Martyrs and false populists.

In desperate times we strain to find something to celebrate. There is an understandable tendency to romanticize the oppressed, and to grasp at anything that looks like alternative politics.

Hence the recent, disturbingly knee-jerk reactions within the left to such disparate phenomena as the militia movement and the Mumia Abu-Jamal case.

I was surprised by the letters in The Nation and The Progressive from readers who were affronted by negative coverage of the militias in each magazine. I've heard the same kind of position taken in conversations with people I know personally who identify with the left. The substance of this ostensibly progressive defense of the militia movement goes something like this: the militia supporters are by and large working class; they often are recruited from especially depressed local economies; their membership expresses their alienation from politics-as-usual; therefore, we shouldn't dismiss their populist frustrations.

It is true that militia members want to curtail the repressive power of the state and complain about the predatory power of large corporations. They oppose NAFTA and want to assert popular, community control of government. But defending them on these grounds is naive and short-sighted, and reflects a broader, perhaps more insidious tendency--including a kind of accentuate-the-positive bias toward whatever looks like autonomous, populist action. This is the same tendency that willfully inflates any sort of apparently group-conscious activity--for instance, youth fads--into the status of political movements.

On the militia issue, the first problem is that class origin, or for that matter class identity, isn't an adequate criterion for making judgments about political positions. The principle that if it comes from the oppressed, there must be something OK about it is not only simplistic; it can have truly reactionary implications. This kind of thinking has too often led down the road to complete accommodation to the worst strains arising from working classes. In fact, it's almost routine now that calls for sympathetic understanding of working-class bigotry--"we need to recognize the genuine fear of loss of control of the family, traditional values, close-knit neighborhood, jobs, way of life etc., etc."--are the first steps down the road to full-scale retreat from commitment to equality and social justice. Think about the Democratic Leadership Council.

There is a long history of rationalizing working-class nativism and racism. It helped sanitize the regime of terror that was the Southern Redemption, restoring unadulterated white-supremacist rule after Reconstruction. The architects of that restoration's ideology characterized the racist putsch in the South as a revolt of the common people against a corrupt elite that cynically used blacks to further unpopular aims.

The same mindset counseled sympathetic understanding for labor's rabid anti-Asian racism in the West in the late Nineteenth Century, and tolerated the New York draft riot of 1863, anti-feminist and anti-abortion activism, and whites' anti-busing riots. One version even sympathized with official resistance in Yonkers, New York, to court-ordered remediation of a lengthy, nefarious history of racial discrimination. Yonkers, the line went, was being penalized as a working-class/lower-middle-class suburb that can't afford to use exclusionary zoning to keep blacks and Hispanics out.

Of course, most leftists who have a warm spot for the militia movement would not support these positions. But the differences are more of degree than of kind. Today, we hear arguments that we should focus on common class interests like living-wage jobs for all rather than affirmative action, and "universalistic" rather than "race-based" social policy. In his new book, Turning Back: The Retreat from Racial Justice in American Thought and Policy, Stephen Steinberg discusses how this ostensibly farther-reaching alternative often masks a retreat from the struggle for equality within the working class. Sometimes, he notes, it yields a racial trickledown argument that the best way to fight racism or sexism is to direct benefits or strategy to whites and men.

Racist and fascist movements always have some popular, working-class base. Mussolini came out of the Italian Socialist party, and National Socialism sought actively to compete for the hearts and minds of politically unsophisticated German workers disposed to authoritarian, conspiratorial, and scapegoating theories. In both cases, the movement drew energy from the same kind of superficially anti-capitalist rhetoric that the militias project--complete with their versions of "black helicopter" fantasies. The Nazis also pioneered, in their conspiratorial mythology about German defeat in World War 1, the "stab in the back" theory that underlies the POW/MIA lunacy running through the ideological pools in which the militia movement swims.

And, besides, their anti-statism really isn't the same as ours, or it shouldn't be anyway.

But confusion on this score points up another problem in the left. We often aren't clear enough about distinguishing opposition to the actions of particular governments and regimes from hostility to the actions of government in principle. As a result, we sometimes over-value anything that looks like an insurgency against concentrated power.

It's easy, for instance, to paint ordinary Not In My Back Yard politics at the local level as something grander and more progressive. Mobilization by residents of a threatened neighborhood to stop a corporate development project can be a very good thing. But the visions that support such mobilizing aren't necessarily progressive; they can rest on the same kind of parochial territorialism that prompts demonstrations against housing desegregation. In fact, opponents of open housing routinely see themselves as the victims of oppressive government and evil realtors. Even the slow-growth movement in local politics isn't unambiguously democratic or anti-corporate. Often enough it simply represents the efforts of those who arrived last week to keep anyone else from arriving next week. We have to recognize such struggles' ambiguity if we are to realize their best tendencies.

We have to recognize that not every popular mobilization is progressive just because it arises from the grassroots. Having experienced the underside of populist rhetoric in segregationism and opposition to civil rights, I'm perhaps especially sensitive to the fact that a lot of nastiness can lie under labels like "the people." Lynch mobs were, after all, a form of popular, direct action.

No matter what Alexander Cockburn says, I haven't seen anything to suggest that I shouldn't judge the militiamen by the company they keep politically. Nor have I seen any signs among them of a substantive vision for political and economic reorganization that would allay my fears.

I confess, as well, to being toward the statist end of the left, at least among those of us whose politics were formed in the 1960s and after. I'm always uneasy when we get fuzzy about the distinction between our objections to actions taken by those who control the American state and a more general objection to the State as an abstraction. Yes, government is ultimately a means of coercion. Therefore, it needs to be accountable to the citizenry. At the same time, government needs to be insulated from the whims of fleeting, potentially tyrannical majorities.

The experience of being black in the United States highlights the dangers of a simplistically majoritarian notion of democracy. Decentralization of public authority in the name of popular democracy--from "states' rights" to the "new (and newer) federalism"--has been a rallying cry of opponents of black civil rights for more than a century and a half.

The state is the only vehicle that can protect ordinary citizens against the machinations of concentrated private power. Even though it does function as an executive committee of the ruling class, the national state is the guarantor of whatever victories working people, minorities, gays, women, the elderly, and other constituencies we embrace have been able to win--often enough against the state itself. And this applies both to formalizing those victories as rights and using public policy to redistribute resources that make them practical reality.

The public sector is the area of the economy most responsive to equal-opportunity employment. And the national state--ours as well as others--is the only entity powerful enough to control the activities of piratical multinational corporations. That's what the fights against NAFTA and GATT are all about--preserving the state's capacity to enforce social, economic, and environmental standards within its own territory.

And that's just the defensive side of the struggle. We need to press for a more active use of the state in international economic and foreign policy to combat the multinationals' depredations across the globe.

It always seemed to me that our struggle, to rehearse a long-outdated slogan, wasn't really to smash the state, but to seize it and direct it to democratic and egalitarian purposes.

I don't get a sense of anything compatible with this perspective from the militia movement. Empty cliches like, "The government is the child of the people and has to be spanked when it gets out of line," don't inspire confidence. Who do the militiamen have in mind when they evoke the image of "the people" What do they consider appropriate uses of public authority?

As Chip Berlet and others point out in the June issue of The Progressive, there's not much reason to think that the militia movement's politics are anything other than paranoid proto-fascist. To say that they're not all racist, sexist, or xenophobic is both bizarre and beside the point. Organizationally and ideologically they're plugged into the most vicious, lunatic, and dangerous elements of the right. No matter that some individuals may think, or want to think, or want gullible journalists to think that they're just out playing a more strenuous version of Dungeons and Dragons.

So what if this puts me on the same side as the Justice Department? We're also on the same side when we demand enforcement of voting rights or redress from Ku Klux Klan violence or prosecution of corporate criminals. And, even if I weren't a former object of COINTELPRO-era surveillance and harassment, I would have no illusions about the really existing law-enforcement authorities--at whatever level of the federal system--being dependable allies. I grew up in inner cities where municipal police were clearly an occupying force. I lived through the civil-rights movement when the state police and FBI worked hand-in-hand with the Klan. Nevertheless, it's important for us to recognize that in principle at least the state belongs to us as much as to any other interests in the society, and part of our fight must be to make it responsive to us.

The issue of our relation to the criminal-justice system highlights another problematic tendency in the left, one that appears most topically in the Mumia Abu-Jamal support movement. We often have trouble keeping straight that being a victim of injustice has no necessary relation to the quality of one's politics or character. A friend in Atlanta, in the aftermath of Wayne Williams's conviction in the city's missing-and-murdered-children case that drew national attention in the early 1980s, observed that the state probably had just railroaded a guilty man. We have to recognize that that is always a possibility in the messy world of social experience.

This is true of organizations as well as individuals. Members of the MOVE cult in Philadelphia certainly should not have been bombed by the city, but it was reasonable to evict them after years of their neighbors' complaints of harassment and public-health violations.

I don't presume to pronounce on Abu-Jamal's guilt or innocence. At this moment only three issues should concern us: that there are very persuasive reasons to believe that he didn't receive a fair trial, quite likely for political reasons; that his freedom of speech has been violated; and that he is an atypically visible victim of the barbarity of capital punishment. We must avoid the temptation to exalt him as a symbol of progressive politics. All that most of us know about his politics, apart from his speaking out against police brutality, is that he has some connection to MOVE--a group with pretty wacky ideas. Certainly he is an activist, but there are a lot of activists, some of whom have bad politics. Being victimized by the state should not in itself confer political stature.

First of all, the evidence to which we have access leaves open a possibility that Abu-Jamal could actually be guilty of the crime with which he is charged. Second, whether he's guilty or innocent, his ordeal doesn't indicate anything about the substance of his politics. It's certainly right and important to rally and organize to support his case. But we must take care neither to rush to make him a hero nor to let his appeal as an individual divert us from broader, more complex concerns.

Norma McCorvey (Jane Roe of Roe v. Wade), in her recent conversion to Operation Rescue's brand of holy rolling, should give us pause about loading too much significance onto individuals whose personal circumstances momentarily embody larger political concerns.

Some of us can recall as well the case of Joanne Little in the 1970s. Little's was an especially tragic story of an impoverished young woman from a small North Carolina town. While incarcerated on a breaking-and-entering charge, she escaped from jail after killing a white jailer who allegedly attempted to rape her in her cell. The state declared her an outlaw, which amounted to a shoot-on-sight order. Little became a cause calibre for the women's movement in particular. But she was in far over her head as a celebrity. Her subsequent forays into petty criminality left the movement with egg on its face.

Even under the best of conditions a movement built around a single individual can go only so far. This approach trades on the imagery of martyrdom; yet its goal is to ensure that the putative martyrs are rescued. Rescued martyrs, however, are always a potential problem because they live on as fallible human beings.

The difference between James Meredith, who integrated the University of Mississippi and was later shot on a solitary march through the state, and Martin Luther King and Malcolm X is instructive. Unlike the others, Meredith survived and went on to follow the twists and turns of post-segregation politics in increasingly pathetic and perverse ways, bottoming out as an aide to Jesse Helms. Martyrs work best when they're dead.

The cause-calibre phenomenon, like fuzzy-mindedness about the militia movement, reflects a romantic, almost opportunistic tendency in the left. It is part of a soothing, "warm-bath" politics, a politics that is counterproductive because it imagines a specious, quick-fix alternative to the tedious, frustrating work that we most need: building support by organizing to create a base for a concrete, coherent political program.

Especially now, in this most dangerous of times, we need to be much clearer than that.

Adolph Reed Jr. teaches at Northwestern and is co-chair of the Chicago-based Coalition for New Priorities.