The Revolt of the Lower Middle Class and the Stupidity of the Elites
Monday, 28 October 2013 10:30By Mike Lofgren, Truthout | Opinion
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) speaks to reporters after a Senate meeting on Capitol Hill in Washington, Oct. 16, 2013. (Photo: Doug Mills / The New York Times)
We read in the aftermath of the government shutdown and near default on the country's sovereign debt that the US Chamber of Commerce is clutching its pearls. "We are going to get engaged," said a mouthpiece for the chamber. "The need is now more than ever to elect people who understand the free market and not silliness." The chamber is the top lobbying organization in America, and it gave 93 percent of its political contributions to Republican candidates in the 2010 election that birthed the Congressional Tea Party Caucus. Apparently it is now having buyer's remorse. Politico, the newsletter of the Beltway illuminati, reports similar tidings: Rich Republican mega-donors like hedge fund vulture Paul Singer are expressing frustration with Republican office holders, even though Singer has been a major financial backer of the Tea Party-oriented Club for Growth, which egged on the politicians who forced the shutdown. Even the Koch brothers have been distancing themselves from the shutdown.
Most Democrats, needless to say, are rubbing their hands with glee, and predictions of doom for the GOP are too numerous to count. The Tea Party, according to this narrative, has taken over the Republican Party and will lead it to inevitable electoral oblivion: The sheer irrationality of their demands constitutes electoral suicide. Others are not so sure. Michael Lind has advanced the theory that the Tea Party is an aggregation of "local notables," i.e., "provincial elites [disproportionately Southern] whose power and privileges are threatened from above by a stronger central government they do not control and from below by the local poor and the local working class." He links it to a neo-Confederate ideology that is "perfectly rational" in terms of its economic objectives - a stark contrast to the prevailing description of the Tea Party as irrational. Lind further contends that progressives have misread the Tea Party, downplaying the element of elite control and obsessing over the anger and craziness of its followers.
There is some truth in this. The Tea Party definitely is disproportionately Southern, as Lind stipulates, and any movement that seeks to hobble the functioning of the federal government naturally will advance themes and tactics that sound a lot like the template of the Confederacy: states' rights, disenfranchisement of voters, use of the filibuster and so forth. Some Tea Party candidates look an awful lot like neo-Confederate sympathizers. But Lind misconstrues some of the data. If, as he says, 47 percent of white Southerners express support for the Tea Party, how does that square with his "local notables" theme: That the "backbone" of the movement is "millionaires [rather than] billionaires?" It is doubtful that 47 percent of the white population in the poorest region of the country consists even of local notables, much less millionaires.
That a fair number of local big shots is involved in the movement is unsurprising and natural, given their economic interests; what is more interesting from a sociological point of view, as well as more significant from a political perspective, is the millions of non-rich people, including those dependent on federal programs like Social Security and Medicare, who pull the lever for Tea Party candidates. The fact that 144 of 231 voting Republican House members opted for shutdown and default is not explained by the Svengali-like influence of a relatively small, regionally based group of Lind's "second-tier" affluent people, especially because the first tier, the people that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce represents, was opposed strongly to the shutdown and to allowing a default. The most plausible answer is that there is a mass popular movement (albeit working in carefully gerrymandered Congressional districts) that would throw these members of Congress out of office if they had voted otherwise. If big-shot money were the sole criterion, the office holders would never have threatened default in the first place.
In advancing his thesis that Tea Party adherents are more affluent and more educated than average, Lind cites a New York Times/CBS News poll from early 2010that claims those findings. This poll is frequently quoted in characterizations of the Tea Party, and there has been relatively little work done on the demographics of the movement since then. But one study found slightly lower levels of education in GOP Congressional districts than in the country as a whole. Given the paucity of reliable data, it is not unreasonable to use GOP district demographics as a rough surrogate for Tea Party demographics if 62 percent of House Republicans are voting the Tea Party line on shutdown and default.
While it may be true that the Tea Party was originally about fiscal issues and initially attracted more affluent people, what appears to have happened is that the Religious Right, always on the lookout to infiltrate and take over organizations (see your local school board) gradually became the demographic center of gravity of the movement. That would explain why the Tea Party initially described itself as wholly concerned with debt, deficit and federal overreach but gradually became almost as theocratic as the activists from the Religious Right. If anything, they were even slightly more disposed than the rest of the Republican Party to inject religious issues into the political realm.According to an academic study of the Tea Party, "[T]hey seek 'deeply religious' elected officials, approve of religious leaders' engaging in politics and want religion brought into political debates." A glance at the bios of the steering committee for Tea Party Unity suggests a strong theocratic bias. That probably explains why Tea Party darling Ted Cruz took time from obstructing Senate proceedings to be the marquee speaker at the Values Voter Summit, whose straw poll he won handily. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence of low-church zealotry, rather than typical plutocratic manners and mores, to be gained simply by watching Tea Party protests. Economic elites just might comport themselves like this, this, this, this or this when publicly expressing their political views, but - with the possible exception of Donald Trump - I doubt it.
Geen opmerkingen:
Een reactie posten