Politics

Igarashi, was stabbed to death.  Later that month the Italian language translator, Ettore Capriolo, was stabbed and seriously injured.  The Norwegian publisher, William Nygaard, narrowly escaped an attempted assassination in 1993.  And on July 2nd of that year, an angry mob surrounded a hotel in Sivas, Turkey where Aziz Nesin, the Turkish language translator, was attending a conference celebrating a 16th century poet; learning of his presence, the mob set fire to the hotel.  Thirty-seven people died.  Nesin escaped the fire, though he was set upon by firemen and seriously beaten. Now, some of the same people and publications who have decried the fatwa as barbaric, and who have defended Rushdie in the name of democracy, tolerance, and freedom, are calling for the murder of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

the economic side, Reagan cut taxes but also raised spending, particularly on the military, and federal deficits skyrocketed.  On the political side, he grew the size of government instead of shrinking it.  On the social side, he made very few moves to dismantle the social welfare systems put in place under FDR and LBJ.  And on the cultural front, he talked a good game, but the man who had signed California’s liberal abortion law while governor, and who himself rarely attended church, was more than happy to tell the Christian Right what they wanted to hear and tally their votes while actually giving them very little in return beyond attention and political legitimacy.

Third party movements in America have generally come about during times of great social and economic stress. Typically, they have begun as social protest movements, coalesced into political movements, and eventually formed into parties.  They have also often met their demise after failed presidential bids, while their issues were diluted and partially co-opted by the major parties. Three notable examples of this are the American (“Know Nothing”) Party of the 1850s, which arose in reaction to foreign immigration and relentless urbanization; the National Labor Union and accompanying National Labor Reform Party of the 1860s, whose constituency was workers caught in the exploitative grind of the industrial revolution; and the People’s (“Populist”) Party of the 1890s, which emerged as farmers were thrust into the modern market economy. There is a common pattern to the history of all three that today’s Tea Party movement may yet be in the midst of following, at least to some extent.