I know I'm about to walk into the DK meat grinder but here goes ...
Progressives must seriously consider ways to effectively counter the implied threats and overt political messaging being sent by the gun-toting right wing at public meetings and events.
To my mind the highly disciplined and totally legal presence of progressives with LEGAL UNCONCEALED GUNS paired with positive messages of support (t-shirts and signboards) for President Obama and progressive ideals sends exactly the right message.
There. I said it.
Please follow me over the fold to explain why the idea is not as crazy as you think.
Before I get to my argument I want to state for the record strong support for a 2nd amendment interpretation supporting an individual right to bear arms.
I do not view the issue as a progressive litmus test and on that point remind Dkers that both Brian Schweitzer and Howard Dean were endorsed by the NRA because of their support for gun rights.
There needs to be great latitude within the progressive community on this issue and I ask those who hold strong opinions against to look at the vastly differing circumstances across and within the big tent.
In the past several weeks there has been much discussion about the intent and meaning of showing up at public town halls and presidential appearances with a sidearm or in some cases even larger weapons.
Political violence.
Personal expressions of a constitutional "right".
Assassination.
Personal security.
Psychological instability and insecurity.
Political threats and messaging.
While each of the above could likely be ascribed as motivational for a subset of the public gun-toters, it is mostly the first and last points I want to address in this diary.
Since Europeans first came to the new world guns have been the blunt instrument of political, economic, and social dominance.
From the 16th century on, the direct application and/or constant threat of gun violence by Europeans on native Americans and African slaves was the way the ruling class imposed social order and subjugation.
Historically, our various heralded domestic conflicts (e.g. Revolution, War of 1812, Civil War, Indian Wars) embodied and expressed the centrality of guns to the American experience ... both as a means to enforce economic and political dominance, and as a sometimes useful tool for the countervailing forces of freedom and liberty.
After the Civil War, fought in part over the tension between freedom and slavery, the active suppression of the newly freed slaves by the KKK reaffirmed the centrality of guns, gun violence, and implied gun violence as a means of organized social control for another hundred years.
Concurrent to this the demands of the industrial revolution required a marshalling of "vast armies of workers" to be gathered up and sent into the great capitalist enterprise as factory fodder. This of course posed a problem for the elites. Though desperately needed, the millions of new immigrants from Europe and Asia could not be completely trusted to meekly fall in line with the requirements of wage slavery. How then would elites impose social order and enforce the rules of a dominant political and economic dialectic?
Guns. And lots of them too.
This time wielded by local and state police, private security forces, hired thugs, and occasionally even the National Guard or the US Army itself.
Force, especially as employed through the barrel of a gun, was the means to keep industrial workers down. The bullet and the threat of the bullet pushed back the day when workers would successfully organize and bargain for fair wages, safe working conditions, a 40 hour work week, and eventually even health care. Not surprisingly, it was the use of organized violence by workers (meeting threats with threats, guns with guns, bombs with bombs) in parallel with mass strikes and other hard line tactics that eventually brought the captains of industry to the bargaining table.
For a very long time the wide distribution of guns in the hands of many non-elites was discouraged by the forces of repression and subjugation. This was especially true for blacks and recent immigrants who could not be trusted (unlike southern and other rural whites) to believe their interests were somehow aligned with those of the ruling class.
At mid-century this proposition would change in a fundamental way.
One of the many interesting political developments of the past 50 years has been the migration of gun rights to the very center of Republican/Conservative orthodoxy. The ruling elites of the Republican Party (e.g. business or country club Republicans in the old parlance) were the same captains of industry who, once upon a time, feared the consequences of an armed working class. However, once the oligarchs understood that industrial unions could be "bought off" with economic security, they left their fear of armed rebellion and revolution behind. There were no real threats to capitalist hegemony. The issue had been managed. Even better, the astute political thinkers among them realized that gun rights as an issue could be fashioned to their political advantage.
Paralleling this development post-war liberalism was being consolidated in an urban/suburban population that saw guns as instruments of crime, degradation, and even as a mechanism of police violence.
The Black Panthers understood this last part to the bone by taking the notion of self defense seriously. They exercised their "gun rights" to such an extent that the elites had them terminated (as executed by Hoover’s FBI and urban police forces nationwide) with extreme prejudice. In most cases this was just bare knuckle political dominance and subjugation dressed up in some fancy anti-crime rhetoric.
Meanwhile, on the upper west side and in like enclaves around the nation liberals didn’t fully understand the changing power dynamics. An expansion of violent urban crime fueled by the growing drug culture and widespread economic dislocations created a generalized fear in the populace. This, and an increasingly fractured left riven by identity politics (necessary though ultimately self indulgent and self destructive) created a deep lack of awareness on the gun rights issue. The working class, natural allies of liberals on core economic issues, could not countenance shrill rhetoric (nor resist effective propaganda from the right) that equated their ownership of hunting rifles and target pistols with criminal behavior.
So where does that leave us now?
I believe we have handed the underlying issue and the power that comes with it (i.e. the implied threat) to the RW lock, stock and ummm barrel.
Current circumstances could provide progressives with an opportunity to neutralize some of the RW advantage on this issue.
To that end I call on willing progressive gun-lovers to legally and publicly take a stand for liberal causes (e.g. single-payer, cap-and-trade, etc.) in the public sphere while simultaneously demonstrating their rights under the Second Amendment.
It's time to end the one-sided political bullying (for that is what it is) by fighting our idealogical battles on a level playing field.
That's what we did in the past 5 years with online organizing, that's what we did with political data, that's what we did with ideas, that's what we did with the Internet, and that's what we should do with the LEGAL RIGHT to bear arms.
No more cringing. No more fear. No more intimidation. We win with our ideas, our ideals, and with the tools we need to make them real.