Former fundies of this stripe spend a lot of time in the early months re-tracing their logical tracks, combing the Bible looking for errors and contradictions, trying to figure out where they went wrong. (It's a grueling process to watch, but a necessary step before they can really come to terms with their loss and let go of it.) We may expect very bright people who are leaving RWA political movements to have the same impulse -- in fact, many are having it right now, as their complicity in the Iraq War hits home. "Where did I get it wrong?" is a painful question to ask; but some of the bravest and most honest ones are now sincerely interested in hearing our side of the story.

For this group, we need to be welcoming and ready to share our worldview with them -- patiently, honestly, and with compassion. These people are looking for new authorities. When we respect their intelligence and give them solid answers, we provide them with a comfortable landing zone -- and stand a good chance of establishing ourselves as these people's new credible authorities in the short run.

But we also need to realize that getting them to accept our ideas as their new dogma doesn't define a victory here. In the long run, real freedom only comes when they can let go of the need for authoritative answers altogether.

These are the ones most discomfited by liberal moral ambiguity, and our enjoyment of colors other than black and white. In the reality-based world, no rules -- not even the laws of physics -- are hard-and-fast. They're all general guidelines at best. As this particular subgroup of Leavers learns to trust themselves and others, they may eventually relax, let go of the need to explain and control everything according some Unified Field Theory, and take life as in all its messy glory. It's only at that point that their escape is truly made good.

That's the detour. Now that that's out of the way, we can get back on the main road.

Dr. Bob Has The Map

by Sara Robinson
It's been long enough now that nobody probably remembers this, so let me recap:

"Cracks In The Wall" and "Tunnels and Bridges" found their genesis in John Dean's summer blockbuster, Conservatives Without Conscience. Dean, in turn, based his book largely on the work of Dr. Bob Altemeyer, the University of Manitoba social psychologist who has spent the past several decades researching the social contour of authoritarianism.

Yesterday, both Dean and Altemeyer were at Firedoglake's Sunday book club discussion. Several participants asked Dr. Bob (as he likes to be called) what the odds are that right-wing authoritarian (RWA) followers can actually change their beliefs. Here's his reply:

Is there really nothing that we can do to change authoritarian followers? Well as I said, some things seem to work. I mentioned how high RWAs want to be like everyone else in many regards. Another thing that “works,”–and this truly astounds me–is that authoritarian followers do get affected by their experiences when you’d swear there was not chance. So I have found, both in surveys and in an experiment I ran one time using myself as the “target,” that once high RWAs meet a homosexual or learn that someone they knew was a homosexual, their attitude toward homosexuals becomes more favorable. (I’m not gay, but I told a class of my students one year that I was for the purpose of this experiment.) So despite all their preconceptions, the highs saw reality and changed. Another thing that works is higher education. Students at my large public university drop in RWA scale scores about 10% on the average over the course of a 4-year undergraduate education. But the students who drop the most are the ones who came in being very high. (I don’t think it’s the profs who cause this to happen, but simply the highs meeting a much wider variety of people than ever before.)

But as John Dean mentioned, normal approaches to changing someone’s mind (reason, discourse, exposure to scientific evidence) do not work with authoritarian followers, but instead provoke a dogmatic response. (The comment from the person from Cincinnati who says the conservatives he knows will change slowly, but not if they are treated with disrespect and humiliated) applies here, I think.) The dogmatism goes back to the way the followers have formed their beliefs, which has basically been to copy the beliefs of the authorities in their lives. They really don’t know why those are the right ideas; they’re taking other people’s word for it. Most people have done more figuring-things-out-for-themselves, so when they get challenged they can go back to the reasons they believe what they do. And if better reasons leading elsewhere come along, why not follow them? But the high RWA is poorly equipped to handle such a challenge. He can respond with the counter-arguments he has been inoculated with, but if they get swatted aside he is lost. And not only is that particular point lost, but the whole shooting match is now in jeopardy because of the simplistic way (”It’s all right or it’s all wrong”) he thinks. So dogmatism is his best defense, and he’s perfectly willing–as I suspect many of you have found–to end an argument he has lost by saying, “OK, you believe what you want, and I’ll believe what I want.”

That's a pretty strong corroboration of what I've been saying here. "High RWAs" are those who score high on Dr. Altemeyer's scale of right-wing authoritarian orientation -- the committed followers. As we've seen, reason doesn't reach them. But, he goes on to say, the very recipe I've been describing -- education, exposure to other people, better skills that enable them to process complexity, and experience in using and trusting their own judgment -- does.

And, yes, says the good doctor: RWA followers have more mental flexiblity than we tend to give them credit for. Just because they don't have great reasoning skills, it doesn't mean they're incapable of acquiring them.

It's a nice confirmation: we really do have good reason to hope that, with the right kind of support, these people can be persuaded to join the reality-based world.

The Beltway Freemen

Maybe it was the orcas talking, but last weekend while I was off in Canada, something occurred to me about the Bush administration. Call it a flash of recognition, if you will.

Something Glenn Greenwald wrote the week before kept rattling about in my head:

The significance of Judge Taylor's ruling lies in the act itself -- the re-affirmation of the principle that the President's conduct is subject to judicial review and is subordinate to the laws enacted by the American people through their Congress. This administration, while claiming it has substantial legal authority for its radical executive power theories, has desperately tried to avoid judicial review of the President's conduct at every turn --- with the abuse of the "state secrets" doctrine, the Specter bill, the denial of judicial review to detainees, the refusal to ask the FISA court for a ruling on the legality of its program.

The significance of Judge Taylor's ruling lay not in the quality of her judicial opinion (which everyone gets to feel really smart by demeaning), but instead it is the resounding rejection of the extremist and dangerous theory that the President, because of the "war" we are fighting, has the right to operate without constraints of any kind, including those imposed by the Constitution and Congressional statutes. [emphasis mine -- ed.] On that key issue, the court's analysis was correct and even powerful.

This all had a familiar ring to me: A group of extremist ideologues, creating their own pseudo-legal bubble, defy the jurisdiction of the federal courts over their actions, claiming this peculiar right by virtue of a radical and unsupportable misreading of the Constitution; and as the law runs its course, they huddle deeper inside their bubble, convinced that only they and their fellow true believers hold the keys to a proper interpretation of the law.

Then, out paddling in the silence of Johnstone Strait, I remembered finally where I had heard all this before: in Jordan, Montana, the spring of 1996, where for 81 days the Montana Freemen engaged in an armed standoff with authorities that eventually concluded in their arrests. (For my contemporaneous account of the standoff, see here.)

It's worth remembering that, as Mark Pitcavage's authoritative profile of the Freemen explains in detail, they had been operating their scam for several years before law enforcement finally descended upon them. Rodney Skurdal's paper terrorism campaign in the Garfield County courts actually began in 1992, though he and LeRoy Schweitzer had been learning about and participating in Posse Comitatus phony-lien schemes for some time before this.

The Bush White House, similarly, has been scamming the public with its pseudo-legal theories about their exemption from the vagaries of federal law for a number of years now, though obviously the scale of the enterprise dwarfs the Montana Freemen exponentially. And the pseudo-legal alternative universe they've created for themselves, as with the Montana band, has been closing in around them as the law, embodied by the courts, begins to manifest itself.

Of course, as long they occupy the White House, these particular Freemen aren't going to be surrounded by the FBI anytime soon, except perhaps in defense against their perceived enemies. What's even more noteworthy, perhaps, is that they're being joined inside their bubble by their fellow Beltway denizens in the media and pundiocracy, as Greenwald has pointed out:

Most of these same "experts" and editorialists have stood by meekly and with a corrupt ambivalence while this administration implements radical theories of executive power which vest in the President the power, literally, to break the law. Yet now that a federal judge has courageously and correctly ruled that this administration is engaged in systematic law-breaking that not even the "war on terrorism" justifies, these same tepid, open-minded experts have suddenly found something to be excited about, as they eagerly parade themselves, showing everyone how smart and serious they are by scoffing at the Judge’s writing abilities. As I document here, and as Professor Tribe suggests, there is every reason to believe that it is these self-styled experts who lack serious scholarship with many of their misguided and ill-informed criticisms of the court’s decision.

But even if there are legalistic flaws in how the court defended its legal findings -- and most, including me, have acknowledged that there are -- the fact that we have a President who breaks the law at will because his administration has adopted the theory that he has the power to do so is surely of far greater importance. [emphasis mine] Only those with profoundly skewed priorities, or those seeking to find ways to defend the President's law-breaking, would view that as a close call.

Indeed, most of these pundits and "experts" were baffled by the Montana Freemen and assumed that they simply belonged in the klink, preferably sooner than later. Guess the tune changes when it's your own class you're talking about:

This has been the most bizarre part of the NSA scandal all along: the President got caught red-handed violating an extremely clear law -- he admitted to engaging in the very behavior which that law says is a felony punishable by up to 5 years in prison and a $10,000 fine -- and yet official Washington (the political and pundit classes) simply decided to pretend that wasn't the case.

The Beltway right is increasingly living in its own Freemen-like alternative universe, replete with the usual vacuum of factuality, ripe for bizarre distortion (see, e.g., Fred Hiatt's take on the Plame affair blaming Joe Wilson for his wife's exposure) and the scapegoating of our "internal enemies" (see Donald Rumsfeld of late).

It's only a matter of time, one presumes, before they start posting rambling, nonsensical legal gobbledygook on the White House fence, warning away federal agents and members of the media. And threatening to hang the sheriff.

Sterotypes, Sellouts, and Winning the Meme Wars

by Sara Robinson
Wow. Looks like we all ate our Wheaties this beautiful Friday morning. Dave: the long rest obviously did you a world of good. And our commenters seem to be in fine voice today, too.

Dave wrote:

I simply don't believe that progressives will win rural districts by selling out their core values. I believe a lot of it has to do with framing those values in a way that rural people can identify with.

As my series has chugged along, I've been mightily accused by a handful of people who seem to think I'm suggesting that we do just this. The implication is that, if we choose to use language the right-wing authoritarian base understands, the content of our message -- those good progressive values -- will necessarily be diluted, compromised, or lost.

Those people are missing my point, which is the same one Dave puts in stark terms above. Our values have far more intrinsic potency than the right wing's do. After all: we're defending the original ideals of democracy, while they're trying to dismantle it. That's such a stark contrast that past generations of Democrats have been able to make it easily, persuasively, and usually in words with fewer than three syllables. If I have a core thesis, it's that we need to find spokespeople who can speak that language again -- and train ourselves to use it, too.

Our message is unbeatable. But the media we've used to send that message has, in recent decades, sucked. The resulting misunderstandings have led to three debilitating stereotypes, which between them have almost totally closed off real communication and undertanding between Democrats and their eroding working-class base.

The first, of course, is that Republicans have brilliantly stereotyped Democrats as urban, feckless, and out of touch. As I've written: when the Democrats abandoned rural America in the 70s, they left the door wide open for this to happen. We vanished; but the GOP stuck around, promoting their ideas without letup through mail, radio, the churches, their local offices, and eventually the government. The party may have been lying snakes in the grass, determined from the start to sell the American middle class out to globalization -- but they consistently showed up, hung around, and sounded neighborly. In small towns and working-class burbs, sheer consistency and friendliness counts for a lot. Before long, everybody's friends were Republicans.

That's how the Democrats got that latte-and-limousine reputation. The GOP promoted it; and there was nobody left in town to say it was all a lie. At the same time, there were plenty of Democratic talking heads and technocrats around who seemed determined to prove its truth. They provided the anecdotes that fed the lie.

Second: Democrats have returned the favor by stereotyping rural Americans (especially, but not exclusively, Southerners) as stupid and racist. As commenter Cal Godot points out, this view has been gleefully promoted by Republicans, who've used it to keep us as far from their hard-won base as possible:

The "they" of the South is created by those who are unwilling to accept the progress of history in the South. That "they" is created not only by the remaining bigots but also by hand-wringing Democrats who timidly approach the "race issue" when in the South, while boldly preaching against racism when in the North. Democrats condemn Republicans for pandering to bigotry in the South, then turn and pander - albeit in a more confused or subtle fashion - to the very same voters.?

To put it quite simply, and to paraphrase Stein, there is no 'they' there. The "they" Democrats imagine controlling the Southern vote is an imaginary creature, constructed by Republican propagandists who have cleverly realized that Democrats can best be defeated by setting things up for them to defeat themselves. Pogo also offers wisdom: Democrats have met the enemy, and it is themselves.

Only people who haven't spent time in rural America could buy into this. In abandoning the countryside, the Democrats made themselves suckers for people peddling illusions.

Earlier Dem pols would never have bought this nonsense. Many of the best of them came out of agricultural and blue-collar districts themselves, and understood the subtle nuances of working-class culture. These guys knew that their constituents liked plain, strong language. They like to know what you're going to do for them, specifically. They want to know you're taking care of local business. Since working-class Americans tend to be more religious than the upper classes, they value the emotional tropes of public ritual, and are comforted by pols who can talk a little church talk when the occasion merits it.

The old pols also knew that if you scare these people, you'd better damn well be able to back up the threat with solid evidence. They may trust authority a little more, but they're not stupid, and they don't take kindly to people who call "wolf" on them just to play politics (a trait that the Bush Administration, in its arrogance, forgot -- and is now re-learning first-hand).

As long as most of the national Democratic leadership consists of people who grew up in affluent suburbs, went to the Best Schools, and have never spent much time with people outside their own class and culture (and, yes, I'm aware I'm engaging in a little stereotyping of my own here), the party will continue to be easily led by wrong-headed stereotypes of working-class Americans -- and will thus also continue to fail utterly to speak to their real concerns. When we buy into these stereotypes, we're letting the GOP win.

And then, on the third hand (as we've seen here recently), we've got progressives who are perversely stereotyping people on their own side who are trying to get past all this and create some dialogue. "Sellout" seems to be the popular epithet for anybody -- from Howard Dean to yours truly -- who thinks that, if we want these people's votes (or, as with the authoritarians discussed in the series, to simply bring them back to the reality-based world), we might do well to actually go out there, get to know who they are, and speak to what they value.

What's ironic about this third group is that they don't even notice that they're actively arguing against some of their own most cherished liberal ideals. Meeting people where they are? Treating them as unique individuals instead of wrongly lumping them into monolithic groups? Using social science research to divine their deeper motivations? Increasing our own cultural awareness to bridge the gaps in understanding? How utterly feckless. How blatantly useless. Don't you understand you can't reason with these people? Don't you know we're in a war?

And if our values are misplaced -- whoa, just wait until you hear our proposals! Moving the conversation forward by focusing on common ground, instead of what separates us. Honestly invoking spiritual values listeners will understand and find inspiring, or comforting. Appealing to authorities they regard as credible, rather than shooting our own toes off by invoking people they despise. Finding strong language that creates emotional bonds, and empowers the nervous and fearful. Asserting that some values support democracy better than others -- and coming out for those values, with full conviction. How dare people who advocate such things call themselves liberals?

The progressive cause is captive of all three stereotypes. We are going to stay bound in place until we start recognizing all the ways they shape our thinking, and decide to think differently.

Most essentially, we need to stay focused on McLuhan's truth that the medium is the message. We have strong ideas, but we've expressed them narrowly, weakly, and intermittently for lo, these past 40 years. The right wing conversely, has weak and damaging ideas -- but they were willing to broadcast them, strongly and without without letup, for as long as it took.

Notice who won the last round of the meme wars. And imagine how much better we might do if the media we choose were even half as strong as the message we have to tell.

The wrong kind of 'tradition'

Normally, a devastating profile of a politician's background like Max Blumenthal's incisive piece in The Nation regarding Republican Sen. George Allen and his history of flirtation with extremist neo-Confederates would be a windfall for an opponent in an election year. In the case of Allen, whose latent racism has already risen to the fore in the form of his "macaca" remarks, it's the kind of story that keeps an already damaging issue for Allen in play.

Indeed, left-wing bloggers have been all over it; Kos has a detailed post up, and everyone from Atrios to Steve Gilliard chiming in.

So where, exactly, is the Jim Webb campaign?

There's no mention of either the story or its contents at the Webb campaign home page. So far, it hasn't even rated a mention at the campaign's blog.

It's not as though the information we now have about Allen isn't damning enough. As Blumenthal makes plain, Allen's connections to the Council of Conservative Citizens -- a neo-Confederate white supremacist organization (about whom I've written often, including this relatively germane post) are both long-term and substantive.

And as Blumenthal details, Allen's involvement in the CofCC has also played out in his policy, particularly as a governor:

But George Allen's relationship with the CCC is different; it went beyond poses and portraits. In 1995, he appointed a CCC sympathizer, Virginia lawyer R. Jackson Garnett, to head the Virginia Council on Day Care and serve on the Governor's Advisory Council on Self-Determination and Federalism. According to the CCC's Citizens Informer, Garnett delivered a speech before a CCC gathering saying that the Federalism Commission was "created to study abuses by the Federal government of constitutional powers that rightfully belong to the states."

Later that year, Garnett closed the Virginia Council on Day Care after accusing it, as he wrote in a letter to Governor Allen, of attempting to "form the minds of our young children with a radical ideology before they enter public schools." The Virginia Council had aroused Garnett's ire, according to the Virginian-Pilot newspaper, for preparing an "anti-bias" curriculum for day care teachers. Allen approved the shut-down.

Allen's Advisory Council on Self-Determination and Federalism bore an eerie resemblance to the Virginia Commission on Constitutional Government, a state agency that engaged in lobbying and propaganda in support of "massive resistance" to integration. One typical pamphlet published by the Commission declared, "We do not propose to defend racial discrimination. We do defend, with all the power at our command, the citizen's right to discriminate."

A year after the trashing of the Virginia Council on Day Care, Allen expressed his fervent belief in states' rights in a letter to the largest neo-Confederate group, the Sons of Confederate Veterans. On the occasion of the group's centennial, in 1996, Allen wrote, "Your efforts are especially worthy of recognition as across our country, Americans are charting a new direction--away from the failed approach of centralized power in Washington, and back to the founders' design of a true federal system of shared powers and dual sovereignty." Then Allen appropriated Lincoln's language in the Gettysburg Address about "a new birth of freedom": "By doing so," wrote Allen, "our country is helping to foster a rebirth of freedom for all Americans and will allow the states to chart their own course and control their own destinies as intended by the Constitution."

It's probably worth noting that the SCV hasn't always been a neo-Confederate organization, at least not in the sense that it is an extremist group which agitates for modern secession and a new Confederacy. Since 1996, however, that has been changing, as the Southern Poverty Law Center explored in some depth last year. For years the SCV was dominated by sincere non-racists whose chief interests lay in extolling the virtues of their heritage, such as they were. But in the past decade, neo-Confederates and other extremists have taken over most of its reins incrementally, so that today it can decidedly be described as neo-Confederate:

In what may be the clearest sign yet of this extremist drift, an analysis by the Intelligence Report finds that a significant number of SCV officials — including at least 10 men who hold key national leadership positions — are also active or recent members of hate groups, principally two neo-Confederate groups, the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC) and the League of the South.

It's especially worth noting that, as Blumenthal describes, Allen's involvement in the SCV fell clearly on the extremist side of the aisle; the speech he gave explicitly encouraged, with political rhetoric swapped straight out of their playbook, the neo-Confederate ascension.

The SCV has been a classic good-ole-boys organization for years, but since the Civil Rights era, it has been studiously non-racist. It has been dominated since the '80s by Reagan Democrats and cultural conservatives. The rift within it is reflective of a rift within this culture generally: between racist extremists and the decent, sensible conservatives who want nothing to do with them.

So why isn't the Webb campaign doing anything to point out George Allen's support for, and considerable involvement with, the extremist faction?

One has to suspect that it has something to do with the Webb campaign's oft-noted pursuit of the "traditional Democrat" vote in Virginia. As I've noted before, this kind of strategy is fraught with all kinds of serious pitfalls, not the least of which is that the Democratic Party, historically speaking, was for much of its existence the home of white supremacists and overt racists.

The Webb campaign's disturbing proclivity for playing footsy with this element of the Southern voting public surfaced in the primary season, when it ran a cartoon vilifying Webb's opponent in a particularly disturbing fashion: as a conniving, hook-nosed Jew sneakily conspiring to take away Virginians' jobs. And why, exactly, was Webb depicted as a fist-swingin' guy who just happened to be wearing a brown shirt, black pants and combat boots? The last time I saw this kind of imagery, it was in an Aryan Nations flyer.

Of course, there was nothing explicitly anti-Semitic about the flyer. But you'd have to be immensely thick not to see what kind of appeal was being made here, especially in a cartoon where stereotypes are the rule anyway. Why use these stereotypes if that's not the kind of appeal you're making?

This aspect of the Webb campaign is largely the continuing influence of a consultant named David "Mudcat" Saunders who has become a Beltway darling with his open embrace of the NASCAR element as a voting bloc. Saunders defends the Miller cartoon in this interview by charging that it was Miller who "injected the race card" into the campaign. Sounds like a classic Republican tactic: Indulge in racist policies and behavior, then accuse those who call them on it of "playing the race card."

Thomas Schaller in American Prospect took a hard look at Saunders earlier this year, and made some important points:

What’s neither amusing nor ironic, but rather sad, is the state of political advice when it comes to the Democrats’ problems in the South. Saunders’ consultancy career, after all, depends on solving the following riddle: How is it that working-class whites -- especially those in the rural parts of the South who sit side by side with similarly situated working-class southern blacks at high school sporting events on Friday nights, shop at the same businesses on Saturday afternoon, attend similar (if different denominational) Christian churches on Sunday morning, and send their kids to the same public schools the following Monday -- troop to the ballot box on the first Tuesday every other November vote and pull the lever for the Republicans while their black neighbors are voting overwhelmingly Democratic? The answer is complex but, of course, is rooted in race.

When I asked Saunders if he could think of any other two sets of Americans who are otherwise so similarly situated yet vote so differently, he had no answer. Probed for a solution to this stultifying racial bifurcation, he mumbled something about how every white southern guy has at least "one black friend." The soporific Trippi -- himself freshly demoted by former NAACP President Kweisi Mfume, whose U.S. Senate campaign in Maryland had been listing badly in 2005 before Trippi was replaced by a new team -- had little to add. Apparently, this is what now passes for serious analysis about southern politics from high-priced political consultants, which is why I flew home feeling a strange sympathy for the man who heckled me, even if he was screaming at the wrong panelist.

I'm not as pessimistic as Schaller about the prospects of making headway in the South, but he hits on an important point: Democrats cannot hope to make gains with racist voters without irrevocably compromising their core principles, particularly their dedication to civil rights and racial justice. As I explained back when Howard Dean stubbed his toe on this problem:

The death of rural America -- a brutal, slow, painful death by suffocation, as corporate agribusiness displaces the family farm -- should be a major issue for Democrats. The Jeffersonian ideal, recall, was an America built as a nation of "citizen farmers." It may be something of a myth, but it is one that is deeply imbedded in our national psyche, and it is not one we can just hastily dispose of like some overripe cantaloupe.

Republicans have made great headway in these states by pretending to be on their side -- mostly by wrapping themselves in red-white-and-blue rhetoric, and especially by waving the bloody shirt of hating the gummint, who by the GOP's lights has been solely responsible for the entirety of rural dwellers' miseries (this was how they managed to fleece them with the misbegotten Freedom To Farm Act of 1996, which should have been more accurately named the Giant Hogtrough For Corporate Agribusiness). Indeed, it's clear this is one of the chief purposes of the proliferation of anti-government tropes by the likes of Rush Limbaugh and his conservative cohorts: to separate working-class people from the very political presence most capable of actually protecting their long-term interests from the Enronesque predators of unfettered corporatism -- namely, the gummint.

Meanwhile, the Democrats have treated these issues as empty afterthoughts at best (Al Gore actually had a reasonably intelligent agriculture program, but you'd never have known about it from either the "invented the Internet" Washington press corps or from Al Gore himself). They have essentially ceded the field to the GOP, and are now paying the price.

Dean at least is trying to confront the problem. Health care and education are natural starting points, though there are many more areas of common ground that in the long term may be even more important. Still, it's a smart gesture.

But Dean makes an error in staking out this argument, an unsurprising one, I suppose, for the son of a stockbroker: He presumes that rural America is monolithic. But in truth, like most American subcultures, it has its own internal divisions. And if you had to explain it in a simple sound bite like Dean's, that division nowadays is between the folks who have Confederate flag stickers in their back windows and those who don't.

The latter -- the decent, civility-minded, neighborly people of common sense and good will who make up the vast majority of rural America -- are the Democratic party's natural rural base, the people who have most felt abandoned by the party's urban focus in the past 20 years. They are the people that Dean, or whoever carries the party's banner, needs to bring back into the fold.

The former -- the neo-Confederates and Patriots, the right-wing extremists and the unregenerate racists and segregationists, all of whom are the people most likely to put a Dixie sticker in the back window -- are the people who once upon a time made the Democratic Party the acknowledged home of the nation's unreconstructed racists. They are the people who fled the party in the 1960s for the welcoming arms of the Nixonite Republican Party.

Dean should not be courting this faction of rural America. Even if he provides them with a brilliant plan to ensure health care for all of them, they will reject it and him in the end anyway, because their hatred of "gummint" ultimately knows no bounds.

As I noted later, Dean in fact did back away from this kind of mistake, and his subsequent "50 state strategy" has, in my estimation, made some real inroads in rural America (certainly it has made a huge difference in revitalizing the Democratic Party in those reaches).

I simply don't believe that progressives will win rural districts by selling out their core values. I believe a lot of it has to do with framing those values in a way that rural people can identify with.

Saunders' strategy, it seems to me, moves us toward a lot of winking and nudging and fudging those core values, a sort of Southern Strategy in reverse. All it's likely to do is make the Democratic Party into the GOP Lite.

I hope Jim Webb can unseat George Allen. But I hope that his success doesn't cost the Democratic Party its soul.

Another orca movie

Just got back from the wilds of British Columbia -- specifically, near Telegraph Cove on northern Vancouver Island. My friend Mike and I spent three days in the vicinity of Robson Bight Ecological Preserve. We didn't enter the preserve, of course, which is off-limits to boats (or at least is supposed to be, though we saw any number of commercial fishermen blithely wading through). We mostly hung out about a quarter-mile from the boundary and watched the whales come through; on Saturday, we saw about 60 whales.

The star of the procession was the A11 pod, which came in next to us from a handful of feet away from where we had been hanging out near the shore. They had also come by us the day before at our camp at Kaikash Creek (the wind was up and so were the whitecaps, so we stayed ashore) and come in close, at times rubbing the rocks there. The most impressive, as you'll see, was A13, the 28-year-old male who sometime this past year suffered a horrifying injury to the top of his magnificent dorsal fin; it appears a boat propeller took out a chunk of its top, leaving a noticeable white scar. These fins, incidentally, are mainly large chunks of collagen. He came up so close in front of my kayak he took my breath away; I was too startled to get off anything but a blurry half-shot of his saddle patch.

The sound recordings were generally pretty clear, but there was a large log boom being hauled by a massive tug that was slowly grinding its way eastward up the strait that day, churning up water and noise along the way. It's part of the constant background noise on the soundtrack.

Hope you enjoy. Back to our regular blogging shortly.

Tunnels and Bridges, Part III: A Bigger World

by Sara Robinson

As we saw in Part II, isolating authoritarian leaders and confronting their followers is a proven strategy for dealing with hate groups, whether it's a local band of skinheads a national movement of several thousand, or a coast-to-coast televangelist gone rogue. But these groups will simply reform and reappear unless we take essential steps to change the cultural atmospherics, and reduce the appeal of their message in the future.

We've seen that liberal tolerance and openess to others' ideas grows as one's fear decreases, and one's sense of the world expands. RWA followers tend to be somewhat less educated and much less familiar with other cultures; our recovered fundies commonly find that the fear that keeps them inside the system dissipates when their exposure to different religions and ethnicities increases, and the unknown world becomes known.

On the other hand, if you were going to deliberately set out to create an authoritarian society, you could hardly do better than some of the GOP's misbegotten social policies over the past couple decades. Here are a few ways in which Americans' understanding of the world has narrowed in recent decades, setting the stage and creating the atmosphere that allowed right-wing memes to take root and fester.

Civics Education
I was at a conference at a small university in the Southwest last year, debating media topics with several other panelists. The conversation included a lively debate over the intent of the First Amendment. It soon became clear, judging from the questions we were getting from the 150 students, that many of them weren't entirely clear on just what that amendment said.

Finally, on an ominous hunch, I peered out into the darkness and asked for a show of hands. “How many of you had a high school class in government or civics?”

Three hands went up. All of them belonged to faculty members over 30. It was, I freely admit, one of the most frightening moments I've had in the past several years.

It turns out that civics classes – the essential information one needs to function as a citizen – have been gutted by tight school budgets over the past 20 years. As a result, we now have an entire generation of Americans who don't know how their government works, how the laws the live under get made, or what rights they have as citizens. They don't know who the Founders are, or what's in the Federalist Papers. They can't really articulate the Enlightenment ideals that led to the formation of this country. They are frighteningly ill-prepared to exercise or defend a birthright they don't even understand.

Small wonder, then, that the 1998 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) found that three-quarters of American high school students lacked basic proficiency in civics. According to a commentary published that year by William A. Galston of the Institute of Philosophy and Public Policy at the University of Maryland:

"The NAEP is administered biennially in what are deemed "core academic subjects." Unfortunately, civic education has not yet achieved that exalted status, and we are fortunate if civic knowledge is assessed once a decade...The results of the 1998 NAEP Civics Assessment were released a few months ago. They were not encouraging. For fourth, eighth, and (most relevant for our purposes) twelfth graders, about three-quarters were below the level of proficiency. 35 percent of high school seniors tested below basic, indicating near-total civic ignorance. Another 39 percent were at the basic level, less than the working knowledge that citizens need.

"When we combine these NAEP results with other data from the past decade of survey research, we are driven to a gloomy conclusion: Whether we are concerned with the rules of the political game, political players, domestic policy, foreign policy, or political geography, student performance is quite low. This raises a puzzle. The level of formal schooling in the United States is much higher than it was fifty years ago. But the civic knowledge of today's students is at best no higher than that of their parents and grandparents, know no more than they did. We have made a major investment in formal education, without any discernible payoff in increased civic knowledge...

"...It is easy to dismiss these findings as irrelevant to the broader concerns with which I began. Who cares whether young people master the boring content of civics courses? Why does it matter whether they can identify their congressman or name the branches of government? Surprisingly, recent research documents important links between basic civic information and civic attributes that we have good reason to care about.

1. Civic knowledge promotes support for democratic values. The more knowledge we have of the working of government, the more likely we are to support the core values of democratic self-government, starting with tolerance.

2. Civic knowledge promotes political participation. All other things being equal, the more knowledge people have, the more likely they are to participate in civic and political affairs.

3. Civic knowledge helps citizens to understand their interests as individuals and as members of groups. There is a rational relationship between one's interests and particular legislation. The more knowledge we have, the more readily and accurately we connect with and defend our interests in the political process.

4. Civic knowledge helps citizens learn more about civic affairs. Unless we have a certain basis of knowledge, it is difficult to acquire more knowledge. The new knowledge we do gain can be effectively used if we are able to integrate it into an existing framework into an existing framework of knowledge.

5. The more knowledge we have of civic affairs, the less we have a sort of generalized mistrust and fear of public life. Ignorance is the father of fear, and knowledge is the mother of trust.

6. Civic knowledge improves the consistency of the views of people as expressed on public opinion surveys. The more knowledge people have, the more consistent their views over time on political affairs. This does not mean that people do not change their views, but it does mean that they know their own minds.

7. Civic knowledge can alter our opinion on specific civic issues. For example, the more civic knowledge people have, the less likely they are to fear new immigrants and their impact on our country."

Perhaps more horrifying of all: that 1998 NEAP survey was apparently the last time the federal government even looked at this issue. Another eight years of high school seniors has graduated in the meantime. Too many of these, no doubt, are getting their remedial civics education from Rush Limbaugh, their pastors, and their skinhead co-workers. When confronted with bad facts, these young adults simply have no idea what the Constitution says, or how a true patriot responds.

Making sure that our high school seniors get at least a year or two of civics education, delivered by well-trained teachers using sound curricula, is arguably even more important that what's being taught over in the science lab. We will not stem authoritarianism over the long haul unless we establish a civics as a core requirement for high school graduation in all 50 states. We can't have an effective democracy -- and will be sitting ducks for would-be tyrants -- until every one of us knows this stuff. It's that simple.

Liberal Education
There's a reason they call it “liberal education.” The more of it people have, the more liberal they tend to become.

Yet it's much harder to get to college now than it's been since WWII. Pell Grants and federally-supported low-interest loans have all but vanished. Now, students who want financial help for college have to fight for it – literally, by joining the military. Construction of new public universities has stalled, making it hard for the Echo Generation to find a place that will take them even if they can afford it. Our grandparents' firm belief that the more education Americans have, the stronger and richer the nation becomes, seems to have been abandoned: today's policy-makers would rather have less-educated workers that they can readily control.

That's only going to change when we realize our government is only as good as the education of the average voter. It's not a coincidence that America's most prosperous decades were also the ones in which we invested the most in education. While most Americans understand (at least vaguely) that our national prosperity and all that goes with it -- good jobs, growing industries, global prestige -- correlates strongly with the number of university degrees we're minting in any given year, we've somehow misplaced the understanding that the advanced thinking skills learned in college are also critical to making us canny, discriminating, well-informed voters.

Either we build the classrooms, pony up the tax money for tuition, and get more Americans back in college -- or we're going to keep ending up with politicians picked on the basis of their suitability as drinking buddies -- and voters who are easily led by their fears instead of by reason.

Cultural Exchange
Americans hold fewer passports per capita and do less foreign travel than the citizens of any other industrialized democracy. We just don't get out much – and the less we travel, the more conservative we tend to be. According to Diana Kerry, who organized U.S. Expatriate voters for her brother John's 2004 campaign, 75% of passport-holding Americans vote Democrat.

We also travel less than we used to. Americans take fewer, shorter vacations than workers in any other first world country. Increasingly, we are not taking vacations at all. And, when we do get away, the costs and post-9/11 hassles of travel are keeping us much closer to home. Over time, these trends are going to seriously narrow our collective view of the world beyond our shores -- with potentially disasterous effects on our ability to make sound political decisions, especially where foreign policy, trade, and war are concerned.

We can fight back, to some degree, by bringing the world to us. The liberalism of urban Americans is fed by the rich cultural mix of our cities -- it's perhaps the main ingredient that turns our cities blue. But xenophobia grows like tansy in the vast rural stretches of the country -- not usually because the folks are naturally mean, but because they simply don't know anyone who's not like them, and therefore can't really imagine what it must be like to be, say, non-white, non-Christian, gay, lesbian, or an immigrant. In the hands of an ambitious right-wing leader with an anti-democratic agenda of his own, this unfamiliarity can all too easily be stirred into outright hostility and fear.

In better days, service groups like the American Field Service, Rotary, mainstream churches, and others historically stood on the small-town front lines against this impulse. AFS imported steady streams of foreign exchange students into small towns, giving rural high school students one-on-one friendships with peers from every corner of the planet. Returning AFS students from our own school were treated like local celebrities when they got back, bearing slides and stories and fluency in languages from Chinese to Afrikaans. At the adult level, international service clubs and church mission groups (run mainly within the largest denominations) provide adults with opportunities to go abroad, often to work on local projects in remote areas; and, at the same time, bring foreign visitors into their towns.

These efforts may look quaint and dated -- but it's hard to overstate the effect this kind of one-to-one cultural exchange can have in opening the horizons of people in rural areas. If we want to dissipate the fear of the Other that drives people into authoritarian thought systems, we need to make sure these networks survive, thrive, and expand. It's not a complete answer, but we need to identify and support the groups that keep these doors to the world open in rural America.

Goin' Up to The Country
The Democrats bear their share of the blame, too. The post-McGovern retreat from the party's traditional blue-collar and farming base ensured that liberals were thin on the ground in much of rural America by 1980. The party's decision to centralize campaign planning in Washington led to the shuttering of thousands of local Democratic offices, many of them serving small towns. The GOP grew like kuzdu into the social void they left behind. By the late 80s, liberals were so invisible in so much of America that the right-wing radio talkers could tell their listeners we had horns and ate babies – and there was nobody actually on the home front left to stand up and contradict them.

They couldn't have gotten away with this if more rural Americans had simply known their liberal neighbors. “Wait – Rush is talking about those nice old ladies down at the Democratic office who did that great float for the Memorial Day parade.” “Hey, my fishing buddy Joe's a Democrat, and he's no traitor – he's a Vietnam vet.” The demonization of liberals happened one person at a time, and counted on the fact that rural liberals had been so effectively scattered and silenced that they couldn't mount a coherent response.

This is why liberal talk radio and Howard Dean's 50-state strategy play a critical role in changing the atmospherics. As we've seen, it's hard for RWAs to demonize a group when they feel affinity and loyalty to a member of that group -- or when they see the actual faces, and hear the actual voices, of those people every day.

We need to get our faces and voices back out there, on every street in America -- and Dean's plan to plant full-time, permanent activists and offices on the ground in every county in America will accomplish that, giving Democrats that missing high local profile again. Rural Americans, even those brainwashed hate-radio fans, will be reminded that those traitorous liberals are people they know, and interact with daily – the teacher, the preacher, the guys in the union and down at the veterans hall. Organizing local progressives, raising their profile, and restoring their voices is the first step to breaking the back of national authoritarian politics.

Our GI grandparents were lifelong liberals not just because of the New Deal, but because WWII took them off the farms and out of the cities and showed them the world; and because the GI Bill opened the university doors to them -- a hope many had never had before. They stayed generally liberal in their outlook -- even when they became prosperous and started voting Republican -- because everybody they knew agreed that travel, education, and tolerance were essential to both the spiritual and economic well-being of a growing empire.

The investments America made in this generation and these goals were, in a very real sense, investments in its own democratic future. We are losing our democracy to the authoritarian movements because we are no longer making these investments. This stuff is basic -- perhaps so taken for granted that it doesn't even need to be said out loud. But, given the decay evident in our civics classes, our college attendance rates, and our overall exposure to the larger world (including the other cultures we share the country with), it's time to step back and start giving them the attention they deserve.

Democracy begins when we value essential liberal values enough to invest in them for the long haul. And, without that investment, it dies.

Next: Landing Zones

Tunnels and Bridges, Part II: Nothing to Fear But Fear Itself

by Sara Robinson

In Part III of Cracks In The Wall, we saw the importance of calming the high fear and panic levels that drive individual authoritarian thinking. Taking fear reduction to the community and national scale is pretty much the same process. The ground rules are: find and build from our common ground; appeal to authorities they're bound to respect; and speak from strength, always avoiding weak and ambiguous language.

Family, Community, and the Moral Common Good
Finding political and cultural common ground, as we all know, hasn't been easy in recent years. Many RWAs are beyond furious at the whole idea of government, for reasons that most of us have found perplexing, but Doug Muder, in his excellent essay "Red Family, Blue Family," makes pointedly clear. For those at the authoritarian end of the spectrum, supporting schools that don't teach their values and parks where they can't put up their Christmas displays feels like taxation without representation. The social safety net just encourages people to ignore their inherited familial obligations. We don't even define “family” the same way they do; and we don't reckon our obligations to it in quite the same way. How can we stop talking past each other, and find solid places to connect?

Muder's essay offers several promising suggestions – all of which emerge from his core point that RWAs are angry with us because they've been told to mistake our tolerance and flexibility for moral unseriousness. Only people who take their commitments lightly could be so keen on creating systems that enable people to abandon their obligations, or excuse them from the consequences of their choices. Staking out common ground, he argues, begins with making our own commitments clear:

The most important fact that conservatives don’t know about liberals is this: We believe that a life without commitments is superficial and empty. Unlike the demonized liberals you hear about on Fox News, real liberals are morally serious people who are not looking to take the easy way out when there are greater issues at stake.

Liberals join the Peace Corps, work in soup kitchens, and stand together with unpopular oppressed peoples rather than walking away from. Why? Because liberals are serious, committed people....Our rhetoric needs to capture the seriousness of our beliefs and commitments. We should, for example, miss no opportunity to use words like commitment and principle. Our principles should be stated clearly and we should return to them often, rather than moving towards a nebulous center whenever we are afraid of losing....

Many, given an accurate view of liberals and the values that motivate us, may come to see that we are not so scary, and that their differences with us can be bridged. And as the pluto-
cratic agenda of the Right lets jobs continue to be lost, wages continue to stagnate, and the gap between rich and poor stretch ever wider, they may recall that the New Deal was not such a bad
idea after all.

As we saw in Part III, individual RWAs relax when they feel sure of who we are and what we stand for, even when they don't agree with it. They are impressed by strength, and have contempt for weakness – especially in those who seek to lead them. They will not trust us as long as we're ambiguous about our values and commitments. But once we start using clear language and taking clear, bold stands for what we cherish, they may at least be impressed with our moral strength even when they don't share our principles. Once their trust is engaged, and they are convinced they are dealing with morally serious people who are strong in their own beliefs and values, it becomes easier to lead them away from black-and-white thinking, and toward greater willingness to think in more complex terms.

The Right Authorities
We've seen that RWA followers only grant legitimacy to authorities who confirm and support their worldview; and they may expand those views if given permission to do so by people operating under color of these accepted authorities. We gain their trust when we support our points by enlisting authorities they respect.

It's true that finding authorities that we can also give some credence to isn't always easy. We need to choose our rhetorical allies carefully. Perhaps the first place to look is in the ranks of sainted Republicans, past and present, who took positions that would now be recognized as liberal. Eisenhower and Nixon both had some magnificent moments here. Teddy Roosevelt and Abe Lincoln also provide rich fodder. "Conservatives Without Conscience" began in conversations between John Dean and Barry Goldwater; one of Dean's main arguments is that Goldwater's values were much closer to those of modern liberals than they are to Bush's. Likewise, there are clergymen with "elder statesman" status on the right -- Robert Schuller and Billy Graham, to name two -- who have surprisingly often argued for positions that square with progressive notions of morality.

Yes, we have our own important liberal sources of authority. But when we are trying to talk to the authoritarian right, our sources will not be believed. In quoting their own heroes back to them, we're not only moving onto common ground -- "we believe these things, too" -- we're also co-opting some of their own mythology, taking control of it and re-defining it in the same way the right wing has re-defined words like "liberal" and "patriot" out from under us. It's a game two can play; and this is the way to play it with a clean conscience.

Brave Words and Strong Language
Democrats seem to have lost the gift of powerful oratory. Most of our public figures speak like overeducated technocrats, relying on facts rather than emotion to carry their message. It's why they're seen as effect urban snobs. It's time to return to language that speaks in clear terms of right and wrong – not to parrot authoritarian values, as some Vichy Democrats are prone to do, but to passionately assert and defend the traditional Democratic values that are the very basis of constitutional government. There are just two rules here:

Stay Strong -- As we've seen, RWA followers are driven by their fears. Rush, Ann, and other right-wing talkers play straight into that fear by speaking in voices that are strong, assertive, even occasionally aggressive. It hits all their buttons, providing an emotional antidote to the fear they feel even as it stokes the fires of their rage. God knows the appeal of these gasbags isn't in the factual information they provide; it's in the soul-comforting conviction they bring to their bloviations. It's their emotional appeal that establishes them as authorities in their listeners' ears, and convinces them to follow wherever they lead.

Democrats have a long and noble rhetorical tradition of speaking from strength, which we stupidly abandoned out of embarrassment at the over-the-top rantings of the far-left leaders of the 60s. In reaction to this, public liberals have spent the last 30 years leaning the other way, trying (at the cost of their own credibility) to sound not-loony, calm, and rational. The upshot, to many Americans, is that we sound like wimps who don't really believe what we're saying, don't understand the fear they feel, and aren't strong enough to be counted on when it matters.

People: Abbie Hoffman has been dead for 17 years, and the Sixties are now three decades behind us. The world has moved on -- and it's desperately in need of Fighting Dems again. America isn't afraid of our strong language; to the contrary, it's terrified by the lack of strength we seem to bring to our convictions.

If you can't remember how this is done, go re-read Tom Paine's pamphlets, Dr. King's speeches, or anything from FDR or JFK or great populists like Bob LaFollette. This is our rhetorical heritage; it is also how we reclaim the respect of the soft-core followers who may be seeking a powerful, moral alternative to the increasinly unignorable cravenness of their own right-wing leaders.

Stay Concrete -- Use the specific, non-abstract language that authoritarians understand. Draw clear lines between people, policies, and the real-life consequences people experience in their own lives. "My proposed bill will put $10 million in new programs for illiteracy" makes your average voter (authoriarian or otherwise) just snooze. But "The war in Iraq is costing you, personally, X dollars per day. In a year, that's Y new teachers you're not getting in your local school, Z amount of health care for your family, and Q amount of effective homeland security" -- that's the kind of real-world specificity that wakes listeners up to the intimate consequences of their choices.

As the GOP rose through the 70s and 80s, it sought out and cultivated candidates that could speak this language – and then, just to make sure, gave them specific training to make them particularly effective at it. It's stunning that Democrats haven't followed suit. They've been talking circles around us for 20 years now.

It's past time for progressives to make strong, passionate oratory a required skill for our emerging leaders as well. Al Gore's global warming talks are perfect examples of how to lay out arguments that are clear, specific, values-based, emotionally appealing, and unambiguous in describing how specific policies can create great personal harm to the listener. Nationally, the growing influence of progressive Christian groups within the Democratic party, and the rise of politicians like Barack Obama and John Murtha who are comfortable with strong moral language, are positive trends. The progressive side is not going to win back the soft core until our ranks are thick with leaders who can present our values in the clear, literal, unequivocal language RWAs associate with strength.

Next: A Bigger World