During the 2008 presidential campaign, then-Alaska Governor Sarah Palin accused candidate Barack Obama of “paling around with terrorists”, referring to one-time Weatherman Bill Ayers, who has long since become a member of Chicago’s political/policy establishment, regularly rubbing shoulders with establishment Republicans as well as Democrats, primarily due to his involvement in urban education policy.

“It was never a concern by any of us in the Chicago school reform movement that he had led a fugitive life years earlier,” former Illinois state Republican Rep. Diana Nelson, told NPR, in a barely-noticed story that got lost in the flood of wild accusations. Nelson had worked with both Obama and Ayers over the years. “It’s ridiculous,” Nelson said. “There is no reason at all to smear Barack Obama with this association. It’s nonsensical, and it just makes me crazy. It’s so silly.”

But now it turns out that another Alaskan Republican—long-time Congressmember Don Young—has not just been palling around with actual terrorists, he’s even signed one of their seditious documents—a “Letter of Declaration”—calling for “alter[ing] or abolish[ing]” the government should it “seek to further tax, restrict or register firearms”. This is a clear-cut call for sedition, given that all the government actions cited are perfectly constitutional according to the most conservative Supreme Court in 70+ years.

A move is now afoot calling for Young to reaffirm the oath of office that he violated in signing the “Letter of Declaration.” The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence has created a petition calling on Young to re-swear his oath to the U.S. Constitution. As explained in a press release:

CSGV’s petition calls on Rep. Young to immediately re-swear his oath to our Constitution and repudiate the “Letter of Declaration.” It also calls on NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre to publicly repudiate the letter and Young’s signing of it.

Young signed the “Letter”, drafted by Schaeffer Cox of the Second Amendment Task Force/Alaska Peacekeepers Militia, on April 13, 2009, as documented on a video posted online that June. (Copy here) On March 11, Cox was arrested as the ringleader in a planned conspiracy to kill state troopers and at least one named judge. (Indictment here.) On March 12, the Anchorage Daily News reported:

Federal agents made extensive recordings of Fairbanks militia members plotting to kill or kidnap judges and Alaska State Troopers and burn their houses, according to documents filed in court Friday.

Four leaders of the Fairbanks-based Alaska Peacekeeper’s Militia — Francis “Schaeffer” Cox, 26, Lonnie Vernon, 55, his wife Karen Vernon, 64, and Coleman Barney, 36 — are charged with conspiring to commit murder, kidnapping and arson. They are also charged with hindering prosecution and possession of illegal weapons.

Cox’s plan was named “241”, meaning that whatever action the government took, Cox’s milita forces were supposed to respond with double the force, according to undercover survelleince information contained in the indictment:

At that February 12th meeting COX specifically unveiled his ’241′ (two for one) plan which called for his militia to respond to attempts to arrest or kill him by responding against state court or law enforcement targets with twice the forces and consequences as happened to him or his familty. If he was arrested, two state targets would be “arrested” (kidnapped). If he was killed, two state targets would be killed. If his house was taken, two state target houses would be burned. COX spent a considerable amount of time logically (in his mind) justifying his actions, stating that ‘at this point, without any further provocation’ he would be ‘well within my rights to drill [Superior Court Judge] McConahy in his forehead’.

Cox’s ideas and actions have a substantial history behind them. He has a history of associating with and espousing the ideology of the “Sovereign Citizenship” movement, which emerged as part of the “militia movment” during the 1990s. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups, explains:

Made up of an estimated 300,000 participants, the sprawling sovereign citizens subculture advocates the idea that the sovereigns themselves — not judges, juries, law enforcement or elected officials — get to decide which laws to obey and which to ignore. Most don’t think they should have to pay taxes.

Sovereign citizens have long targeted judges and law enforcement officers Just this past May 20, two law enforcement officers were killed and two others were wounded by a father-son pair of sovereign citizens in West Memphis, Ark. In 1995 in Ohio, a sovereign named Michael Hill pulled a gun on an officer during a traffic stop. Hill was killed. In 1997, New Hampshire extremist Carl Drega shot dead two officers and two civilians, and wounded another three officers before being killed himself. In that same year in Idaho, when brothers Doug and Craig Broderick were pulled over for failing to signal, they killed one officer and wounded another before being killed themselves in a violent gun battle.

Despite openly denying government authority over everything from taxes to traffic laws, “Sovereign citizens” routinely try to pass themselves off as patriots and garden-variety gun-rights advocates, and they are often supported in this by the NRA and conservative politicians. This is exactly what Don Young did, through a spokesman, when his signing of the seditious “Letter of Declaration” came to light, following Cox’s arrest.:

Rep. Young’s communications director, Meredith Kenny, said the video shows Rep. Young signing the letter at an “open-carry day” in Fairbanks in the spring of 2009. At the open carry day, gun rights activists appeared in public openly wearing handgun in holsters.

“Rep. Young attended not because of anything having to do with Cox — nor is he in any way affiliated with Cox — but because he has always been a vocal and staunch defender of the Second Amendment,” Kenny said. “Congressman Young stands strong with gun owners of America, and will always defend the 2nd Amendment rights of Americans.”

Young’s casual endorsement of sedition, and the political establishment’s ho-hum attitude toward it so far stand in stark contrast to the official anti-Muslim hysteria being promoted in Congress. On March 11, Representative Peter King held a hearing on the threat of Islamic radicalization, as reported by The National:

Peter King, the chairman of the House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee, who called the hearings, has accused the Muslim community of refusing to cooperate with law enforcement and charged that preaching in some US mosques was leading to radicalisation.

“To combat this threat, moderate leadership must emerge from the Muslim community,”

But that same sort of moderate leadership is precisely what’s missing with regard to the “Sovereign Citizens” movement, and other violent rightwing extremists–particularly in the case of Representative Young, who sits on the NRA’s national board. Indeed, King appears to be badly misinformed about the Muslim community, as a report by report by Charles Kurzman, a sociologist the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, found that “ the largest single source of initial information” in disrupting Muslim terrorist plots was the Muslim community itself, responsible for 48 disruptions out of 120.

When presented with an opportunity to be equally responsible in opposing rightwing extremist violence, Representative Young failed the test of patriotic loyalty. In light of this, the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence’s petition seems like a mild-mannered response. As CSGV’s Josh Horowitz put it:

“It is simply unacceptable for a sitting member of Congress to sign a document calling for violence against the government of the United States. We call on Rep. Don Young to do the right thing and repudiate this repugnant document.”

But if Don Young were a Muslim, there seems to be little doubt he would already have been expelled from Congress.

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.