The last two weeks have been quite a dynamic period of time. The GOP determination to make financial reform an endless fight ala health care reform seems to have suddenly crumpled, a sudden rise in media scrutiny, along with chilling reminders of the 15th Anniversary of the Oklahoma Bombing seems to have suddenly taken the wind out of the Tea Party Movement--though for how long no one can say, and the passage of a deeply racist anti-immigrant law in Arizona has produced a wave of violent threats against Representative Grijalva. This only describes part of the complex dynamics of political shifts over the past two weeks, but it's still far too much for most of us to get a handle on, partly because the dominant terms of political discourse--even in progressive online circles--is simply too impoverished to adequately describe what is happening. I'd like to focus attention on a few highlightable incidents in order to draw out what is difficult for us to deal with conceptually, and then bring in a recent blog post by Sara Robinson at the Campaign for America's Future, "None Dare Call It Sedition", that I think is enormously clarifying.
Sedition: Crime of creating a revolt, disturbance, or violence against lawful civil authority with the intent to cause its overthrow or destruction
Well, finally. It's high time somebody had the guts to say the S-word -- sedition -- right out loud.
When the indictments against the Hutaree were unsealed last week, the S-word was right there, front and center, in Count One. The Justice Department accused them of "seditious conspiracy," charging that the defendants "did knowingly conspire, confederate, and agree with each other and other persons known and unknown...to levy war against the United States, and to prevent, hinder, and delay by force the execution of any United States law."
This is very serious stuff. But the Hutaree are getting nailed for sedition only because they crossed the line with inches to spare. They're by no means the only ones. Advocating, encouraging, and sanctioning sedition is the new norm on the conservative side.
My simple explanation of what's been going on here is that Clinton set out to distinguish between dissent and sedition, and Limbaugh lashed back, because he's all about sedition. As Sara said, sedition is the new norm on the conservative side.
Similarly, Beck's claim that his followers, those on "our side" are just like Martin Luther King, was breathtakingly absurd on many levels, perhaps its deepest absurdity is that King was profoundly patriotic--in the spirit of Langston Hughes's declaration that "America was never America to me" and yet "America shall be"--while Beck and his minions are profoundly seditious in their intent, just like the segregationist power structure King battled against.
Also similarly with Brewer, King's legacy has become too deeply embedded in America today for conservatives to deny it ("racial profiling is against the law")--and so they must resort to trying to capture that legacy for themselves, subvert that legacy against itself, a move that is one with their broader project of subverting America--by turning it into a police state when they are in charge, and by waging seditious warfare against it when they are not.
This is what I think has been going on--not just over the past two weeks, but for decades, really. But it is what the last two weeks have put on particularly clear display, if we avail ourselves of the perspective that Sara's diary provides.
First, Sara cites another example:
We saw it again last Thursday, when the Guardians of the Free Republics -- a Sovereign Citizen group that believes that the oath of office taken by state governors is invalid under their twisted Bizarroland interpretation of the Constitution -- sent letters to most or all sitting state governors telling them to either a) take what they consider to be a legitimate oath of office; b) stand down; or c) or be removed "non-violently" within three days. The FBI, rightly, regards this as a potentially seditious threat against the governors.
Then she explains the significance:
These two events are a wake-up call for progressives. They're telling us that it's time to openly confront the fact that conservatives have spent the past 40 years systematically delegitimizing the very idea of constitutional democracy in America. When they're in power, they mismanage it and defund it. When they're out of power, they refuse to participate in running the country at all -- indeed, they throw all their energy into thwarting the democratic process any way they can. When they need to win an election, they use violent, polarizing, eliminationist language against their opponents to motivate their base. This is sedition in slow motion, a gradual corrosive undermining of the government's authority and capacity to run the country. And it's been at the core of their politics going all the way back to Goldwater.
This long assault has gone into overdrive since Obama's inauguration, as the rhetoric has ratcheted up from overheated to perfervid. We've reached the point where you can't go a week without hearing some prominent right wing leader calling for outright sedition -- an immediate and defiant populist uprising against some legitimate form of government authority....
Progressives need to realize that the right began defiantly dancing back and forth over the legal line, daring us to do something about it, quite some time ago. And it's high time we called it out -- and, where appropriate, start prosecuting it -- for exactly what it is.
She goes on to define exactly what sedition is -- and is not, how that difference is spotted:
Here's the defining line we need to hold on to. People who promote subversive ideas, no matter how dangerous those ideas might seem, are completely protected under the First Amendment. Even calling for the overthrow of the government is protected (though not benign, as we'll see later, because it creates justification, permission, and incitement to seditious acts). That's why the conservatives have been safe -- so far.
It's only when those people start actively planning and implementing a government rebellion that it turns into criminal sedition. In this case: the weird rantings on the Hutaree website -- not seditious. The group's allegedly operational plans to assassinate a police officer, ambush the resulting funeral, and thus bring on a national militia uprising -- absolutely seditious, if the charges stick.
This bright-line distinction, which has been part of American sedition law for the past 50 years, parallels closely the line drawn by terrorism analysts in sussing out which groups are benign and which ones are headed for trouble. As I've noted before, one of the cardinal signs these experts watch and listen for is a fundamental shift in rhetoric. In the early stages of dissent, groups establish the lines of conflict by obsessively focusing on their enemies and loudly denouncing their essential evilness. You hear this kind of talk in politics all the time these days. It's always ugly, but not inherently dangerous.
But in the latter stage, the talk turns overtly eliminationist, and the group starts expressing its clear desire and intention to eradicate specific enemies. When they shift to that second stage, it's a sign that they've made the mental commitment to violent action -- and are more likely to be acquiring arms, selecting targets, and getting ready to act in the near future. When a group starts actively planning an attack on government offices or officials, it's officially crossed the line into sedition.
Understanding the technical line-crossing definition is vitally important--and I don't use the word "technical" to denigrate its importance. Our adherence to technical distinctions is one of our most precious means of preserving our liberty. But once one is clear about the meaning of sedition, one can also be clear about the meaning of advocating sedition. And even though advocating sedition is perfectly legal, as Sarah says, it is nonetheless quite different from other types of political speech, and we are well advised to understand it for what it is, to attack it for what it is, to educate others about what it is, and to make advocates of sedition pay a political price for their hatred of America, and their advocacy of making war against her.
Openly advocating acts of sedition has become the conservatives' main political stock in trade over the past year. (The SPLC offers a strong summary here.) You hear it everywhere from Rush to Glenn to Michelle Malkin to Michelle Bachman. Everybody on the right is now roundly convinced that the fairly-elected President of the United States isn't even a citizen. He's a Muslim, and thus in treasonous league with terrorists. The main goal of his administration is to turn the country over to the One World Government. He's a socialist. He's a fascist. All of these are direct attacks on Obama's fundamental legitimacy and authority to lead the country -- and thus a deliberate incitement to revolt against his administration.
She then goes on to describe a range of different ways in which the right is arming itself, training and organizing for actual acts of sedition. For example:
For the past five years, armed Minutemen have been usurping the job of the U.S. Border Patrol. And within the past year, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the number of right-wing militias has more than doubled to over 500, many of which present themselves as alternative law-enforcement posses that are adjunct to the ones staffed by the county sheriffs.
It's not just militias, though their dramatic resurgence is a good indicator for how widespread a seditious mentality has become. Others are much more explicitly planning for seditious action:
And some of these groups have already effectively crossed the line, in spirit if not in prosecutable fact. When the Christian dominionists train up "Joel's Army" by sending their sons to the US armed services so they can get the combat experience they'll need to set up a worldwide theocracy, that's evidence of an active plan to effect an armed government takeover. When senior US military officers put their commitment to Jesus ahead of their commitment to uphold the Constitution and regard the military as God's force in the world, we should be very afraid.
This is the on-the-ground but under-the-radar background reality we need to have in mind when viewing the behavior of Republican politicians, operatives and enablers:
It's time to confront the sobering fact that the entire right wing -- including the GOP establishment, which encourages, endorses, and echoes these sentiments almost every time its officials appear in public -- is now issuing nearly constant invitations to criminal sedition. They're creating a climate and using language that lowers their base's inhibitions around violence -- and irresponsibly eggs on the handful of sociopaths in their midst who are already primed to kill. They've given their newly-expanded corps of flying monkeys permission to brandish their guns in public, empowered their militias, promised them glory, and are now telling them explicitly which targets to hit.
We'd be idiots not to regard this as an overt threat. Especially when they keep telling us, very explicitly, that they mean it to be. When somebody says they're going to shoot you, believe them.
Believe it or not, there's plenty more from this excellent essay that I haven't quoted. But I've quoted enough to provide the necessary context for understanding the three incidents from the part two weeks that I want to now focus on.
Clinton & Limbaugh
First--and most importantly--is Clinton's speech reflecting on the Oklahoma City Bombing and Limbaugh's response, which Media Matters has devoted a very long page to here. Clinton's speech was a very thoughtful, historically informed speech, in which he drew a clear distinction between political disagreement and dissent on the one hand and political violence and incitement thereto on the other. Here' the excerpts that Media Matters highlighted:
The second lesson we have to learn is that we can't let the debate veer so far into hatred that we lose focus of our common humanity. It's really important. We can't ever fudge the fact that there is a basic line dividing criticism from violence or its advocacy. And the closer you get to the line, and the more responsibility you have, the more you have to think about the echo chamber in which your words resonate.
Look, criticism is part of the lifeblood of democracy. Nobody's right all the time. But Oklahoma City proved once again that, beyond the law, there is no freedom. And there is a difference between criticizing a policy or a politician and demonizing the government that guarantees our freedom and the public servants who implement them. And the more prominence you have in politics or media or some other pillar of life, the more you have to keep that in mind.
And:
But what we learned from Oklahoma City is not that we should gag each other or that we should reduce our passion for the positions we hold, but that the words we use really do matter because there are -- there's this vast echo chamber. And they go across space and they fall on the serious and the delirious, alike; they fall on the connected and the unhinged, alike. And I am not trying to muzzle anybody.
But one of the things that the conservatives have always brought to the table in America is a reminder that no law can replace personal responsibility. And the more power you have, and the more influence you have, the more responsibility you have. Look, I'm glad they're fighting over health care and everything else; let them have at it.
But I think that all you have to do is read the paper every day to see how many people there are who are deeply, deeply troubled. We know, now, that there are people involved in groups -- these "hatriot" groups, the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters, the others -- 99 percent of them will never do anything they shouldn't do. But there are people who advocate violence and anticipate violence.
And,finally:
When George Washington served his two terms and went home to Mount Vernon to retire and John Adams became president, he was called out of retirement one time. You know what it was? He was called out of retirement to command the Armed Forces sent to Pennsylvania to put down the Whiskey Rebellion, because good Americans who had fought for this country crossed the line from advocating a different policy and opposing the current one to taking the law into their own hands in a violent manner.
Once in a while, over the last 200 years, we've crossed the line again. But by and large, that bright line has held, and that's why this is the longest-lasting democracy in human history. That's why there is so much free speech. That's why people can organize their groups. It may seem like fringe groups that advocate whatever the livin' Sam Hill they want to advocate. That's why. But we have to keep the bright line alive. So that's the second lesson.
Clearly, the entire theme of this section is both the need not to cross the line into violence and incitement to violence and the importance of vigorous, passionate disagreements on the proper side of that line. He does not use the term "sedition", but his thinking is very much in line with the distinction, and with the significance of it that Sara has drawn--although with his patented desire to please, Clinton doesn't dwell on the dark side too long, and actually significantly understates how much and how frequently conservatives have flirted with crossing the line.
Indeed, in a passage Media Matters did not quote here, Clinton said:
Now, I have to tell you that I had a great time fighting with Newt Gingrich and Tom Delay and Dick Armey. I loved seeing that picture of him in the Post today - the outline - Armey with his cowboy hat on. I remember when he called Hillary a socialist. (Laughter.) I remember when Newt Gingrich, shortly after becoming speaker-elect, said that Hillary and I were the enemies of normal Americans. It didn't bother me a bit. I was glad to get in and mix it up.
How did Limbaugh respond to all this? Simple: by lying, just as he always does. Despite Clinton's repeated statements that dissent was good, that he even enjoyed political fights in which the other side used slanderous attacks, and even that some who had resorted to violence in the past had been "good Americans", Limbaugh falsely attacked Clinton for trying to silence him and others like him:
You have President Clinton here simply lying about a terrible tragedy to try to chill free speech and libeling me and the tea party at the same time. It does not get more despicable than this."
Of course, the passages quoted from Clinton's speech clearly show he was not trying to chill free speech. But what about his other claims here? And how are they related? The answer is quite straightforward, and clearly evident from the other excerpts Media Matters has on the same page. Limbaugh asks what words, exactly influenced McVeigh towards violence, and then uncritically accepts McVeigh's own justification of his mass murder as uncontestable fact (thereby endorsing McVeigh's sedition worldview and implicitly adopting it as his own):
Limbaugh asks Clinton, "What words caused Timothy McVeigh to act," says McVeigh was "outraged over the government invasion" in Waco. Responding to Clinton's statement that "the words we use do really matter," Limbaugh asked of Clinton: "What words caused Timothy McVeigh to act? Name one. I want to know what words and who spoke them. What are the words that Timothy McVeigh heard? What are the words he admitted that he heard that prompted him to act?" Limbaugh went on to say: "All I've ever heard is that Timothy McVeigh was outraged over the government invasion led by Janet Reno of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. And the Murrah building was blown up on that exact date two years later. ... Somebody show me the words, Mr. President, that McVeigh heard and caused him to act."
Media Matters further quotes:
Limbaugh: "McVeigh was not inspired by anybody's words, he was inspired by Mr. Clinton's deeds." Limbaugh said that "McVeigh was not inspired by anybody's words, he was inspired by Mr. Clinton's deeds. And this is what they're trying to wash over; this is what they're trying to erase from the historical record."
Limbaugh: Clinton has "ties to the domestic terrorism of Oklahoma City." Limbaugh said that Clinton, the Obama administration, and the press can "try to make Oklahoma City the result of a modern tea party movement," but "President Clinton's ties to the domestic terrorism of Oklahoma City are tangible; talk radio's ties are nonexistent. We had nothing to do with it."
Of course, as MSNBC's broadcast of "The McVeigh Tapes" reminds all of us, McVeigh spent a long period of time absorbing a paranoid, conspiratorial, rightwing militia worldview. He spent months traveling the gunshow circuit, soaking up the words of countless rightwing conspiracies and ideologues. The role of rightwing talk radio--a much less developed presence at the time, was not a part of MSNBC's account, nor was it specified by Clinton, either. It was Limbaugh's guilty conscience alone (or, more likely, in tandem with his hyper-inflated ego) that inserted himself into that discussion.
But how does one accurately, historically make sense of the violence of Oklahoma City and the political culture that it came out of? And how does one distinguish that which is toxic from that which simply--even positively--invigorates our democracy? "The McVeigh Tapes", for all it's focus on specific details does not even begin to try to answer that. This is why Robinson's diary, "None Dare Call It Sedition" is so important for understanding where McVeigh came from, where many more potential McVeighs today are coming from, and what people like Limbaugh are up to when they continue to incite sedition. This is why everyone here should not just take my word for it, go read the entire essay for yourselves.
Beck & Brewer
But first, consider the other two examples I cited. Here's Beck:
As I said before, Beck's claim that his followers, those on "our side" are just like Martin Luther King, is breathtakingly absurd on many levels. Above I stressed the contrast between King's deeply critical, but profoundly patriotic view of America (echoing Langston Hughes's declaration that "America was never America to me" and yet "America shall be") and Beck's seditious hatred of America. But equally absurd is the contrast between King's profound dedication to nonviolence and the gun-nut fanaticism of Beck's side, which is inextricable interwoven into every aspect of their seditious worldview. Tacitly, if not explicitly, Beck endorses and stands for everything that Robinson wrote about in her essay. And none of that has anything at all to do with Martin Luther King, except to oppose everything he stood for 100%.
Finally, we turn to Arizona Governor Jan Brewer's signing and incoherent defense of the racist anti-immigration law. This belongs in the matrix of sedition-related actions for a number of reasons, of which I'll cite just three: First, because of the long-standing role that militias and militia-like groups have played in stoking anti-immigrant hysteria in Arizona for decades now. The desire to displace standard law enforcement, and to usurp the government's monopoly on the use of force has been central to this movement from the very beginning, and those desires are inherently seditious. Second, the law passed is clearly an affront to federal power, an assertion of state power in a realm that's clearly a federal jurisdiction, and thus a rallying point in the spreading calls for asserting states rights over the federal government, even to the point of calling for secession. Third, the lack of any objective basis for stopping people and asking to see their papers is a de facto license for every law enforcement officer to act as a law unto themselves--the very antithesis of what our government under law, enshrined in the Bill of Rights, is all about.
Conclusion
This is just a snapshot of three incidents from a two-week time period. But as Sara states, this is really about a core characteristic of the conservative movement dating back at least as far as Goldwater. One thing we need to be very clear about: The desire to overthrow the established order of the American government may be many things. But one thing it most definitely is not is "conservative" in the reassuring sense of striving to maintain continuity, respect tradition and legitimate authority, and avoid violent upheavals.
Conservatives aren't just at war with America. They are at war with everything they say about themselves.
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