CodePink’s Medea Benjamin recently stirred up controversy by offering an “olive branch” to tea party movement activists.
Benjamin’s editorial reads, “We are not naïve to think that it would be easy for the Tea Party and the peace movement to work together… But building peace means reaching out to the other side and trying to find common ground even with those people whose beliefs contradict so many of our own. If the Tea Party is really against runaway government spending, then certainly we can work together to cut a slice out of the military pork that is bankrupting our nation.”
Is her move brilliant politics or little more than a Hitler-Stalin Pact?
To be clear, lots of the left have wrangled over how to win over elements of the tea party crowd to things progressives/radicals can agree on, while others have blanched at such suggestions, most notably currents in the radical left.
For people of color, such proposed alliances are incredibly relevant. The tea party movement has long been accused of racism. And there are plenty of examples of same that concerned people point to — Birther conspiracy theorists, bigots, etc.
Right-wingers counter racist (and leftist) infiltrators are being kicked out of events these days, and that the tea party movement is seeking moderation. Don’t count T-Pain as a person of color supporting the tea party movement faithful though.
The perceptions of Benjamin and others are being criticized as misreading tea party movement activists, often well-off and essentially libertarian, for potential recruits. “I don’t think the left has much to offer upper middle class white guys who mostly want to cut taxes, balance budgets, and destroy the last vestiges of the welfare state,” says Chris Maisano. ” The Tea Party ranks don’t seem to be a very fertile ground for left organizing, and anyone who thinks the teabaggers can be brought over to our side is engaging in wishful thinking.”
However, there are no shortage of people considering a coalition of tea party activists and anti-war forces to press for change. Among them, conservatives are debating the left-right alliance that Medea Benjamin suggests. Can such a united front be successful? Is it even possible?
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Hell Mot**** NAW!!! People of Color need to stay away from these types of alliances at all costs!!! They want to kill us, you don’t unite with the enemy. The fact that Code Pink would even try to extend an Olive branch, exposes The Left for who they really are, WHITE NORTH AMERICANS; who on the one hand kiss African and Latino babies when they need to use us as as cannon fodder to press the agenda for “middle” (white) America, but can ignore the the racists actions of the teabag crowd!
People of Color need to seek out alliances based on SOLIDARITY,not an alliance of convenience. Back in the day The Nation Of Islam extended an olive branch to the American Nazi founder George Lincoln Rockwell because they both shared the belief that race mixing was wrong. Does that not reek of contradictions! You can’t build an alliance with people who want to annihilate you. A revolutionary’s beef with Obama isn’t the same beef a teabagger has with Obama; so there can never be Solidarity between the two.
Our beef with Obama is one based on the objective realities of an Imperialism in crisis flaunting the face of the oppressed around as a subterfuge, their beef with Obama is the subjective idealism of racial superiority that is the ideological basis for their delusion of American greatness
Oh yeah, I really do love all the nasty, ugly, mean-spirited, racists slurs against Obama because it pulls the covers of this colorblind sh*** America runs around pretending to be. The teabagger epitomizes what America is and all it can ever bE.
ONE AFRICA! ONE NATION!
VIVA LA REVOLUCION!
I wish this could be broadcast across the US left.
The white blindspot Benjamin is illustrating is the reason white progressives have so few non-whites organizing with them.
And they pretend to not understand why they are isolated from Blacks and other non-whites. This is why.
When will this tea party group go away???
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I think we should call these people Libertarians with a capital L like the US political party to distinguish them from people who actually support liberty for the whole human race, not just for disembodied capital and the few people who have access to it in varying degrees. Just my humble opinion.
I think the “smart politics” is to point out the logical conclusions of Teaparty rhetoric and observe the extent to which they oppose things they should logically support, and vice versa.
By the overt logic of their rhetoric of “free” trade and democracy, but not the thinly-veiled logic of their politics of domination and exclusion, they should support the immediate closure of the 4-5 wars, 700-1k overseas military bases, the domestic drug war, the massively wasteful and generally repugnant prison-industrial complex, etc.
They should support the free movement of labor from other countries to the US and recognize the right of such labor to the same minimum wage and working conditions that are theoretically guaranteed to citizens. To do otherwise is to support the hemorrhage of US citizen jobs, which they claim to be against, and the driving down of wages, substantially reducing the ability of even US citizen workers to trade their labor “free”ly and fairly.
If they don’t want “taxpayers” to get ripped off by Medicare, they should support meaningful healthcare reform to drive down costs. With trillions cut from the budget at this point, extending Medicare to cover everyone should cost a drop in the bucket, while creating jobs, which I think they are supposed to like. This is obviously superior to private vouchers and laissez-faire paths because private health insurance has shown itself to be more fiscally wasteful, so everyone would pay more under a private system than they would under universalized Medicare.
It is self-defeating to give up essential social services, basic bargaining rights, civil liberties, freedom of and from religion, etc and legitimize the nonsense Teaparty narrative that uses false fiscal concerns as a mask for an anti-POC, anti-worker, anti-woman, nativist agenda. They will never give us the opportunity to work with them on the things we should theoretically agree on. That’s why we can point those things out as an analytical tool. I could be wrong, but maybe this could prove to be the “smart politics.”
An oppressed group forming an alliance with a privileged group? I wonder whose agenda will dominate…