Alexander Cockburn, columnist for the Nation and author of Corruptions of Empire and The Golden Age Is In Us, has long been regarded as an enforcer of far-left orthodoxy. But in recent months, Cockburn has taken an unorthodox stance on such issues as the militia movement, the “county supremacy” movement, and federal police power. When Cockburn spoke in Madison, Wisconsin, during a tour to promote The Golden Age Is In Us, he said in response to a question from the audience that he would not oppose abolishing the BATE or reducing the powers of the FBI. He has also made a serious effort, in the Nation and other publications, to change the prevailing image of militia members as tobacco-chewing, “nigger-hating” rednecks.

After attending a gun rally in Michigan last June, Cockburn reported in the Nation that far from being the “mini-Nuremberg” other leftists had predicted, the event was tame and marked by civility. The literature sold there conveyed “the usual reasonable populist concern with government surveillance and the threat of world government.”

In a July issue of the Nation, Cockburn finds it “disheartening to find out how many on the left-liberal end of the spectrum hope earnestly for a ferocious pogrom against the militias and all those ‘linked’ to them . . . and, at the end of the day, summary fusillades by government SWAT teams to finish off the dissenters,” In another issue last summer, he complained of “a post-Oklahoma City cottage industry in left-pwog journalism, featuring the whole of redneck or working- class America as part of some vast neo-Nazi or K.K.K. network, thus giving an agreeable frisson to the genteel reader.”

In Cockburn’s view, leftists have made a grave mistake in failing to understand—and often misrepresenting—the nature and aims of the militias. In the June 26 Nation, Cockburn wondered, “How come people oppressed by economic circumstances and government predations who take up arms and defy the state in southern Mexico are hailed in The Nation and other pwog publications as virtuous revolutionaries, whereas those in the West and Midwest who do the same thing are reflexively denounced as Nazis?” Cockburn recommended that “instead of whining on about the right, and discovering to its apparent stupefaction that the N.R.A. and Pat Buchanan direct their appeals to the right. The Nation should try to offer some political vision, develop positive programs of its own, and stop . . . remitting info to the F.B.I, about the redneck menace.