Last month, I sat down with Michael Steven Smith for a wide-ranging conversation. Democracy @ Work is pleased to present it here as a 3-part series. Michael is an accomplished progressive lawyer and a former board member of the Center for Constitutional Rights. He is also co-host of the nationally broadcast Law and Disorder radio show, where he has interviewed some of the most prominent voices of the American left, including Chris Hedges, Daniel Ellsburg, and Democracy @ Work’s own Richard Wolff. Michael co-authored Who Killed Che? with his co-host Michael Ratner, and his latest book, From the Flag to the Cross: Fascism American Style, is highly recommended and available now from OR Books.
Isaiah Blum: I’d like you to talk like a little bit about Law and Disorder radio, how you came to be involved in that, how your background positioned you to be involved in that..
Michael Steven Smith: Yeah. I started Law and Disorder Radio 21 years ago with Michael Ratner. He was then the president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. And we recruited Heidi Boghosian, who was the Executive Director of the National Lawyers Guild. Then we recruited Dalia Hashad, who was an Arab-American woman working for Amnesty International. And I went to the board meeting of WBAI, and I made a presentation - this was in 2004, after 9/11, and the Iraq war, and the Patriot Act – and I made a pitch about why we needed to explore the repercussions of all this stuff. And they thought that was a good idea. And then Bernard White who was the program director just put me on, me and Michael, and then Heidi. If you’d like, I can send you a list of all the guests we’ve had. It’s like a political/intellectual history of recent times. Everybody from Tariq Ali to Howard Zinn. Yesterday we interviewed Chris Hedges on Gaza, and on the current political situation. Next show is going to be on Cuba.
IB: I’ve been going through this book you co-wrote, and it’s a great book. The title is From the Flag to the Cross. I think it’s a great title, and I really like the approach of the book. You’ve got seven different left-wing figures, American figures. But very, very different voices. And I think it does a really interesting job showcasing what too often is not shown, which is that there’s a lot of intellectual diversity still on the left, and it’s a very broad and very wide-ranging political and intellectual tradition. Was it intentional that the different essays would be sourced from the most diverse voices possible?
MSS: Yes! These interviews, which we turned into book chapters, were all with people who I knew, with the exception of Bill Mullen. Diane Feeley was an old friend of mine. We worked together at Pathfinder Press in 1971 for four years. When the SWP disintegrated she joined an organization called Solidarity, which I support. I asked her to be an interviewee to talk about unions, and I asked her to recommend someone to talk about the peculiar oppression of black people, with the assumption that they would be in the vanguard of a coming anti-fascist struggle, since historically they always have been. And she recommended Bill Mullen. But the other six people are people I know. Chris Hedges had just gone out to Seattle and appeared in a rally for Kshama Sawant. And I watched that rally, and listened to what she had to say. So I reached out to her and asked her to be interviewed; she contributed the last chapter on what is to be done. I think that what inspired the idea of the book was the profound insight of Bertolt Brecht, that you can’t talk about fascism without talking about capitalism, from whence it comes. Every person we interviewed understood that. So Chris talked about White Christian nationalism as a core part of the whole fascist project. And he talked about how what we really need, ultimately, to stop this fascist transformation that’s going on, is a general strike. And Kshama talks about that at the end. So that bookends the book. As I mentioned we had Diane Feeley on Unions, Henry Giraux on education, Margaret Kimberly on the Black Struggle, Bill Mullen, who said you can’t rely on the courts, the courts are not gonna save us. And that’s true, because even when you get good decisions, and we’ve had a number of good decisions from the courts, you have to think about what Hitler said about the pope: “how many divisions does the pope have?” The courts cannot enforce their own rulings. They’ve got no divisions to do that. So while they ruled against Trump in a number of ways, they really just sit there when Trump ignores them.
IB: You talk about unions bookending the book, and indeed, there’s this thread running through all of those essays, this agreement that the main tool to fight any growing fascist movement is militant unions. And I think that’s certainly true. We know that when Hitler first came to power, his first order of business was to crush the German labor movement, completely destroy the independence of the unions, outlaw the communist and leftist parties.
MSS: Exactly. And that’s something that Rick Wolff explains in his chapter. Rick says that the German working class was pulverized by the First World War, then by the Depression and inflation. Meanwhile, the capitalist class sought in Hitler an agreement. Rick writes about this. The capitalist class would be supported by Hitler, and in turn they would support Hitler. That’s what happened. And there’s a parallel with what’s going on here in this country now. You can see it in the destruction of the East Wing of the White House, where Trump got money to do that from a number of corporations, whose names he plans to put up on a plaque in a new ballroom that he’s building. It shows the ties that he has to the capitalist class, irrespective of the vulgar project that he’s launched.
IB: Yeah, it’s much more openly transactional now, I think. The deal made between the Nazis and, you know, Krupp Steel and IG Farben, they really did make this kind of Faustian bargain, and at the same time a lot of these industrialists were quite anti-Semitic or even maybe fascistic in their thinking. But mainly, I think, a lot of them were sort of in that mandarin caste, this wealthy, cloistered-off-from-society class who, by their nature, were apolitical up until the point that they feared a response from a militant working class, a militant socialist party, a militant communist party. And that was what pushed these capitalists into the arms of the Nazis.
MSS: That’s precisely true. And a corner of the curtain has been revealed with the Epstein files, which shows you the nature of the capitalist class. After all, the people who made up the elite around Epstein are various segments of the ruling class in this country, and even around the world.
This concludes part 1 of this 3-part series. Join us next week for Michael’s unique insights into the $100 million lawsuit filed by Malcolm X’s family against the NYPD, FBI, and CIA, alleging complicity in the civil rights leader’s murder.
Isaiah Blum is a Graduate of the New School, teacher, and contributor with Democracy @ Work. He writes about economics, politics, history, culture, and more. Follow him on Instagram @blumbergznews