America
Anyone for tea?
Leonard Quart
These days when there’s talk of a conservative upsurge, it’s the right-wing populist Tea Parties that first come to mind. The Tea Parties exploded with great fanfare close to two years ago, protesting Obama’s economic stimulus package.
Lacking a coherent political programme and attracting a variety of political strands (racists, social conservatives, anti-gun control activists) they have angrily united behind a commitment to small government, reduced taxes and deficit, and hostility to environmental and gun controls. They are also Constitution worshippers, and see a number of their principles as stemming directly from the original text of the founding document. Though some Tea Partiers have even called for a constitutional amendment to give states the power to repeal acts of Congress; anything to erode the power of the federal government, even a return to 19th century Senator Calhoun’s idea of nullification. He was a man who believed that slavery was a positive good.
Eighteen percent of Americans identify themselves as Tea Party supporters, and they tend to be Republican (80%), white, male, married, older than 45, better off and more educated than the general public, and ferociously antagonistic to Washington. Many of them view our pragmatic liberal president as moving the country towards that old American bugaboo, ‘socialism’.
It’s hard for me to imagine the too rational, politically strategic Obama causing fear in anybody’s heart, but ‘socialism’ probably signifies for the Tea Partiers any attempt (eg health care) at helping the poor at the expense of the middle class or the rich. The Tea Party’s members support books, politicians, and causes they favour with much greater fervour than liberals are now able to muster. We may sign petitions and organise a few demonstrations, but compared to the shrill passion of the Tea Partiers, liberal responses are generally tepid, even moribund. And a number of the new Republicans elected to Congress are allied with Tea Parties – they are clearly an ominous force to reckon with.
Last weekend’s horrific assassination attempt of a well-liked centrist Arizona Democratic Representative, Gabrielle Giffords (and murder of six others), has put the Tea Parties on the defensive, It’s not that the emotionally disturbed assassin’s political views can be defined as clearly right or left, or that the charged political atmosphere can explain his actions. But there is no denying that the inflammatory rhetoric used by the Tea Parties, Sarah Palin, and others on the right in their attacks on the Obama administration and Democrats has established a violent tone for much of recent American political discourse.
In a country whose history is strewn with political assassinations, and guns, especially in a state like Arizona, are readily available and it’s law that everyone who is an adult and a citizen or a lawful permanent resident is entitled to carry guns, it’s fortunate that events of this order of violence haven’t occurred more often.
But there is no sign that Tea Parties are planning to rethink their rhetoric. They angrily assert that the liberals’ ‘efforts to try and smear us and shut us up will fail’. And they are raising money to defend themselves from mainstream media attacks. Rational discussion of what happened seems outside their purview, so one hopes less ideological, more pragmatic conservative voices can be heard above the din, and, at minimum, the level of political debate will become more civil.
The Tea Parties replaced a very different, diverse, ever-changing, and non-populist phenomenon – the neo-conservatives – as symbols of the right. The neo-cons never developed a base, a political organisation, or a defined leadership, but they boasted a fully formed intellectual perspective. Leading figures in the first wave of neo-conservatives were former liberal intellectuals like Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, and James Q Wilson, who, repelled by the counterculture and the New Left and Black Power movements of the 60s, had, in addition, become disenchanted with the leftward trend of American liberalism in those years (eg George McGovern’s opposition to the Vietnam War).
Despite my being deeply linked to the political movements and culture of that era, some of the neo-cons’ sceptical analysis of the welfare state’s expansion, especially Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s (he was uneasily linked to the neo-cons, and defected from them a bit later) incisive critique of ‘The War on Poverty’ I felt was on target. Moynihan held that the programmes were administered sloppily, and that the government understood little about what community meant. He saw the whole programme’s efforts as all too often adulterated by politicians, ‘middle-class professional reformers, elite academics and intellectuals’. And the neo-cons generally offered a critique of the left that, even though I usually disagreed with it, had substance.
That first group of neo-conservatives were still linked to the Democratic Party, and a belief in activist government. But by the late 70s, most of the neo-cons embraced the free market as a solution to social problems, and began to move away from an interest in domestic affairs into the realm of foreign policy where they attacked détente and were committed to a powerful American military. So when Reagan came to power in 1981, many of the neo-cons found an ideological home and a significant role as the Republican Party’s house intellectuals.
Over the years, a new generation of neo-cons, who had no link to the left or the Democratic Party, emerged: like William Kristol, Robert Kagan, Douglas Feith, and the ill-starred I Lewis Libby. Many of them were in the forefront of supporting the war in Iraq – an expression of their blind belief in America’s role in the world. In Justin Vaisse’s book ‘Neo Conservatism: The Biography of a Movement’, he writes: ‘One can see neo-conservatism as an avatar of American messianism, as the expression of an underlying nationalism…And under George W Bush it exalted national greatness and looked to crusades abroad to expand freedom as a way of strengthening citizen virtues at home’. In short, the neo-cons had become no different from the Cheneys and Rumsfields whose world view they shared. Over the years they had turned into reflexive rightists.
However, once the Democrats gained ascendancy, the neo-cons’ political power diminished, but they still write columns, play major roles in conservative think tanks, and edit magazines.
The Tea Parties have already caused political havoc, but it’s hard for me to accept that they won’t eventually disappear like almost all American populist insurgencies have done in the past. And though the neo-cons may be in decline, and the Tea Parties don’t share their commitment to an aggressive foreign policy in the Middle East and elsewhere, given the right historical moment, I have a queasy feeling they will be back influencing policy again.
Leonard Quart is a professor emeritus of American studies