The Tea Party says that all they're
interested in is trying to create an unregulated free-market utopia. This shift has been, amazingly enough, a
response to hard times, which has pushed the culture wars off the front burner,
just like hard times did in the early 1930s. (In those days the social issues were
evolution and prohibition).
What unites
the two (culture wars & the quest for free-market utopia) is the crushing
irony of populist conservatism. In both
cases you're talking about a movement that empowers the powerful but that does so by insanely imagining
that it's standing up for the little guy a.k.a. the common man.
In
"Pity the Billionaire," Thomas Frank marvels that the Ayn Rand myth
of the free market could make such a sweeping comeback with "free
market" deregulation which even then was almost cratering the US economy. On page 118 of this new book, Frank brings up
Naomi Klein's shock doctrine theory and the irony that the right claimed that
the Obama administration was trying to take advantage of the economic crisis to
move America to the left. In reality however, the conservatives and
their captive economists apply the shock doctrine to America's economic
meltdown to invent an even more
utopian vision of a free market.
What Naomi
Klein was talking about were deeply unpopular policies forced on nations at
moments of crisis. The irony here is
that the Wall Street bailouts of 2008-09 fit this pattern: At a
moment of supreme danger, the country was asked to prop up the banks that
had basically spent the previous decade in an orgy of fraud and wholely
unwarranted bonuses. "Give Wall
Street what it wants, we were told, or else."
But what is really spectacular is how this alarming
historical episode got processed through the right's "upside-down machine' and
came out as the story of how power-hungry leftists trying to
"transform America," by force, during a crisis: Rather than a story about
how Hank Paulson and Co. bailed out their friends, it became a nutcake story of
how "Big Government" was trying to get its fingers around the throat of free
enterprise! This was the moment, you
will recall, when sales of "Atlas Shrugged" spiked, and the great
fear of a "crazed government reacting to
hard times by grabbing economic power' really got going. The year after that (i.e. 2010) saw the
publication of Glenn Beck's surprisingly influential novel, "The Overton
Window," with its big central idea of liberals using fake crises to grab
power. Masterful propaganda all
this. We at least have to give them
credit for that, disgusting as their achievement might be to us.
The funny
thing about the "Righties" is that they
too want to imagine themselves as the victims of the "shock doctrine."
Even
the parties that were manifestly the beneficiaries/architects of it want to
imagine that!
Despite
being organized by Americans for Prosperity (Koch brothers) and FreedomWorks
(Dick Armey), the Tea Party has taken on a life of its own and that's driving
the GOP presidential primaries. Although
"Pity the Billionaire" focuses on the sleight of hand that the right
successfully pulled off by doubling down on disastrous economic policies, some
say that many of the "free market" populist backers are crossovers
with the religious and "social-values" white
"American-entitlement" movement.
On the other
hand, the Tea Party movement has been pretty forthright about not wanting to
discuss culture-war issues. This was
especially the case in 2009-2010, when economic issues drove everything else
off the front pages. The Tea Partyers are
primarily small business people for whom the culture-war issues are secondary, while
attacking "red tape" and organized labor are primary. As EJ Dionne has pointed out, the
communitarian spirit that drove culture-wars populism for decades is very
different from the individualistic spirit of the free-market creed. If anti-evolution types suddenly got the
old-time religion of the free market, that's fairly remarkable. Which is not to say it can't happen or it
won't happen even more broadly -- Lord knows these groups have come together
before. Anything is possible when you
don't have a vigorous left challenging these people's views and thereby making
their contradictions obvious. People
might even start to believe that Jesus was a great venture capitalist or
something. Never underestimate the powers of brilliantly well-planned and well-funded
propaganda when it is focused on a large population of low-information voters!
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