By Jake Blumgart
Among left-leaning urbanites, the Tea Party is usually spoken of with
a mystified shake of the head — it really seems as though approximately
half the country has lost its damn mind. A moderately reformist,
business-friendly Democratic president whose compromises and tactics are
so often met with derision from the left is considered a sinister
Kenyan anti-colonial socialist by many Republicans. The healthcare
reform law he champions is a bizarre jury-rigged contraption that builds
on the current system but does not replace or dramatically alter it.
And yet this law, which conservatives advocated six years ago, is now
denounced thunderously as a murderous assault on the free-enterprise
system. The scent of madness is in the air. But why is this happening?
Two recently released books provide fascinating insight into the
general current of the conservative mindset and its present American
iteration.
The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism by
Harvard professors Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson is a
socio-political examination of everyone’s favorite hard-right social
movement. Corey Robin’s
The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin
is a collection of essays loosely framed around the opening chapter
that outlines a unifying theory of conservatism as “the felt experience
of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back.”
Robin’s main contention is that conservatism, in all its varied
forms, shares a unifying mission, a driving passion that animates
everything from the French Counter-Revolution to the antebellum South,
fascism, Nixon and his silent majority, and the Tea Party. Robin
dismisses the hoary dichotomy whereby the left stands for equality and
the right stands for freedom. The conservative’s notion of freedom is
limited to those who already enjoy it: the privileged. “Historically,
the conservative has favored liberty for the higher orders and
constraint for the lower orders,” he writes in The Reactionary Mind’s
opening essay. “What the conservative sees and dislikes in equality, in
other words, is not a threat to freedom but its extension.”
There are two other important aspects of Robin’s thesis. First,
conservatism is usually a reaction against social movements and
political actors on the left, both reformist and radical. The religious
right did not rise to postwar political prominence until the gay
liberation and feminist movements challenged heterosexual male power and
privilege in the 1970s; the fascist parties were a direct counterpoint
to Bolshevism. Second, conservatives are usually willing to cede the
public sphere to democracy, but the private sphere is another matter.
The fiercest battles are waged in the home and workplace — as the recent
wave of anti-union and anti-reproductive freedom Tea Party legislation
on the state level demonstrate. The conservative will not surrender the
private sphere to democracy, equality, or freedom.
This thesis won Robin a degree of notoriety rarely enjoyed by
left-wing academics. The audacious contention that the sophisticated
intellectual rightism of figures from Edmund Burke to William F. Buckley
shares much of anything with proudly non-analytic demagogues like Sarah
Palin (let alone monsters like Hitler) disturbs and angers many. “I
feel sure that if trapped on a desert island with the man, I should soon
commit suicide,”
notes John Derbyshire, who was recently fired from
The National Review for writing what
Gawker‘s Louis Peitzman referred to as the “
most racist article possible” in the wake of Trayvon Martin’s murder.
Despite the alleged lack of finer-grained analysis, Robin’s chief
contention makes a good deal of sense, particularly in the light of
recent events. Consider the Tea Partiers scrutinized in
The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism — as
friendly a bunch of rock-ribbed conservatives as you’re ever likely to
meet. Skocpol and Williamson’s portrait of the movement flies in the
face of those who would dismiss the Tea Party as ignorant rednecks and
tri-corner-hatted weirdos, or those who would hold it up as a populist
alternative to the Republican Party.
The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism
reveals a conservative movement that fits neatly with Robin’s analysis:
a reaction to the left, obsessed with maintaining privilege, and intent
upon restricting
democratic expression.
Skocpol and Williamson find Tea Partiers to be “overwhelmingly older
white citizens, relatively well educated and economically comfortable
compared to Americans in general. Almost all are Republicans or
conservatives to the right of the GOP.” Many Tea Partiers volunteered
for the Goldwater campaign in 1964 and swelled the ranks of the John
Birch society. The gray-haired ranks at Tea Party events synch neatly
with the fact that “average age of Fox viewer is over 65, while
conservative talk radio listeners average 67.”
These reactionary news sources reinforce their belief in Obama’s
innate evil. Almost all of the people interviewed in the book felt an
intense, unwavering antagonism toward the president. One woman notes
that her husband and she were never political until Obama “got in,” a
note struck by several other interviewees (although many Tea Partiers,
at least two-fifths, had been previously involved in politics).
Defeating Obama, the Democrats, and their moderately reformist agenda —
recast as a socialistic takeover — is the driving force behind the
movement. “We do Tea Party stuff to take the country back to where we
think it should be,” one interviewee proclaims. For the Tea Party,
“reform is revolution, improvement is insurrection,” to use Robin’s neat
description of many reactionary movements.
Interestingly, grassroots Tea Partiers express very strong levels of
support for popular safety net programs, like Medicare and Social
Security. In one poll cited in the book,
62 percent of Tea Partiers believe the two programs (
which make up about one-third of the federal government's budget) are “worth the cost . . . for taxpayers.” Other polls have found
similar levels
of support. Two-thirds support extending the payroll tax, which does
not apply to annual wages above $110,100, to ensure Social Security’s
stability. Contrary to the popular “Get Government Out of My Medicare”
anecdote, Tea Partiers are well aware that their favored social programs
are funded by tax dollars and run by the federal government (veteran
benefits are popular too). They feel that the social welfare programs
that they benefit from have been “earned,” in sharp contrast to other
public support programs that they believe are shot through with fraud
and abuse, “placing a burden on hard-working taxpayers to make payments
to freeloaders who have not earned public support.”
The groups most often named as “freeloaders” are immigrants, the
poor, and the young. Skocpol and Williamson find “an almost total lack
of empathy for fellow Americans beyond the group” among Tea Partiers.
Despite the interviewees’ generally sweet demeanors and friendly
attitudes towards Skocpol and Williamson, they can be “downright cruel”
when discussing those they consider parasitic. The general privilege of
the Tea Partiers is highlighted by the fact that they rarely express a
fear that immigrants will take jobs (because most of the activists are
retired or happily employed), instead emphasizing the idea that
immigrants are illegitimately dipping into the public purse. In fact,
most immigrants are excluded from the social safety net, even though
their payroll taxes contribute to Social Security and Medicare.
At first blush, these attitudes seem hypocritical, but Robin argues
that it is cases just like these that allow for a mass-based
conservatism. Unlike the old feudal orders, whereby the elites jealously
horded their privilege, conservatism must operate within a democratic
framework. The elites secure the support of their followers “by making
privilege democratic and democracy aristocratic.” Right-wing parties
must build a mass base in order to get elected and rule, therefore they
must provide genuine power and benefits for their supporters, who are
framed as “deserving” or “earning” government support, unlike whichever
flavor of “other” is (un)popular at the time.
Robin has been accused of promoting a variation of the old Marxist
“false consciousness” theory: that grassroots right-wingers, like the
Tea Partiers, are simply tricked into giving the elites their support,
bedazzled by the distraction of “cultural” issues (Thomas Frank’s
problematic What’s The Matter With Kansas? is a famous recent
example of this line of thought). Occasionally he seems to fall prey to
this simplistic analysis, as in this flippant line from one of The Reactionary Mind’s
later essays: “characteristic of all great counterrevolutionary
theories, in which the people become actors without roles, an audience
that believes itself on stage.”
But in the book’s opening essay, Robin utilizes a more nuanced
analysis. The conservative elites provide something tangible to their
allies and offer them real power in a hierarchical order in the home,
workplace, and (at least symbolically) over ardently stigmatized groups.
In the case of the Tea Party, they also offer material benefits. Even
Paul Ryan’s viciously austere budget proposals preserve Medicare for
those who currently receive it, or will in the near future. They also
provide a defense against unionism at work and reproductive freedom at
home. Immigrants and young people, clamoring for a seat at the table,
are a threat to that control, to the privilege they have eked out. They
are afraid of losing “their” America, the nation as it used to be.
“That is the task of right-wing populism: to appeal to the mass
without disrupting the power of elites or, more precisely, to harness
the energy of the mass in order to reinforce or restore the power of
elites,” Robin writes. And sure enough Skocpol and Williamson find that
reports of the Tea Party’s supposed antipathy towards big business and
Wall Street are greatly exaggerated. Instead, “they never blamed
business or the superrich for America’s troubles.” No, Tea Partiers are
frightened by the Democratic Party, which they conceive of as a rabble
of welfare recipients, immigrants, and public union members, groups they
believe are going to steal away their hard-earned gains.
This powerful animus and the grassroots fervor it inspired after the
sweeping Democratic victory of 2008 is used to further the influence of
elite conservative organizations, mostly based in D.C. and staffed by
lobbyists and former politicians. Newer “astroturf” D.C. organizations
include the Tea Party Express, an organization that supports massive and
immediate cuts, but equivocates when asked about specifics.
Freedom Works, along with Ryan and his acolytes, plan to dismantle
Social Security and Medicare as we know them, shifting many costs to the
elderly, while completely shredding the rest of the social safety net.
This is one instance where the “false consciousness” accusation rings
true. “There is no evidence that ordinary American citizens who
sympathize with the Tea Party were clamoring for the elimination of
Medicare,” write Skocpol and Williamson. But the Tea Party only has eyes
for Obama: “If an organization seems to be against Obama and liberals,
Tea Partiers are trusting to the point of gullibility.”
Bolstered by conservative media, political, and economic elites, Tea
Partiers believe that their America is fundamentally threatened. For
them, the mild-mannered reforms offered by the Obama administration are
the thin-edge of the wedge, the beginning of a path that could lead to
revolution or even worse, socialism. They cannot be compromised with or
brought into a bipartisan huddle. To preserve their privilege, the
envisioned threat must be throttled, and the 2012 general election is
their golden opportunity.
Photo: from the Flickr stream of Fibonacci Blue
Jake Blumgart is a freelance reporter-researcher living in Philadelphia. His work has been featured by Jacobin, AlterNet, American Prospect, Philadelphia City Paper, and The Stranger. Follow him on Twitter.