“No Country For Old Tea Partiers”: Conservatives Who Caused The Shutdown Must Make Peace With Themselves And Modern America
Fareed Zakaria has a very sharp op-ed in the Washington Post this week dissecting conservatism’s longtime “diet of despair” and how conservatism’s traditional rhetoric of “decay, despair and decline” has created an anti-American mentality among the set that very self-consciously claims to love the country more than everyone else.
But one section in particular crystalized something that has been nagging me over the last few weeks, especially when tea party conservatives denounce compromise and deal-making as if they are bad things, when the smug Ted Cruz goes on about waging a “multi-stage, extended battle” to change Washington or, as Zakaria notes, John Boehner utters with exasperation that “the federal government has spent more than what it has brought in in 55 of the last 60 years!”
Zakaria’s reply is spot on:
But what has been the result over these past 60 years? The United States has grown mightily, destroyed the Soviet Union, spread capitalism across the globe and lifted its citizens to astonishingly high standards of living and income. Over the past 60 years, America has built highways and universities, funded science and space research, and – along the way – ushered in the rise of the most productive and powerful private sector the world has ever known.
I asked half-kiddingly the other day why conservatives are trying to convince markets not to invest in the United States (“the markets should be terrified of a country that is trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars in debt,” according to Heritage Action’s Michael Needham, for example), but there’s as much truth as humor to the question.
As Zakaria puts it, the conservatives who spurred the recent government shutdown (and, let’s remember, voted against both reopening it and against the U.S. paying its bills) must make peace with modern America:
They are misty-eyed in their devotion to a distant republic of myth and memory yet passionate in their dislike of the messy, multiracial, quasi-capitalist democracy that has been around for half a century – a fifth of our country’s history. At some point, will they come to recognize that you cannot love America in theory and hate it in fact?
They may, but it won’t be soon. This is why less than a year after getting beaten soundly in last November’s elections, the conservative fringe shut down the government and threatened to force a national default as part of a quixotic, suicide-run quest to roll back a law it couldn’t stop using the ordinary legislative process. And it had the gall to claim the mantel of “the American people” as they did it.
Think about the animating faction of the GOP in the Obama era – a group conservative in the literal sense of being angry with and afraid of change. These are the people who would show up at Tea Party rallies toting signs about the need to “Take Back America.” For four years they were assured by the conservative entertainment complex that restoring the America they grew up in was a real possibility. The vertiginous changes remaking the land could be ascribed to Barack Obama, an illegitimate fluke of a president who won only because of a one-off surge of young and minority voters powered by excitement about his historic nature and vapid “hopey–changey” rhetoric. He was “Barack the Magic Negro,” in Rush Limbaugh’s formulation. He was, simultaneously, helpless without his teleprompter but also a radical instituting a nefarious plan to sap America of its God-given freedoms.
He was the problem; real America was the solution.
The 2012 elections shattered that illusion. Obama was only a symptom of changes in the country, not the cause. Inexorable demographics have relegated the Tea Party’s America to memory. So ask yourself, how are those voters likely to react? A warm embrace of the new America? Or, faced with an unacceptable reality, will they retrench in their fantasy and double down on crazy and angry?
We’ve seen an initial double-down. Its failure won’t stop more of the same – the question is whether the rest of the GOP will keep indulging the hardliners.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, October 18, 2013
“The Tea Party, Now And Forever?: That Cosmopolitan, Multiracial Man In The White House Is The Embodiment Of Everything They Fear
People (including me, I’ll admit) have been predicting the demise of the Tea Party for a long time, yet it has managed to stick around, the tail wagging the Republican dog even unto the point of shutting down the government and bringing the country within hours of default. Yet at the same time, if you paid attention to this crisis, you would have seen the words “Tea Party” escaping only the lips of Democrats (and a few reporters). None of the Republicans holding out to destroy the Affordable Care Act started their sentences with “We in the Tea Party…” It has become a name—or an epithet—more than a movement, even as its perspective and its style have woven themselves deeply within the GOP. Not that there aren’t still Tea Party organizations in existence, but how many Republican politicians in the coming months are going to be eager to show up at a rally where everyone’s wearing tricorner hats?
What this moment may mark is the not so much the death of the Tea Party as the final stages of a transition. The silly costumes will get put away, and the angry rallies may draw no more than a handful of fist-shakers. But we should finally understand that the Tea Party has metastasized itself within its host, even if fewer people use its name. It would probably help to come up with a new name for it, since the word “party” misdirects us into thinking that if it isn’t doing practical things like endorsing candidates or putting forward a policy agenda, then it’s fading. But it isn’t, and defeats like this one don’t necessarily make it weaker.
The time has come to stop looking at the Tea Party as a political movement and understand it as a psychological, sociological, and religious phenomenon. That isn’t to say it’s unalterable, and I do think it’s going to be politically wounded in 2014. What is likely to happen is a geographical winnowing, with its politicians losing where they were weakest to begin with. In 2010, many Tea Partiers got elected even in places where they weren’t thick on the ground, since that’s what wave elections can produce. But in the next election we’ll probably see the defeat of people like Maine governor Paul LePage—in other words, those who come from anywhere other than the South and certain corners of the Midwest and interior West. Tea Partiers will still win in Alabama, but not in New England.
The ones who remain will not be chastened by what just happened, nor when their numbers decrease. As there is after every Republican defeat, there’s talk now amongst the base about the need for more “true conservatives.” But if you look at the people who decided to end the crisis, they aren’t that different in their policy beliefs from the Tea Partiers. Mitch McConnell would genuinely like to repeal the ACA, and outlaw abortion, and slash food stamps. This isn’t even a dispute about tactics, because that would mean the Tea Partiers have some kind of coherent set of tactics in mind, beyond “Fight, fight, fight!” It’s about the apocalyptic worldview that animates the Tea Partiers. Establishment Republicans like McConnell have the same policy agenda as the Tea Partiers, but they also know that if they lose this round, there will be another round, and another after that. They don’t think that America could literally come to an end if they don’t prevail in the next election.
But the Tea Partiers do. In one recent poll, 20 percent of Republicans said they believe Barack Obama is the Antichrist. It’s easy to laugh, but try for a moment to imagine that you believed that. What kind of tactics would you favor? Would you be amenable to compromise? How would you look at even a small political defeat? As Andrew Sullivan argues, even for those who are a step back from imagining a literal apocalypse coming some time in the next few months, the root of the problem is modernity itself, and the stakes are impossibly high:
What the understandably beleaguered citizens of this new modern order want is a pristine variety of America that feels like the one they grew up in. They want truths that ring without any timbre of doubt. They want root-and-branch reform – to the days of the American Revolution. And they want all of this as a pre-packaged ideology, preferably aligned with re-written American history, and reiterated as a theater of comfort and nostalgia. They want their presidents white and their budget balanced now. That balancing it now would tip the whole world into a second depression sounds like elite cant to them; that America is, as a matter of fact, a coffee-colored country – and stronger for it – does not remove their desire for it not to be so; indeed it intensifies their futile effort to stop immigration reform. And given the apocalyptic nature of their view of what is going on, it is only natural that they would seek a totalist, radical, revolutionary halt to all of it, even if it creates economic chaos, even if it destroys millions of jobs, even though it keeps millions in immigration limbo, even if it means an unprecedented default on the debt.
It isn’t just that they sincerely believe that the most uncompromising tactics are the path to victory, it’s also that they believe that adopting anything short of the most uncompromising stance is itself a surrender, before the battle has even begun. You can’t let the devil just sit in the parlor for a while and hope you’ll be able to convince him to leave. You have to bar the door. And as Ed Kilgore notes, this isn’t just about very religious people bringing a religious worldview to their politics; it’s a circular process:
It’s not just that these culturally threatened folk embrace their politics like it’s a religion. The actual religious outlook many of them espouse—whether they are conservative fundamentalist Protestants or neo-ultramontane Catholics—has imported secular political perspectives into their faith. They’ve managed to identify obedience to God with the restoration of pre-mid-twentieth-century culture and economics, and consequently, tend to look at themselves as the contemporary equivalents of the Old Testament prophets calling a wicked society to account before all hell literally breaks loose. So their politics reinforces their religion and vice-versa, and yes, the Republican Party, like the squishy mainline Protestant Churches and lenient do-gooder Catholic priests, are generally within crisis-distance of being viewed as objectively belonging to enemy ranks.
It’s true that this phenomenon is the latest iteration of a pattern we’ve seen before, whether it was the Birchers during the Johnson years or the militia movement under Clinton. Some portion of American conservatives comes to believe that the country has been infected with the most diabolical of viruses, and the normal democratic means are no longer sufficient to confront the evil within our borders. But by now we have to conclude that it’s been worse this time, and not only because the Tea Party’s forebears never got a fraction of the influence within the GOP that it now has. The threat of modernity that Sullivan points to is, for these people, all too real. The world is leaving them behind. And that cosmopolitan, multiracial man in the White House became the embodiment of everything they fear. Every one of his policies, whether born in The Communist Manifesto or at the Heritage Foundation, they see clearly as a rapier thrust at their very hearts. There is no telling them to wait for a more opportune moment to strike, or that the battle of the moment is one they cannot win. To lose is to lose everything.
So when does the Tea Party end? In the simplest terms, it ends whenever the next Republican president takes office. When that happens, there will be no more government shutdowns, no more cries of Washington tyranny, no more debt ceiling standoffs, no more Republican obsession with deficits. The tricorner hats will be put away. But the fears and resentments that created and sustained the Tea Party will fester, waiting until the next Democratic presidency to burst out. And it will begin all over again.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, October 18, 2013
“Your Job Isn’t Safe Until Extremist’s Lose Theirs”: Tea Party Extremism Cost Millions Of Jobs And Risks Millions More
If Americans learn anything from this month’s shutdown-and-debt-ceiling debacle, they ought to realize that political extremism brings real costs—denominated in dollars and jobs as well as national cohesion and prestige—and that those costs are not small. So long as the Tea Party faction continues to wield its malign influence over the Republican leadership in Congress, the threat of further, even worse damage will not subside.
Everyone should heed the clear warning issued by Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), his cohort on Capitol Hill, and the leaders of outfits such as the Tea Party Express and FreedomWorks, all enraged and determined to lash out again as soon as possible. “This was going to be a multi-stage, extended battle,” said Cruz, “but we’ve also seen a model that I think is the model going forward to defeat Obamacare, to bring back jobs, economic growth…”
Only a dwindling fraction of voters is still mesmerized by such demagogic nonsense, but their anger intimidates enough Republicans to ensure that Cruz and company can seek to sabotage the economy again—and they will. So it is vital for everyone to understand what these vandals have inflicted on us already.
We will probably not know the full cost of the shutdown and the near-default for several months, if ever, but fresh estimates are now arriving daily. According to Standard & Poor’s, the financial ratings agency, the shutdown alone reduced economic activity in the United States by at least $24 billion and cut growth in the current quarter by as much as 0.6 percent. That means a loss of thousands of jobs and billions in household income, just when the economy would traditionally surge upward for the holiday season.
But that is just the beginning of a much grimmer inventory of suffering, which can be traced back more than two years to the first episode of Tea Party debt-ceiling bluster. For that assessment, we can look to none other than the Peter G. Peterson Foundation—named for its creator, a former Republican Commerce Secretary and fanatical fiscal hawk—whose latest contribution to public discourse is a thorough study, with charts, of “the cost of crisis-driven fiscal policy.” Peterson’s full study is worth reading, but its essential points are simple enough.
The repeated manufacturing of partisan fiscal crises has created sufficient uncertainty to reduce growth since 2009 by as much as 0.3 percentage points annually—eliminating as many as 900,000 potential jobs.
Now add on the wrong-headed cuts in federal discretionary spending caused by budget sequestration—the awful “solution” to the 2011 debt crisis. That reduced annual growth by 0.7 points since 2010 and raised unemployment by almost a full percentage point, or 1.2 million lost jobs.
Finally, the report examines two possible economic scenarios that could follow a Treasury default: a “brief” recessionary interlude that would see unemployment jump to 8.5 percent, costing 2.5 million jobs, and a longer, deeper, more volatile recession in which joblessness would rise to 8.9 percent and more than three million jobs would be lost.
Just as disturbing as all this sad waste of human potential is the incredible pettiness of the goals pursued by the Republican leadership. Their ultimate, most pathetic demand was to deny health insurance to their own aides.
So when Ted Cruz and the Tea Party tell you their holy crusade against health care will “bring back jobs,” assume the opposite (and act accordingly). There is no bipartisan compromise on offer here— only more of the same ruinous obstruction, and worse.
Your job won’t be secure until they lose theirs.
By: Joe Conason, The National Memo, October 18, 2013
“200 Years Of Tea Party Paranoia”: From The Civil War Onward, They Always Lose
“It’s easier to fool people,” Mark Twain apparently never said, “than to convince them that they have been fooled.” You can find those words all over the Internet attributed to Twain, but I can locate no credible source.
Too bad, because it’s absolutely correct.
Twain probably did say something similar, because it sounds like an opinion the acerbic author of Huckleberry Finn would have endorsed.
Think of the hilarious episode of The Royal Nonesuch, a mangled Shakespearean farce performed by a pair of riverboat scamps called the King and the Duke for the befuddled citizens of a Mississippi river town.
“The duke said these Arkansaw lunkheads couldn’t come up to Shakespeare,” Huck says. “What they wanted was low comedy—and maybe something ruther worse than low comedy, he reckoned.”
And low comedy they got. The plan was to pocket the cash and float off downriver before the yokels got wise.
I thought of that scene watching Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Sarah Palin outside the White House recently, protesting the very government shutdown they’d fiercely championed—a confederate battle flag fluttering in the background, the emblem of disgruntled losers everywhere.
Is there no scam so transparently farcical that millions of American lunkheads won’t fall for it? Evidently not.
As you read here first, anybody with an eighth grader’s understanding of the U.S. Constitution knew that Cruz’s mad quest to destroy the Affordable Care Act could not possibly succeed. And was politically self-destructive as well, if not for Cruz, then for the Republican Party.
Of course millions of gullible voters lack that understanding. Meanwhile, the Texas Senator and his allies continue to bombard the faithful with emails promising imminent victory and soliciting cash. They’re like the most shameless televangelist faith healers.
Except now the enemies list doesn’t feature only Democrats like President Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, but prominent Republicans such as Paul Ryan, John McCain, Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham.
Anyway, here’s Huck Finn’s daddy, America’s first Tea Party patriot:
“Oh, yes, this is a wonderful govment, wonderful. Why, looky here. There was a free nigger there from Ohio—a mulatter, most as white as a white man. He had the whitest shirt on you ever see, too, and the shiniest hat; and there ain’t a man in that town that’s got as fine clothes as what he had…They said he was a p’fessor in a college, and could talk all kinds of languages, and knowed everything. And that ain’t the wust. They said he could VOTE when he was at home. Well, that let me out. Thinks I, what is the country a-coming to? It was ‘lection day, and I was just about to go and vote myself if I warn’t too drunk to get there; but when they told me there was a State in this country where they’d let that nigger vote, I drawed out. I says I’ll never vote agin.”
Sound like anybody you know? The professor, I mean.
Try to put Pap’s racism aside; everybody in the novel, set in slave-owning Missouri around 1840, shares it. Among other virtues, Twain was a great reporter. Besides, liberals calling everybody racist are tedious and smug.
Equally striking are Pap Finn’s social anxiety and envy, his anti-intellectualism and paranoia, attitudes which have always run like a dark stain under the surface of American life.
The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik finds another antecedent to today’s Tea Party in the John Birch Society:
“Reading through the literature on the hysterias of 1963, the continuity of beliefs is plain: Now, as then, there is said to be a conspiracy in the highest places to end American Constitutional rule and replace it with a Marxist dictatorship, evidenced by a plan in which your family doctor will be replaced by a federal bureaucrat—mostly for unnamable purposes, but somehow involving the gleeful killing off of the aged.
“There is also the conviction, in both eras, that only a handful of Congressmen and polemicists (then mostly in newspapers; now on TV) stand between honest Americans and the apocalypse, and that the man presiding over that plan is not just a dupe but personally depraved, an active collaborator with our enemies, a secret something or other, and any necessary means to bring about the end of his reign are justified and appropriate.”
Same as it ever was.
Then it was H.L. Hunt; today it’s the Koch Brothers.
But you know what? From the Civil War onward, they always lose. It’s powerlessness that makes people vulnerable to conspiracy theories.
And maybe I’m getting soft, because I’m actually starting to feel sorry for them—the Limbaugh and Cruz fans that send me emails calling Democrats “evil.” Not simply because they’re the pigeons in a giant con game, but because they’re so frightened, like children scared of monsters under the bed.
It must be a terribly unhappy way to live.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, October 16, 2013
“A Confederacy Of Zealots”: A Tea Party Purge Among The GOP
The Republican Party has reached its Ninotchka period. Ninotchka, you may recall, was the eponymous Soviet commissar played by Greta Garbo in Ernst Lubitsch’s 1939 MGM comedy, released one year after Stalin’s show trials resulted in the execution of all of the tyrant’s more moderate predecessors in the Soviet leadership. “The last mass trials were a great success,” Ninotchka notes. “There are going to be fewer but better Russians.”
Like the Stalinists and the Jacobins, today’s tea party zealots have purified their movement — not by executing but by driving away those Republicans who don’t share their enthusiasm for wrecking their country if they can’t compel the majority to embrace their notions. Today, there are fewer but “better” Republicans — if “better” means adhering to the tea party view that a United States not adhering to tea party values deserves to be brought to a clangorous halt. NBC News-Wall Street Journal polling last week turned up a bare 24 percent of Americans who have a favorable impression of the Republican Party — a share almost as low as the 21 percent who have a favorable impression of the tea party.
Also like the Stalinists and Jacobins, today’s Republicans devour their past leaders. To the hard-core right wing, the Bushes, Mitt Romney, Bob Dole and John McCain are irritating vestiges of the party’s pussyfooting past; none was sufficiently devoted to rolling back the federal government when he had the chance. Thankfully, the Bushes et al. haven’t met the fate of Bukharin and Danton — but they are as conspicuously absent from today’s Republican rallies and state conventions as Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin are conspicuously present.
If anything illustrates just how far today’s Republicans have drifted from their traditional moorings, it’s the dismay with which their longtime business allies have greeted their decisions to close the government and threaten default. Such pillars of the Republican coalition as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and the National Retail Federation have called for an end to the shutdown and an increase in the debt limit. Bruce Josten, the chamber’s executive vice president for government affairs, told The Post last week that his organization is considering backing primary challenges to tea party incumbents.
Today’s tea party-ized Republicans speak less for Wall Street or Main Street than they do for the seething resentments of white Southern backwaters and their geographically widespread but ideologically uniform ilk. Their theory of government, to the extent that they have one, derives from John C. Calhoun’s doctrine of nullification — that states in general and white minorities in particular should have the right to overturn federal law and impede majority rule. Like their predecessors in the Jim Crow South, today’s Republicans favor restricting minority voting rights if that is necessary to ensure victory at the polls.
The remarkable resurgence of these ancient and despicable doctrines is rooted in the politics of demographic and cultural despair. A series of focus groups that Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg conducted of evangelical and tea party Republicans (who, combined, constitute a majority of party members) found that they entertain a widespread and fatalistic belief that the United States is well on its way to becoming a socialist state by virtue of the growing number of non-white Americans’ dependence on government. Encapsulating the groups’ perspectives, Greenberg writes: “Their party is losing to a Democratic Party of big government whose goal is to expand programs that mainly benefit minorities.”
It does not register with these Republicans that Obamacare, which facilitates more widespread access to privatized insurance, is nowhere as socialistic as Medicare and Social Security. It seems that some believe that Obamacare is socialistic because they fear it will chiefly benefit the welfare queens of Republican lore, while Social Security and Medicare beneficiaries include millions of deserving people just like them — the disproportionately elderly and white Republican Party’s members.
It should not have been surprising, then, that demonstrators waved Confederate flags at the tea party demonstration Sunday on the Mall while demanding that congressional Republicans not succumb to the pressure to compromise and that the Obama administration open the Mall’s monuments, the World War II memorial in particular. The tea party’s theory of government and the fear and loathing that many adherents harbor toward minorities find a truer expression in the Confederate flag than in the Stars and Stripes.
It’s not clear whether those waving the Confederate flag on Sunday favored opening the Lincoln Memorial. I suspect, however, that the Republican enshrined there wouldn’t have favored them.
By: Harol Meyerson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, October 15, 2013
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