allies...

Don't Fear the Right

We regularly hear warnings about militias and tea parties, but for the most part, these people are not the enemy. Although Tea Party leadership has been largely taken over by Republicans of the Sarah Palin school, many of the rank-and-file are potential class allies. Even some of the local leaders are libertarians who oppose war and defend civil liberties.

Militia members may be even more likely to have things in common with honest leftists and greens. The ideology is different, but the class interests are similar. And don’t forget; the government and their mercenaries have plenty of guns, and they’re not reluctant to use them. If the people are to resist, we may need to ally with people who have some, too.

According to Jesse Walker, managing editor of Reason magazine, corporate media and government are conducting a “Brown Scare” against the Right [“Brown” as in Hitler’s brownshirts]. A Brown Scare is similar to a Red Scare and is used for the same reasons, to discredit and divide those opposed to the system, and pave the way to attack them.

“With Brown Scare tactics, serious critiques are delegitimized by being associated with fanatics,” says Walker, while civil liberties are curtailed for everyone.

Now that this left-right, Tory/Lib-Dem alliance has removed the Labour Party from power and is governing Britain, these commitments to restoring core liberties -- Actual Change -- show no sign of retreating. Rather than cynically tossing these promises of restrained government power onto the trash pile of insincere campaign rhetoric, they are implementing them into actual policy. Clegg, now the Deputy Prime Minister, gave an extraordinary speech last week in which he vowed "the biggest shake-up of our democracy since 1832." He railed against a litany of government policies and proposals that form the backbone of Britain's Surveillance State, from ID Card schemes, national identity registers, biometric passports, the storing of Internet and email records, to DNA databases, proliferating security cameras, and repressive restrictions on free speech and assembly rights. But more striking than these specific positions were the general, anti-authoritarian principles he espoused -- ones that sound increasingly foreign to most Americans. Clegg said:

It is outrageous that decent, law-abiding people are regularly treated as if they have something to hide. It has to stop. . . . And we will end practices that risk making Britain a place where our children grow up so used to their liberty being infringed that they accept it without question. . . . This will be a government that is proud when British citizens stand up against illegitimate advances of the state. . . .

And we will, of course, introduce safeguards to prevent the misuse of anti-terrorism legislation. There have been too many cases of individuals being denied their rights . . . And whole communities being placed under suspicion. . . . This government will do better by British justice. Respecting great, British freedoms . . . Which is why we'll also defend trial by jury.

Clegg also inveighed against the oppressive criminal justice system that imprisons far too many citizens and criminalizes far too many acts with no improvement in safety, and also pledged radical reform to the political system in order to empower citizens over wealthy interests. To underscore that this was not mere rhetoric, the Tory/Lib-Dem coalition published their official platform containing all of these proposals, and the Civil Liberties section begins with language inconceivable for mainstream American discourse: "The Government believes the British state has become too authoritarian, and that over the past decade it has abused fundamental human rights and historic civil liberties."

“Liberty is something everybody can identify with—President Bush called the Constitution just a goddamn piece of paper,” said Shepard, a 58-year-old security guard for the local zoo and nearby Anne Frank Human Rights Memorial. “The Constitution is a contract with the people and the government,” he said with indignation.

With friends up in the mountains “who think the world is going to end,” he said, “I’ve always been more conservative but I’ve found Gwen and the liberal people are more willing to stand up than the John Birch Society and churches. These people wait until their ministers tell them what to think. They support the government and God.”

“Checks and balances—history teaches us what happens when we don’t have it,” he added.