The angry Rorschach movement
The Republican leadership, such as it is, seems to have settled on a strategy of “repeal and replace” for healthcare reform and the coming election. I’m sorry to have to tell them, but even with gains in November, they won’t be able to overcome a veto. The best hope for repeal is if the incumbent president is defeated in 2012 and both the Senate and House are in Republican hands. Good luck with that.
Still, that’s the strategy they’re going to pursue. Not so much because Republicans have any principles, as Dan has been pointing out, but because they want to tap into the anger and discontent that’s manifesting as the Tea Party movement. What I’m afraid of, though, is that the Republicans, and the broader “liberty movement” in general, have little idea of what the Tea Party is all about.
In his latest column, Ron Brownstein describes skepticism about the health care bill, and big government in general, as centered in the white non-college-educated middle class:
Obama has already been hurt by the perception, fanned by Republicans, that the principal beneficiaries of his efforts to repair the economy are the same interests that broke it: Wall Street, big banks, and the wealthy. The belief that Washington has transferred benefits up the income ladder is pervasive across society but especially pronounced among white voters with less than a college education, the group that most resisted Obama in 2008. Now health care could threaten Democrats from the opposite direction by stoking old fears, particularly among the white working class, that liberals are transferring income down the income ladder to the “less deserving.”
Without commenting on the validity of the perceptions he describes, think Brownstein’s right about the demographic provenance of the Tea Party folks. This reminds me of two things.
One is an essay by Michael Brendan Dougherty about the late radical right-wing writer Sam Francis. It was in that article that I first learned about the anti-elitist social commentary of Francis and James Burnham. The gist is that democracy is a sham masking control by a managerial class of elites at the expense of the traditional (read white) working class. Michael’s article is worth a read, and I’ll probably plumb Francis’s and Burnham’s work as I look more into the Tea Party movement.
The other thing I’m reminded of is the 1993 Michael Douglas movie Falling Down. It’s probably not a coincidence this movie came out when it did, sandwiched between the Perot candidacy and the Republican Revolution in Congress. The movie is a garbage heap of cliches, but it anticipates the directionless anger that I see in the Tea Party today.
I’m not sure where I’m going with this, but let’s just say that it’s a general unease with the siren song of a relatively successful mass movement. I see it luring not just the Republican Party, but the somewhat more intelligent parts of the free market movement as well.
I think I can be forgiven a lack of specificity in my unease since there’s no one who can tell me what exactly the Tea Party is about. Someone recently told me quite astutely that the Tea Party is like Barack Obama’s candidacy, a blank canvas on which we can all project our hopes and aspirations. And that’s what I’m worried about. Well-meaning folks are trying to co-opt the movement for their more-identifiably-pro-liberty ends, but I’m not sure it’s going to be a fit.
The Tea Party seems to be an anti-elite, anti-intellectual, anti-immigrant, populist grab bag of emotion. And while I can’t blame them for the sentiment given how Washington’s been performing as of late, I’m not crazy about the amorphousness of it all.
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