Has there really been a "new atheist movement" of any significance in the USA?
American Atheists. Its founder got prayer in schools overturned via a Supreme Court decision.
If so I haven't really heard about them or anything that they've managed to accomplish. Over here atheism pretty much still seems to be one of the "dirty words" like communism, anarchism, etc.
Well, that's kinda my point isn't it? They've accomplished some but really not all that much-- that requires a broader political movement.
The baby steps of recognition of human rights and equal protection I think come first before all this talk of a "larger political movement" can really be put on the table, and the more successful US atheists are working on exactly those fronts.
See, I think that's ass-backwards. Most Americans don't give a fuck about that stuff and the only way you'll get them to fight for it is by including it in a broader political agenda that includes concrete demands for material improvements to the average person's life. You're not gonna give two shits about the Ten Commandments being placed in a courthouse or atheists not being allowed to include a Tree of Reason at a holiday display at town hall when you're unemployed, or your wages just got cut, or your employer jacked up your insurance premiums, or dropped your health insurance entirely, or your son just got locked up for having an 8 ball of coke on him.
What did the Nazi- Russian alliance do for the Popular Front and the NNC?
The Popular Front was arguably always a vehicle for Stalin's foreign policy ambitions and a compromise with the West, and was opposed by Trotsky. I hardly think that you can use Stalin's radical shifts in policy to indict connecting secularism to a broader political movement in general.
Connections to wider political movements tore the balls off the desegregation movement for over 20 years. It allowed Fascists to claim that any movement towards desegregation was a plot from Russia and not an organic internal movement.
Oh please, you really think Jim Crow would have been any less viciously defended had the Communists never been involved in the Civil Rights struggle at all? Besides, the high point of Communist involvement was in the 30s and 40s before communism had developed such a bad rap in the US, and back then the commies were the ONLY ones willing to do jack shit because the liberals had sold them out so that they could maintain a Democratic majority for FDR. Finally, I already made explicit that I don't think the modern atheist analogy to the Civil Rights struggle was valid-- secularism has never been won on the basis of the nonreligious as an identity group before, and it won't now.
Topic: Does secularism have any relevance outside of a broader political movement?