OVERKILL
The
pundits, left and right, have been out on a Pat-bashing expedition
of such relentless ferocity that they appear to have used
up their favorite smears long before the campaign season formally
kicks in. This has backfired in their faces. After making
his much-vilified book, A
Republic, Not an Empire, a bestseller, their overkill
tactics have had precisely the opposite effect on most grassroots
conservatives, who tend to believe the opposite of whatever
the Clinton-loving trendy-lefty media is telling them. The
smear campaign had a similar effect on the Reform Party activists
and independent voters Buchanan is now trying to reach. For
Ross Perot, when he ran for President, was
similarly attacked, and by
the same people, for daring to question the sanctity of
the two-party monopoly, and for his principled and courageous
opposition
to the Gulf war. Besides, they’ve been smearing Pat since
1992, and he comes out of it stronger and more confidently
articulate than ever. It didn’t work then, and it won’t work
now – and so the Smear Machine is taking a different tack.
SMEAR
BY PROXY
Instead
of attacking Pat, their new strategy is to smear his supporters,
and Lenora Fulani is
the first in the line of fire. Fulani is a longtime left-wing
activist and a professional psychotherapist who ran for President
as the candidate of the New
Alliance Party – the first black presidential candidate
to get on the ballot in all fifty states. Active in the Reform
Party since its inception, Fulani is a tireless activist on
behalf of independent politics, and has been trying for decades
to lure the left out of its traditional obeisance as a satrap
of the Democratic Party. Finally giving up, in the early nineties,
and declaring most of the left to be hopeless, Fulani and
her associates joined the nascent Reform
Party, founded by Ross Perot: having come out of the New
Left, and run up against the limitations of their own
politics, they sought to reach out beyond traditional "left"
constituencies and make their case to Middle America.
POLITICAL
ODYSSEY
In
the process, their own politics were changing: instead of
repeating the ancient mantras of "socialism" and "revolution,"
they began to speak in a language meant to appeal to their
intended audience. Applying their own version of the "power
elite" analysis developed by such New Left writers as
G. William Domhoff
to the American political scene, they began to talk about
the essential unfairness of the political process. The two-party
system stacks the deck in favor of the elites – they had been
saying this to the left for years, mostly in New York City
and environs, to no effect. So they took up the populist rhetoric
of the Perotistas, and their progressive forebears, in calling
for direct democracy, popular referenda, and especially the
liberalization of election laws that effectively keep "third"
parties off the ballot.
FROM
LEFTISM TO BUCHANANISM
Former
activists in the New Alliance became an important part of
the Reform Party anti-Establishment coalition; at the last
Reform Party national convention, Fulani received 45 percent
of the vote in
the race for vice chair. My overseas readers, and even
many Americans, don’t realize that third parties must undergo
onerous
petitioning requirements to even get on the ballot. Naturally,
the two "major" parties are automatically on. With their encyclopedic
knowledge of the arcane legislation governing ballot status
– it is different in every state – the New Alliance folks
were and are an invaluable asset to the Reform leadership,
and Fulani has become a respected figure in the party. This,
of course, was almost too much for her former leftist colleagues
to bear. They really went bonkers, however, when Fulani
committed the one unforgivable sin and endorsed
Buchanan. From then on, it was open season on Fulani,
her political associates, and every jot and tittle of her
FBI file.
HUE
AND CRY
The
first to raise a hue and cry were the neoconservatives. As
Peter Steinfels said in his
book on the subject, there are only about 17 of them,
but 15 are syndicated columnists. And they were unanimous
in the braying, jeering note of disdain that characterized
their collective commentary: Aha, they cried, Pat has become
a Marxist-Leninist! All the usual suspects chuckled with glee
that Pat had finally shown his true "leftist" colors. Their
disdain was best expressed by the invidious Linda
Chavez, who opined that Pat had been "body-snatched" and
that an imposter had taken him over:
"And
what about the company this Buchanan impersonator keeps? Would
the real Pat Buchanan have deigned to lunch with a Black Power
leftist turned therapist, Lenora Fulani, who once ran for
president on the New Alliance Party ticket? Fulani is now
a power broker in the Reform Party, where her own brand of
weirdness apparently doesn't stand out, and Buchanan is said
to be courting her favor in order to win the party's nomination.
Who knows, maybe the whole party is made up of cyborgs plotting
to take over the world."
THE
SMEAR
Who
were all these "weird" people outside of the Washington beltway
who imagined that they somehow had something to say about
the way the country is run, and by whom? The characterization
of Fulani as "a Communist," as Jack Gargan, newly-elected
Reform Party chair put it in an
interview with Weekly Standard reporter Matt LaBash,
was endlessly repeated, and the red-baiting chorus was taken
up by Krauthammer:
"So
off to dance with Ross Perot – and to lunch with Lenora
Fulani, self-described (former?) ‘militant black nationalist
. . . Marxist and social therapist,’ now a power in the Reform
Party. Buchanan's association with Fulani, once head of the
‘black-led, woman-led, multiracial and pro-gay’ New Alliance
Party, is beyond parody. Fulani is so far out on the loony
left that she once called Michael Dukakis a ‘white supremacist
candidate.’ (She ought to read Pat's columns.)"
WHY
THE OUTRAGE IN DEFENSE OF . . . DUKAKIS?
As
if Pat is some kind of anti-black bigot – but then what is
a black woman, the leader of a multi-racial black-organization,
doing up there on the podium with him? And why the outrage
at Fulani’s attack on an archetypal liberal Democrat? Black
conservatives have been making the same point about liberal
institutions like the public schools and the welfare state
for years – that they keep African-Americans down and dependent
on the State and a managerial elite that benefits from their
misery. If that isn’t white supremacism, then what is? There
is something odd about Krauthammer’s sudden compassion for
Michael Dukakis.
It sounds suspiciously like the complaints of liberal Democrats
– and orthodox leftists like Chip
Berlet, whose organization, Political
Research Associates, is almost entirely funded by a major
Democratic Party donor.
PANIC
ON THE LEFT
Berlet
is professional political hit man whose specialty is smearing
anyone outside the traditional left-right categories as an
extremist, at best, and a nascent Nazi at worst. He and his
organization have been a veritable fountainhead of anti-Fulani
material, which details the political history of Fulani and
her group from a leftist perspective. In Berlet’s view, Fulani
endorsing Buchanan is a betrayal of leftist principles, a
sell-out that does not augur well for the left. Clearly he
and his fellow left-wing dogmatists are in a panic, which
is palpable in the following tirade by Berlet & Co.:
"What
can possibly explain the Reform Party and the discussions
about recruiting Pat Buchanan, that include possible support
from H. Ross Perot, and Lenora Fulani? We think the rhetoric
of right wing populism is attractive to some forces on the
left who side with business nationalists and isolationists
because of joint opposition to global "free trade" treaties
that undeniably benefit international corporate elites at
the expense of working people. Liberals and progressives are
being asked to ignore the historic prejudice behind right
wing populism. Consider the statement of John Talbott, the
Reform Party spokesperson in New Hampshire: ‘If you close
your eyes, it is difficult to hear much of a difference between
Ralph Nader on the left and Pat Buchanan on the right when
they talk about corruption in government, the excesses of
corporate welfare, the devastating effect of free international
trade on the American worker and a desire to clean big money
and special-interests out of Washington. There's a reason
for this; 91 percent of the American people consider themselves
middle class or working class. The time is now for a new political
party that is neither right nor left, neither conservative
nor liberal, but created and built to represent the hard-working
average American in reforming our government. If we all pull
together, put our prejudices behind us, and ignore traditional
labeling such as liberal or conservative, we can join together
to fight the battle of our lives against the collaboration
of big business and big government, break the two-party monopoly,
and return controlof our government to the true owners of
this country – the American people.’
"The
call to put prejudice behind us is ironic indeed in this statement
which really is asking people to close their eyes to the prejudice
of Pat Buchanan with his history of racism, sexism, homophobia
and antisemitism. Liberals and progressives who join in coalitions
with right wing populists see the anti-corporate and anti-government
arguments. What they don't see (or choose to ignore) is the
flip side of what is called the ‘producerist’ narrative of
right wing populism. The producerist narrative sees a hard-working
productive middle class and working class being squeezed from
above and below by social parasites. Historically, this has
led to scapegoating and conspiracy theories of power. The
overall outcome of the producerist model of populism is a
broad social and political movement sometimes called "Middle
American Nationalism" or "The Radical Center" or "Middle American
Radicals." Whatever the label, this is a form of repressive
populism with a producerist narrative. Some argue that globalization
of the world's economies on behalf of powerful corporate interests
is the only issue that matters. But what about racism, sexism,
homophobia, and antisemitism? It is a political fact of life
that many liberals and progressives find themselves on the
same side of the struggle against corporatist globalization
along with business nationalists and the followers of Pat
Buchanan. But working on the same side of an issue is not
the same as creating a coalition where we give assistance
to the enemies of our friends. Which of our allies on the
left are we willing to toss overboard to keep the leaky lifeboat
of populist anti-elitist politics afloat?"
MORE
PANIC ON THE LEFT
It
is worth quoting that whole tirade in full just to show how
panic-stricken the Left is at the Buchanan phenomenon. These
guys are clearly frightened to death that the so-called Radical
Right is about to co-opt their captive constituencies – and
with good reason. They have, typically, developed an arcane
and highly abstract theory to explain how and why Buchanan
has more genuine workers in his camp than all the socialist
parties in the US combined. Any attempt by leftists to move
to the center is anathema to the orthodox leftist Berlet,
who speaks the language of post-Marxist identity politics
in order to demonize the Right – and smear those leftists,
like Fulani, who dare to break with their Marxist past.
LEFT
TO RIGHT
Now,
plenty of leftists have swung over to the right over the years
– isn’t that what the neoconservatives were (and are) all
about? Nobody brings up the Trotskyist past of Irving
Kristol, father of William,
or questions his rightist credentials, in spite of his past
association with the Workers
Party of Max
Shachtman, and the "Shermanites" grouped around the periodical
Enquiry – many of whom became prominent neoconservative
academics and publicists of one sort or another. The sainted
Sidney
Hook, who received the Medal of Freedom from Ronald
Reagan, wrote the manifesto of the Workers Party. Yet
he was never red-baited – although he never stopped
calling himself a socialist. From the Young
Peoples Socialist League to the Heritage
Foundation or the American
Enterprise Institute is a journey undertaken by many an
intellectual nomad, but only Fulani has provoked a storm of
outrage and invective matched only by the attack on Buchanan.
Using the material provided by Berlet, and other sources,
a number of pieces have come out, all echoing the same line:
Fred Newman, Fulani’s close associate, is a sinister Svengali,
and Fulani is a "cultist" and a "Marxist-Leninist," a member
of a secret "underground" Marxist party that is hiding its
true "totalitarian" politics behind a façade of political
banalities. "What
You Don’t Know About Lenora Fulani Could Hurt You," by David
Grann, in the New Republic, is – as you can tell
by its title – the most hysterical of these hit pieces, and
I quote:
"But,
in fact, Newman and Fulani's presence in the Reform Party
is something entirely different. It is the culmination of
a 30-year crusade by a group the FBI once considered armed
and dangerous to infiltrate the political system. Now, after
years of absorbing little-known organizations on the left,
Newman and his followers are on the verge of controlling the
third-largest party in America and doing what once seemed
unthinkable: influencing the race for president of the United
States."
LET’S
GO PUBLIC!
Wow!
Why don’t we make public the
files of everyone the FBI considered "dangerous"
during the scary sixties? You can bet that would make
an impressive list, which would contain the names of many
more than several prominent politicians – not to mention magazine
editors and writers, and celebrities in every field.
NEWMAN
AS SVENGALI?
Grann
follows the scenario laid out by the orthodox leftist Berlet:
in the seventies, he recounts, the Newman group held informal
discussions with Lyndon
LaRouche, and although the relationship lasted barely
a month, Newman was supposedly affected for life. It was there,
avers Berlet, that Newman acquired his "deprogramming" skills,
and learned how to run a "cult." The basis of this alleged
secret "cult" is Newman’s psychological theories, which are
utilized in the very successful "social
therapy" centers that operate in New York City and throughout
the country. Newman and trainees in his methods have turned
around the lives of drug addicts, career criminals, and other
losers in prisons and welfare facilities nationwide. Their
method is simple: get the patient out of himself, and direct
his attention away from the self-obsessions that bring on
his problems and toward the process of social change. It is
political activity as "social therapy," and the theory behind
it is sound: why is this necessarily "cultist" or "kooky"?
To give the emptiness of his case against Newman some spice,
if not some real meat, Grann goes on to describe the more
lurid aspects of Newman’s psychological theories: "Others
have said Newman encouraged them to participate in what he
called ‘friendosexuality,’ a practice that Newman cheerfully
recommends in his book Let's
Develop." Gee, it seems to me that the New Republic
was all too willing to overlook a little "friendosexuality"
when it involved their beloved Philanderer-in-Chief. Why not
cut Newman a little slack?
GOOD
ON GUN CONTROL
Grann
writes as if the kookiness of all this is self-evident, but
then so much is self-evident to him that would not be so apparent
to an ordinary person like you or me. He takes the word of
a few embittered ex-members of the Newman group as if it were
holy gospel, repeating unproven assertions that the group
was arming "with semi-automatic rifles." Well, at least we
know they’re good on the gun control issue – although this
knowledge will no doubt scare the bejesus out of all the little
Al Gore groupies, the white yuppies and soccer moms who avidly
read the New Republic each week.
WACO-IZE
THOSE GUYS!
Oh
no, not semi-automatic rifles! Grann also breathlessly
relates hearsay about how Newman "broke up at least two marriages"
and otherwise intervened in the most ‘intimate" details of
his followers’ life, describes the house he lived in as a
"compound," and hints that some of the Newmanites were sexually
abused or exploited. Will somebody please call Janet
Reno? Time to get out the ninja-clad Special Forces and the
local SWAT team – they’ll make short
work of those "cultists"!
THE
‘INFILTRATORS’
Grann
retails the complaints of each and every dissident and disgruntled
member, accepting them at face value, and even chronicles
the carping of one Jack Essenberg, who claims legitimacy for
his mostly upstate version of the New York Independence
Party (as the New York branch of Reform is called). According
to Grann:
"Strangers
began to show up at state party meetings—busloads of them,
it seemed, voting and working in tandem, as if in an elaborately
choreographed production. It didn't take Essenberg says, before
he traced the incursion to a tiny office on the twentieth
floor of a building in lower Manhattan. Protected by a series
of thick metal locks, it housed the Reform Party's Manhattan
chapter."
COMPLAINTS
OF SUCCESS
But
I thought the whole idea of getting into politics was so that
strangers would show up at state party meetings – that’s
called success. But in the mind of Essenberg, who just wanted
to maintain his position as a big duck in a small pond, and
couldn’t care less about the growth and success of independent
politics, this was an "incursion." Furthermore, I don’t know
how familiar Grann is with life in New York City, but what
building in lower Manhattan isn’t protected by a thick
series of metal locks?
CONSPIRACY
THEORIES
Grann
writes that Lyndon LaRouche, the archetypal political nutball,
"though once a figure respected on the left, by the early
'70s [he] had descended into a gothic world of conspiracy
theories." Yet the baroque conspiracy theory woven by Grann
about the supposedly sinister Fulani-Newman "cabal" – consisting,
as he admits, of about "30 hardcore members" – makes old Lyndon
look like a piker.
REDS
UNDER THE BED?
We
are expected to believe that a secret Marxist-Leninist organization
– Berlet and his fellow "researchers" strongly imply that
the Fulani group still maintains the "underground" organization,
known as the "International Workers Party" – has penetrated
the very center of American politics. "Since the '60s," Grann
opines, "they have searched for ways to penetrate the political
establishment, and, with the Reform Party, they now have."
Say, what? Since when is the Reform Party "the
political establishment" – and, if it is, then why are all
the Establishment’s kept pundits panning the Reformers unmercifully?
And if Grann thinks that joining the Buchanan campaign is
tantamount to joining the Establishment, then one can only
wonder how that one got past the New Republic’s editors
– probably the same way all
those fabricated stories written by Associate Editor Stephen
Glass did.
A
FIT OF PIQUE
That
the furor over the Fulani endorsement is really motivated
by leftist pique at the perceived defection to the right is
exemplified most clearly in the analysis provided by Grann’s
other major source, the Anti-Defamation League. The ADL, which
specializes in smearing rightists and critics of Israel as
"anti-Semites," naturally levels
the same charge against Newman and Fulani. Their affinity
for Louis Farrakhan – on account of his hostility to both
major parties, his message of black economic independence
and self-help, nis aloofness from the liberal black leadership
– comes in for criticism from the ADL, along with Newman’s
insufficient enthusiasm for the state of Israel – which is
evidence of "anti-Semitism." That Newman is Jewish does not
seem to enter into the ADL’s calculations: in their book,
an anti-Zionist Jew is no better than a Hitlerite, if not
worse. Such dogmatism is not arguable: it is a theological,
and not a political, debate.
JUDGE
– AND PREPARE TO BE JUDGED
What
is arguable, however, is the proposition that people
ought to be judged, not by what they did or believed twenty
or thirty years ago, but by what they are doing and saying
now. People change their politics all the time: people
live and grow (or, like certain neoconservative ideologues,
they merely stew in their own ideological juices, growing
more stagnant and crankish as the years go by).
WHAT
DOES LENORA FULANI WANT?
All
right, then, what is Lenora Fulani saying today? Oh, such
dangerous "Marxist-Leninist" ideas as the need for a noninterventionist
foreign policy, why the
lesson of Waco is that the federal leviathan needs to
be reined in, the need
to free up the educational system with vouchers, how the
political establishment is the main obstacle to a free and
fair electoral system, and the
failure of the welfare state: "The Democratic Party’s
heavily funded welfare extravaganza," she writes, "was useful
for keeping Black America in line with the Democratic Party.
But did such spending eliminate poverty and help us to become
good wage earners in a productive and expansionary economy?
Apparently not. Black America is still poor." To add to her
credentials, besides serving as a co-chair of the Buchanan
campaign, Dr. Fulani is now a weekly columnist for Joe Farah’s
WorldNetDaily,
the independent Internet newspaper, wildly popular with many
conservatives and libertarians. This is a "Marxist-Leninist"?
I don’t think so.
DOUBLE
STANDARD
Face
it: anyone else coming out of the black community and advocating
what were formerly thought to be "consevative" ideas would
be embraced with open arms by the Bush people. Isn’t George
Bush going around the country touting the glories of vouchers?
A black woman challenging the moral and political efficacy
of the welfare state is a powerful image that the Bushian
political technicians would just love to make use of. The
problem is that she has endorsed the "wrong" candidate. At
least one black radical, Eldridge
Cleaver, a leader of the murderous Black
Panther Party, was forgiven his radical past and accepted
into the Republican fold. And plenty of white radicals, too
– just look at David Horowitz, a conservative who
has made a career out of his Commie past. Why not Leonora?
BEYOND
LEFT AND RIGHT
As
the concept of "left" and "right" begins to shift, and change,
yesterday’s reactionaries are today’s revolutionaries, and
that’s a major reason for the "strange bedfellows" syndrome
that seems to be going around. During the Kosovo war, we had
ex-peaceniks as hawks, and yesterday’s cold warriors cooing
like doves. Now, we have ostensible leftists like Fulani and
Ralph Nader joining with Buchanan is a concerted attack on
the depredations of globalism – but that’s another column.
THE
ARGUMENT FROM INTIMIDATION
For
now, suffice to say that the smearing of Lenora Fulani is
meant to intimidate thinking leftists (and thinking conservatives)
into staying safely inside their predetermined and unalterable
political categories, like prisoners locked up for life. It
is meant to scare people away from Fulani, and Buchanan, and
mark them as political untouchables. But, most of all, it
is meant to show that the realm of politics belongs to the
elites, and is not to be intruded on my the hoi polloi like
Buchanan, Fulani, or anyone not likely to be endorsed by the
editors of the New York Times or the New Republic.
At the end of his article, Grann lets loose with a remarkable
monologue of pure hatred and contempt that is worth reproducing
in full, for the sheer force of its bitter disdain. Fulani
and Newman, he writes,
"have
succeeded because the U.S. elite itself has changed, too.
America's political and media establishment once excluded
people like Fulani and Newman without a second thought. Today
almost no one the courage to. The establishment, which Newman
and Fulani once assailed, has embraced the notion that everyone
has something to say."
DON’T
GIVE ME THAT!
In
the elite world of Grann and Marty Peretz, the peasants outside
the Beltway are a vague menacing presence that is to be feared
but never consulted – or even considered. "People lke
Fulani and Newman" means anyone who doesn’t think Al Gore
is awful cute in his earthtones and isn’t thrilled
at the sight and sound of John
McCain telling us how he would have taken Belgrade. And
don’t tell me how the Establishment doesn’t exclude people
anymore: Perot was excluded from the last presidential debates,
and now they’re scheming to keep out Buchanan. The day the
Establishment embraces the idea that "everyone has something
to say" is the day they start liberalizing American election
laws and giving new parties a fair shot and a level playing
field. Yeah, right – that’ll be the day!
AN
ARISTOCRATIC DISDAIN
But
Grann is unselfconscious about his aristocratic prejudices:
if only we could be governed by the subscribers to the New
Republic! Ah, but it is not to be. The peons insist on
having their say, and now – horrors of horrors! – they are
getting a respectful hearing. Grann is furious:
"Lenora
Fulani, like any other politician or pundit, has spent the
past few months shuffling from CNBC to CNN to Fox News Channel.
One day not long ago she appeared on CNN with a former U.S.
congresswoman and a retired secretary of labor to talk about
the presidential race and other issues of the day. At one
point the anchorwoman turned to Fulani, a leader of a movement
the FBI once called ‘armed and dangerous.’ ‘Let's talk about
the test-ban treaty, if we can switch gears here a little
bit,’ the anchorwoman said. She paused for an instant; the
congresswoman and the secretary of labor waited.
‘Lenora,
what do you see happening in the Senate?’"
HOW
DARE SHE?
How
dare she pretend to be a legitimate commentator? Who
does she think she is – William
Raspberry? Or that nice young man on the McLaughlin
Group who writes for the Chicago Tribune? The hatred,
the arrogance, the presumptuousness of this self-appointed
arbiter of social and political legitimacy apparently knows
no bounds. It is typical of the anti-populists who dominate
both the neoconservative "Right" and the compromised Clintonian
"Left" – an attitude that they and they alone were born to
rule. Well, I have news for them: their days are numbered,
and their rule is about to be challenged. The Buchanan campaign
is just the beginning – the beginning of the end for the elites
in politics and business who believe they rule by a kind of
divine right. America is still a republic, and not an empire
– a fact they are about to be rudely reminded of.
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