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Saturday, November 27, 2010

SPLC the Next Acorn?

The faux outrage peddlars are predictably hyperventilating about the Southern Poverty Law Center's recent yoking of the Family Research Council to other right-wing hate groups. FRC's anti-gay hate speech (among other things, rancid Islamophobia for one) clearly justifies and even necessitates the making of these sorts of connections in my view. Movement Republicanism mobilizes inchoate white racist and patriarchal hate and hysteria in the service of elite-incumbent interests. That right is well-funded and well-organized (or at any rate, it follows orders) and it is crucial that the left expose and grasp these connections the better to organize in earnest to fight them on their actually-existing terms.

But I must say that I am very nervous at the kind of qualified support and supercilious nit-picking SPLC's courageous stand is getting across too much of the left. Even more troubling, I have noticed smears and insinuations about "improper" financial conduct and fundraising and salaries are often sprinkled amongst the reporting and comments appearing in many published accounts online of this latest trumped up scandal concerning what is in fact an indispensable left-progressive community-based organization.

I can only assume that these insinuations represent the iceberg tip of gathering attacks in the ugly emotional and promotional depths of what passes for right-wing discourse, and that the organized right is preparing an onslaught comparable to the outrageous attacks that managed disastrously to bring down Acorn last year. The attacks on Acorn were, of course, an arrant outrageous fraud, and exposed and generally accepted as such in the aftermath. But despite this exposure and verdict Acorn was in fact taken down and has been taken from us all the same. Even now, somehow, Acorn remains a name freighted with false insinuations and glib associations of conspiracy and criminality by the liars and know-nothings of the right, all the while the left remains largely silent and unaccountably indifferent both to the travesty and to the real loss represented by the right's hatchet job on Acorn.

People who actually do care about the indispensable work done by the SPLC for years need to get out ahead of this. The grounds of genuine left education, agitation, and organization are under attack by the right, and the Democratic left seems to me to be alarmingly complacent about what is taking place and what its consequences will likely be over the longer term.

While efforts to build new aggressively partisan-left think-tanks and media-savvy organizations like Media Matters and the Center for American Progress, say, are useful, it is crucial to ensure that these efforts not provide a pretext for withdrawal of still more support and attention from already neglected but indispensable long-standing reliably progressive organizations, especially those based in community activism that focus on white racism and precarious labor. And certainly it would be folly for the left to confuse the administration's Organizing for America of all things with a viable oppositional force working to organize the shared interests of working people, people of color, and women in this country!

Precarious workers confront the hopeless prospect of ever longer lives of enforced labor and further dismantlement of their already tattered safety nets and retirements, white racist violence and exploitation is on the rise, every woman's right to a safe legal abortion is being whittled away while heroic efforts to provide women with healthcare are under violent criminal attack. Things are very bad and they are getting worse.

My point isn't to condemn Organizing for American or its mission -- far from it! -- or to join in on the frankly suicidal stupidity of those keyboard commandos of the left who apparently fancy progressives benefit in some way from discounting and disabling the inadequate reforms of Democrats and thereby enabling the literal evil of Movement Republicanism.

My larger point in all this is just to insist that we need to support and strengthen our more radical, more community-based organizations to provide a substantial grounded ground-up counter to right-wing radicalism as well as an organized push from the left to the Democrats (the kind of substantial push that doesn't punish compromises as defeats but pushes on from compromises to next steps) with whom we are forced to ally pragmatically given actually-existing constraints and also given the actually-existing urgency of the moment, economically-ecologically-historically.

The Republican paralysis of governance in the face of unprecedented economic and ecologic and historic crises is going to be bad enough as it is, we must unite at least to preserve and defend our few reliable remaining sites for oppositional education, agitation, and organization in the face of catastrophe. We cannot afford to abandon Acorn and SPLC and organized labor given the truly dark times ahead, nor to abandon the Democrats, debased though they may be compared to our guiding ideals, in the face of the active evil to which Movement Republicanism is now entirely devoted.

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