29.09.2010
Tea Party: rumblings on the frenzied right
Jim Creegan reports from the United States on the polarisation of politics and an increasingly frenzied middle class
“Tonight the ruling class knows. They have seen it now. There is a people’s revolution. The people have had enough.” Thus spoke millionaire estate agent Carl Paladino at his victory rally on September 14, after burying the official Republican candidate for governor of New York in that state’s primary contest, contrary to all expectations. Paladino, who had the endorsement of Sarah Palin and the Tea Party, will carry the Republican banner into the general election against the Democratic nominee in November.
Following his victory, Paladino’s e-mail postings to his business and political associates have come to public attention. In addition to depictions of bestiality, they contain an image of an African tribal dance over the heading “Obama Inauguration Rehearsal” and a photographically altered picture of Obama in the garish outfit of a 70s-style pimp walking hand in hand with Michele, attired as his ‘ho’. (Political supporters have dismissed criticisms of these electronic postcards as humourless elitist snobbery toward the high jinks of your average white guy next door.) Paladino also described the Democratic head of the New York state assembly as ‘an antichrist or a Hitler’. He has advocated sending welfare recipients to prison in order to teach them habits of personal hygiene. The ‘ruling class’ of his victory speech was not the one familiar to Marxists; he was referring instead to the politicians in the state capital at Albany, to whom he has threatened, figuratively, “to take a baseball bat.” Paladino fancies himself a contemporary version of Howard Beale, the ‘mad-as-hell’ news anchor portrayed by Peter Finch in Sidney Lumet’s 1976 film, Network. Paladino’s anger, like that of all Tea Partiers, is directed at politicians, not the capitalists they now serve more openly than at any time since the gilded age that followed the civil war.
Paladino is one of eight Tea Party candidates for major office to defeat leadership-backed rivals in recent Republican primaries. Another, Christine O’Donnell, who won the senatorial primary in Delaware on the same day, is a former Christian crusader against the evils of masturbation. She has publicly stated her beliefs that the earth is 6,000 years old and that inter-species breeding techniques have produced mice with fully functioning human brains. Comedian Bill Maher played a tape of a 1999 appearance by O’Donnell on his talk show, on which she admitted to having “dabbled into witchcraft” (although she never actually joined a coven, she said), and gone with a date to a blood-sprinkled satanic altar. To avoid questions concerning these youthful dabblings, O ’Donnell abruptly cancelled appearances on news programmes scheduled for the following Sunday.
A third, and slightly less flamboyant candidate, Nevada’s Sharron Angle, will face the Democratic senate majority leader Harry Reid in the general election. She is on record as favouring the “phasing out” of social security and medicare (government retirement and old-age medical insurance schemes, respectively) and replacing them with private plans. She has said that unemployment insurance ‘spoils’ workers, and should be reduced from its already inadequate levels. Not to be outdone, Rand Paul, the Republican candidate for the senate in Kentucky, said on national television that he would have had a hard time voting for the civil rights act of 1964 had he been in congress at the time. Paul added that he had no problem with the provision of the bill that banned racial discrimination in government venues, but thought that outlawing segregation in privately-owned facilities like hotels and restaurants violates the sanctity of private property. He found himself attempting for the next few weeks to tamp down the media uproar caused by this remark.
These electoral upsets have sent the national Republican leadership into spasms. Some argue that the positions espoused by Tea Party candidates, however popular amongst the small fraction of the electorate consisting of Republican primary voters, can never appeal widely enough to carry the party to victory in a general election. Many Democratic politicians agree, regarding early Tea Party triumphs as a gift that will help them in November, especially in eastern-seaboard states. The Democrats are already running television adverts depicting the Republican parvenus as ‘wing nuts’. But other top Republicans correctly recognise the Tea Party as the fastest growing and most energetic force in American politics during this election season, and are adjusting their rhetoric and congressional votes accordingly; they especially want to avoid the dreaded epithet reserved by the party’s extreme right for any elected official suspected of ‘moderation’ (eg, being soft on environmental protection or abortion rights). The epithet is RINO: Republican In Name Only.
The changed political climate has allowed at least one Republican bigwig to vie for distinction in a field thus far dominated by Democrats: public vacillation. On the night of the two most recent Tea Party triumphs, Fox network viewers witnessed a set-to between George W Bush’s master campaign strategist, Karl Rove, and paleo-reactionary news-show host, Sean Hannity, normally an amicable pair. Rove strongly denounced the winner of the Delaware primaries, Christine O’Donnell, as ‘nutty’ and lacking in the qualities required of a winning candidate, only to provoke an impassioned defence of the anti-self-abuse firebrand from Hannity. Taken to task the next day the rightwing radio demagogue Rush Limbaugh - the man many call the real head of the Republicans today - for disloyalty to his party, a chastened Rove returned to television that night to qualify his strictures and endorse O’Donnell.
Newt Gingrich, former speaker of the house of representatives and rumoured presidential hopeful, is also frothing along with the Tea Party. He recently praised as profoundly insightful a magazine article by Dinesh D’Souza. D’Souza writes that Obama inherited his politics from his Kenyan father (whom the president hardly knew). “Incredibly,” writes this far-right ideologue of East Indian descent, “the US is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s. This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anti-colonial ambitions, is now setting the nation’s agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son” (quoted in The New York Times, September 15).
In a prologue to the primary elections, approximately 100,000 Tea Partiers filled the mall that stretches between the Lincoln memorial and the Washington monument in the nation’s capital on August 28. This ‘restore America’ rally, staged at the summons of the movement’s television and radio guru, Glenn Beck, took place on the same date, and in the same location, as Martin Luther King’s march for jobs and freedom, at which he delivered his ‘I have a dream’ speech 47 years earlier. A niece of King’s even adorned a speakers’ platform dominated by Beck and Sarah Palin. The politics of the march were deliberately toned down. Beck had previously urged participants not to carry harsh anti-Obama placards like those on display at earlier events, and speakers emphasised religious and broadly patriotic themes - support for troops overseas, homilies about the founding fathers - over so-called partisan politics. But even the misappropriation of the symbols of the civil rights struggle could not eliminate the racial insults that gush irrepressibly from the Tea Party’s depths like gobs of oil from the BP spill, some intentional and others completely unselfconscious. In the latter category was a guide to Washington for the marchers, written by one of the event’s organisers, which advised visitors that “Most taxi drivers and many waiters/waitresses … are immigrants, frequently from east Africa or Arab countries. As a rule, African immigrants do not like for you to assume they are African-Americans” (quoted in Newsweek blog August 25 2010).
A new normal
The above developments are symptomatic of the deep anxiety, often boiling over into rage, with which the country approaches mid-term elections, to be held on November 2. The main political beneficiary of this mood is the Republican right. The question is not whether the Democrats will lose congressional seats, but rather how many. Some opinion polls are showing a 12-point preference for Republicans among likely voters. With all 435 seats in the house of representatives up for a vote, the betting is that the Democrats will lose their 39-seat majority there. In the senate, where Democrats hold an effective majority of 58 out of 100 seats, prospects are more uncertain, but the 60-seat, filibuster-proof ‘super-majority’ that rode into that chamber on Obama’s coattails two years ago is now definitely a thing of the past.
In that the Tea Partiers are standing as Republicans rather than as independents, and that an important part of the electorate is responding to the perceived failures of the governing party by voting for the other party, the Republican-Democrat duopoly is still in intact. It is functioning to contain discontent within channels that make it not only manageable, but in this case positively beneficial, for the ruling class. But for all their easily ridiculed stupidity, the Tea Partiers grasp one thing traditional centrist politicians miss: that the two-party system is fraying around the edges; that it is increasingly difficult to win elections by using the tried-and-true American political formula of appealing to the status quo against the dangers posed by ‘extremists’. The status quo is rapidly becoming too inhospitable to be appealed to.
It is now a media commonplace that the economic crisis of 2008 ushered in a ‘new normal’. Several statistics suggest its contours. Corporate profits have rebounded handsomely from the crash of 2008, and are expected to reach a record high of nearly nine percent next year. In response to these rosy projections, the prices of stock-market shares have climbed steadily. These robust profits, however, do not come from expanded sales. They rather represent the savings firms have made from post-crash ‘economies’, such as huge redundancies, and greater productivity (read: intensified work) from those who remain on the job. The unemployment rate has hovered around 10% for over a year, an alarming statistic in a country where six percent was previously considered on the high side and unemployment insurance is meagre compared with western Europe. The total number of unemployed, now at more than 14 million, is as great in terms of absolute numbers (though not as a percentage of the workforce) as during the great depression. To this must be added 1.1 million too discouraged to look for work, and another 8.9 million ‘employed part-time for economic reasons’ (read: cannot find enough work - US Bureau of Labor Statistics September 2010).
Landlord repossessions are at an all time high, as boarded up houses and shops are becoming a familiar sight in middle class neighbourhoods, not just in urban ghettos, where they were always part of the landscape. Figures from the 2010 census reveal that one in seven Americans, one in five children, and one in four black people (over 40 million all told) now live beneath the official poverty line - percentages as high as in 1964, when Lyndon Johnson’s ‘great society’ programmes promised to eradicate the blight of poverty forever. And in a country driven more than any other by dreams of avarice, median household income was five percent lower in 2009 than in 1999 - the first decade of over-all living-standard regression within the memory of almost everyone now alive. Executive suites may fret about a ‘double-dip’ recession that would wipe out their recovered profits; the rest of the country is hardly aware of any ascent from the initial dip.
Look down in anger
The Tea Party arises out of this deteriorating situation, but theirs is not the rage of its principal victims. A New York Times/CBS poll published in April showed Tea Partiers to be considerably less plebeian than many observers (including this one) had previously thought. The self-identified supporters of the movement in the poll’s sample were 59% male, 75% over age 45, and 89% white. Thirty-seven percent held university degrees, as opposed to 25% of all American adults, and 20% reported a yearly household income of $100,000 or more, compared to only 14% of population at large.
A few other results are worth noting. Most respondents said that they themselves felt secure financially, but were worried that a member of their household would be out of a job within the next year. In addition, ‘more than half say the policies of the administration favour the poor, and 25% think that the administration favours blacks over whites - compared with 11% of the general public.’ The largest number of respondents said the Tea Party’s goal should be shrinking the size of government, but supported maintaining social security and medicare programmes at current levels, and thought that cuts should be only in areas of ‘wasteful’ spending (all figures and citations - New York Times April 15).
The above survey presents a picture of a relatively comfortable segment of the white population, middle aged or older. While it did not specify the respondents’ geographical location, the attitudes expressed are less typical of urban professionals in the country’s coastal cities than of those who reside either in suburbs or in the towns and cities of the inter-coastal heartland. They are not hit hard by the sour economy, but are far down enough on the social ladder to be keenly aware of the distress of those who are, and fear it could affect their families at some future point. Their instinctive response, however, is not solidarity with the distressed, but a determination not to become part of them. They are resolved to hold on to what they have, for themselves and their children, at all costs. Now as ever in the US, their class prejudice is colour-tinged. There may be white people among the unemployed, evicted and debt-burdened, but such misfortunes are still seen by this cohort as things that befall ‘them’, not ‘us’, and if society is fracturing more deeply along a class axis, they want to end up on the right side of the fault line.
But can they ever feel secure with a black man in the white house? Many remember the 1970s as the decade of forced bussing to achieve racial balance in the schools, and ‘affirmative-action’ preference for minorities in hiring and university admissions. If these things took place under white presidents, how can they conceivably rely on Barack Obama to prevent the have-nots from gaining at the expense of the have-somes?
The survey also sheds light on the motives behind the Tea Party’s anti-‘big-government’ rhetoric. Opposition to government despotism has an old provenance in this country, going back to the war of independence, whose symbolism the Tea Party has appropriated. A flag of the rebellious colonists picturing a coiled snake along with the legend, “Don’t Tread on Me”, has become the unofficial Tea Party emblem. But when queried, movement supporters can usually point to nothing more outrageous than Obama’s healthcare reform bill as an instance of the tyranny against which they are in full cry. Obama’s real acts of despotism - ‘extraordinary rendition’, imprisonment without trial and assertion of the right to assassinate US citizens deemed ‘enemy combatants’ - are things they would probably support if they thought about them at all. Most respondents to the New York Times survey (in contradistinction to some of the candidates who supposedly represent them) had no objection to government spending - on social security and medicare - from which they benefit. ‘Wasteful spending’, on the other hand, is a designation reserved for money that goes to someone else, like blacks and poor people. Tea Partiers are no more concerned with public thrift than they were when George W Bush was running up record deficits without their apparent notice. Their new-found fixation with federal balance sheets may at first appear identical to the quite different budgetary concerns of the Wall Street bankers, from whom they borrow their slogans. But at bottom it is a genteel camouflage for the same fear and loathing that drives them to call Obama a socialist, a pimp and the son of a philandering Luo tribesman. These epithets are euphemisms for another word they dare not use in public.
Aliens abound
If the United States stands out among nations for its continuing racialism directed against black people, it holds no such distinction when it comes to the kindred scourges of anti-immigrant bigotry and Islamophobia - contagions that are now sweeping the entire western world. But the US is no laggard in the secretion of these toxins, either.
In April, Jan Brewer, governor of Arizona, signed into state law a bill that would require legal aliens to carry their residence papers with them at all times, and permit police to demand these papers of anyone they may stop or arrest if they have a ‘reasonable suspicion’ that the detainee may be an illegal alien. Suspicion being an intangible thing, the law was instantly understood as a licence for police to harass Arizona’s large Mexican population, even though the rate of illegal border crossing has diminished slightly in recent years. Liberal and minority organisations throughout the country were appalled, and called for a commercial boycott of the state. But the law drew solid support from a majority of Arizonans, and, according to polls, from a majority of Americans as well. The Obama administration successfully intervened in federal court to block the law’s implementation pending appeal by the state of Arizona, on grounds that it encroached on Washington’s authority to enforce immigration law.
But, in the meanwhile, the law became a cause célèbre of the Republican right. It was endorsed by Arizona’s own senator John McCain, and leading Republican senators from other states - Grassley, Graham and Kyle - who threw aside their worship of the US constitution to call for the repeal of the 14th amendment. Adopted after the civil war to ensure full legal status to emancipated slaves, the amendment confers citizenship upon anyone (except the children of foreign diplomats) born in the United States, and accords them the full protection of its laws. The intent behind repeal is to deny this status to the American-born offspring of illegal aliens. Arizona’s Maricopa county, near Phoenix, is also the home of a national Tea Party celebrity, Joe Arpaio. Advertising himself as America’s toughest sheriff, Arpaio made his reputation by housing prisoners in tents amid stifling desert heat, and parading them through the streets in bright pink underwear.
Grabbing more headlines over the summer than Arizona aliens, however, is the controversy surrounding the proposed ‘ground-zero mosque’, as the right has dubbed it, even though it is not, strictly speaking, either at ground zero or a mosque. The proposed building location, now occupied by an old warehouse, is two city blocks away from the site of the September 11 attack, and is not intended to be a mosque, but a 15-storey Islamic community centre containing a prayer room. Its imam, Feisal Abdul Rauf, is not only an adherent of Sufism, a mild, mystical branch of Islam, but has conducted religious sensitivity training for the FBI, and has just toured the middle east promoting ‘American values’ in the pay of the state department. A genuine mosque has existed near the proposed site, in New York’s financial district, for many years. Muslims, moreover, comprise only about two percent of the American population, and are therefore more inclined than in Europe to avow their patriotism.
None of these considerations prevented rightwing bloggers from stirring up opposition to the building’s construction, soon followed by Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post and his national Fox News television network. The Zionist establishment then added its voice in the person of Abraham Foxman, the head of the Anti-Defamation League of B’Nai Brith, which ostensibly opposes all racial end ethnic prejudice, not merely discrimination against Jews. The Zionist leadership wields more influence in New York, with its big Jewish population, than in the country as a whole. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict has driven many Jews who were once liberal or leftist-inclined to the right over the decades, as is evidenced by their prominence among the so-called neocons who promoted the invasion of Iraq. Sarah Palin also got into the act with her famous twitter, urging mosque opponents to “repudiate” the notion that imam Rauf is a man of peace. Unsubstantiated claims were then made to the effect that Rauf had taken donations from terrorists.
Thousands of people demonstrated both for and against the so-called mosque’s construction this past September 11. The anti-mosque demonstrators were a motley collection of Christian fundamentalists, Zionists and hell’s angels biker types, with a sprinkling of anti-Muslim Hindus. Seven out of ten residents of New York City oppose the mosque’s construction, although most who live in the borough of Manhattan, and New York State as a whole, have no problem with the project.
New York’s billionaire Republican mayor, Michael Bloomberg, has thus far stood by his decision to allow construction to go forward. Certain Democrats have been less resolute. Barack Obama, after defending the mosque on grounds of religious freedom, backtracked the next day, saying he had only intended to extol freedom of worship in the abstract, without taking a position on whether the mosque actually had the right to exist on its proposed site. Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the senate majority leader, who is facing a close contest with Tea Partier Sharron Angle in November, said that the mosque should be built somewhere else. Reid is a centrist Democrat. Howard Dean, however, is the darling of the party’s ‘progressive’ wing, who made a bid for the presidential nomination in 2004, and served until recently as chairman of the Democratic national committee. Was it pressure from the powerful Zionist lobby in his party that persuaded Dean, who is not now standing for any public office, to opine on Keith Olbermann’s Countdown that the whole issue was highly complicated, and that the views of religious freedom advocates and anti-Islamic bigots should be evenly weighed in pursuit of some sort of compromise? The officially endorsed Republican primary candidate for governor, Rick Lazio, made opposition to the mosque the central plank in his campaign platform. He lost, as we have seen, to the Tea Party’s Carl Paladino, who not only opposes building a mosque near the old World Trade Center location, but, in contradiction to his professed libertarian principles, vows if elected to initiate a government seizure of the proposed site to prevent building the Islamic centre on it.
Most publicly prominent opponents of the so-called mosque of course deny accusations of Islamophobia. They rather invoke the ‘sensitivities’ of those who lost family members in the 9/11 attacks, even though some of those families find the mosque unobjectionable. As for those who oppose it, their sensitivities could only be injured on the assumption that they hold all Muslims collectively responsible for the crime of 9/11.
Others are less inhibited about expressing their true feelings, like supervisors and workers at a meatpacking company who cursed their fellow Somali employees for being Muslims, threw blood, meat and bones at them, and interrupted their prayer breaks - one of a rising number of such workplace incidents throughout the country (New York Times, September 24). The true spirit of the anti-mosque campaign was also grasped by Terry Jones, the Florida preacher who threatened to hold a public Koran burning at his church on September 11, until persuaded to cancel his plans by a personal phone call from Robert Gates, secretary of defence, who argued that such an act would endanger US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. The campaign’s true spirit was also evinced by a drunken and mentally unstable young man named Robert Enright, who had made a film in Afghanistan about the hardships of American soldiers stationed there. On August 24 in New York City, Enright slashed a Bangladeshi taxi driver, Ahmed Sharif, across the hand, arms and neck with a pocket knife, after inquiring as to whether he was a Muslim.
Pre-emptive rage
The rise of the Tea Party right is primarily a consequence of the ‘great recession’ that began in 2008. Hence its emphasis on economic anxieties, as opposed to the social issues - abortion and gay marriage - that only a short time ago were far-right staples, but now seem to have lost their charge. The Tea Party does not, however, represent the anger of the hardest hit. At its core is a kind of pre-emptive rage among those who think they have a good deal to lose from redistributive measures, and are profoundly uncomfortable at even the mildest hint of them. ‘Social justice’ is the phrase they most revile. They seethe at the mention of past government initiatives aimed at lessening the economic gap between black and white. Their fear is further fed by the impending disappearance of the country’s white majority and the waning of American power in the world. Yet, because the Tea Party is now the only organised force expressing any kind of rage at all, it has to an extent become a magnet for the more widespread and inchoate anger of many for whom the American dream of rising material expectations is becoming obsolescent.
The Tea Party confronts the Republican leadership with a certain dilemma. It has re-energised the party as a whole, and mouthing its slogans is the surest way to get votes in many areas and restore Republican prestige after the debacle of the Bush presidency. But it is hard to do so without defending the patent lies and public idiocies issuing from the mouths of the movement’s leading candidates, something over which Karl Rove has expressed great discomfort. Unqualified endorsement would also mean associating the Republicans with the Tea Party’s barely concealed appeal to racialist and anti-immigrant sentiment. The Republicans long ago wrote off the possibility of building a base among blacks, and have routinely trafficked in racial innuendo. They have, however, made some inroads among hispanic voters on the basis of social conservatism and the pentecostal protestantism that is now spreading among latinos. Inflaming hatred of immigrants would threaten to seal the party off forever from the fastest growing ethnic constituency in the United States, and make it the exclusive party of the most backward elements of what will soon become the white minority. Right now the opportunist vote-getting impulse seems on the ascendant.
The Tea Party’s rise also presents a general conundrum. Why has it emerged as the only mass current to challenge the political status quo in a time of deepening crisis? This question cannot be answered without understanding two other things: the marked shift of ruling class opinion away from Obama over the past year, and the role of the Democratic Party in preventing any kind of counter-mobilisation. These questions will be taken up in a future article.