I personally tend to identify two poles in the black American community, each with its own praxis, leadership, adherents, and vocabulary: dignity and security. As ideologies proper, I would call them ‘communalists’ and ’socialists’. Both are somewhat loose matches for the ideology as it is practiced, but a fairly pure pair of modern figures would be MLK and Farrakhan. Between Reconstruction and the Brown-CRA period, they represented respectively the cynics and establishment - the socialists’ strivings to provide education and opportunities to the black community were accepted, but regarded as insufficient, by their philonegrist colleagues.

The Civil Rights Era basically involved a massive level of cooperation between the communalist and socialist elements; the NAACP was the prime mover in herding those angry cats. And they tended to stick to their own - King was a product of the Washingtonian middle class and Farrakhan owes an obvious debt to Moorish Science. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: the NAACP is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, success stories in social justice in the West. Others had purer motives or practices and fought worse oppression, but within the bounds their founders could expect, they won.

Anyhow, the communalists tend to emphasize independent religion and culture, group pride, historical revision, social dignity, and just order. As that checklist and their opposition to the economism of the socialists suggest, various communalist strains are paleo/neoconservative in outlook and/or identification. (One extreme example, Nuwabian despot and kilopederast Malachi York, pushed his followers aggressively to vote Republican.) There’s significant crosspollination from conservative social groups and ideas - nativism, essentialist ideas of race and gender, homophobia, hoplophilia, anti-intellectualism and anti-Semitism, and a general tendency towards what Umberto Eco called ‘ur-fascism’. Of course, these are not necessarily part of any communalist’s outlook, nor are socialists immune to them. One might, if one wanted to be particularly careful, divide them into ’soft communalists’ for whom individual success and personal pride are the primary virtues and the siege mentality isn’t a central factor, and the ‘nationalists’ who tend to follow more extreme ideas.

The socialists emphasize redression of specific wrongs, positive and negative antidiscriminative action, education, improvement of working conditions, improving the distribution of wealth, and maintaining community safety. Because their outlook is more focused on redression and social well-being, they tend to get along with non-black civil rights and social pressure groups far better than communalists. They’ve also been a mainstay of labor politics in America since Reconstruction. They could be divided into liberal socialists (they look after the rafters - the idea being to make sure that members of the community are not kept from achieving and prospering without focusing exclusively on the success of individual people) and progressive socialists (they look after the floor - the idea being to make sure that no members of the community are made completely destitute either by deliberate racist or classist aggression or the vicissitudes of the system).

The latter is the typical foundation-level ideology for black politicians and activists, especially mainstream Democratic ones, and the former tends to be truer of black celebrities. The race riots, bombardment, and rise of the Klan coincident with Booker T. Washington’s self-improvement movement have significantly soured the black collective memory on pure socialist thought, though; pressure is generally towards communalism, as right-wing racists tend to smear black politicians and activists regardless of their alignment and it is much more internally dangerous to be perceived as not radical enough about it.

The career path of the black minister or community organizer involves interacting with people of many ideas and walks of life, and the communalist trend tends to foster aggressive personalization of systemic abuse. Where the socialist identifies their privation with the more general American fat-cat (often explicitly identified as white, although so is the general American fat cat), the communalist sees it in specific persons or groups, and unfortunately that often includes intellectuals and Jews.

The black-Jewish relationship is a complex one. On the one hand, there is the communalist tendency towards anti-Semitism of its own accord. On the other hand, there has since the 40s been a tendency by mainstream and politically conservative Jews to reflexively regard Muslims with suspicion, and black Muslims have always been regarded as a potential threat. Add this to a lot of bad blood between immigrants (especially poorer, working-class ones) and blacks, and the result has been a lingering contempt that nobody is exactly sure of the purpose of, everyone considers unnecessary, and few people are willing to risk their skins tackling.

And partially because of a tendency by older upper-middle-class conservative Jews (who are disproportionately represented among Jews in the media) to behave aggressively towards group slights but instinctively frame, register, and react to them in a political context, the generalized anti-Semitic attitudes - and generalized racist attitudes - of the American lower class present in the black lower class have been significantly overreported. The infamous ‘Hymietown’ remark is perfectly conversant with a lot of New York stereotyping, but because it was Jackson saying it it got repeated to the point of nausea.

A final note on a subject I have always felt intense concern and anger about: Ray Nagin, the comical/literal bete noir of right-wing bigots, has always been a Blue Dog, often on better terms with the Republicans than his own party, and his ‘chocolate city’ remarks fit perfectly into a wider pattern of right-communalist thinking and statements. And like any good Blue Dog or communalist, he is an economic conservative. The disturbing and underreported link between the two groups is underscored by the revelation that told Blanco that Katrina was going to be an unprecedented bureaucratic disaster for Louisiana was Nagin telling her he had been on the phone with Karl Rove.

Although it lacks any statistical punch, Blumenthal’s interviews of American assholes in Israel would seem to suggest the point I made earlier: the Americo-Israeli project seems to disproportionately produce voters in Israel who have no interest in Israel as anything but a political project. I imagine that if one were to poll American Israelis, one would find a disproportionate level of antagonism towards Obama in the wake of Cairo and Netanyahu’s dickery.

Obama’s insistence on speaking to Israeli leaders about the ostensible diplomatic position of the US on settlements for a decade or more has been called “interfering with Israeli politics” by Americans and Israeli reactionaries, and it remains to be seen if it will have any serious backlash in Israel. (Obama is very popular there; Netanyahu less so.)

While to some extent this is because the American discourse on Israel is shaped pretty comprehensively by unswerving ideological and political fealty to Likud (with AIPAC routinely punishing American political actors for adopting positions or rhetoric similar to that of Kadima, Labor, or any other ideological grouping there), there is an ancillary influence that has recently become a critical part of Israeli politics: the new axis of debate.

Much of the debate between right and left in Israel has disintegrated in the wake of heavily US-backed integration of neoconservatism into the national politics. Instead, within Israel the debate is now between the political adherents to Israel as a nation and Israel as an ideology, and right now the latter have more money and control of the government. The latter tend strongly to be ignorant, well-off, ideologically inflexible, and foreign. The last of those seems to be the key: as long as you haven’t been raised from birth in Israel, it’s a lot easier to treat the hatred of the Arab world as either a grand, unending narrative or something arising ex nihilo. Anyone else would see the move from conflicts with states to conflicts with radicals - from surgical strikes to occupation and guerilla combat - and from bombings to rockets as indicative of some manner of change which can be somehow assuaged or at least contemplated.

It’s not for no reason that Avigdor Lieberman, the mover and shaker of the genocidal right, barely speaks Hebrew and makes an electoral strategy of courting Russophones and Americans - and that the overwhelming majority of active settlers are Americans or ideologues, and typically both. For them, and for their lunatic collaborators among the established Israeli population, the Israeli state exists to ensure that as long as you have a mother the Orthodox establishment feels is sufficiently Jewish and white, then you’re entitled to buy land in a subdevelopment and have a dozen children. Queers, secularists, and Arabs are enemies of the state whether or not they know it, and as such gay parades, cremation, and Arab Israeli presence in government and the Army are to be opposed no matter what. The Palestinians don’t exist, aren’t really Palestinian, and don’t belong there anyway, so one of the many things the state has to do to keep property values cheap is exterminate them like insects.

If you’ve noticed I haven’t discussed foreign policy here, it’s because it’s an ideological totem - something external to and not necessary for the fantasists’ creed. While their leaders are perfectly enthusiastic about the old Israeli reactionary project of nuclear blackmail, exaggeration of external threats, and utter disregard for foreign national sovereignty, those exist for the fantasists mainly as a way of adopting a persecution complex - something extremely important to Americans in particular, because the American Jewish experience’s primary activity is imagining your own destruction, an activity which produces a fairly dangerous mindset when combined with a lack of any actual danger to life or limb. (It would be ubiquitous, but Americans are only one of the several immigrant groups the ideologues aim for - and especially for those coming from the more dismal corners of the former Soviet Union, persecution isn’t some exotic thing to transform into ritual - it was big even in the Soviet days, and now it’s how right-wing politicians get elected.)

Israel plays a role in the ideologues’ grand fantasy that it not only should not but cannot in reality. It is a country of millions with citizens of every major creed, race, and walk of life, and the terra nullia created by the violent expulsion of the last rural Palestinians has more or less run out. The choice is between moving into the cities (which seems to  be deeply offensive to the Americans, for whom renting is a form of suicide) desert exurbs (which are an entirely different and less sexy kind of fantasy, banal and Southwestern) and territory whose occupation by Israel has made it a concrete force of evil in the eyes of hundreds of millions of people, which offers it no strategic and little economic value, which its citizens have no concievable claim to and which essentially makes foreign relations with Israel as difficult as with Taiwan. Realists of every political tendency have agreed almost unanimously that the settlements are destructive and need to end yesterday.

The problem is Lieberman and what he represents - not just a radical ideology whose core involves the flat denial of basic, observable reality, but massive foreign support for that ideology based on a common developed or affected ignorance. There will always be Americans coming to Israel and acting as if the place exists to give them a half acre in a stupidly-named suburb; as of right now, it is the policy of both the Americans in charge of dealing with Israel and what is or at least was the major Israeli political party of the realist right to treat that ridiculous fantasy as the national purpose. This, not Israel and more than just Likud, is what AIPAC stands for: Give me Kosher Pines or give the entire country death!

I’ve got a bigger post on green culture on the way, but in the meanwhile (and because I’ve lost his name before) I’d like to direct your attention to Wang Chong, an obscure Taoist who - in addition to having a name which we must find hilarious - was not only one of the few Chinese philosophers to come from humble origins but also profoundly skeptical, coming to incorrect conclusions frequently but tearing the superstitions of his time a new asshole. From Wikipedia:

People say that spirits are the souls of dead men. That being the case, spirits should always appear naked, for surely it is not contended that clothes have souls as well as men.

I’m Glenn Beck / and I’m here to say
The IRA are smuggling drugs in my mouth / On Kolob I will be Jesus’s favorite wife
Bamboo, Obama, connect the dots people / Oh God the Arabs are watching again

Prophesy is an interesting word, partially because it doesn’t actually mean anything*; it is the verbal form of prophecy, and a fairly predominantly American Evangelical phenomenon. It rests on a wackily fundamental misunderstanding, and it’s everywhere.
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On alicublog, which remains one of my favorite blogs, Roy Edroso addressed the potential hate speech prosecution of Dutch kulturkampfer Geert Wilders in the same way he did the earlier legal complaint against Mark Steyn:

Hear, hear. Wilders is a wretched bigot, but here in the states we let them rave.

I didn’t respond before, bu it’s this kind of thing that pisses me off. In the US, we let them rave because we have a legal tradition protecting speech and a broad right to freedom of speech and press encoded in the Constitution. The Netherlands is not the United States. Neither is Canada, for that matter. Different nations have the right to their own legal traditions. If you want to argue that the specific American concept of freedom of speech is an inalienable right, do that; just be honest about what you’re doing.

I live in Oregon. We have an even stronger constitutional protection of free speech than the US Constitution. It’s so broadly interpreted that it’s been repeatedly applied by the state supreme court to regulations banning all-nude stripping. Other states may put their exotic dancers under the unfair yoke of “pasties” or “g-strings,” but in God’s own country, that 18-year-old has a right, enshrined in 150 years of glorious tradition, to display her unobscured genitals to drunk guys for money for as long as she damn well pleases. Other states don’t have that protection, and that’s why there’s so many strip clubs on the Oregon-Idaho border. Is Oregon right, and Idaho wrong? Is the federal interpretation of free speech right, and the Oregonian interpretation wrong?

Israel banned Meir Kahane’s Kach party and prevented him for standing for office for basically the same thing — openly campaigning for the persecution and exclusion of a large minority of his country’s citizens. I can’t remember the last time I heard a free-speechy liberal mourning Kahane’s persecution, and for good reason. The United States is large, and its race-warriors have generally either been marginal or in control of the reins of state. Hate speech has never been as dangerous here.

Have you seen Fitna? In the context of Wilders’ political stances and demands, and the current climate in the Netherlands, it can only be seen as incitatory — an attempt to depict Islam as incompatible with Western laws and ideals, and Muslims as ineligible for protection under those laws and ideals. Ultimately, whether Wilders has broken Dutch law is up to the Dutch people. Hate speech laws would be unconstitutional in the United States, and I oppose them completely. But while freedom of speech is an inalienable right, whether hate speech is as well is another question.

Oh, and Roy? Must you, must you quote someone who uses the word “dhimmitude” unironically?

Hello there, *campers*. I’m Thuryl, II*D*’s Australian correspondent, here to bring you news from the other side of the world (or, if you are on this side of the world, this side of the world).

Before that little election or whatever it was that you Americans held a few months ago, some of you contacted me about the possibility of moving over here in the event that McCain won. To you, dear friends, I say: you’re ignorant fuckwits who know nothing about Australia. At the best of times, we manage to be slightly less horrible than you. My purpose here will mostly be to show you just how bad we are.

The media over here are already getting tired of reporting on Obama’s inauguration and looking for news further afield. Today, they’ve managed to latch onto a misogynistic lecture by Abu Hamza, an “Islamic cleric” who runs a small Muslim social club about 10 minutes’ drive away from my home. (Wonderful term, that, isn’t it? Don’t bother researching whether he’s widely respected or has any kind of recognition outside his own congregation; just call him a “cleric” and be done with it. Do people go around referring to street preachers as “Christian clerics”?)

Now, this lecture was delivered back in 2003, and Abu Hamza hasn’t done anything much in the public eye since then, so the only purpose anyone could have for digging it up and kicking up a fuss about it today is race-baiting. It’s not as if it’s even a slow news day, for heaven’s sake. Yes, the lecture is pretty repulsive: among other things, it argues that a married woman has no right to refuse her husband’s sexual advances. On the other hand, this is still the Catholic Church’s official position on marriage. The Vatican is a damn sight more influential than Abu Hamza, and yet somehow people find it easier to believe that a Catholic can disagree with the Vatican than that a Muslim can disagree with whichever “cleric” has been trotted out and demonised this week. Or, if you happen to be a Protestant, look at, say, your own Phyllis Schlafly. Civil authorities don’t do much better than religious ones on the issue, either: spousal rape was completely legal in Australia until 1985, and many police still don’t take it seriously.

I seem to recall something in a book I read once about removing the log from your own eye before pointing out the speck in your neighbour’s.

Today is the last Martin Luther King Junior day to be observed under George W. Bush; he is, in spite of himself, an icon for the religious right - in the temple of a sort of Aryan superhero a grand emissary from Mammon incongruously welcomed.

The next one will be observed under Barack Obama; such is the nature of our polity that he represents (for now) the relative left, a man of centrist convictions generally aligned with the neo-liberal movement, a sighted lunatic in a nation of blind lunatics, a Lodge or Rockefeller surrounded by Goldwaters.

I can’t expect, as long as the religious right continues to dominate the media’s picture of ‘religious issues’ and the right-wing power-structure remains in place, that we will see a national candidate, or really even a national figure, similar to King. The Christian left has these days been relegated to the sidelines, pushed into common cause with soft-rightists and eccentrics.

Martin Luther King Junior Day 2009 will be celebrated under an evangelical reactionary, and Martin Luther King Junior Day 2010 under America’s closest equivalent to a Christian Democrat. We can at least take some comfort in the country’s rejection of the alternative.