Martyrs and false populists.

• Author: Reed, Adolph, Jr.
• Position: Class Notes - Column

In desperate times we strain to find something to celebrate. There is an understandable tendency to romanticize the oppressed, and to grasp at anything that looks like alternative politics.

Hence the recent, disturbingly knee-jerk reactions within the left to such disparate phenomena as the militia movement and the Mumia Abu-Jamal case.

I was surprised by the letters in The Nation and The Progressive from readers who were affronted by negative coverage of the militias in each magazine. I've heard the same kind of position taken in conversations with people I know personally who identify with the left. The substance of this ostensibly progressive defense of the militia movement goes something like this: the militia supporters are by and large working class; they often are recruited from especially depressed local economies; their membership expresses their alienation from politics-as-usual; therefore, we shouldn't dismiss their populist frustrations.

It is true that militia members want to curtail the repressive power of the state and complain about the predatory power of large corporations. They oppose NAFTA and want to assert popular, community control of government. But defending them on these grounds is naive and short-sighted, and reflects a broader, perhaps more insidious tendency--including a kind of accentuate-the-positive bias toward whatever looks like autonomous, populist action. This is the same tendency that willfully inflates any sort of apparently group-conscious activity--for instance, youth fads--into the status of political movements.

On the militia issue, the first problem is that class origin, or for that matter class identity, isn't an adequate criterion for making judgments about political positions. The principle that if it comes from the oppressed, there must be something OK about it is not only simplistic; it can have truly reactionary implications. This kind of thinking has too often led down the road to complete accommodation to the worst strains arising from working classes. In fact, it's almost routine now that calls for sympathetic understanding of working-class bigotry--"we need to recognize the genuine fear of loss of control of the family, traditional values, close-knit neighborhood, jobs, way of life etc., etc."--are the first steps down the road to full-scale retreat from commitment to equality and social justice. Think about the Democratic Leadership Council.

There is a long history of rationalizing working-class nativism and racism. It helped sanitize the regime of terror that was the Southern Redemption, restoring unadulterated white-supremacist rule after Reconstruction. The architects of that restoration's ideology characterized the racist putsch in the South as a revolt of the common people against a corrupt elite that cynically used blacks to further unpopular aims.

The same mindset counseled sympathetic understanding for labor's rabid anti-Asian racism in the West in the late Nineteenth Century, and tolerated the New York draft riot of 1863, anti-feminist and anti-abortion activism, and whites' anti-busing riots. One version even sympathized with official resistance in Yonkers, New York, to court-ordered remediation of a lengthy, nefarious history...