The Far-Right Revival: A Thirty-Year War?

[elleng]

'In the winter of 1999, the Kansas City Star asked several local dignitaries and writers to herald the upcoming century by writing predictions, replicating an exercise that the paper had conducted a hundred years earlier. Some of the Victorian-era predictions had proved pleasingly prophetic: “the rays of the sun will be bottled up and made to do the bidding of man.” Others, less so: “there will be no great war in the twentieth century.”

This time around, one of the invitees was Leonard Zeskind, a Kansas City-based researcher of the American far-right, who had recently been awarded a “genius” grant by the MacArthur Foundation for decades spent in immersive study of extremism and racism. Zeskind, the director of the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights (IREHR), did not offer soothing sci-fi imaginings. He wrote, “Two hundred years after this country fought a civil war to ensure that black people were officially citizens, and a hundred years after a second battle ensured blacks enjoyed the rights of that citizenship, race will once again divide Americans. And this time white people will lose the prerogatives of majority status.” Demographic projections hold that non-Hispanic whites will become a minority around 2050, Zeskind noted. America has always changed, of course, and this shift brings with it the potential of a diverse, dynamic, and flourishing culture. At the same time, Zeskind predicted, a significant number of white Americans would likely mobilize to retain their political and economic influence. “If the past is prologue, a bitter conflict will begin mid-century and continue a full generation,” Zeskind wrote.'>>>

http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-far-right-revival-a-thirty-year-war

[muriel_volestrangler]

1. An interesting point: is the Malheur, Oregon situation 'self-reinforcing'? Is a quick end needed?

Meanwhile, elsewhere on the far-right frontier, anti-government gunmen have occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, in Oregon, since January 2nd, drawing members and ideas from several movements, including Wise Use (opposed to environmental regulation), Patriots (opposed to federal overreach, which they associate with tyranny), and Sovereign Citizens (opposed to the Fourteenth Amendment, with origins in white nationalism.) J. M. Berger, a fellow with George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, calls it a “gumbo of diverse grievances and beliefs.” Berger, like other specialists, believes that the Malheur occupation is self-reinforcing, “as people from different groups and movements get to know each other face to face and build trust.”

That seems like a good point. Just giving the various malcontents and bigots a space to meet, bond and persuade each other of their own grievances allows them to build a movement. Even if many of them are eventually arrested, they have new friends who are more likely to support and help them in any future insane ideas. It's like having too many like-minded criminals together in a prison - they build their own community.

That's the downside of the "take it slowly, they're not harming anyone" approach.

[modrepub]

2. Civil War was more about removing the power of the slave holders

It was the perceived power the large slave holders that had mobilized the Republican Party for the presidential election of 1860. Keep in mind the Supreme Court had issued the controversial Dred Scott ruling basically prohibiting slave prohibitions in place in the free states, slave holders in MO were roaming around killing settlers in KA, there was a doughface in the Oval Office (northerner ProSlavery sympathizer), radical enforcement of the fugitive slave act and the beating of a popular free-soil senator (Charles Sumner) by a southern senator (Preston Brooks). While there was a significant party arguing the morals against slavery, IMO the vast majority of voters sided with the Republicans in an effort to check the powers of the slaveholders. It's, as always, about the perceived powers of the other side.