Anarchy Allergy

If you've listened to or watched right wing mainstream media lately, you've heard them accuse the "woke progressive left" of hating America. You want to do something about global warming? Then you must hate America. Want to tax the rich? That's un-American, you America-hater! You protesting with BLM and Antifa? Well, then you most certainly hate America! You in favor of reorganizing the police or cutting military expenses? Well... You know... You hate America.

When conservatives claim that someone on the left "hates America," we need to understand what they mean when they say "America." You see, to them it's not the territory or the people. How could it be? To them half of the population aren't real Americans anyway. No, what they mean by America is just their own conservative values. When progressives point to something wrong within the country, like systemic racism for example, conservatives immediately use the "they hate America" accusation because pointing out faults implies something needs to be changed. Conservatives don't want change. To them America is already perfect, something they want to conserve (duh). They believe in the meritocracy so hard and so completely that, to them, there can be no racism, no patriarchy and no bigotry; if you don't make it, it's your own fault, you apparently didn't work hard enough or you're just not smart enough. And conversely, the billionaires who made it to the very top of the economical and power hierarchy, deserve every penny they got. Natural hierarchies and meritocracy are some of the conservatives' strongest beliefs, and they use both to explain away any accusation of racism and other forms of discrimination.

The below linked video does a marvelous job of explaining all this, but I want to briefly focus on America's deeply rooted fear and hatred of leftist ideologies, the source of conservatives' tendency to accuse leftists and progressives of hatred for America. Every time I go to research the things I see or hear in relation to America's aversion to leftism, I'm truly amazed by what I learn about the deep roots of this fear and hate. In the video the immigration act of 1903 is mentioned; that act prohibited anarchists from entering America. Can you imagine that? "The land of the free" making laws that exclude people with a certain ideology from entering the country? They did just that, and they repeated this feat in 1952 when communists were kept out of the country. And in between, in 1918, Congress passed the Anarchist Exclusion Act, which vastly expanded the definition of "anarchism" and made all immigrants vulnerable to denaturalization and deportation, regardless of how long they lived in the country.

The 1903 Alien Immigration Act barred anarchists from entering America, but what spurred the passing of this extremely targeted law? For that we must go back two years earlier; on September 6, 1901, Leon Czolgosz—an unemployed factory worker, American-born son of Polish immigrants, and self-proclaimed anarchist—walked up to President William McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, and shot him. Eight days later the president died from a gangrene infection around the bullet wounds, and on October 28 Czolgosz was executed in Auburn Prison on an electric chair provided by Thomas Edison. Now here's how the fear was stoked in the very early 1900's:

...the electric chair and cinema were exemplars of technological modernity in the Progressive Era. Thomas Edison happened to be an instrumental figure in the development of both. Edison’s laboratory invented kinescope technology and, as a means of undercutting his primary rival in pioneering consumer electricity, George Westinghouse, lobbied the New York State Supreme Court to adopt alternating-current electrocution as a form of execution.

Leading up to Czolgosz’s execution, Auburn Prison was inundated with requests to witness the execution. To capitalize on the public interest, the Edison Manufacturing Company filmed a staged reenactment of the execution with a panorama of Auburn Prison filmed on the day of the actual execution. Shown in storefront nickelodeons—an early name for movie theaters—the Edison Manufacturing Company promoted Execution of Czolgosz, with Panorama of Auburn Prison as being “faithfully carried out from the description of an eye witness.” The film shows the character of Czolgosz led out of his cell, strapped into the electric chair, and ultimately killed with three courses of electricity. While this portrayal of the execution was sanitized compared to actual use of the electric chair, Execution of Czolgosz—and American bloodlust—temporarily resurrected the bygone spectacle of the public execution.
_{source: History Associates Incorporated}

A public execution of the American president followed shortly by a public execution of the shooter who was a self-proclaimed anarchist. Add to that the refusal of the courts to look into the possibility that Czolgosz was mentally impaired, and you have the ingredients for the predecessor of the Red Scare. Here's how the next president, Theodore Roosevelt addressed the situation in his first appearance before Congress:

The newly-ascended President Theodore Roosevelt delivered his first address to Congress on December 6, 1901. After eulogizing his predecessor, he launched into a condemnation of anarchism. He declared that the anarchist “is malefactor and nothing else.” Roosevelt asserted that an anarchist was no more than a criminal “whose perverted instincts lead him to prefer confusion and chaos to the most beneficent form of social order.” He urged Congress to take immediate action, including the exclusion and deportation of anarchists from the United States through new immigration laws. It was lost on no one that Czolgosz was the son of foreign-born parents with, as the New York Times put it, a “foreign-sounding” name. Roosevelt, like many others, saw radicalism as primarily a foreign threat; he believed that because the United States was the freest country in the world, it wasn’t possible for anyone to be a home-grown anarchist without foreign influence.
_{source: History Associates Incorporated}

Not only an anarchist, but an anarchist with a "foreign-sounding" name... I don't know if it's a coincidence, but psychologists were called "alienists" at the time; psychology and psychiatry hadn’t yet undergone the same level of professionalization and legitimization that physical medicine had to this point, and while courts admitted the expert testimony of physicians, they rarely considered the testimony of alienists. However, there were two psychologists, Channing and Briggs, who afterwards made the case that Czolgosz was probably mentally impaired, and that this was a consequence of the abject living conditions of his social class at the time. Here's one last quote:

After analyzing interviews and observations of Leon Czolgosz’s family and acquaintances, Channing and Briggs came to the conclusion that insanity was the most likely explanation for Czolgosz’s crime. Channing wrote that Czologosz’s chronic sicknesses, the result of unhealthy living conditions in Cleveland, caused him to become delusional. This delusion led Czolgosz to believe that it was his duty to kill the president for the good of the “common and working people.” Channing and Briggs echoed a host of other social reformers who were concerned by the living and working conditions of the working class. Whereas many painted Czolgosz as a rational actor who freely adopted a dangerous and alien ideology, Channing and Briggs ultimately blamed the social conditioning of low wages, dangerous workplaces, and little social mobility for America’s working poor. Their argument was not just psychological; it was also sociological. In other words, anarchists were not just imported into America, but rather they were also raised in America.
_{source: History Associates Incorporated}

I invite you all to watch the below linked video. And then connect the dots. Aliens who bring with them ideologies that are not compatible with "the American way" of doing things and are a threat to the natural merit-based hierarchy of the "indigenous" Americans... Or; how anarchy allergy led to the Red Scare and conservatives being the only "real" Americans.

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