This is not a palinode. About the Vietnam War, we were right. Time and retrospection have only
deepened the details of that fiasco, which indeed (as most of us somehow did
not realize at the time) was just a re-run (cum napalm) of the fiasco begun by
the French. It was -- to use the
technical term favored by my current servicemen friends -- a classic cluster-fuck.
We ourselves, however, by and large had no idea of any way
forward, apart from a vague and lazy all-you-need-is-love (bzw. socialism)
utopianism. A tight Marxist
core actually thought strategically and programmatically, but unfortunately, by the late 60’s --
post-Kronstadt ’21, post Hamburg ’23, post purges and show-trials ‘37ff, post
Hitler-Stalin ’39, post Hungary ’56, post Czechoslovakia ’68 -- you pretty much
had to close your eyes to what had happened in actual History, to retain an optimistic faith in the wise workings of Historical Materialism.
And so we fell back upon obstruction, sit-ins,
passive-aggressive resistance. For
this, we do not collectively apologize, any more than we apologize for having
soiled our diapers as infants, or sprouted pimples as a teen. On Vietnam, I repeat: We were right. We simply had no clue what to do about
it. So we lay down in front of
military vehicles, chained ourselves to army-base fences, occupied buildings,
and (the fun part) made love-not-war.
~
So now the poor Republicans -- and this is spoken with some
genuine empathy -- under the crushing pressure of inexorable advances of the
juggernaut of History, which has robbed them of their reason, have backed themselves into a corner, and worked
themselves into a dissociative state.
Emotionally, intrapsychically, their quandary is not that different from
what we suffered from. That we
were, with hindsight, right, is
psychodynamically irrelevant: we
could not have known that at the time.
That said, the Tea-types have chosen a very strange issue to
raise atop their battle-standards:
bitter opposition to the Affordable Care Act -- something that, in some
form, both parties have been working towards for decades, an evolutionary
combination of Medicare, Romneycare, and Social Security (the latter, as
regards the young earners subsidizing the old and sick), and which was passed
by this very Congress, was found sound by the Supreme Court, and has weathered
dozens of lost-cause challenges in the House. It is as though hordes of hippies and SDS activists had been
flooding the streets in protest against, I don’t know, Radio Free Europe, or
General Foods.
[The French observer Tocqueville
noticed this kind of disconnect
already over a century ago:
Pour un étranger, presque toutes
les querelles domestiques des Américains
paraissent, au premier abord, incompréhensibles ou puériles.
-- Alexis de Tocqueville, De la
démocratie en Amérique (1835), p. 260 ]
But again: That
does not matter within the cleidoic pressure-cooker that the Teabaggers now
crouch in; they do not see
themselves as others see them; and
with that, they are subject to the evolutionary dynamics of any fringe sect,
such as the Trostskyist or Mao-oid splinter-groups on the left: though the nosological particulars for
this cohort more likely will
resemble those of the Branch Davidians, Jonestown/People’s Temple, or the
Heaven’s-Gate doomsday group.
If the psycho-ideological parallels with Marxist
sectarianism here posited, have any validity, then we may expect to witness
(and here, in making a testable prediction, I am giving empirical hostages to
fortune) a spectacular implosion, with fractures and splits along unpredictable
microscopic socio-ideological fault-lines: defections, recriminations, and general bewilderment.
Not a pretty sight.
The lads & lasses in The Weathermen had at least their youth to
excuse them. But what is the
excuse for Michelle Bachmann and Ted Cruz?
 |
| Mark Rudd & Bernadine Dohrn, redivivi |
~
For a selection of
individual detective stories,
available for your
Nook or Kindle,
visit this site:
[Update 3 October 2013] Another historical parallel:
The President spoke of the absurdity of the nation’s being
held hostage by a minority of one party in one house of one branch of
government. This morning, this Tea
Party hard-core is being referred to as “The Thirty”, based on their
numbers. But to anyone steeped in
history, the phrase amusingly echoes the name of those appointed by Sparta to
rule over Athens at the end of the Peloponnesian War -- the “Thirty Tyrants”.
~
In the annals of Communist sectarian, my favorite among the
party-names is the
Tesnyaki
These were Bulgarians. (Bulgarians are sort of like Russians without the Old
World charm.) Their turn upon the stage
of history was brief and inglorious, but the name is worth examining.
Beginning with the Bolsheviks -- the word means
“majoritarians”, though that was objectively an overestimate at the time --
Communist and Socialist parties, and even groupuscules, have usually tried to name themselves in
ways that made them sound substantial.
(E.g. the grandly and fancifully named sect “National Causus of Labor
Committees”). In America, especially during the
Popular Front, CPUSA front groups often had broad bland big-tent titles -- “Workers
Party”, “American League for Peace and Democracy” -- sometimes almost comically so: “Mother’s Day Peace Council”,
“League of Women Shoppers”.
But Tesnyaki means
…. “the Narrow Ones”. And
for a group that at least nominally aimed at rule by the majority -- the
workers and peasants -- the choice of name was odd indeed.
It pointed, however, to a key consideration, whose often
underestimated importance would be ratified by time. The implication was:
tightly knit. (As Greta Garbo said in “Ninotcha”,
defending the Stalinist purges, “There will be fewer but better
Russians.”) And indeed, by being tightly knit, following orders
without question though it meant turning on a dime, the parties of the
Comintern achieved influence well out of proportion to their numbers. In America, the CPUSA never
amounted to anything numerically, yet by the 1930’s they managed to
control many union front organizations bureaucratically
-- packing the leadership, and always showing up in force for votes. The surprising extent of their
behind-the-scenes success, especially during the period of the Popular Front,
can only be explained by such discipline.
After all, there have been many movements of or for workers in this
country, from the Knights of Labor and the Wobblies on; the CP had no monopoly on that. And unlike any of their rival
groups, the CP labored under the incredible burden of (in the 1920s) geographically
insensitive dictation from Moscow, and (in the ‘30s) increasingly insane
activity, noxious from a Left perspective especially: the purges, the show trials, the gutting of the Loyalist
side in the Spanish Civil War, and finally (can’t make this stuff up) the
Hitler-Stalin pact that gave the green light for WWII.
We are currently witnessing something similar in the House.
The hard core of Republican freshman fanatics, mostly
hailing from the boondocks that God forgot, have nevertheless somehow managed to stymie the
Democrat-controlled Senate and White House, and bring much of the nation’s
business to a halt, even threatening a Samson-gambit on the debt ceiling that
could really pull the temple down.
(Cf. Howe & Coser on
the CPUSA: “the damage wrought by the party in its passion to conquer, or to
destroy what it could not conquer”.)
The Teabaggers’ ‘Moscow’ in this case consists of
behind-the-scenes manipulators like the billionaire Koch brothers and (gawd, is
he still not dead?) the ineffable Edwin Meese:
And the lesson of history here is: No matter how scatterbrained their ideology, how reckless
their actions, if they keep tight and hang tough, they might just get away with
it.
~
The rather far-fetched parallel with which we began this
post, was offered in a ludic
spirit, largely to tweak the Tea Party’s nose. But if someone had the time and the inclination, it would be
worth pursuing further.
For: To any
student of labor history, the remarkable thing about the Stalinoids’ role is
how utterly remote it was from the everyday interests of workers. Many is the strike they subtly
sabotaged, since a labor victory (in the Third Period view) would only foster
illusions of reformism. But
more: As the years progressed, you
could not make sense of the actions by the CPUSA (and other sections of the
Comintern) in terms of labor vs. capital at all. Nor was the truth behind the façade always just
self-interested Soviet raison d’état: sometimes even the basic welfare of
Russians and other Soviet bloc citizens -- even the security of the state
itself, as in the Red Army purge on the eve of World War II -- was sacrificed
to obscure factional infighting within the ruling clique.
Thus, consider the possibly yawning disconnect, between the aims at the level of the Koch
brothers, and the vein-popping hayseeds who are their public face. The sort of emotional issues that move
the latter to fury, such as abortion, are unlikely to be hot buttons chez the
Kochs. The key coup for them
is not Roe v. Wade, but Citizens United.
In fact, my hunch is that the Kochs and their henchmen would just as
soon that Roe v. Wade remained in effect, so as to keep the yokels in
ebullition, distracting attention from structurally more crucial matters such
as the upcoming double-tap sequel to Citizens United, re recess appointments, soon to appear before the Supreme Court.
We really don’t know what their game is. Possibly something as simple (and
semi-publically acknowledged) as rolling back the Great Society and the New
Deal. (The minimum wage in
particular seems to stick in their
craw.) Or possibly something
a bit more esoteric …
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