In the past I've liked some of the things this guy has had to say, but his Op-Ed for the Post today lost me entirely with this statement.
Since World War II, perhaps the Republican Party's greatest political achievement has been to marry conservatism -- once considered a patrician creed -- with anti-elitism. The synthesis began with Joseph McCarthy, who used conspiratorial anti-communism to attack America's East Coast, Ivy League-dominated foreign policy class. It grew under Richard Nixon, who exploited white working-class resentment against campus radicals and the black militants they indulged.
That's right, the Black Power movement was nothing more than the indulgence of Campus Radicals. Never mind that the U.S. government, the F.B.I, and Nixon focused their efforts almost entirely on derailing the black militants rather than the campus radicals with COINTELPRO.
That's right, the Black Power movement was nothing more than the indulgence of Campus Radicals. Never mind that the U.S. government, the F.B.I, and Nixon focused their efforts almost entirely on derailing the black militants rather than the campus radicals with COINTELPRO.
During this white middle class "indulgence," Fred Hampton was murdered in his sleep by police, and Black Panthers Eddie Ellis, Geronimo Pratt and Assata Shakur were framed by the FBI for crimes they didn't commit. Eddie Ellis served twenty five years in prison for a crime he didn't commit, Pratt spent 27 years in jail, eight of them in solitary confinement, before his conviction was overturned.
Although medical evidence showed that Assata Shakur couldn't have committed the murder for which she was convicted, she resides under political asylum in Cuba, as she is still wanted by the FBI, who are offering a million dollar reward for her capture.
In fact, the COINTELPRO program almost exclusively focused on oppressing black liberation groups, rather than the campus radicals who were supposedly responsible for "indulging" them.
According to FBI documents, one of the purposes of the COINTELPRO program was to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of the Black nationalists". They wanted to prevent the rise of a black "messiah" and Martin Luther King Jr. had been amongst the candidates until his assassination in 1968 when the attention shifted to Huey P. Newton. Of the 295 documented actions taken by COINTELPRO to disrupt Black groups, 233 were directed against the Black Panther Party.
As for the campus radicals who Beinart presents as the focus of the wrath of reactionary conservative America, their fate is probably best symbolized in the fate of The Weathermen, the terrorist group made up of white college radicals who committed several bombings during the 60s.
In fact, it would be more accurate to describe The Weathermen as idealizing and poorly imitating the eloquent rhetoric of black militants, rather than the other way around. In this particular context, it was the campus radicals who were the wannabes.
Mainly, the Weathermen wanted to bring the war home. They believed that "all [white] Americans were legitimate targets for attack" and sought to make the U.S. unlivable as long as the war continued. From a Leninist perspective, their politics defined infantile leftism. The "Days of Rage" were denounced as "Custeristic" by Fred Hampton, the soon to be police-murdered Black Panther leader whom Weather folks idealized.
Of course, most of them got away with it. Since they were white, no one thought they were actually dangerous, despite all the bombings. Fred Hampton, who denounced them, was murdered in his sleep by police. While being shot at from outside his apartment, he reached for the gun under his bed. He was shot before he could discharge his weapon, but as it fell to the floor, it fired once. News coverage at the time described the incident as a shootout between police and Black Panthers.
[Hampton was] massacred, in a still-controversial shooting that Chicago law enforcement officials described as a shoot-out but which physical evidence indicated was an assassination. (After the Tribune cited "bullet holes" proving Hampton had fired back, a Sun-Times team ran photographs revealing the holes to be nailheads.)
It seems to me that it is disrespectful to passingly describe black militants as the "indulgence" of campus radicals without noting the consequences of the actions of folks like the Weathermen, who embraced and managed to discredit the goals of other movements before retiring to quiet lives in the suburbs. The rest of us are still living with the consequences of Nixon's policy of targeting and destroying black leadership at every opportunity, through any means.
But the great irony of Beinart's piece is that while he notes the diminishing power of GOP populismin legitimizing Bush's domestic spying policies, he glosses over completely the last time a President utilized such populism to justify similarly immoral policies, and who the target and bogeyman was.
It wasn't white campus radicals.