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Friday 10 February 2012

Glenn Beck and the Tea Party Revolutionaries

Friday, 3rd September 2010

Larry Sabato's latest forecast predicts that the Republican party could pick up as many as 47 seats in the House of Representatives this November. He also thinks they have an outside shot at retaking the Senate. This is the background to Conservative Cabbie's post tweaking me for this blog's previous - and many! - suggestions that the GOP was in heaps of trouble.

He's right. I didn't anticipate unemployment remaining close to 10% through the mid-terms and I didn't think that Pat Toomey, for instance, would be well-placed to win in Pennsylvania. And he's also right to suggest that I under-appreciated the impact the Tea Party movement might have, not least the effect it has had on the prisms through which the mid-terms are going to be viewed.

It's tempting to look at Glenn Beck's prayer-fest on the Mall last weekend as a high point for a certain kind of nostalgic conservatism. There's some merit to that view. But the dominant feature here is nostalgia, not a conservatism re-tooled for government. Beck talked about the need to "restore honour" if America was ever to be great again. That this was an echo, though perhaps an untitting one, of George W Bush's promise to "restore honour and dignity to the White House", actually demonstrates the extent of the nostalgia permeating the rally and, more broadly, the Tea Party movement. America, you see, is always threatened and always needing to be restored to its past glory*.

This can be interpreted, then, as the latest episode of America's Culture Wars. This being America, the cultural is also political but it's culture that infiltrates politics not the other way round.

Perhaps the stupidest - politically speaking - thing Obama said on the campaign trail were his remarks about rural whites who were bitter and clinging to their guns and their bibles. Not because there wasn't an element of truth to his remarks - which also argued that Democrats needed to do more to reach out to these voters - but because they confirmed a sense of lofty, metropolitan and cosmopolitan disdain for these parts of America. It wasn't a mistake Bill Clinton would have made and Obama's remarks essentially confirmed Jim Webb's diagnosis of what's wrong with both political parties.

It wasn't, then, a surprise that even in the Democratic primary Obama did poorly in the arc that runs from middle-Pennsylvania down through Appalachia and west to the Ozarks and eastern Oklahoma. What's sometimes, if lazily, called "Real America" wasn't convinced by Al Gore (not least because of guns and coal) and it surely needed to be convinced that Barack Hussein Obama was One of Us.

Racial animus doubtless explains part of the hostility to Obama but only a very small part. The President, who made his unusual background a major, perhaps even the major, part of his campaign, exemplifies how the United States is changing. As both Reihan Salam and Christopher Hitchens argue the elderly, largely white crowd at BeckFest don't look very much like the American future.

That future arrived very quickly. Those conservatives who complain they don't recognise America these days have a point. It really isn't how it was when they were kids playing catch with pop on perfect, never-ending summer evenings. That's just a statement of fact.

Of course there had been minorities and immigrants before. But for much of the United States these could seem to belong to different worlds, far from your own experience. It was a metropolitan, coastal and border thing, a long way from life in the heartland. We're speaking broadly here but this was still generally true even fifty years ago. The changes since have been immense.

Even the history the kids learn today - with its focus on Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King - is necessarily very different from the history their grandparents learnt. And that, inevitably I think, has had an impact on the ideas about America held by young Americans and helps explain why they're much more comfortable with change - as a cultural phenomenon - than are their grandparents.

Often it's silly to speak of America as a young country since it is, after all, much older than many other countries. But this incarnation of America is a young** place, no more than 70 years old and perhaps only 50.

It is only recently that African-Americans have become true and full members of the Union; it is only recently that Hispanic-America moved beyond California, Texas and the south-west. It is only recently that there was a new wave of considerable immigration from Asia. And so on. You could include the changing status of women, of gays, of the workplace and much, much else. And since America often makes a virtue of embracing the new because it's new it's not surprising that some people feel alarmed and even left-out or left-behind by much of this. Obama's presidency, coming at a time of economic turmoil, merely serves to reinforce this sense.

As Reihan puts it, BeckFest was concerned with

[...] a spiritual restoration, a return to time-tested virtues that had been celebrated by the more homogeneous America of the past, in which non-traditional families were stigmatized and relatively rare, church attendance was far more common, and the dominance of Anglo-Protestant culture was unquestioned.

Those days are gone and, deep down, most people know it. To recall and be comforted by the apparent blissful simplicities of the past is no crime. But it's not a platform for long-term political renewal either. Reihan again:

Instead of accepting or embracing this transformation, a large and growing number of white Americans are, knowingly or otherwise, taking a page from minority protest movements of the past by asserting themselves and demanding recognition from political and cultural elites. Many on the left find this sense of anger and alienation risible, seeing in this movement of “are-nots,” as opposed to “have-nots,” a class of ignoramuses duped by Fox News into acting against their supposed economic interests.

Yet it seems more plausible that Fox News is following its audience rather than leading it — that this anger and alienation has existed for years, and has only now found a decidedly unconventional tribune in the form of Glenn Beck. Though this is a class with economic grievances, it seems more concerned with psychic injuries — with a profound sense of disempowerment in the face of centralized political power.

Again, this is the kind of thing Jim Webb has been talking about for years (and one reason why, though there were obvious drawbacks to the idea, there was also a good case for putting Webb on the ticket).

It is, on the face of it, absurd to suppose that white Americans are over-looked or victimised by contemporary American culture. Nonsense too to suggest that there's no place in public life for God and Jesus. But this is what many people, however incoherently, feel and their concerns can't be wished away or dismissed out of hand.

Nevertheless, 80% of American pensioners are white and you can't build a long-term political coalition on their votes. Nor can the current discontent - real and widespread - be divorced from unemployment, a stuttering economy and a decade of negligable income growth for millions of middle-class Americans. The combination of economic uncertainty and major, structural change to society is fertile ground for a conservative populism.

So what do the Tea Partiers want? Dave Weigel has an excellent post on the movement and its relationship with the Republican party which I commend to you in its entireity and he reminds us of the Tea Party's "Contract From America", a ten point plan for restoring American greatness which reads:

1. Protect the Constitution

2. Reject Cap & Trade

3. Demand a Balanced Budget

4. Enact Fundamental Tax Reform

5. Restore Fiscal Responsibility & Constitutionally Limited Government

6. End Runaway Government Spending

7. Defund, Repeal, & Replace Government-run Health Care

8. Pass an ‘All-of-the-Above” Energy Policy

9. Stop the Pork

10. Stop the Tax Hikes

Never-mind the duplication and never mind too that points 1 and 5 are, alas, wishful thinking since no President since at least the Second World War has respected the office's constitutional limits but do note how points 1 and 5 are themselves nostalgic for a long-gone America that (probably!) won't be coming back and might well be unpopular even if it did.

Note instead that this is a call for a) tax cuts b) spending reductions and c) a balanced budget. Well, good luck with that. Maybe that's too pessimistic a view. Over to Weigel:

The politician who’s rightly seen as the ideological vessel of the tea party movement is Sen. Jim DeMint. I’d argue that he’s more important to the movement than its bigger star, Sarah Palin, because DeMint has actually gotten specific about what he wants to do in power and why he thinks tea party activists can help him do it. He thinks that Congress needs to reckon with popular entitlements and spending programs, and it needs to cut them even though this has been, consistently, politically disastrous. His theory is that things are bad enough that Americans understand what needs to be cut. They are ready to give up benefits and programs that, in the past, they’ve supported, because they realize how bad things are. That was the not-so-hidden subtext of Glenn Beck’s big rally on the mall last week. Beck, who’s done so much to inform the Tea Parties, told a crowd of 100,000 or so people in person, and many in the TV audience, that they needed to look inward and look back to God and be ready to restore the pre-New Deal vision of America.

Trouble is, I'm not sure the country as a whole is ready, no matter how much they look to God, to restore the "pre-New Deal vision of America". Even if it were desirable I don't quite know how you go about doing it.

Nor is it obvious that, no matter what Tea Partiers and Republicans say, that America really is ready to cut either entitlements or popular spending programmes. (GOP concerns about fiscal responsibility will carry some additional credibility when they demand cuts to the Pentagon budget.) Debt may have filtered down into the public consciousness; dealing with it may not have.

And pensioner-opposition to Obama's healthcare reforms is often less-rooted in opposition to "government-run healthcare" (since many pensioners benefit from said care) than in fears that their own generous benefits will be cut. So, some of the GOP's most reliable voters are simultaneously demanding budget restraint and protesting anything that might reduce their own benefits. This is a tricky circle to square.

More fundamentally the GOP's increasing reliance on elderly and white voters is problematic at a time when the United States is becoming less white. In one - and it is only one - sense then, the GOP can win now at the expense of its longer-term prospects. That's certainly better than losing now but it doesn't solve the problems posed by demographic trends.

Those trends may change and the Democratic coalition may fracture too. So there's that. But, understandably, the current GOP approach is both better suited to full-throttled opposition than the compromises that will inevitably be forced upon it should it retake either branch of Congress and that, again reasonably, are much better-attuned to a time of economic uncertainty than a period of renewed growth and optimism.

Almost by definition a two-party system can't exclude one party from power permanently and, equally clearly, GOP strength amongst white voters will continue to be vital. But in the longer-term it must be supplemented by support from other kinds of Americans.

So, yes, suggestions of its permanent eclipse are exagerrated but this doesn't mean that the Tea Party and its discontents are going to lead the way to a bright new Permanent Republican Majority.

Still, the mid-terms are going to be interesting. Which is not nothing.

* The left does this too. Remember Howard Dean and his promise that "we're going to take out country back"? As though it had been sotlen from them in the first-place!

**This is true elsewhere: Britain and France and Canada and Australia have undergone comparable changes too but in different ways and with different successes and different failures and coming from rather different places.

Filed under: Americana (459 more articles) , GOP (305 more articles) , Mid-terms (18 more articles) , Obama (355 more articles)

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ndm

September 3rd, 2010 3:17am Report this comment

Excellent post.

The "elderly, largely white crowd at BeckFest don't look very much like the American future" but it is pretty much the audience demographic for Fox News.

I am pretty sure that none of this crew actually support the following:

7. Defund, Repeal, & Replace Government-run Health Care

They certainly have no intention of defunding, repealing and replacing the Government-run healthcare system they benefit from - Medicare. Indeed, much of the Teabaggers' opposition to healthcare reform was predicated on the fact that their socialized medical system would be affected. What they really mean, therefore, is

7. Defund, Repeal, & Replace Government-run Health Care for other Americans.

Dennis

September 3rd, 2010 4:25am Report this comment

Americans need to wake up the fact that Beck is simply another opinion pushing charlatan who is a product of mormon cult theology and he mixes this with his personal make up as a dry alcoholic. Hedoes not possess a single ounce of journalistic integrity, has no college degree, has no qualifications and he is definitely not a true conservative. But then, what can anyone expect from someone who can't
find anything filthier than their own personal reflection. Since people like Beck cannot survive on the basis of any personal merits, they survive by puting others down with lies and half truths in order to feel good about themselves. The truth about Beck is that he a dry mormon alcoholic who never got the counseling required for alcholics. He flippantly throws around Christian terms like "God", "Jesus","Holy Spirit" as well as voices of other so called "Spirit Powers" on his radio talk show. Beck is a mormon in active standing with the mormon church and is not a Christian. Mormonism teaches many gods, that the god of the earth was once a man who attained godhood status, there is no trinity, the cross of Christ means nothing and that Jesus Christ and Satan were brothers. Because Beck does not possess a single ounce of journalistic integrity, he is the perfect abortion poster child for Fox Network. The people who love what Beck says are no different than the impressionable sheep who loved every speech made by Adolph Hitler in his early years when he brought Germany into an era of economic prosperity These same sheep also blindly followed Hitler into one of the darkest chapters of world history. Beck and the Fox Network both cater to the same lowest common denominator of demagogery. Beck man would not know the first thing about God as he is a mormon. Someone should ask him which of the many mormon gods he kept talking about during his argument with himself on Saturday on the square in DC. Like a typical dry alcoholic, Beck even lied on national television when he spoke about holding a document signed by George Washington. That event never took Place Unfortunately, people who love being led around by the nose do not realize that he is talking about a different god than that of Christianity, Judaism or Islam and that he has been a product of mormonism cultism from the day he started doing a radio talk show as an opinion pusher. You don't have to hae a degree in psychology to see that he exhibits all the signs of a dry alcoholic. The only reason this unstable impressionable idiot fell into mormonism was because the woman he wanted to have sex with would not do so unless they got first got married and from that point, they joined the mormon cult. Glenn Beck is as big a charlatan as Josephs Smith or the
5th grade graduate (Charles T Russel) who started the Jehovah's Witness cult

Archie

September 3rd, 2010 5:29am Report this comment

What's an "untitting honour"? Doesn't sound like much fun!

Archie

September 3rd, 2010 5:31am Report this comment

Or was that an "untitting echo"? Which sounds like even less fun!

Austin Barry

September 3rd, 2010 7:36am Report this comment

The ever perceptive Christopher Hitchens has identified the coming storm:

'Saturday's rally was quite largely confined to expressions of pathos and insecurity, voiced in a sickly and pious tone. The emotions that underlay it, however, may not be uttered that way indefinitely.'

The 'progressive' alliance that Beck rails against will be having concerns about what's brewing in flyover America.

Perhaps some of its members are driving cars sporting the bumper sticker I saw the other day:

'Paddle faster, I hear banjos'.

Pot Head

September 3rd, 2010 8:05am Report this comment

When I hear Pailn address big Tea Party crowds I can see why they love her so much, she speaks of an America that never existed but they desperately want to exist , it's the American equivalent of John Major invoking images of warm beer and cricket on the village green, but with more guns, bibles and trucks

But also listening to Palin doing a big set piece speech, I'm reminded of what CS Lewis said on listening to Hitler speaking on the radio:

"I don't know if I'm weaker than other people," he said, "but it is a positive revelation to me how while the speech lasts it is impossible not to waver just a little"

But for me thanks goodness; as soon as it's over the spell is broken.

BTW - I'm not comparing Hitler to Palin !

Rhoda Klapp

September 3rd, 2010 9:22am Report this comment

Well, same old eloi BS. You and your beltway crew just do not seem to understand the tea party or Beck phenomena. Your quotes are from people who I have no doubt could have written them (maybe DID write them) without actually bothering to watch what went on at all. The opinions are pre-digested, and the prejudice is there for all to see. Eloi people, of course.

Just to make it clear, Ive been to twenty one of the United States, worked there for a while, visit whenever I can, and take an interest in US affairs. What I have not done is ever find out the reason that America is the most successful nation in its own terms of economic success, prosperity and freedom. You and your eloi mates don't know either, although you may think you have a prescription. (Is the current hiatus due to, what, not enough Mexicans, lack of an NHS, Not enough like Europe? I doubt it.)

Now, the Glenn Becks of the world, and many another right-wing rabble-rouser, would have you believe that the success of the USA is intrinsic in the constitution, the founders in their wisdom put it all in there in a magic formula which would ensure success. I pretty much doubt that too.

I don't think anybody knows what it is. But I do know you ought not to interfere with a working formula if you don't know how it works. And I'd say those people who you, well, not denigrate, really just show no respect for, the 'hard-working americans' of political rhetoric, those people and their culture who undoubtedly have been instrumental in getting America to where it is today (good and bad), deserve more credit. And the political class, the democrat and republican machines, the New York Times and all the lazy media deserve no credit at all.

Conservative Cabbie

September 3rd, 2010 11:09am Report this comment

Alex

Interesting and thanks for the link. I'll come up with something more detailed later when I've had a chance to really digest. But first a question. How long has elderly white America been dismissed as a dying breed? There is nothing to suggest that voters vote the same way as they age. In Clinton's wins, Repubs got the same percentage of 18-29's as McCain did. And yet move forward 8 years as those voters moved into the next age cohort and suddenly the Republican sharte of the vote went up. People become more conservative as they age.

Politics is not quite so stuck in the mud as you think. I suspect that in the fifties when Democrats had something like a 20-30 point registration advantage, no-one could see beyond new deal politics and certainly not Reagan-esque conservatism. And yet that's exactly what happened.

It's easy to dismiss the Republican vote as being too sectional. But that is even truer of the Democratic vote. They are dead in the water if Republicans can eat into just one of the constituencies that Democrats rely on: blacks, hispanics, youth or graduates. Without big majorities from those groups, Democrats are unelectable.

fifer

September 3rd, 2010 11:43am Report this comment

I love the "ten point plan". To summarise:

1. Protect the constitution, apart from the Amendments we don't like (like the 14th).
2. Ignore climate change and hope it goes away. In 50 years we can say the Democrats knew but didn't shout loudly enough.
3. Ignore the legacy of the Bush years and pretend that someone else pissed away a trillion dollars on a re-election campaign masquerading as a war and turned a massive projected budget surplus into an almighty fiscal black hole
4. See 3
5. See 3, again
6. See 3. Are we seeing the theme here yet?
7. It's fair and it's reasonable so let's bin it
8. All of the above...except of course nuclear or renewables as we aren't funded by nuclear or renewable companies.
9. See 3
10. Don't repeal the Bush tax cuts because they worked so well.

That's why these people have no credibility. In this country, Cameron has some credibility because it wasn't him who spent the last decade pissing the money up the wall. The hole that America and, to some extent, the rest of the world is in is down to the truly spectacular incompetence of the Bush administration. As simple as that, I'm afraid.

This is a large but intellectually stunted movement which tacks as close to "git the damn black commy" as it can without crossing the line (which, of course, its supporters regularly do). Rather a shame for a great country but pretty much what they get for twice voting in the worst president of the last hundred years. Oh well.

Conservative Cabbie

September 3rd, 2010 11:53am Report this comment

Alex

In your Specter post that I linked to, you made the point that the former swing state Pennsylvania had been solidly Democratic since 1988. And yet now, we're seeing Republicans ahead in the state level races and doing well in many congressional races and Obama's approval hovering around 40%. The story is even worse in Ohio, even worse still in Missouri. The Democrats are losing the mid-west badly. What we are witnessing is a big rejection of liberalism...again. Anytime the Democrats dabble with center left politics, they get rejected - Carter one term, Clinton forced to middle post '94 and now following liberalisms greatest success (the election of Obama), it's only taken two years for it to be rejected again. America is a centre-right country and over-rated demographic time-bombs won't alter that fact.

Conservative Cabbie

September 3rd, 2010 12:07pm Report this comment

fifer

That's a nice re-writing of history.

1. The constitution allows for amendments to be changed, there's nothing unconstitutional about that.

2. Less was spent on the Iraq war than Obama's failed stimulus. If you want to talk about pissing away..

3. Obama's deficits are 3x worse than the worst of Bush's.

4. Bush's tax cuts? Don't believe the hype:

"From 2004 to 2007, federal tax revenues increased by $785 billion, the largest four-year increase in American history. According to the Treasury Department, individual and corporate income tax receipts were up 40 percent in the three years following the Bush tax cuts. And (bonus) the rich paid an even higher percentage of the total tax burden than they had at any time in at least the previous 40 years."

Rhoda Klapp

September 3rd, 2010 3:22pm Report this comment

Fifer other mistake is to mix up the tea partiers with some kind of approval of Bush. The tea party is not the republican party. The tea party doesn't like tax and spend whether it is done by dmes or Bush. They advocate small government, and that means small spending. Bush did not deliver that, and the GOP is not trusted to do so. Hence tea party support for their people in primaries against republican incumbents. The tea party is not the provisional wing of the country club republicans. It is a pressure group to keep politicians of both sides honest. To which I say, good luck with that.

ndm

September 3rd, 2010 5:25pm Report this comment

Michael Joseph Gross has an article in Vanity Fair on Her Serenist Highness Sarah Palin.
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2010/10/sarah-palin-201010

Apparently she likes to style herself the North Star although I think Polaris(er) would be more appropriate.

Conservative Cabbie

September 3rd, 2010 5:36pm Report this comment

ndm

An article that is being laughed at even by the left for it's ridiculousness and falsity. Is this what the left has stooped to? they really are redundant

ndm

September 3rd, 2010 7:46pm Report this comment

@Conservative Cabbie

The left is not laughing at the article but the "ridiculousness and falsity" of Sarah Palin.

Conservative Cabbie

September 3rd, 2010 7:49pm Report this comment

ndm

If you believe anything in that article, you are more gullible than a birther (or trig-truther). Try Mother Jones, Slate or Politico. And isn't interesting that the left's criticisms of Palin always seem to centre around her role as a woman and a mother. But you lot aren't sexist. Oh no!

Craig Strachan

September 4th, 2010 12:09am Report this comment

It's not clear that Beck, a convert to Mormonism from Catholicsism, is concerned with restoring the primacy of "Anglo-Protestant" culture.

Baron

September 4th, 2010 12:40am Report this comment

Rhoda Klapp @ 9.22 hints at something that’s at the core of America’s long-term future – the breakdown of whatever it was that elevated this mongrel republic to its economic supremacy. It ain’t there any more, it has vanished, no movement, no individual can bring it back. The cures offered by either Obama or Palin are but small plasters capable of merely camouflaging few festering boils on a body that has passed its sell-date. What brought about the tipping point, when did the point of no return occurred is everyone’s guess, what’s for sure is that there is no possibility of return.

it matters not the America of the years and decades ahead will be populated by different peoples, the younger Americans will view history through disparate prism, the State will gain stronger dominance and stuff. In the grand scheme of culture movements it counts for little, the economic engine with all it entails that had delivered the foundation of America’s dominance has come to a halt, is beyond repair. The balance between wealth creation and wealth distribution has swung in favour of the latter, it’s a terminal disease, no cure for it exists, only a gradual decay will put the whole construct to rest. The once great culture cannot but continue to move south, it will be a painful journey interrupted with periods of transient ‘reawakening’, all to no avail.

this century belongs to cultures other than that of America’s past.

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