A recent article by Melissa Harris-Lacewell on the blog for The Nation magazine called the recent terror attacks by Nativists on Congressional Democrats and Democratic Party offices as an opportunity “act[s] of sedition.”

From Lacewell’s point of view, however, it’s not so much a matter that the Nativists are racist or engage in a new brand of “Jim Crow terrorism” (both are mentioned in the article as expressions of this “sedition”). Rather, what makes them “seditious” is that, “the Tea Party is a challenge to the legitimacy of the U.S. state.”

“When Tea Party participants charge the current administration with various forms of totalitarianism,” Lacewell continued, “they are arguing that this government has no right to levy taxes or make policy. Many GOP elected officials ... joined as co-conspirators with the Tea Party protesters by arguing that this government has no monopoly on legitimacy.”

Lacewell’s call to bring the hammer down on the “seditious” Tea Party Nativists comes from her definition of the state: “The state is the entity that has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, force and coercion.... To the extent that a state is challenged as the sole, legitimate owner of the tools of violence, force, and coercion, it is challenged at its core.” (Emphasis added)

In other words, only the state has the right to impose its views and conceptions of what it deems right and proper on others, even if those views and conceptions are considered to be unprincipled, immoral, illegal or discriminatory. To even argue that the government and its state are acting in an authoritarian, discriminatory or repressive manner should be considered “sedition,” and thus subject to the ever-growing spate of laws against “extremism.”

And it’s pretty clear that Lacewell’s view of the omnipotence of the state monopoly on power does not just apply in one direction.

So, think the ongoing occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan are illegal and immoral? Sedition. Participate in a strike or protest against a lockout or contract violation? Sedition. Want an end to police violence? Sedition.

In casting such a wide net on the question of sedition and the monopoly of the state, Lacewell finds herself in a rather diverse and generally unsavory crowd, with John Adams (who, as President, signed the Alien and Sedition Acts into law), A. Mitchell Palmer (Woodrow Wilson’s Attorney General and architect of the “red scare” of 1919-1920) and Congressman Howard Smith (author of the infamous Alien Registration, or Smith, Act).

While Lacewell herself has not commented on her article since it was written last week, several of her fans have taken to her defense of the omnipotence of the state. In doing so, they have made fools of themselves by attempting to rewrite the history of the 1960s, shamelessly pretending that all of the radicalism of that period was benign and friendly to Washington.

The reason that many of those radical movements were crushed was because the state, using arguments akin to Lacewell’s as justification, undemocratically and, in some cases, unconstitutionally spied on, infiltrated, disrupted, framed up, detained and imprisoned their leaders and supporters, under programs such as the FBI’s COINTELPRO.

But this is 2010, not 1970, and a Democrat is holding on to the levers of the capitalist state.

We communists know that these kind of laws against “sedition” are rarely used against rightwing movements. The Smith Act, for example, as billed as an “anti-Nazi” law, but was only successfully used to prosecute self-described socialists and communists before being declared unconstitutional. This is why talk of “sedition,” even in the case of the Tea Party Nativists, has to be opposed by workers.

The Nativists are a reserve shock army in case the “sedition” of working people organizing in defense of their rights and livelihoods get out of the control of the Democrats, their “middle class” officials and self-appointed “leaders.” As such, when workers are finally compelled to deal with the Nativists, it will be as part of a larger battle over that very issue of “monopoly.”

That, and the possibility of workers winning this larger battle of democracy against capitalism, is what really concerns Lacewell and her fellow liberals at The Nation — as it should.