from Bring the Ruckus. excerpted response by McBee:
I believe that it is important to discuss the ramifications of a permanent “left” establishment, at least in urban centers and at a national level, and a disenfranchised far right, clinging to it’s reactionary white supremacy and xenophobia, and of course, it’s guns. Looking towards the recent past, the rise of the insurgent right, It occurs to me that the State’s struggles with armed right wing cadre eclipsed most of the overtly armed phase of the left urban guerrilla offensives of of the late 60’s and 70’s. Waco and Oklahoma city are two of the most salient examples of this escalation. If the farming crisis and imposing neo-liberalism domestically gave birth to the Army of God, and the Militia’s, one shudders at the response to a rapid dismantling of most of white supremacy.
I think most of us have assumed that the capitalist state would be in league with fascist elements in opposition to a revolutionary left challenge. This may not be the case, as a truly radical and autonomous fascist movement may constitute a far more potent armed challenge to their order. 3 way fight indeed. But it may afford us some space. Both because the challenge from the right would be presumably primarily violent, and perhaps more controversially, a “left” establishment may be easier to compromise, to maneuver around (or through).
I think McBee’s right to point to the implications of the Republican defeat for possibilities for fascist and/or Far Right populist mobilization, and the dangers represented by Palin. (Perhaps Matthew Lyons has already addressed these issues somewhere.) Official, elite opinion seems to be to write off the white working class in the South as an important base for mass support. There was an article in the New York Times after the election (don’t have the citation right now), which, observing the large proportion of the white working class vote for McCain/Palin in the South, said something to the effect that the deep South was now “irrelevant” in electoral politics. With the Republican Party severely weakened, where are all these whites angry with the idea of a Black President going to turn? As McBee points out, some of these whites may have lost privileged accessed to state resources. As the recession deepens, perhaps into full-blown depression, the state will be called on to assist cities, states, and regions. Favoritism by an Obama presidency in the allocation of federal aid will be called “anti-white discrimination.” The white wc in the South may be “irrelevant” to the official political process, but not in the extra-parliamentary arena. (Nor should leftists write off all Southern white workers as hopeless rednecks “clinging to their guns, bibles and pickups,” thus abandoning poor whites to the fascists. Liberal elitist attitudes towards poor whites, summed up in phrases such as “trailor park trash,” and jokes about “you know you’re a redneck when…,” turn me off.)
I hadn’t examined Palin’s politics and career in Alaska that closely, but I get a whiff of “national bolshevism” from some things I’ve read: a CounterPunch article (Richard Rhames, “Meet the New Boss”), tongue-in-cheek referred to “Stalinist Alaska,” with its redistributionist Guaranteed Annual Income, and “Red Sara’s” statements that Alaskans “share the wealth” and “collectively own” the state’s resources.
Nick Paretsky