Like a cat with an embarrassment of rodentlike riches, the Times' Ross Douthat this morning paws liberals' discombobulation over the Tea Party movement's success.
"[T]he liberal mind is desperate for a narrative, a storyline, something to ease the pain of losing to a ragtag band of right-wing populists," writes Douthat, who then relates and topples a few floated narratives, from racism's prevalence to what Douthat sees as "the most persuasive liberal storyline" -- that of Tea Partiers as entitlement hypocrites (i.e., the "Don't touch my Medicare" thing).
Parenthetically, my favorite from Douthat's list: "that the Tea Parties are nothing new.... [H]istorian Sean Wilentz ... link[s] Glenn Beck’s daffier ideas (and the Tea Partiers who love them) to the cold war-era paranoias of the John Birch Society. These parallels are real. But there’s a crucial difference. The Birchers only had a crackpot message; they never found a mainstream one. The Tea Party marries fringe concerns (repeal the 17th Amendment!) to a timely, responsible-seeming message about spending and deficits."
It's my favorite not because it's true that Tea Partyism is indeed "nothing new," but because Douthat has his subsequent crackpotisms backward. One could rather easily make an intellectual case for repealing the 17th Amendment -- one more Madisonian buffer between lawmaking and the great unwashed is at least theoretically plausible -- whereas Tea Partiers' "responsible-seeming message" about deficit-busting merged with more and more tax cuts is just more immensely falsifiable drivel.
There is one other storyline, however, that Douthat omits from liberals' explanatory grab bag, and which I find most compelling. I should add that Douthat committed no intentional oversight here, since most liberals -- and virtually every movement progressive -- reject the thesis, which is this:
Because America is a center-right nation, the Tea Party is more closely aligned with the majority thrust of political sentiment; which is to say, what looks extraordinarily crazy to the center-left appears but mildly and even acceptably pixilated, perhaps, to the center-right. Put another way, the Tea Party is the majority's affably touched uncle; to the numerically narrower and more distant left, it's a dangerous, raving madman.
This major premise of a center-right nation is commonly embraced by political theorists (though, again, it is roundly rejected by movement progressives of the hallucinatory "We the People" chant), but it helps to explain as well, I think, why the seemingly sudden rise of anti-Obama fervor after what so many of us mistook for a universal desire for organic "change." In brief, or so goes the minor premise, voters in 2008 voted less for Obama than they did against the accumulated nightmares of BushWorld, in which willingly resided the profoundly foolish John McCain.
The presently disaffected majority, therefore, wasn't so much pumped by the Tea Party as it was primed by its own preexisting ideology. Nevertheless the Tea Party, financed with jesuitical genius by offstage deep pockets, has exploited what already was.
Comments