From: NLG Civil Liberties Committee <cberlet@igc.apc.org>
Subject: Perot's VP Stockdale & Racism
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Originator: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
Organization: ?
Date: Thu, 8 Oct 1992 22:50:37 GMT

/* Written  8:17 pm  Oct  7, 1992 by cberlet in cdp:elections.usa */
/* ---------- "Perot's VP Stockdale & Racism" ---------- */
In the original posting I wrote that Stockdale was a current Board
Member of the Rockford Institute. Stockdale resigned in 1989. I
apologize for the error which was picked up from a reporter who
misunderstood the Hoover/Rockford sequence. Stockdale was on the
Rockford board during the Neuhaus controversy where the issues of
racial insensitivity and anti-Semitism first surfaced.

More information on the Rockford Institute, Stockdale, the
Paleocons, and the Perot campaign

- - - - - - PLEASE NOTE: My original posting suggested that
Stockdale needed to answer some tough questions about his service
on the Board of Directors of Rockford. Many people seem to have
lost sight of that key point. This is a fair issue to raise about
someone running for vice-president.
- - - - - -

The Rockford Institute feud where the staff in New York was tossed
out for raising issues of racial tolerance was covered in the <New
York Times>, May 16, 1989 (pp. 1,8). Perot's running mate
Stockdale was on the Board of Directors of Rockford in 1989.
Theologian Rev. Richard John Neuhaus and his staff at the Center
for Religion and Society were fired and locked out of their
offices.

>From the <Times>:

"The raid on the center's office was provoked by Pastor Neuhaus's
complaint, supported by a number of leading conservative figures,
that the Rockford Institute's monthly publication, <Chronicles>,
was tilting toward views favoring native-born citizens and values
and that it was `insensitive to the classic language of anti-
Semitism.'"

"Pastor Neuhaus and his Center for Religion and Society have
become symbols of the neo-conservative side of the argument,
standing opposite the center's parent organization, the Rockford
Institute."

To unravel the background of the dispute takes a political
scorecard. The Rockford Institute and rightists like Pat Buchanan
are allied with reactionary and hard-line rightist forces in the
U.S. The more moderate of these hard-right forces sometimes are
called paleo-conservatives or "Paleocons" due to their ties to the
"Old Right" in the United States. The farthest fringe of this
circle is populated by persons who reflect a racial-nationalist or
even neo-fascist viewpoint.  Buchanan networks across the spectrum
of the hard-right, from Paleocon to neo-Fascist. Racism and
anti-Jewish bigotry were common themes in some (although not all)
Old Right groups.

Buchanan endorsed the work of the Rockford Institute after the
Neuhaus incident. In his January 25, 1990 newsletter, Buchanan
penned what was in essence an ode to fascism which celebrated the
efficiency of autocracy, and concluded with the line, "If the
people are corrupt, the more democracy, the worse the government."
The column also echoed historically racialist themes.

The "Neocons," the neo-conservative movement in the United States
for over ten years quietly tolerated more than a little
anti-democratic authoritarianism, anti-Jewish bigotry, and racism
from their tactical allies on the Paleocon right. Their alliance
was based on shared support for militant anti-communism,
celebration of unfettered free enterprise, calls for high levels
of U.S. spending on the U.S. military, and support for a
militarily strong Israel dominated by hard-line ultra-
conservative political parties that would stand as a bulwark
against communism in the Middle East.

Since there are some high-profile Jews in the intellectual
leadership of the neo-conservative movement, some persons have
concluded that neo-conservatism is a Jewish ideology. This is a
prejudiced assertion, and it is at the heart of much of the
Neocon/Paleocon dispute, with the Paleocons repeatedly making
bigotted references about the people who "control" the Neocon
movement and charge them with "anti-Semitism" and "nativism." See
for example the June 1992 <Rothbard-Rockwell Report>, which
defends the Paleocons.

For a look at the Neocon view of Buchanan and the Rockford crowd
see the May 1992 issues of <First Things> published by Neuhaus
("The Year that Conservatism Turned Ugly"), and <Commentary>
("Buchanan and the Conservative Crackup").

Fascist political movements are experiencing a resurgence around
the world. In the United States, the 1992 presidential campaigns
of David Duke, Patrick Buchanan, and H. Ross Perot echoed
different elements of historic fascism.

Duke's neo-Nazi past resonates, in a consciously sanitized form,
in his current formulations of white supremacist and anti-Jewish
political theories. Duke has embraced key elements of the neo-
Nazi Christian Identity religion.

Buchanan's theories of isolationist nationalism and xenophobia
hearken back to the proto-fascist ideas of the 1930's America
First movement and its well-known promoters, Charles Lindbergh and
Father Charles Coughlin. In his Republican convention speech,
Buchanan eerily invoked Nazi symbols of blood, soil and honor.

Perot's candidacy provided us with a contemporary model of the
fascist concept of the organic leader, the "Man on a White Horse"
whose strong egocentric commands are seen as reflecting the will
of the people.

These three candidacies were played out as the Bush Administration
pursued its agenda of a managed corporate economy, a repressive
national security state, and an aggressive foreign policy based on
military threat, all of which borrows heavily from the theories of
corporatism, authoritarianism, and militarism adopted by Italian
fascism.

Duke, Buchanan, and Perot all feed on the politics of resentment,
alienation, frustration, anger and fear. Their supporters tended
to blame our vexing societal problems on handy scapegoats and they
sought salvation from a strong charismatic leader.  See the
prescient article on "The Politics of Frustration by conservative
Republican analyst Kevin Phillips in <The New York Times Magazine>
April 12, 1992, pp. 38-42. In this article, Phillips, (remember,
he is an anti-Bush conservative Republican) raises the issue of
similarity between the current campaign and the Weimar period in
Germany when the fascists were organizing under the banner of
national socialism and popular discontent.

There are other strains of fascism active today. While much
attention has been paid to the more extreme biological-
determinist neo-Nazi groups such as racist skinheads, there has
also been steady growth in other forms of Fascism. Corporatism
(sometimes called corporativism) and the economic nationalist
branch of fascism are being revived. In Eastern Europe, racial
nationalism, a key component of fascism, has surfaced in many new
political parties, and is a driving force behind the tragic
bloodletting and drive for "ethnic cleansing" in the former nation
of Yugoslavia. Other pillars of fascism such as racism,
xenophobia, anti-Jewish theories and anti-immigrant scapegoating
provide a sinister backdrop for increasing physical assaults on
people of color and lesbians and gay men.

Further complicating matters is the reemergence in Europe of
fascist ideologies that promote concepts of racial nationalism: a
national socialist strain of fascist ideology called the Third
Position or Third Way, and its more intellectual aristocratic ally
called the European New Right (Nouvelle Droit) For a brilliant
short essay on the rise of the Nouvelle Droit see "Pograms Begin
in the Mind"

by Wolfgang Haug, a transcribed lecture with a challenging
introduction by Janet Biehl (<Green Perspectives> May 1992, P.O.
Box 111, Burlington, Vermont 05402.) Intellectual leaders of the
European New Right, such as Alain de Benoist, are hailed as
profound thinkers in U.S. reactionary publications such as the
Rockford Institute's <Chronicles>. The more overtly neo-Nazi
segment of the Third Position has intellectual links to the
Strasserite wing of German national socialism, and is critical of
Hitler's brand of Nazism for having betrayed the working class.
See magazines such as <Scorpion> or <Third Way> published in
England. Third Position groups believe in a racially-homogeneous
decentralized tribal form of nationalism, and claim to have
evolved an ideology "beyond communism and capitalism."

Third Position adherents actively seek to recruit from the left.
One such group is the American Front in Portland, Oregon, which
runs a phone hotline that in late November, 1991 featured an
attack on critics of left/right coalitions. White supremacist
leader Tom Metzger promotes Third Position politics in his
newspaper <WAR> which stands for White Aryan Resistance. Third
Position themes have surfaced in the ecology movement and other
movements championed by progressives.

Conspiracism and scapegoating go hand-in-hand, and both are key
ingredients of the fascist phenomenon. Fascism is difficult to
define succinctly. As Roger Scruton observes in "A Dictionary of
Political Tought," fascism is "An amalgam of disparate
conceptions." (Scruton, Roger. "A Dictionary of Political Tought,"
London: The Macmillan Press, 1982, p. 169)

Scruton:

"[Fascism is] more notable as a political phenomenon on which
diverse intellectual influences converge than as a distinct idea;
as political phenomenon, one of its most remarkable features has
been the ability to win massive popular support for ideas that are
expressly anti-egalitarian."

"Fascism is characterised by the following features (not all of
which need be present in any of its recognized instances):
nationalism; hostility to democracy, to egalitarianism, and to the
values of the enlightenment; the cult of the leader, and
admiration for his special qualities; a respect for collective
organization, and a love of the symbols associated with it, such
as uniforms, parades and army discipline."

"The ultimate doctrine contains little that is specific, beyond an
appeal to energy, and action."

Another way to look at fascism is as a movement of extreme racial
or cultural nationalism, combined with economic corporatism and
authoritarian autocracy; masked during its rise to state power by
pseudo-radical populist appeals to overthrow a conspiratorial
elitist regime; spurred by a strong charismatic leader whose
reactionary ideas are said to organically express the will of the
masses who are urged to engage in a heroic collective effort to
attain a metaphysical goal against the machinations of a
scapegoated demonized adversary.

In any case, in most definitions of fascism the themes of
conspiracism and a needed scapegoat emerge.

In recent years the four main centers of paranoid conspiracism and
scapegoating on the right have been the John Birch Society, the
Liberty Lobby, the LaRouchians, and the right-wing Christian
fundamentalist sector of the movement known as the New Right.

The most useful general sources of information on U.S. right-wing
conspiracy theories and the basis for understanding the role of
reductionism and scapegoating in these movements are: Richard
Hofstadter, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" (New York:
Knopf, 1965); George Johnson, "Architects of Fear: Conspiracy
Theories and Paranoia in American Politics" (Los Angeles:
Tarcher/Houghton Mifflin, 1983); and Frank P. Mintz, "The Liberty
Lobby and the American Right: Race, Conspiracy, and Culture"
(Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1985).

For a lengthy discussion of scapegoating and witch hunts, see the
September/October issue of <The Humanist> with a special section
on "Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism,> which includes the
author's article on the far right's scapegoating of secular
humanism.

For a deeper understanding of fascism and its use of scapegoating,
see: A. J. Nichols, "Weimar and the Rise of Hitler" (New York: St.
Martin's Press, 1979), Daniel Guerin, "Fascism and Big Business"
(New York: Monad Press/Pathfinder, 1973), James Joes, "Fascism in
the Contemporary World: Ideology, Evolution, Resurgence" (Boulder:
Westview, 1978).>

- Chip Berlet, analyst Political Research Associates 678
  Massachusetts Ave, #702 Cambridge, MA 02139

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