Niki Raapana
Living Outside the Dialectic
October 7, 2010

Every policy the Tea Party has protested is based entirely in communitarian ideology. From National Health Care to the Bank Bailout to the Stimulus Package to Stop the IRS and End the Fed, it’s all communitarian. Yet the actual word, communitarianism, is missing from your protests and debates. Our entire country is being led down a communitarian path without any idea of how it’s happening. So, I’d like to present it to you as a topic for discussion.

This is not an attempt to take-over or co-opt your party. I have zero aspirations for political or leadership positions. Simply bringing the topic of communitarian development before American voters has been the driving force behind everything I’ve written about it for the past ten years. My primary goal is to make the changeover to communitarian government open to public debates in every affected country.

Communitarianism is the belief that individual and national sovereignty must be balanced against the needs of the global collective. Their entire foundation for forced social evolution rests on their Big Idea that all the world’s people will be “free” after everyone gives up any claims to their personal freedom. Defined as the new “spirit” of community, Communitarians believe they are leading mankind into an advanced moral and spiritual state of being. Across the globe, communitarian gurus promote a global program designed to create one big, planned, gated community. They call it sustainable community development.

Anti communitarianism is the antithesis to communitarianism. That means we think the opposite of communitarians. We disagree with their Big Idea. We oppose forced social evolution. We disrespect their organizations. We object to communitarian programs, policies, and laws being enforced upon nations that have not legally adopted supremacy of communitarian law. We hate what they’ve done to America.

The Anti Communitarian League began in Seattle, Washington in the spring of 1999. We were renters who became targets in a huge land war between the community planners and our wealthy landlord. I spent three years volunteering my time to help “slumlord” Hugh Sisley resist hostile, “innovative” government land use actions against him and his tenants. (Sisely and the City won; We the Tenants lost.)

The City of Seattle and King County government had established new agencies with new agency rules. These offices were granted expanded power to write and enforce new judicial administrative regulations. Their new laws supposedly completely overruled our 4th and 5th Amendment Rights. When we complained and insisted on a Redress of Grievances, City officials told us our rights had already been balanced against the “rights of the community at large.” When they could not provide evidence for this drastic change to U.S. Rule of Law, I began reading everything about it that I could find .

I learned very quickly that this wasn’t just an ordinary local land dispute. It was apparent to me that we were on the front lines of a massive multi-front war against our individual, state and national freedom.

It took me a full year of reading before I identified the replacement system driving the new actions. American officials rarely tell American voters the name of the new system. The Reinvention of America into a Sustainable Communitarian Paradise was never supposed to be debated or voted upon by the American people. By the time we found out about it, it was, according to our officials, already a “done deal.”

In the beginning I was still naive enough to think lots of other Americans would join in our fight. I asked everyone I saw if they knew the Bill of Rights had been replaced with communitarian values. Most of them laughed right in my face. I wrote hundreds of snail mail letters and spent thousands of hours studying, reading, and hoping someone more qualified would take over the resistance. I was shocked to learn we were the only anti communitarians in the United States. I remain horrified by the fact that every university in the country teaches communitarianism yet our original thesis against it is the only one ever written.

A lengthy study of the recently available online documents about your party shows me that your loosely affiliated organizations have not taken an official position on the philosophy that drives the Reinvention of American Government. I’ve found a few local groups that have posted information about UN Local Agenda 21 and Sustainable Development. I haven’t found any local Tea Party groups (besides affiliates of Gigi Bowman in NY) who are being asked to discuss or vote on communitarian changes to the U.S. system.

Since my above definition of anti communitarian thinking is based entirely in my own personal research, experience and understanding, it’s only fair to provide you with a short synopsis of who I am and how I came to be an anti communitarian thinker.

In the early 80s while I was attending college in Anchorage, Alaska (and bartending nights at Whitekey’s Fly By Night Club) I became a registered Libertarian voter. My friend Kenzo and I even attended a fund raiser for Dick Randolf and won a lunch “date” with Ed Clark. Having read Atlas Shrugged in the sixth grade, I thought I knew what the Libertarians stood for.

When I transferred to UMAss, Amherst in 1984, I did deep background research on U.S. policies toward the Sandinistas and found myself opening up to socialism. After writing two extra credit documentaries on U.S. Economic Policy in Central America, I began identifying my politics as Libertarian, Socialist & Feminist, and later added Green to my list. (I never identified with either the Democrats or the Republicans.)

I think I clicked with the Libertarians because I was convinced they represented individual liberty. My freedom to move whenever I want to move on means everything to me. But I also come from German Wisconsin farm stock and have a deep respect for people who work the land. I admired the socialists because I thought they represented land starved Nicaraguans against the arable land gluttony of the ruling Somoza family. I grew up on Steinem and Bella and had always considered myself a feminist. I love camping and being in the woods, so I naturally assumed that’s what being a Green was all about.

It was only after I began fighting the new community development policies in 1999 that I did a thorough vetting of all my political beliefs. What I learned was most difficult to swallow.

My first realization was that the Libertarian Party was unwilling to step up and debate the communitarians, even after Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne wrote that the “last great debate” in American politics was between the Libertarians and the Communitarians. I later realized the party’s founders were internationalists promoting free market/free trade communitarianism in the United States.

My second realization was that Bella signed the Communitarian Platform. Feminism, as it turns out, is just another dialectical branch of communitarianism.

My third big realization was the role socialism plays in the phony dialectical evolution into communitarianism. Socialism, like capitalism, exists only to further the communitarian synthesis.

The Green Party ended up being number two on my enemy list, the first place reserved forever for their ideological affiliate Dr. Amitai Etzioni, founder of the Communitarian Network.

By 2002 I decided I would only vote for candidates who defend the U.S. Bill of Rights by openly attacking communitarian policies in the U.S.. Obviously I’ve never voted since then.

Focusing mainly on The Communitarian Reinvention of American Government under Presidents Clinton and Bush II, some of my ACL research was devoted to minor communitarian Third Way politicans like Senator Evan Bayh. I did make note of Senator Barack Obama’s introduction as the Third Way Wonder Boy in 2004. All I needed to know about Obama when he ran for president was the fact that Communitarian Platform signer Professor John McNight also signed Obama’s Harvard Law School application.

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It was during the 2008 elections that I became acquainted with some people who supported Ron Paul. When I was unable to find Congressman Paul using the word communitarianism once in all his years of published speeches against the U.N. Agenda, and his office never responded to my inquiries, I refused to endorse him on my websites. The ACL has endorsed only a couple of candidates in our entire time online, and one’s a Canadian. When the Ron Paul Revolution became the Tea Party protests, I didn’t join, but I was happy to see the turnouts. I was relieved that our people were finally showing some gumption.

I am now convinced your smallest local groups are in the position of taking any political direction the members choose to take. Maybe once your members are introduced to their enemies as communitarian thinkers, you can stop everyone else and their brother from defining what it is you stand against.

“Vast forests have already been sacrificed to the public debate about the Tea Party: what it is, what it means, where it’s going. But after lengthy study of the phenomenon, I’ve concluded that the whole miserable narrative boils down to one stark fact: They’re full of shit. All of them.” http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/210904

According to the Communitarians, the U.S. Constitution (and all national government) is “outdated” and poses a barrier to achieving world peace and justice. This appears to be in direct opposition to your principles:

“There already is a universally accepted national tea party statement and a national tea party platform. We’ve had them for a long time. The national tea party statement is called the Declaration of Independence, and the national tea party platform is the Constitution of the United States. And come to think of it, I can name six or seven national tea party leaders—revered figures who command the movement’s loyalties. Their names are among those signed at the bottom of our national tea party statement and our national tea party platform. They are John Hancock, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, James Madison.” Tea Party Declaration of Independence from Political Party Loyalties By Paul Beaird March 23, 2010

There are several indications your party is being misled and co-opted by communitarians.

1. Some people are already calling you communitarians:

“They’re what I call “molecular,” or communitarian, individualists — that is, individuals cooperating with others to achieve what the politicians promise but can’t deliver.” http://www.thenews.com.pk/03-10-2010/opinion/7993.htm

2. Branches of your movement are tricking you into supporting Right Wing Conservative Communitarians like Palin and Beck:

3. Communitarianism is a social science that infiltrates national and state governments via social development programs. It’s called Socio-Economics. Why would Tea Party members discount it as an issue?

“This is not a movement based on social issues,” Melanie Morgan, a former talk show host who has been active in Tea Party Express, told USA TODAY earlier this year. “Many conservatives are involved only because of the fiscal aspect of smaller government, of lower taxation, of an accountability as far as the debt is concerned, the runaway spending by the liberal Congress.” http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/2010-09-20-values20_ST_N.htm

4. The Left Wing Communitarian President of the United States is using Right Wing Communitarian Shills and Rolling Stone Magazine to slander you as corporate backed phonies:

RS: What do you think of the Tea Party and the people behind it?

Obama: I think the Tea Party is an amalgam, a mixed bag of a lot of different strains in American politics that have been there for a long time. There are some strong and sincere libertarians who are in the Tea Party who generally don’t believe in government intervention in the market or socially. There are some social conservatives in the Tea Party who are rejecting me the same way they rejected Bill Clinton, the same way they would reject any Democratic president as being too liberal or too progressive. There are strains in the Tea Party that are troubled by what they saw as a series of instances in which the middle-class and working-class people have been abused or hurt by special interests and Washington, but their anger is misdirected.

And then there are probably some aspects of the Tea Party that are a little darker, that have to do with anti-immigrant sentiment or are troubled by what I represent as the president. So I think it’s hard to characterize the Tea Party as a whole, and I think it’s still defining itself.

RS: Do you think that it’s being manipulated?

Obama; There’s no doubt that the infrastructure and the financing of the Tea Party come from some very traditional, very powerful, special-interest lobbies. I don’t think this is a secret. Dick Armey and FreedomWorks, which was one of the first organizational mechanisms to bring Tea Party folks together, are financed by very conservative industries and forces that are opposed to enforcement of environmental laws, that are opposed to an energy policy that would be different than the fossil-fuel-based approach we’ve been taking, that don’t believe in regulations that protect workers from safety violations in the workplace, that want to make sure that we are not regulating the financial industries in ways that we have.

There’s no doubt that there is genuine anger, frustration and anxiety in the public at large about the worst financial crisis we’ve experienced since the Great Depression. Part of what we have to keep in mind here is this recession is worse than the Ronald Reagan recession of the Eighties, the 1990-91 recession, and the 2001 recession combined. The depths of it have been profound. This body politic took a big hit in the gut, and that always roils up our politics, and can make people angry. But because of the ability of a lot of very well-funded groups to point that anger — I think misdirect that anger — it is translating into a relevant political force in this election. http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/209395

5. Obama’s and the RS writer’s opinion seems to be completely at odds with average people’s opinion within the movement:

“Obama could not be more wrong — in fact, his thinking shows a lot more about his problems than the tea party’s. If the Tea Party is being run by special interest lobbies, then our special interest lobbies are in a lot of trouble. The convention was held at the Mill Valley community center. There were about 500 people there; it was standing room only. They spent the whole day milling about between different tables that represented various groups, ranging from the NRA to the seller of a cookbook of “conservative recipes.” I didn’t look, but I assume it was full of recipes for meatloaf and mashed potatoes with nary a sprig of endive in sight. There were funny T-shirts, cut-outs where you can get your picture taken next to Lincoln, Reagan, or Palin, and lots of sugary foods from Costco.

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It was all very unprofessional, by which I mean that it did not seem the least bit stage managed or fake, in the way that the events put on by professional political operatives usually are. It was all quite spontaneous. Here’s an example. The speakers were unorganized, and had to speak in the hall in competition with all of the tables. So if people were not interested in a speaker, they would just go on buying and selling books and T-shirts or signing up for petitions, and eventually the speaker would be drowned out. If they were interested, the chatter would stop and eventually people would stop and listen. It was, in a charming way, the competition of the free market of ideas at work. http://www.libertycentral.org/president-obama-is-wrong-about-the-tea-party-2010-10

JakeSense, 19 September 2010 12:30AM said, Please stop repeating the lie that Tea Party members are “Conservatives”. Numerous polls in the US consistently show that almost half of people who identify with the Tea Party — myself included — are Liberal Democrats. The Tea Party has one, and only one goal — Fiscal Responsibility. Just because some fools (Sarah Palin and Glen Beck) are trying to co-opt the Tea Party does not make any the rest of us Conservative. We can disagree vehemently with Palin and Beck, yet still think the government must learn to balance it’s budget, stop piling on so much debt and the Federal government spending is out of control.
http://www.alternet.org/story/148206/this_country_just_can%27t_deal_with_reality_any_more

6. Communitarian Radicals think they are the experts on what you really mean:

“When tea party activists say they want to change Washington, what they mean is, they want to get rid of politics.” http://perspectives.thirdway.org/?p=874

I realize “forests” have already been cut down trying to explain your Tea Party. There appears to be a few solid and agreed upon principles behind it, but every description of what you represent incorporates the writer’s personal views and political beliefs into their definition of you. From Obama down to each local group online, the Tea Party is whatever you want it to be. Now that I fully grasp that amazing truth, may I humbly suggest you consider adding anti communitarianism to your local group’s discussion list next time you meet up?

Sincerely,
Niki Raapana
Anti Communitarian League

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