Date: Fri, 8 Mar 1996 13:39:19 -0800
From: djones-AT-uclink.berkeley.edu (rakesh bhandari)
Subject: Re: Buchanan: right-wing populist?


>From Sally Rayan: 

> They tend to obsess, not about racial issues, but
>about the Constitution and the works of the Founding Fathers (the FF's, don't
>you know). It's interpretation and application for today is an endless debate
>amongst the patriots in general

Perhaps you are two quick to separate the two discourses.  The return to
the America that FF built may be a racial project after all; this is the
sort of argument Adolph Reed has been making.  

By the way, I think Buchanan spatters this shit talk all over his campaign
trail.  

I risk the economistic danger of dismissing the interest expressed here in
political, constitutional transformation; but I think you (Sally) are
simply failing to even consider how this fetishization of the Founding
Fathers and the pristine America (before internal and external migrations
for example)they represent is part of a reactionary vision for America's
future, a vision that worries me for obvious reasons.  

At any rate, please tell more about why you think the vision of the
Founding Fathers is so central to their discussion; what does the desire
for *return* indicate; who do they think has sold the FF's out? who is
responsible for the attack on the Spirit embodied the Constitution?   

Do you think they would be open to a radical critique of the FF themselves
and the Constitution, for example the demonstration that those ruling class
Anglo-Saxons conceived the Constitution as a way to break the power of the
real multi-ethnic majority of women and men (see for example Bertell
Ollman's edited book on the Constitution or Gerald Fresia's Towards an
American Revolution).  

Or perhaps they hope that they can take us back to the real vision of the
FF and  enfranchise themselves selectively? 

Is FF a code for a racialized democracy for real Americans--that is
democracy for those whose genealogy predates all that smelly internal and
external migration, especially from those really foreign nations)?  

By the way, I am not impressed by verbal support for the Zapatistas
thousands of miles away; the Militias may well be impressed by some of the
formal characteristics of their rebellion--so what? 

Rakesh Narpat Bhandari




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