“…racist “birther” attacks on President Obama, discussions of the conspiracy behind the problem facing America (complete with anti-Semitic illustration), Christian nationalism, anti-environmentalism, and serious calls for legislation promoting states’ rights and “nullification.”

While Christian nationalism is often in the mix in such far right settings as this, the presentation on the subject stood out to veteran rightwatcher Burghart.  

[One of the speakers was]…Sandpoint High School senior Brady Smith, who had attended something called “the patriot academy” in Texas.  A lanky redhead in a dark suit. Smith read from his notes about how the root cause of the country’s sickness was that we’ve forsaken our Godly heritage as a Christian nation. He listed several problems: the attack on “traditional marriage,” abortion, and our public education system not teaching Christianity, as symptoms of the larger sickness. The cure to all that ails the country, according to Smith, was a return to our Godly heritage. His remarks were warmly received. But to the outside observer, Brady Smith’s youth foretold a tragedy in the making.

You may be wondering, as I did, what is the Patriot Academy?  It turns out that it may not only be where Brady Smith got many of his ideas — it provides us with a window on the growing role of conservative Christian homeschooling in Republican electoral politics.  

Patriot Academy is a training and ideological indoctrination program for young prospective conservative political leaders. Held annually at the Texas state capitol in Austin since 2003, the Patriot Academy is a project of Torch of Freedom Foundation, headed by Rick Green a former State Representative (1999-2003) from Dripping Springs, Texas. Green is also an associate of Christian historical revisionist David Barton’s Wall Builders empire. Green travels the U.S. giving Christian nationalist lectures at churches, Christian academies and home schooling conventions. He ran as a the Republican candidate in a close-but- unsuccessful race for the Texas Supreme Court in 2010. (David Barton is the former longtime Vice-Chair of the Texas Republican Party, who has barnstormed the country on behalf of the Republican National Committee in election years.)

The group’s Facebook page describes the event as “a five-day political training program where students age sixteen to twenty-five learn about America’s system of government from a Biblical worldview.” They claimed that 85 students from 22 states participated in 2010 and that they are hoping for 100 at the next session in August 2011. Many participants have been homeschooled.

Interestingly, the Torch for Freedom Foundation web site, has among its very few links to other groups, one to an apparently forthcoming electorally focused entity called Stand USA.. Also interesting, is that the Patriot Academy’s Facebook site “Likes” only two other sites — Rick Green and American Majority. The latter turns out to be an electoral training organization headed by Ned Ryun, the co-founder of Generation Joshua, the political mobilization arm of the Christian Rightist, Home School Legal Defense Association. He is the son of former Rep. Jim Ryun (R-KS) and is a former writer for president George W. Bush. American Majority, also produces historical material, which while de-emphasizing religious themes, seeks to adjust history to justify their current political views.

History is powerful, which is why the religious and secular right invoke it so often. But progressives have generally not done well in addressing how the religious and secular right manipulates history to craft a contemporary political narrative that places them conveniently as the true interpreters of the will of God and the Founding Fathers. I wrote back in 2007 that

Christian revisionist-influenced political breezes are even blowing in the Democratic Party. Prominent campaign consultants are advising their clients not to use the phrase separation of church and state because it raises “red flags with people of faith” and because the phrase does not appear in the Constitution. This is an excellent example of how successful Christian revisionists have been in their efforts to delegitimize the term as part of their efforts to shape and control public discourse in their direction. This is also symptomatic of the way that our political leaders are so far away from being able to articulate a compelling narrative of the story of religious liberty in America, that some are conceding the ground and listening to campaign consultants who say that it is better to say nothing.

Clearly, we need to do better, much better than this. Meanwhile, homeschoolers steeped in Christian nationalism have been systematically groomed and mobilized to provide fresh blood and perspective in the Republican coalition. And national pols who know better, from John McCain to Newt Gingrich are pandering to Christian Nationalism.

According to an article in World Net Daily, profiling the homeschooled (til the 9th grade) and then-Congresswoman elect Jaime Herrera (R-WA)

Homeschoolers were active nationwide in the mid-term elections, with a division of the Homeschool Legal Defense Association called Generation Joshua deploying 900 students in 21 races.

The Student Action Teams, or SATs, of about 45 or 50 were sent out five days before the election. In previous elections, they have worked for candidates such as Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, Gov. Bob McDonnel of Virginia and Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn.

Daniel Webster, a homeschooling father, who was infamously smeared by opponent Rep. Alan Grayson, D-Fla., as “Taliban Dan,” was a beneficiary of Generation Joshua’s Florida efforts last week. Webster defeated Grayson by 18 points.

At this writing, American Majority (whose constituency certainly extends far beyond homeschoolers) has trainings coming up in a dozen states, notably the battleground state of Wisconsin.

Meanwhile, the more extreme elements of the homeschooling movement have had many years to develop, and have done so largely unnoticed, with a few exceptions. The 2006 documentary Jesus Camp revealed neo-pentecostal summer camp director Becky Fischer proudly teaching children that their lives would be defined by their service in God’s Army, and that that was not merely metaphorical. The film also showed Religious Right leader Lou Engle personally coaching the children (on a field trip from North Dakota) in antiabortion protest at the U.S. Supreme Court.

All this follows the trends that were clear when I was writing about Christian nationalism and revolutionary theocratic elements of Christian homeschooling for my book Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy. At the time, a staffer at the Home School Legal Defense Association, Chris Klicka wrote that sending children to public school “violates nearly every Biblical principle… It is tantamount to sending our children to be trained by the enemy.” Klicka also urged Christian homechoolers not to have anything to do with non-Christian homeschoolers. “The differences I am talking about,” he insisted, “have resulted in wars in the not too distant past.”

Journalist Eleanor Bader wrote about one revolutionary political training effort in 2009. She reported that longtime antiabortion leader (Operation Save America) Rusty Thomas was organizing what he called a Kingdom Leadership Institute, which is a forerunner to what he believes will be a bloody conflict the goal of which will be, writes Bader,

“…not only to criminalize abortion and homosexuality, return prayer to the schools, get women out of the workplace, and declare the U.S. a Christian nation, but also to impose Biblical rule on all who reside within our national borders.”

In briefly highlighting these elements of the homeschooling movement, I do not mean to suggest that all homeschoolers, or even Christian homeschoolers, are necessarily conservative, theocratic or even political. Rather, it is important to understand these elements that are active and significant, even if mostly operating just beyond our field of vision. It is also important to stress that just because parents and teachers might try to raise children to become theocratic end times revolutionaries and/or faux 21st century versions of the Founding Fathers, that doesn’t mean that they will succeed in raising up a generation of David Bartons, Rick Greens, Rusty Thomas’s, Lou Engles and Becky Fischers. But by that standard, it doesn’t mean that they won’t either.

[Crossposted from Talk to Action]

[...] In 1991, Cronon completed a book entitled Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, which examines Chicago ‘s relationship to its rural hinterland during the second half of the nineteenth century. In 1991, it was awarded the Chicago Tribune‘s Heartland Prize for the best literary work of non-fiction published during the preceding year; in 1992, it won the Bancroft Prize for the best work of American history published during the previous year, and was also one of three nominees for the Pulitzer Prize in History; and in 1993, it received the George Perkins Marsh Prize from the American Society for Environmental History and the Charles A. Weyerhaeuser Award from the Forest History Society for the best book of environmental and conservation history published during the preceding two years.

[...]

In July 1992, Cronon became the Frederick Jackson Turner Professor of History, Geography, and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin ­Madison after having served for more than a decade as a member of the Yale History Department. In 2003, he was also named Vilas [pronounced "Vy-lus"] Research Professor at UW-Madison, the university’s most distinguished chaired professorship.

Cronon has been President of the American Society for Environmental History, and serves as general editor of the Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books Series for the University of Washington Press.  [...]  He has served on the Governing Council of The Wilderness Society since 1995, and on the National Board of the Trust for Public Land since 2003. He has been elected President of the American Historical Association for 2011-12.Born September 11, 1954, in New Haven , Connecticut, Cronon received his B.A. (1976) from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He holds an M.A. (1979), M.Phil. (1980), and Ph.D. (1990) from Yale, and a D.Phil. (1981) from Oxford University. Cronon has been a Rhodes Scholar, Danforth Fellow, Guggenheim Fellow, and MacArthur Fellow; has won prizes for his teaching at both Yale and Wisconsin; in 1999 was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society’ and in 2006 was elected a Fellow of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters as well as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

He is obviously a Maoist of the worst Marxist-Leninist sort!

How do we know?  Because the Republican Party of Wisconsin wants him investigated.

The Republican Party of Wisconsin has made an open records request for the e-mails of a University of Wisconsin professor of history, geography and environmental studies in an apparent response to a blog post the professor wrote about a group called the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

Professor William J. Cronon, who is the president-elect of the American Historical Association, said in an interview Friday that the party asked for e-mails starting Jan. 1.

The request was made by Stephan Thompson of the Republican Party of Wisconsin. In his request, Thompson asked for e-mails of Cronon’s state e-mail account that “reference any of the following terms: Republican, Scott Walker, recall, collective bargaining, AFSCME, WEAC, rally, union, Alberta Darling, Randy Hopper, Dan Kapanke, Rob Cowles, Scott Fitzgerald, Sheila Harsdorf, Luther Olsen, Glenn Grothman, Mary Lazich, Jeff Fitzgerald, Marty Beil, or Mary Bell.”

Most of the names are Republican legislators. Marty Beil is the head of the Wisconsin State Employees Union and Mary Bell is the head of the Wisconsin Education Association Council.

Cronon said the university had not yet complied with the open records request. The e-mails would be subject to the state’s open records law because they were written on an university e-mail account.

The university has an e-mail policy that states, “University employees may not use these resources to support the nomination of any person for political office or to influence a vote in any election or referendum.”

Cronon said he did not violate the policy in any way. “I really object in principle to this inquiry,” Cronon said of the party’s open records request.

Thompson was not available for comment. But in an statement, Mark Jefferson, the party’s executive director, said, “Like anyone else who makes an open records request in Wisconsin, the Republican Party of Wisconsin does not have to give a reason for doing so. [...]“

What was Cronon’s offense?  He wrote an Op-Ed piece for the terrorist-loving New York Times.

Entitled “Wisconsin’s Radical Break,” Cronan wrote:

NOW that a Wisconsin judge has temporarily blocked a state law that would strip public employee unions of most collective bargaining rights, it’s worth stepping back to place these events in larger historical context.

Republicans in Wisconsin are seeking to reverse civic traditions that for more than a century have been among the most celebrated achievements not just of their state, but of their own party as well.

You’ve heard of the states as laboratories of democracy.  Cronon:

[...]

Wisconsin was at the forefront of the progressive reform movement in the early 20th century, when the policies of Gov. Robert M. La Follette prompted a fellow Republican, Theodore Roosevelt, to call the state a “laboratory of democracy.” The state pioneered many social reforms: It was the first to introduce workers’ compensation, in 1911; unemployment insurance, in 1932; and public employee bargaining, in 1959.

University of Wisconsin professors helped design Social Security and were responsible for founding the union that eventually became the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. Wisconsin reformers were equally active in promoting workplace safety, and often led the nation in natural resource conservation and environmental protection.

But while Americans are aware of this progressive tradition, they probably don’t know that many of the innovations on behalf of working people were at least as much the work of Republicans as of Democrats.

Although Wisconsin has a Democratic reputation these days — it backed the party’s presidential candidates in 2000, 2004 and 2008 — the state was dominated by Republicans for a full century after the Civil War. The Democratic Party was so ineffective that Wisconsin politics were largely conducted as debates between the progressive and conservative wings of the Republican Party.

Let’s remember who led the “conservative wing” of the Wisconsin Republican Party in the Fifties: Senator Joseph Raymond “Joe” McCarthy was a Republican U.S. Senator from the state of Wisconsin from 1947 until his death in 1957.

You may have heard of him.

Today we are engaged in a final, all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity.

Cronon:

When the Wisconsin Democratic Party finally revived itself in the 1950s, it did so in a context where members of both parties were unusually open to bipartisan policy approaches. Many of the new Democrats had in fact been progressive Republicans just a few years earlier, having left the party in revulsion against the reactionary politics of their own senator, Joseph R. McCarthy, and in sympathy with postwar liberalizing forces like the growing civil rights movement.

The demonizing of government at all levels that has become such a reflexive impulse for conservatives in the early 21st century would have mystified most elected officials in Wisconsin just a few decades ago.

When Gov. Gaylord A. Nelson, a Democrat, sought to extend collective bargaining rights to municipal workers in 1959, he did so in partnership with a Legislature in which one house was controlled by the Republicans. Both sides believed the normalization of labor-management relations would increase efficiency and avoid crippling strikes like those of the Milwaukee garbage collectors during the 1950s. Later, in 1967, when collective bargaining was extended to state workers for the same reasons, the reform was promoted by a Republican governor, Warren P. Knowles, with a Republican Legislature.

The policies that the current governor, Scott Walker, has sought to overturn, in other words, are legacies of his own party.

But Mr. Walker’s assault on collective bargaining rights breaks with Wisconsin history in two much deeper ways as well. Among the state’s proudest traditions is a passion for transparent government that often strikes outsiders as extreme. Its open meetings law, open records law and public comment procedures are among the strongest in the nation. Indeed, the basis for the restraining order blocking the collective bargaining law is that Republicans may have violated open meetings rules in passing it. The legislation they have enacted turns out to be radical not just in its content, but in its blunt ends-justify-the-means disregard for openness and transparency.

This in turn points to what is perhaps Mr. Walker’s greatest break from the political traditions of his state. Wisconsinites have long believed that common problems deserve common solutions, and that when something needs fixing, we should roll up our sleeves and work together — no matter what our politics — to achieve the common good.

[...]  Perhaps that is why — as a centrist and a lifelong independent — I have found myself returning over the past few weeks to the question posed by the lawyer Joseph N. Welch during the hearings that finally helped bring down another Wisconsin Republican, Joe McCarthy, in 1954: “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

The Republican Party leaders of Wisconsin have no such sense of decency:

[

Cronon concluded his Leninist diatribe:

Scott Walker is not Joe McCarthy. Their political convictions and the two moments in history are quite different. But there is something about the style of the two men — their aggressiveness, their self-certainty, their seeming indifference to contrary views — that may help explain the extreme partisan reactions they triggered. McCarthy helped create the modern Democratic Party in Wisconsin by infuriating progressive Republicans, imagining that he could build a national platform by cultivating an image as a sternly uncompromising leader willing to attack anyone who stood in his way. Mr. Walker appears to be provoking some of the same ire from adversaries and from advocates of good government by acting with a similar contempt for those who disagree with him.The turmoil in Wisconsin is not only about bargaining rights or the pension payments of public employees. It is about transparency and openness. It is about neighborliness, decency and mutual respect. Joe McCarthy forgot these lessons of good government, and so, I fear, has Mr. Walker. Wisconsin’s citizens have not.

Executive Director of Wisconsin's Republican Party Mark Jefferson responded as I've written above, with a press release decrying:

“I have never seen such a concerted effort to intimidate someone from lawfully seeking information about their government.

“Further, it is chilling to see that so many members of the media would take up the cause of a professor who seeks to quash a lawful open records request.  Taxpayers have a right to accountable government and a right to know if public officials are conducting themselves in an ethical manner.  The Left is far more aggressive in this state than the Right in its use of open records requests, yet these rights do extend beyond the liberal left and members of the media.

“Finally, I find it appalling that Professor Cronin seems to have plenty of time to round up reporters from around the nation to push the Republican Party of Wisconsin into explaining its motives behind a lawful open records request, but has apparently not found time to provide any of the requested information.

“We look forward to the University’s prompt response to our request and hope those who seek to intimidate us from making such requests will reconsider their actions.”

Republican Party of Wisconsin | 148 East Johnson St. | Madison, Wisconsin 53703
p: 608.257.4765 | f: 608.257.4141| e: info@wisgop.org

What's going on here?  Andrew Leonard of Salon explains:

[...] The obvious goal is  to find something damaging or embarrassing to Cronon — although judging by Cronon’s account, smoking guns seem unlikely to be lying around in plain sight. (Eight of the names referenced in the request belong to the eight Republican state senators targeted by Democrats for recall.)

I can’t do a better, more eloquent or more profound job of summarizing the issues at stake than Cronon himself does in a lengthy blog post that the professor posted Thursday night. Everyone should read it.

I agree.  And read about ALEC.

Who’s Really Behind Recent Republican Legislation in Wisconsin and Elsewhere? (Hint: It Didn’t Start Here)

[...]

I don’t want this to become an endless professorial lecture on the general outlines of American conservatism today, so let me turn to the question at hand: who’s really behind recent Republican legislation in Wisconsin and elsewhere?  I’m professionally interested in this question as a historian, and since I can’t bring myself to believe that the Koch brothers single-handedly masterminded all this, I’ve been trying to discover the deeper networks from which this legislation emerged.

Here’s my preliminary answer.

Telling Your State Legislators What to Do:
The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)

The most important group, I’m pretty sure, is the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which was founded in 1973 by Henry Hyde, Lou Barnett, and (surprise, surprise) Paul Weyrich. Its goal for the past forty years has been to draft “model bills” that conservative legislators can introduce in the 50 states. Its website claims that in each legislative cycle, its members introduce 1000 pieces of legislation based on its work, and claims that roughly 18% of these bills are enacted into law. (Among them was the controversial 2010 anti-immigrant law in Arizona.)

If you’re as impressed by these numbers as I am, I’m hoping you’ll agree with me that it may be time to start paying more attention to ALEC and the bills its seeks to promote.

You can start by studying ALEC’s own website. Begin with its home page at http://www.alec.org

First visit the “About” menu to get a sense of the organization’s history and its current members and funders. But the meat of the site is the “model legislation” page, which is the gateway to the hundreds of bills that ALEC has drafted for the benefit of its conservative members.
http://www.alec.org/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Model_Legislation1

You’ll of course be eager to look these over…but you won’t be able to, because you’re not a member.

Becoming a Member of ALEC: Not So Easy to Do

How do you become a member?  Simple. Two ways.  You can be an elected Republican legislator who, after being individually vetted, pays a token fee of roughly $100 per biennium to join.  Here’s the membership brochure to use if you meet this criterion:

http://www.alec.org/AM/pdf/2011_legislative_brochure.pdf

What if you’re not a Republican elected official?  Not to worry. You can apply to join ALEC as a “private sector” member by paying at least a few thousand dollars depending on which legislative domains most interest you. Here’s the membership brochure if you meet this criterion:
http://www.alec.org/am/pdf/Corporate_Brochure.pdf

Then again, even if most of us had this kind of money to contribute to ALEC, I have a feeling that membership might not necessarily be open to just anyone who is willing to pay the fee. But maybe I’m being cynical here.

Which Wisconsin Republican politicians are members of ALEC? Good question. How would we know? ALEC doesn’t provide this information on its website unless you’re able to log in as a member. Maybe we need to ask our representatives. One might think that Republican legislators gathered at a national ALEC meeting could be sufficiently numerous to trigger the “walking quorum rule” that makes it illegal for public officials in Wisconsin to meet unannounced without public notice of their meeting. But they’re able to avoid this rule (which applies to every other public body in Wisconsin) because they’re protected by a loophole in what is otherwise one of the strictest open meetings laws in the nation. The Wisconsin legislature carved out a unique exemption from that law for its own party caucuses, Democrats and Republicans alike. So Wisconsin Republicans are able to hold secret meetings with ALEC to plan their legislative strategies whenever they want, safe in the knowledge that no one will be able to watch while they do so.

(See http://www.doj.state.wi.us/dls/OMPR/2010OMCG-PRO/2010_OML_Compliance_Guide.pdf for a full discussion of Wisconsin’s otherwise very strict Open Meetings Law.)

If it has seemed to you while watching recent debates in the legislature that many Republican members of the Senate and Assembly have already made up their minds about the bills on which they’re voting, and don’t have much interest in listening to arguments being made by anyone else in the room, it’s probably because they did in fact make up their minds about these bills long before they entered the Capitol chambers. You can decide for yourself whether that’s a good expression of the “sifting and winnowing” for which this state long ago became famous.

Partners in Wisconsin and Other States: SPN, MacIver Institute, WPRI

An important partner of ALEC’s, by the way, is the State Policy Network (SPN), which helps coordinate the activities of a wide variety of conservative think tanks operating at the state level throughout the country. See its home page at http://www.spn.org/

Many of the publications of these think tanks are accessible and downloadable from links on the SPN website, which are well worth taking the time to peruse and read. A good starting place is:
http://www.spn.org/members/

Two important SPN members in Wisconsin are the MacIver Institute for Public Policy:

http://maciverinstitute.com/

and the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute (WPRI):
http://www.wpri.org

If you want to be a well-informed Wisconsin citizen and don’t know about their work, you’ll probably want to start visiting these sites more regularly. You’ll gain a much better understanding of the underlying ideas that inform recent Republican legislation by doing so.

Understanding What These Groups Do

As I said earlier, it’s not easy to find exact details about the model legislation that ALEC has sought to introduce all over the country in Republican-dominated statehouses. But you’ll get suggestive glimpses of it from the occasional reporting that has been done about ALEC over the past decade. Almost all of this emanates from the left wing of the political spectrum, so needs to be read with that bias always in mind.

Interestingly, one of the most critical accounts of ALEC’s activities was issued by Defenders of Wildlife and the Natural Resources Defense Council in a 2002 report entitled Corporate America’s Trojan Horse in the States. Although NRDC and Defenders may seem like odd organizations to issue such a report, some of ALEC’s most concentrated efforts have been directed at rolling back environmental protections, so their authorship of the report isn’t so surprising. The report and its associated press release are here:
http://alecwatch.org/11223344.pdf
http://www.nrdc.org/media/pressreleases/020228.asp

There’s also an old, very stale website associated with this effort at
http://alecwatch.org/

A more recent analysis of ALEC’s activities was put together by the Progressive States Network in February 2006 under the title Governing the Nation from the Statehouses, available here:
http://www.progressivestates.org/content/57/governing-the-nation-from-the-statehouses

There’s an In These Times story summarizing the report at
http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/2509/

More recent stories can be found at
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/miles-mogulescu/alec-states-unions_b_832428.htmlview=print

http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/6084/corporate_con_game (about the Arizona immigration law) and there’s very interesting coverage of ALEC’s efforts to disenfranchise student voters at http://campusprogress.org/articles/conservative_corporate_advocacy_group_alec_behind_voter_disenfranchise/
and
http://www.progressivestates.org/node/26400

For just one example of how below-the-radar the activities of ALEC typically are, look for where the name of the organization appears in this recent story from the New York Times about current efforts in state legislatures to roll back the bargaining rights of public employee unions:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/04/business/04labor.html

Hint: ALEC is way below the fold!

A Cautionary Note

What you’ll quickly learn even from reading these few documents is that ALEC is an organization that has been doing very important political work in the United States for the past forty years with remarkably little public or journalistic scrutiny. I’m posting this long note in the conviction that it’s time to start paying more attention. History is being made here, and future historians need people today to assemble the documents they’ll eventually need to write this story. Much more important, citizens today may wish to access these same documents to be well informed about important political decisions being made in our own time during the frequent meetings that ALEC organizes between Republican legislators and representatives of many of the wealthiest corporations in the United States.

Go access.  Knowledge is our weapon in the fight to defend ourselves from what radical Teddy Roosevelt knew:

I am well aware that every upholder of privilege, every hired agent or beneficiary of the special interests, including many well-meaning parlor reformers, will denounce all this as “Socialism” or “anarchy”–the same terms they used in the past in denouncing the movements to control the railways and to control public utilities. As a matter of fact, the propositions I make constitute neither anarchy nor Socialism, but, on the contrary, a corrective to Socialism and an antidote to anarchy.

That was the progressive Republican Teddy Roosevelt who inspired George W. Bush, who John McCain so admires:

[...] the Times has the entire transcript.  It’s worth quoting at length:

Q: How do you think of your self as a conservative? Do you think of yourself more as a Goldwater conservative or Reagan conservative or George W. Bush conservative?

Senator John McCain: A Teddy Roosevelt conservative, I think. He’s probably my major role model…. I think Teddy Roosevelt he had a great vision of America’s role in the 20th Century. He was a great environmentalist. He loved the country. He is the person who brought the government into a more modern – into the 20th century as well. He was probably engaged more in national security slash international affairs that any president [had] ever been. I understand that TR had failings. I understand that every one of my role models had failings…..

[snip]

Q: Roosevelt wasn’t really a small government person. He saw an active role for government what thing in your record in your record would you say are in a similar vein of using government to do things that…

Mr. McCain: Campaign Finance reform – obviously he was a great reformer — is one of them. Climate change is another. He was a great environmentalist

Q: You don’t believe in small government, the sort of classic conservative view of minimal government is not one you would necessarily share.

Mr. McCain: …I also believe there is a role for government. If there is abuses, TR was the first guy to enforce the Sherman anti-trust act against the quote trusts that were controlling the economy of America. Because I believe his quote was unfettered capitalism leads to corruption. So there certainly is a role for government but I want to keep that role minimal. And I want to keep it in the areas where only governments can perform those functions.

Government should take care of those in America who can’t care for themselves. That’s a role of government. It’s not that I’m for no government. It’s that I’m for government carrying out those responsibilities that otherwise can’t be exercised by individuals and the states — that’s the founding principles of our country — and at the same time recognizing there’s a role for our government and society to care for those who can’t care for themselves, to make sure there are not abuses of individual rights as well as the rights of groups of people and to defend our nation. And National Security is obviously No. 1.

So I count myself as a conservative Republican, yet I view it to a large degree in the Theodore Roosevelt mold.

The GOP now wants to break doyen professor of history William Cronon. They’re attacking in full.

Read how and why.  And study up on American conservatism:

[...]

An Introductory Bibliography on the Recent History of American Conservatism

John Micklethwait & Adrian Wooldridge, The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America, 2004 (lively, readable overview by sympathetic British journalists).

David Farber, The Rise and Fall of Modern American Conservatism: A Brief History, 2010.

George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, 1976(one of the earliest academic studies of the movement, and still important to read).

Lee Edwards, The Conservative Revolution, 2002 (written from a conservative perspective by a longstanding fellow of the Heritage Foundation).

Bruce Frohnen, et al, American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia, 2006 (a comprehensive and indispensable reference work).

Jerry Z. Muller, Conservatism, 1997 (extensive anthology of classic texts of the movement).

There are many other important studies, but these are reasonable starting points.

And, of course, Rick Perlstein.  Knowledge is power.  Knowledge is our weapon.  Use it.  Fight back.  Defend William Cronon.

Cross-posted at Amygdala.

ADDENDUM, March 26th, 8:58 a.m., PST:  Everyone and their dog has been blogging and tweeting about this, so a bazillion links, so I’ll give few or none, but here is the NY Times editorial: “A Shabby Crusade in Wisconsin.”

Fitzgerald, Barca disagree on whether law goes into effect Saturday:

Madison — In a stunning twist, Gov. Scott Walker’s legislation limiting collective bargaining for public workers was published Friday despite a judge’s hold on the measure, prompting a dispute over whether it takes effect Saturday.

The measure was published to the Legislature’s website with a footnote that acknowledges the restraining order by a Dane County judge. But the posting says state law “requires the Legislative Reference Bureau to publish every act within 10 working days after its date of enactment.”

The measure sparked protests at the Capitol and lawsuits by opponents because it would eliminate the ability of most public workers to bargain over anything but wages.

The restraining order was issued against Democratic Secretary of State Doug La Follette. But the bill was published by the reference bureau, which was not named in the restraining order.

Laws normally take effect a day after they are published, and a top GOP lawmaker said that meant it will become law Saturday. But nonpartisan legislative officials from two agencies, including the one who published the bill, disagreed. [....]

As well, I’ll stress:

In response, Cronon has posted a lengthy rebuttal on his own web site. In the post, Cronon states that he has committed no wrongdoing in terms of the use of his state e-mail account — and also saying that it would violate federal law to reveal e-mail conversations with students that have touched upon these subjects.

Cross-posted at Obsidian Wings.

Cross-posted at Amygdala.

Setting the Record Straight on “Jack-Booted Thugs”
I’m still not really up to writing much, or well, but an item over at Media Matters caught my eye tonight, and I felt compelled to offer some thoughts on it.

Adam Shah of Media Matters For America offers this as his set-up:

National Rifle Association executive vice president Wayne LaPierre is the last person a responsible media outlet should have on its airwaves to comment on the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF). That’s because LaPierre once referred to ATF agents as “jack-booted government thugs” and reportedly called for “lifting the assault weapons ban to even the odds in the struggle between ordinary citizens and ‘jack-booted government thugs.’”

Shah’s framing can be read in such a way as to suggest that anyone who would call government agents “jack-booted government thugs” is inherently nuts. The gripe I have with this is that government agents frequently are jack-booted thugs. That LaPierre said so isn’t why his comments were problematic.

LaPierre is a reactionary who deals in the nuttiest sort of black-helicopter conspiracism. His rhetoric, offered in the 1990s, is indistinguishable from that of the militia movement that grew like a cancer in that same period, and it’s this context that elevated his “jack-booted government thugs” comment from a truism to an eye-raiser.

But it takes some space to explain why….

The full discussion is worth reading, but skipping down a bit, we get to the part where he gets to the LaPierre writing a letter where he refernces the Koresh cult, which the rightwing militas portrayed as a bunch of innocents attacked by the government for no reason:

LaPierre was opportunistically playing to this sentiment when he made his “jack-booted government thugs” comment. In the same letter in which he wrote those words, he even made explicit reference to the action against the Koresh cult, and, further, added

“Not too long ago, it was unthinkable for federal agents wearing Nazi bucket helmets and black storm trooper uniforms to attack law-abiding citizens. Not today.”

Of course, such a thing hadn’t been “unthinkable” to left-wing political parties, the civil rights movement, radical groups, labor unions, anti-war groups, and more other non-conservative and anti-conservative groups than can be named–they’d been on the receiving end of government violence for over a century, by that point. It was only “unthinkable” to white Christian conservative good ol’ boys who had never been subjected to it. LaPierre was part of a cadre of reactionaries who, for purposes of political expediency, was trying to make it thinkable to them. The world learned how thinkable some of them found it when a fertilizer bomb went off in front of a federal building in Oklahoma City, killing hundreds.

I couldn’t agree more. After all, it wasn’t the ATF necessarily, but when gov’t agents came for Fred Hampton and scores of other Black Panthers, they were indeed jack-booted thugs.

There’s a vitally import point here, wrapped up in who LaPierre and his audience are, that usually seems incredibly abstract & philosophical to many. To wit: all discourse is embedded, embodied, contextual. It is NEVER trascendent and disembodied no matter what it might pretend. It is NEVER simply about objects devoid of context in philosophical Cartesian space. There is always a subject who speaks and a subject spoken to. American rightwing “anti-government” rhetoric ALWAYS comes out of a discourse where the speaking subject and the audience subject are white (even if it gets picked up by minorities and repurposed because of its white-supremacist cultural credibility).

There is nothing whatsoever abstract & philophical about this, of course, and feminism in particular has done a good deal to make awareness of this commonly available to everyone. But this doesn’t just apply to white supremacists. Far from it. It applies to classic liberalism as well, as Mike Konczal pointed out this week at Rortybomb in a piece titled “International Woman’s Day, Wendy Brown, and What Feminist Theory Can Do For You.” In it, he refers to an article by Brown:

Brown also has a critique of liberalism in an article that is sadly not online, Liberalism’s Family Values (collected in States of Injury). Like Okin, she deals with the liberal tradition being predicated on a liberal subject that is the antithesis on the conceptual and practical role women play in society. The eight values of a liberalism positioned next to the values they exclude from the political realm is a particularly sharp explanation of what is going on under the hood of liberalism. From the article:

I want to make a quick argument that this critique is important for those who want to rebuild an economy where prosperity is broadly shared and concentrations of power are held in check….

Why? Academic feminism has thought deeply about two arguments that need to be addressed. The first is that that the project is larger than stagnating wages, something that can’t be addressed by the differential inflationary impacts of the consumption of cheap electronic goods and really cheap food. The issue is about freedom and autonomy. The subject that can lead a life of equality, liberty, autonomy in the public is not a given or a prerequisite to society but instead a political creation, something created only through struggle.

The second is that a contract, like a marriage contract or like a labor contract, can be “freely” entered into but still contain elements of coercion to it. Coercion can still be the central characteristic of it. That the market is a series of voluntary transactions, and any outcome of it just, is an illusion. How to pull away that veil is the project, and feminist thought gives us a start on it.

What Brown is doing here is, in a sense, critiquing the formal structure of liberal political theory, if we think of the formal structure as that which contextualizes and shapes that which is the content of the theory. As soon as I began reading this, I immediately thought of Robert Kegan’s levels of cognitive complexity, particularly the fifth level, about which I’ve written relatively little online. Here, for the sake of completeness, is my crib sheet on the subject:

Harvard psychologist Robert Kegan has developed a theoretical framework for integrating the developmental theories of Jean Piaget and later developmental psychologists, such as Lawrence Kohlberg and Erik Erikson. Kegan argues that at each developmental stage, what was the background/context/subject of consciousness in the previous stage now becomes foreground/content/object. The result is the table below:

Feminist theory of the sort that Brown practices belongs to Level 5. It takes liberal political theory (a Level 4 theory concerned with autonomy/self-authorship) as its subject. Level 5 is particularly concerned with opposites, and transforming their seemingly absolutist nature into more tractable forms. In short, it takes them out of the realm of absolutes that define us and turns them into objects that we may manipulate and define for ourselves. This is why, at the deepest and most fundamental level, feminism is a theory of liberation for men as much as it is for women.

Conservatives, for the most part, are either stuck at Level 3, the level of traditional social order, where the self is defined by the social roles and relations of society, or at Level 2, an even more primative level associated with late childhood and early adolesence. (Libertarian “you’re not the boss of me!” temper-tantrums, anyone?) Liberals, OTOH, tend to be fixated at Level 4, based on a mascunilist model of autonomy, which Brown’s article excerpt above provides an embrionic critique of.

Marxism also provided this sort of a crtique, but there were relatvely few people around in the 19th century who capable of grasping the Marxist critique at the level it was offered. That’s because day-to-day consciousness levels tend to be determined by the complexity of the world that people live in, and the sorts of experiential supports they encounter which enable them to comprehend and deal with the complexity around them. Because today’s world is considerably more complex than the 19th century was, Level 5 consciousness is far more common today than it was back then. And so we have a much better chance of making sense of a critique of Level 4 ideology, thus enabling us to overcome the limitations it carries with it.