Us vs. Them

This ad is the perfect closing argument for this election cycle, or perhaps the last year and a half of American politics.


The ad was put out by Ralph Reed's new outfit. The Faith and Freedom Coalition, as reported by Mother Jones, joined with other conservative evangelical Republican groups called the Council for National Policy to meet with Tea Party Patriots officers plan Get-Out-The-Vote operations for Tuesday's elections. They also plotted out, just to be safe, coordinated activities for the next 40 years.

While the depth of direct involvement by Religious Right figures like Reed, Phyllis Schlafly, Tony Perkins, and Richard Viguerie is an important new part of the story, the connection between the Tea Party "movement" and the old culture warriors has been probed for quite some time.

What I find interesting is the uniting of minds that would produce a message like the one above. The Culture Wars have roiled politics for so long because they have been sustained by a quasi-Calvinist elect that sees its controversies not as policy debate among reasonable people but the division between the holy and the nonbelievers. Because of its Constitutionally-mandated secularism, the Government is part of the "them" for such zealots. If Tea Partiers do not embrace this idea personally -- and there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that many do -- they carry the same mindset in their Constitutional originalism and fixation on idealized Founding Fathers. While the Tea Party may steer clear of cultural issues at the present, it has erected its own version of "Us vs. Them" since last summer's health care debate.

Because political commentary so often focuses on policy outcomes and not ideology, progressives have underappreciated how intertwined the religious and political strains of the Us vs. Them narratives are. Hints of that interconnection are squirting out in strange places. Take Glenn Beck's assault, for instance, on Wilsonian progressivism and Woodrow Wilson himself, one that has some currency among Tea Partiers. As Dana Milbank, David Greenberg, and Media Matters have detailed, Beck's historical interpretation of the Wilson presidency is little more than historical ignorance borrowed from Jonah Goldberg. For Beck and like-minded conservatives, Progressivism's original sin was allowing the ideas of secularism into the Constitutional garden. Belief in the secular state's power to improve the lives of its citizens is what defined the Them. Beck is simply laboring to give that categorization a rickety historical narrative.

For many of us, this narrative seems positively bizarre. As Greenberg puts it in Slate,

it's telling that these Progressive Era reforms have enjoyed such an enduring and uncontroversial place in our sense of what government should do. Their long-reigning acceptance shows better than anything else just how deeply reactionary Beck and company are.

 But Wilson is merely a useful, if poorly utilized example of the larger critique not just of the "welfare state" but of secularism in toto. If you read or listen to Beck carefully, he is echoing an argument made by the Council for National Policy's founder Tim LaHaye. Yes, the same Tim LaHaye who wrote those Left Behind novels you are too much of an elitist to have read. Before he got into the business of commercializing one of the more troubling aspects of Christianity, LaHaye wrote political tracts decrying the pervasive influence of secular humanism in American government and intellectual life. His first book, The Battle for the Mind, came out in time for the 1980 elections, and leveled fantastic charges at the welfare state, public education, international organizations, and government agencies as being part of an interconnected atheistic conspiracy to overturn a Christian nation. He rehashed the same arguments in time for the 2000 election.

If the state represents the sinister Them against the godly Us, then what do we do with the fact that people elected that state to do those sinister things? That voters election after election, generation after generation have chosen to support fairly strong regulatory and redistributive policies? Are all of those people the Them, too, or have hundreds of millions of individual votes been the product of a grand and unholy plot? Of course not, just as Harry Reid and Barack Obama are not Them. They are not space aliens in a bad flick. They are Americans -- Us. And so are the people who voted for them and will vote for them again on Tuesday.

This sentiment is what Nancy Pelosi may have been getting at when she called those Tea Baggers who crashed Congressional Town Halls "un-American" last summer. They were un-American in their rejection of democracy. If I can channel one of my Founding Fathers here, James Madison first made the point that the minority has right to have their opinion voiced, but not the right to overturn electoral results. This kind of ad, this kind of sentiment does exactly that.

For all the hand-wringing on the Left about what the Tea Party stands for and where it came from, the Us vs. Them dynamic is the most critical to understand and counteract.

 

Tea Party and Goldwater

Leave it to me to bash political science and then link to something written by a political scientist about polling data. Well, anyway, over at Salon, Alan Abramowitz parses some data on Tea Party self-identification and reports that the movement is essentially an intraparty movement within the GOP and not an independent force:

Eighty percent of Tea Party supporters were Republican identifiers or independents who leaned toward the Republican Party, and 54 percent were strong Republican identifiers. And 96 percent of Tea Party supporters reported voting for John McCain in the 2008 presidential election.

Furthermore,

Fully 84 percent of strong Tea Party supporters described themselves as conservative and 54 percent described themselves as very conservative while only 41 percent of all members of the public described themselves as conservative and only 20 percent described themselves as very conservative.

here's some fun with maps for the sake of comparison:
1964 Election returns by county:

                                          source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1964prescountymap2.PNG

Tea Party Membership per 10,000 (June 2010)

                                          source: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/patchworknation/#/archive/?category=elections&map=tea-party-membership-june-2010

Throw out the Deep South results because of lack of voting rights in 1964.  

The Paranoid Style Never Goes Out of Style

I risk beating a dead horse here, but it's still deflating to see Richard Hofstadter's "Paranoid Style in American Politics" cited over and over again by present-day pundits and writers. Yesterday on Salon, Laura Miller proclaimed that the essay "never seems to get old." The current up-swing in anti-Muslim sentiment, she writes, is another manifestation of the paranoia cycle Hofstadter describes. Journalist Will Bunch's new book on the Tea Party movement similarly relies on Hofstadter in its analysis of the movement's rank-and-file.

I am not dismissing "The Paranoid Style" as a piece of work -- it is an excellent essay. Furthermore, I admire its author a lot. Hofstadter was the kind of public intellectual that is rare today, unfortunately. But working historians moved beyond his psychologically-centered analysis of the Right decades ago. Why? First, the value of Freudian analysis has dimmed considerably in the humanities. Let's just leave that issue alone for now. More importantly, scholars like Hofstadter had a particular way of looking at American history that has fallen out of favor within the profession. He was among the "Consensus school" of historians of the 50s and early 60s who believed the country was on a historical path toward becoming an ever-more just, tolerant, and liberal society. Its recent triumph over fascism was a validation of that belief, and the nation's conflict with Communism would bear it out once again. What the right-wing anticommunist fringe of Hofstadter's era didn't appreciate was that Communism was dangerous to the nation only if it failed to live up to its liberal democratic ideals, enshrined in a post-New Deal political order. As the United States became a more equitable society, such conservatives lashed out at the process of leveling out of their own personal insecurities.

The problem with this mode of analysis, as scholars like Michael Rogin, Leo Ribuffo, Michael Kazin, Alan Brinkley, and a whole host of contemporary historians of post-1945 conservatism have pointed out, is its assumption that the nation truly is on a developmental arc in the first place, let alone a liberal democratic one.  It obscures powerful contra-narratives created by conservatives out of their own understanding of American history, which have co-existed with those of liberals for decades. These are the narratives about personal freedom, limited government, and human imperfection that the Tea Party or other hard-Right conservatives are tapping into to attack the Obama Administration. These narratives include tacitly (or actively) racist and classist interpretations of American history and individualism, echoes of the Reagan-era critique of Cadillac-driving Welfare Queens. But these narratives are constructed not out of anxiety, but from the impressions and personal experiences that form the world views of everyone, no matter their politics.

The reason to dispense with Hofstadter "status anxiety" crutch is because it encourages progressives to see the Tea Party and their ilk as freaks. They are not a spectacle at the end of the American political boardwalk for the rest of us (who know so much better) to gawk at. If we read American history from outside the friendly confines of the Consensus School, we discover something very different indeed about progressive or liberal values -- that the belief in racial and gender equality, economic justice, an active government that intervenes on behalf of individual rights and the greater good, and a social safety net are the outlier ideas through much of our existence. In many ways, we are the freaks.

On UN Plots

I, like 99.9% of historians, am not one of those "history repeats itself" people. But literally last night I was writing about how members of the American Legion in the 1950s declared educational materials from UNESCO to be a one-world government and/or Communist plot. One of the main proponents of this stance thought the Girl Scouts were passing out subversive literature because it said something vaguely internationalist. And he got the Illinois Department to pass a resolution saying so.

So then today I read that Tea Party/GOP candidate for governor in Colorado thinks a Denver bike share program is a UN plot to subvert the US Constitution and our freedom. (Well, the bikes are RED.)

Please, just stop.

"One Nation" or, Why the Right can Unify and the Left Cannot

Spooked by the Tea Party, a coalition of progressive, labor, and civil rights groups have founded their own umbrella organization called "One Nation," as the Washington Post reported today. The coalition is designed to unite the disparate agendas of the Left for the midterm election battle and to hold the Obama Administration to its progressive campaign promises.

Apparently, even coming up with a name like "One Nation" took some heavy lifting. It gives just a subtle whiff of a national rallying cry -- and, unfortunately, echoes unintentionally the name of a right-wing nationalist party in Australia. The challenge of uniting the American Left around an activist or electoral agenda has a history as deep as the emergence of the labor movement in the late 19th century. The United States has no labor party for a reason. The periodic assembling of the armies of reform has a similar history -- pick your favorite Progressive Party, for instance.

Putting aside the potential for success or failure of this latest round of coalition building, the explicitly antipodal nature of the One Nation effort in response to the Tea Party demonstrates some interesting differences in the political imaginations of the left and right. One of the most striking things about the Tea Party is its invocation of representing "the people." What holds it together is less an ideology (at least one that can be broken down into bullet points) than a feeling of community. The "We" is less about people interested only in gun rights, or taxes, or immigration but in restoring the political primacy of a particular kind of American -- suburban or rural, middle or lower-middle class, white, non-mainline Protestant.

Americans on the Left find their community in a more fractured. They gather around particular issues with similarly impassioned activists. Environmentalists or free speech advocates or those looking to Save Darfur may all think and act the same way in the election booth, but they are not good at thinking collectively as a "we." I found this to be true even on the local level of left-of-center politics during my graduate student days. We were trying to organize a response of students to the Daisy Lundy hate crime incident and the usual cast of characters assembled to talk strategy. The kid from the Living Wage campaign insisted that his cause was fundamental to racial harmony and should be made a priority of the response. We tried not to slap our hands to our foreheads.

Why the modern Left is so bad at claiming it speaks for the best interests of the nation, or that its political tradition represents the best of American democracy is a question too big for a Monday morning blog post. It would rather invite people to its cause to defend the specificity of their needs and wants (good wages, equal opportunity, gender equality) than to be heard as the "real" America or as "the people." Meanwhile, the Right drifts from the specific to the general and generates if not grassroots energy than at least disproportionate media attention. We don't need to start a Talmudic study of the 14th Amendment or the Civil Rights Act to counterbalance the Tea Party's nationalistic embrace of the Constitution. But, as the Obama campaign so grandly demonstrated (and the Hillary campaign did not), something more evocative would help.