03/16/10 – Jesse Walker – The Scott Horton Show

All right, terrific.
I want to start talking to you a little bit about a few weeks ago you attended a fairly interesting event while all the other people were at CPAC.
It's something called, well, I don't know, actually never figured out what the official name of it was.
But you managed to get a group of very, very interesting and diverse people together in one room to talk about the war.
Can you tell me more about that?
Sure.
This was back in February, and I'm not sure what the official name of the gathering was either.
But there were two or three dozen people from all points of the political spectrum, left wing, right wing, libertarian, and other miscellaneous who shared an opposition to both the specific wars that are going on right now and to empire.
Different people took that opposition to empire to different extents, let's say.
Some people I think were more thoroughgoing opponents of war in all its forms than others were.
But the idea was to get people together who might not agree on social security or health care or who should control the means of production, but who do share this interest in having the United States have a more humble foreign policy, as someone once said.
Well, you mentioned a more humble foreign policy.
I mean, what is it that you all hate America so much about?
I don't know.
Oh, you know, it's just all the damn people in there.
One thing that was very nice about it was the lack of that sort of cant.
You know, I mean, the conservatives there, you know, had no truck with that kind of rhetoric that you heard so much of in the Bush administration.
The liberals did not, well, there was a little bit of Tea Party baiting, but for the most part did not go into the, for the left wing equivalent of that.
And what people came to that for different reasons, you know, I mean, there are some people who I think were ultimately pacifists.
There are, I mean, obviously people come to their foreign policy positions, not for just one reason, but I mean, some people, they felt it was taking away resources that could be used to greater effect by the government at home.
Others would like to have that money in people's hands at home through, you know, reduction of the initial taxation.
You had, you know, people who see war as an affront to liberty and also people who see war as an affront to family values.
Talking about the ways that, you know, mothers are ripped from their children who are sent off to war, the mobility at home that is encouraged by the military lifestyle, and still more, I mean, I could barely scratch it.
I mean, there are people who are concerned about the corporate domination of politics and saw that connected to the military-industrial complex.
And there was an awful lot of historical perspective.
And one of the first things that happened in the discussion is a number of, it was mostly a free-flowing give-and-take of ideas, but they did have some sort of five-minute statements at the beginning of each chunk of the discussion.
And very early in the day, we had people talk about the opposition to past wars, World War I, World War II, Vietnam, and then going up forward to the left-right nation's alliance of the Ron Paul campaign in 2008, and the ways in which people had reached across or attempted to reach across ideological lines in the past, either with success or ultimately with it getting snuffed out.
Well, you wrote not too long ago in the Wall Street Journal a little bit about populism and tea parties, and you talk a little bit about Obama and Al Franken and so on.
Where has been the grassroots effort or the populist effort on an issue that most clearly affects poorer people in America when the economic draft hits?
Well, you know, the most important thing to recognize about the current wars is that there's not much of an anti-war movement.
That's certainly true now with a Democratic president, because a lot of people have hung up their shoes and gone home.
But even when you had the mass marches, and you had a lot of people who were sort of actively engaged in what was presented as an anti-war, anti-empire movement, it really did not have much impact on politics, other than people being able to wave the bloody shirt and point to them.
There certainly were resolutions and such on the local level, and that's very good.
But in comparison to the anti-war movements of the past, I mean, I don't mean just Vietnam.
I mean, one thing that was brought up at the meeting was just how successful the America First Committee was during the lead-in to World War II, and for the people among the people around the table, not all of whom were going to agree that World War II was a bad idea.
It was still a very impressive example of this group that was a very middle American that included people from both the right and the left, and the miscellaneous, that had a lot of supporters in Congress, and really were, although FDR was doing covert assistance of different types, and overt assistance as well, in terms of things like the Lend-Lease Act, ultimately was holding the line against the U.S. getting involved in the war, until the United States itself was attacked at Pearl Harbor.
And I think that we haven't seen anything comparable to that with the recent wars, despite the obvious populist interest in opposing them.
Someone like Jim Webb will speak up, someone like Ron Paul will speak up, but neither the mainstream of the Democratic Party, nor the mainstream of the Republican Party seems to be listening.
Well, what I'm curious about, though, is why the Tea Partiers, and why even with the young Ron Paul movement, the kids are still chanting, End the Fed, which...
Oh, I see what you mean.
Yeah, I mean, why the current populist moment hasn't embraced this.
Well, with the Tea Parties, I think it's pretty obvious.
It's that, I mean, it's the movement that's sort of united by their opposition to government spending, or excessive government spending, or government spending when the President is a Democrat.
And there's a conscious effort to smooth over differences people have in other areas.
And that's most obvious in the case of the social conservative issues, because that's a place where people are being clearly muted, who otherwise might be speaking out on that under a Tea Party banner.
But also in foreign policy, people want to have the energy of the Ron Paul movement as part of the Tea Parties, but they really want a table and a discussion of what's happening abroad.
Now, someone like Ron Paul will bring up foreign policy in the context of government spending and so on, but that has not set the agenda for the Tea Parties.
Now, I haven't...
I mean, I think the Ron Paul movement has been very...
I mean, Young Americans for Liberty and so on has been very good on this issue.
I mean, several people from Young Americans for Liberty, I think someone affiliated with the campaign for liberty, although I don't know if he's officially a part of it, were at the meeting.
The Fed is the focus because, you know, domestic policy really is the focus right now.
It would be nice to see people moving some of that.
I mean, this is a fruitful area of cooperation, or could be a fruitful area of cooperation between the Ron Paul people and the people in the revived SDS, for example.
And that was one topic of discussion because there was one or two...
There were one or two people from SDS at the meeting, and I'd like to see that happening.
I was also asking some of the left-wing young activists why they don't start Tea Party chapters of their own.
I've always been sort of surprised at the lack of creative thinking on the left, that you automatically have to demonize a group that's very open and has a lot of diversity of opinion instead of joining in and saying, here's our position on bailout, and so on, and why we're against it.
And maybe they could draw some energy towards an anti-war statement.
But I'm just getting back to your original question.
I think that it's a movement animated by domestic issues, and people think it would just drive people away if they start bringing up this other stuff.
It always kind of perplexes me that people don't see the obvious connection, though, between their own lives, particularly in tax and spending issues and the war.
Because the joke about the Tea Parties is they don't want you to touch anything that has to do with medical, Medicare spending, and Social Security, and the Pentagon, which comprises almost all of it, doesn't it?
Yeah.
And of course, you should never paint with too broad a brush with the Tea Party.
It's a very multifaceted movement.
I made that wisecrack earlier about opposing spending while there's a Democrat in office.
That's very true of some of them, but it's not true of all of them.
And I think there's a lot of hope for having people take on a more, speaking as a libertarian, taking on a more broad libertarian critique of American politics today within the Tea Party movement.
But that said, yeah, they don't want to touch that.
I think what really drove that home was there was that stupid Mount Vernon statement that got adopted the week before CPAC, I think it was, where all these conservative bigwigs put their signatures on this incredibly vague and mushy statement of principles.
And their foreign policy plank was so vaguely stated that you could read it as supporting anything from the immediate invasion of China to cutting off the foreign aid budget and being a military isolationist.
I don't have the statement in front of me, but the first half of it was saying we must do all we can to spread the values of freedom around the world, and the second half is within the bounds of prudence.
And depending on how you define prudence, that can make anyone from Bill Kristol to Ron Paul happy.
So, I mean, there's this real strong effort to smooth over any differences.
The only exception is in a case like the Rand Paul campaign in Kentucky, where his, not really his positions, but his father's positions on foreign policy will be brought up as a weapon against him by someone who wants to defeat him and wants to cut into some of his Tea Party-style support.
Not very successfully so far.
But other than that, I mean, most of the GOP hopes it'll go away.
The only exceptions are, on the one hand, folks like Ron Paul, and on the other hand, the people who believe, I mean, the David Brooks types, or maybe not, I shouldn't say David Brooks, but some of the weekly standard types who seem to think that foreign policy should be the center of the Republican agenda, and they don't like seeing it swept under the rug, because they're much more interested in that than they are in, you know, stopping bailouts, a lot of them actually support a number of the bailouts.
Hey, Jesse, Scott here.
Hey, how are you doing?
I'm doing good.
Thanks for joining us on the show today.
I appreciate it.
Everybody, it's Jesse Walker from Reason Magazine.
Listen, so tell me, drop some names a little bit about who all was there at this conference, because I'm really excited about this.
This has been a pet project of mine, just at least rhetorically anyway, an idea of mine for a long, long time, is trying to really, you know, not to sound like too much of a commie, but get everybody who's on this side of the class war to, you know, join together over the most important issues, obviously peace and the Bill of Rights, most important among those.
And I'm really excited about this thing, because it seems like there's a lot of people involved in this nascent anti-imperialist league, or whatever it's going to be called here, that something could actually come of this.
And then you'll have, I guess, you know, you're really right how the Tea Parties have minimized the foreign policy angle, but that's okay, so we'll just do this and emphasize our foreign policy angle this way.
It seems like still a great way to include maybe the Tea Party people, and like those left-wing kids that you were asking them, why don't they join the Tea Party?
Well, maybe we can get both of those sides to join our new anti-imperialist league.
Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, it was dumb of me, I should have gotten the program in front of me before I started doing the shows, so I could reel off the names.
So this will be an incomplete list, and I should tell you before I go on that part of the agreement of participating in the first meeting was that we wouldn't quote people or say specific things they said at the meeting without their permission afterwards.
So I can't answer, if you want to say what did Ralph Nader have to say about such-and-such, I can't answer that right now, although I might make some statements that so-and-so said without saying who so-and-so was.
But Ralph Nader, I just mentioned him, he missed the morning session, but he gave a lunch talk and then stuck around for the afternoon.
Also on the left, Katrina Vanden Heuvel, the editor of The Nation, and a few people who write for The Nation, William Greider was there.
On the right, Kara Hopkins, Daniel McCarthy, Scott McConnell from the American Conservative, Alan Carlson from the Howard Center, who's a very big social conservative who's also anti-war, and William Lind, who's a big writer on the topic of fourth-generation warfare, very conservative.
In fact, I should say that of the people I was speaking as a libertarian, when the topic moved away from foreign policy, he was the person most likely to say things I disagreed with.
It was not one of the leftists, it was him.
But very sharp comments on defense policy, I thought, and I actually mean defense policy, not military policy.
I mean, he was talking about ways to get things back towards defense.
Bill Coffman was very instrumental in getting the thing pulled together and had a lot of things to say.
Glenn Ford from, not the old movie star, but the fellow from the Black Agenda Report was there.
Oh, let me, Jeff Taylor from, I can't remember where he's teaching now, but a political scientist who did an interesting book on the different populist and anti-populist traditions in the Democratic Party, and whose own views are sort of, he's sort of like a libertarian-green-Christian mixed combination.
It's very hard to classify, but very interesting.
Yeah, Jeff Taylor from the show.
I'm just reeling off names now, but the point is, there are people from, oh, a number of libertarians, of course, me, Doug Bondow, David Henderson.
So it was a real coalition from all sides of the spectrum.
Well, you know, I can't help but point out here that this sounds like the roster of people who we publish, or at least link to, at antiwar.com all the time.
All the rest of the left, the right, and the libertarians.
They may have scanned down a few antiwar.com pages when looking for ideas of people to invite.
Yeah.
Well, Jesse, I know you can't quote specific people, but what exactly is the plan of action?
Is it in terms of activism, or writing, speaking?
What's the next step in bringing all this?
Well, I mean, they're sort of trying to build outwards from this.
The next meeting later this year, as far as I know, it's not set yet, is probably going to be public.
The first meeting, there was a deliberate attempt to, I mean, it was a deliberate decision not to include elected officials.
The closest we had to a politician was Ralph Nader, and perhaps some will come to the second meeting.
And, you know, have, and then once you're able to do these things in public to then a, you know, move towards, you know, direct plans for activism.
I mean, at this point, since most of the people at this meeting were writers, you know, that means two things.
You're going to have a lot of reports going online about what happened, which, you know, you've seen, and you can go online and read them.
And the other is, you know, you're not going to have a whole lot of action plans, because, you know, these are more people who write than are, than run out on the streets, although there were some, you know, activists there, as I said.
But that said, there was some discussion of having some, a touring teach-in, for example, with people from both the left and the right, and the, you know, non-Euclidean part of the spectrum.
You know, having, you know, one thing that kept sort of coming up is, you know, what alternatives are there to marches?
I don't know if it kept coming up, but it did come up in some conversations, because, you know, we've had a lot of marches, and they haven't done much good at all in terms of actually changing policy.
And I don't know that we have, you know, any, I mean, it's not like we came out with some grand new idea, but I think that just the need to think creatively about that, and maybe just using the fact that you could have folks from Students for a Democratic Society and Young Americans for Liberty working together on a project could itself get attention and open doors in a way that having yet another answer march in D.C. does not.
So those are some of the answers.
But in terms, again, this was a preliminary meeting, might not be the right word for it, but this was an opening meeting to just prove it can be done, that it would not end with a food fight, that people could get along.
I think most of the people did their get-along.
You know, there were some moments, I think there's one person who probably won't be coming to future meetings, but in general, it was pretty productive.
I mean, just the fact that people were able to, you know, sit down and have, hear something that they agree with, coming from someone that they don't ordinarily agree to, and with a spin that they had never really put on the issue before, that might make them want to go read some more from that other side's point of view, and incorporate that into their critique of the empire, I think it's self-productive.
Well, you mentioned the Jeffersonian liberal Jeff Taylor, and he writes at Front Porch Republic, and his article about this meeting is called, Come Home, America, Prospects for a Coalition Against Empire, and I really highly recommend it, because he goes through the whole history of all left, right, populist, anti-war coalitions in history, and how they all worked, and who all, which congressmen you never heard of helped, and all kinds of great stuff.
It's a really great article.
If people want to read up on this, I mean, the two most, or actually the three things you should most read are, first of all, Jeff's piece at Front Porch Republic, second, Sam Smith of the Progressive Review, who was also there, wrote a very nice, and fairly lengthy summary of what he took away from it, over at his site, the Progressive Review, or Under News, as he also calls it, and also, I didn't mention the organizers, but Kevin Zeese, from the left, and George O'Neill, from the right, Kevin Zeese wrote a piece, which I think was on the Veterans for Peace website, which was just calling for the idea of left and right, and others joining together around this issue, and I believe that first went up before the weekend that we met, but it also just sort of gets across the idea of what he was trying to accomplish by bringing the meeting together.
Yeah, well, I have a lot of hope for this, because, you know, we have this two-party system where either ideology, at least, if not the parties in power, at least the liberal and conservative ideologies are kind of half libertarian and half authoritarian, and of course, we only get the authoritarian parts out of our politicians, but it seems like if the actual voters out there, you know, that tend to be of the liberal or conservative persuasion, if we can just get our priorities straight, it seems like we have a lot to agree on, such as, you know, keeping the Bill of Rights, and, you know, even imagining, you know, you talked earlier, Jesse, about whether one of the debates there, maybe there was a little difference of opinion about whether the government ought to spend the money here at home on other things, or whether the people ought to just keep it, can you even imagine how great it would be to be in peacetime and have that argument, well, now what do we do with the money?
Tax cuts, or more programs, or whatever?
Sure, yeah, but, I mean, one thing that I can say is that what everybody wants is what millions of Americans want, is a return to normalcy.
And I should say that there is, I mean, there are stumbling blocks, I mean, people on the right, I mean, it's obvious what the stumbling blocks on the right are, is trying to get people who conceive of themselves as conservative to oppose their country's foreign policy in wartime.
On the left, it's getting past people's identification with Obama, I mean, there was some discussion of how any of the polling of black Americans, there's this, it's this sort of down-the-line support for an anti-war foreign policy, but also a very strong support for Obama, which, you know, kind of gets in the way of, you know, point A.
So, I mean, there are these stumbling blocks, and there's also, I should say, I mean, although it was a very convivial gathering, there were times when, you know, people automatically kind of assumed that there was more agreement on other issues than there was, at one point somebody read a statement of what that person hoped everyone could get behind, and it included things that were just the automatic turnoff for anybody who was not on the left.
And I think that people who are used to being in, you know, the traditional coalitions can be a little oblivious to things like that.
But at the same time, I mean, the very fact that this was organized, that people were able to come and have these conversations, says to me that maybe a bunch of us can get past those stumbling blocks.
Well, just to finish up, I just was thinking about the, you mentioned you're from a libertarian perspective and you write for a libertarian publication, where has the libertarian movement been the past eight years?
It has seemed like it's been a bit quiet.
And is there a reason for that?
Yeah, I mean, the libertarian movement, well, you know, people who are self-identified as libertarians, I mean, a lot of them supported the wars or some of the wars, partly because there's always been kind of a hawkish rump within self-identified libertarians.
And also because 9-11, you know, I mean, it didn't change everything, but it changed something.
And some people really turned around their foreign policy views as a result.
But the flip side is, I mean, I think that whenever somebody wanted an anti-war position, to have a spokesperson for an anti-war position that was not on the left, I mean, nine times out of ten, they went to a libertarian.
I mean, it's basically been the Libertarians and then American Conservative Magazine.
I mean, that's been the source of, you know, people who are not traditional leftists opposing a war and empire.
So I don't know that libertarians have been all that more absent than, say, Democrats, you know, who have been very craven through the last eight years.
I mean, it had to be, I mean, just remember the 2004 election, you know, John Kerry's campaign, his refusal to take, even when he's criticizing the war, to take an anti-war position.
So I think it just might reflect the general, the way that society was itself acting after the last eight years.
Yeah.
And I guess in a sense, the libertarian movement is kind of half left, half right, just like the rest of the country, too.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, Jesse, thank you so much for being on the show today.
That was Jesse Walker, managing editor of Reason Magazine, the author of Rebels on the Air, an Alternative History of Radio in America.
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