Jonathan Raban's "At the Tea Party" in the New York Review of Books (courtesy Matthew L.) is generally excellent but especially relevant to me. Anyone who has undergone an ideological conversion at some point in life – particularly the right-to-left kind – will empathize with the author's discomfort and inner conflict throughout the piece. I am familiar with the lonely feeling of being in a crowded room and realizing that everyone around you is absolutely out of their goddamn mind. And I strongly suspect that a lot of conservatives look at the carnival freakshow that is the Tea Party and know exactly what that feels like.
The conservative movement has always had an image problem.
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Previously (pre-Gingrich and "Contract with America" era) the problem was that "conservative" conjured up images of old, well-heeled white men in a country club sipping 40 year scotch in cashmere sweaters. The ideological faces of the movement were people like Safire and Buckley, pretentious stuffed shirts who fancied themselves intellectuals. True, there was a lunatic fringe – Father Coughlin, the Birchers, McCarthy – but mainstream conservatism tried to keep it at arm's length. Now the driving intellectual force of the movement is a gaggle of AM radio nutbars; Father Coughlin is back but this time the elected officials are groveling at his feet. And the new image of the average conservative has less to do with country clubs than with trailer parks, NASCAR infields, and barely literate adults in histrionics and stupid hats.
Raban does fail to note that the Tea Party Convention, with its $600 registration fee and multi-weekday format, does not provide an accurate cross-section of the movement. Of course the attendees will be retirees with money to throw around.
Who else would have the time or money to blow on such a circus?
But even in this overwhelmingly homogeneous group he notes a clear dividing line between, for lack of a better term, the sane and the batshit crazy.
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There are people in the audience who exchange silent grimaces with their spouse or friends when Tom Tancredo goes on his anti-immigration tirade and proposes a "civics literacy test" for voting or when Joseph Farah of World Nut Daily gives his boilerplate "God is American, and where's the birth certificate?" sermon. Half the room cheers like mad, getting the bile-fueled entertainment for which they came, and the other half wonders "Who are these people and what the hell am I doing here?"
Educated conservatives realize, for example, that 25% of the electorate is going to be Latino in a couple of decades and Tancredoism will guarantee indefinite minority status for the GOP. They realize that the insane birth certificate crap is just the update version of, as Lee Atwater (Reagan's version of Karl Rove) said:
You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger"
Conservative or not, any reasonably intelligent person knows exactly what the "birther" crap is – and more importantly, how damaging it is to the cause. Raban highlights the serious schism between people who do and do not get that. I don't know where conservatism goes from here, but I know where a lot of individual conservatives are going if the Glenn Beck legions manage to consume the GOP entirely.
hardie dunn says:
So where are they going?
Joseph Steinberg says:
Do you mean to say, even in the GOP, the world turns round? I'm getting this sense, that all the hardcore "batshit" crazies are trying to do is create a picture of a golden age that appeals to two or three disparate generations of "moderate" crazies pining for the "better" world of their childhoods. Philosophically, I think conservatives are just denying that progress is inevitable, and trying to pick the right future.
Hazy Davy says:
That Lee Atwater quote is amazing, if it's real. It reveals that I'm not quick enough to judge the political fringe.
displaced Capitalist says:
My conservative friends (whom I respect a lot and are quite intellegent) are getting really excited about Romney's campaign in 2012. The problem is that they don't seem to realize that Palin got a really good chance of beating Romney in the primaries. Who will they vote for when it's Palin vs. Obama?
I hope they just sit out rather than compromising their integrity and voting for either…
Brandon says:
Haha, yeah, Lee Atwater was the original Karl Rove. There was a fascinating documentary on him a while back, I think it was on Frontline. I guess he expressed a lot of remorse for his political attacks before he died, we can judge whether to forgive him or not. But that attack on Michael Dukakis in 1988 was one of the most vile spectacles in American political history. During a televised debate, the moderator, Bernard Shaw, asked Dukakis a question about his opposition to capital punishment that actually began with, "If Kitty Dukakis was raped and murdered…"
Ed says:
It's true, he did have something of a personal conversion when he found out he had brain cancer. Rumor has it that he tried to apologize to Dukakis but was told to blow it out his ass…not sure if that's true. Maybe I'll ask Dukakis if he shows up at APSA again.
Daniel says:
You were an ex-Con Ed. Hoping to type that one in before someone else thought of that one.
Daniel says:
What is more likely to occur in your opinion: Conversion to the left or right? It seems to me that quite a few people I know converted to at least the middle from the right, but that was probably due more to McCain and Palin than an actual change in ideology. Was there something specific that made you change or was it a gradual conversion?
J. Dryden says:
It strikes me that the Teabaggers are the next generation of Perot voters; based on the reports of people who attended Reform Party gatherings, the crowd at the Teaparties sounds like it's made up of the same group of people–i.e., disgruntled conservatives and libertarians, who are more united by what they oppose than by what they have in common. Basically, batshit-crazies with just enough legitimate grievance against the entrenched do-nothing-ness of party politics to make them unnerving.
The obvious difference, of course, is that A. there's no clear leader to the current movement, no matter what Glenn Beck thinks of himself, and B. this time the batshittedness is coalescing within one of the two major political parties. Which is really bad news for all concerned, since it seems to threaten to render that party frighteningly toxic.
One can only hope that the current movement breaks off and forms a third party, with the inevitable fate that accompanies that decision…
jazzbumpa says:
Rove literally learned the trade at Atwater's knee. There is no circle of hell that is just punishment for what they did to this country.
Conservatism has always – back to the days of Edmund Burke – been closely aligned with intellectual nihilism. Buckley hid it behind polysyllabics. Now, they don't even bother to try. Bush fit naturally into the shit-kicking, aw-shucks good-old-boy persona. Everything else about him, like the god-damned Crawford non-ranch was a made-for-TV fantasy.
I was conservative in my youth, deeply influenced by Catholic upbringing and a far right high school government teacher. Living in the real world moved me to the left of center. The Clinton impeachment made me realize the boundless evil of Repugnicants. Bush radicalized me. That's why I have a running series on my blog called "Republicans, All Wrong All the Time."
Seriously, they have not done anything right in 50 years.
WASF,
JzB
Crazy for Urban Planning says:
You weren't asking me, but I became a liberal after living in Europe. Life is much less restrictive there – all the sudden I arrived and said – "hey, these people don't have to be embarrassed for progressive ideals. I can handle this." I read the article and what can you say? They are crazy as anyone!
comrade x says:
If the non- batshit crazy conservatives move into the Democratic party, won't that shift the Democrats even farther to the right?
Would you really want more Blue dogs in the Congress?
ben says:
Palin was up in Calgary last week. Mostly slagged in the comments at http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/sarah-palin-sees-eye-to-eye-with-albertans-in-calgary-speech/article1492634/
What got me were some supporters saying that Palin was awesome because she is for less taxes and smaller government. What they fail to mention is that Palin is not anywhere a "true" libertarian (she's big on governing via the Christian religion & meddling with other countries with the use of force).
Her, Beck & others also rail on about being against the banker bailouts, but offer no alternative for dealing with the calamity that would have occured had the 5 main US banking conglomerates been brought to their knees. People like to hear simple answers that makes easy sense to their simple biases without grapsing just how complex (& messed up) the whole financial, economic and political system is.
Of course no serving politician will come right out and say how bad things are. Just keep the fingers crossed and borrow just a little bit more to get us through the next term. Frustrating now matter where you sit on the fence.
ladiesbane says:
I think the conservative / liberal equation becomes crystal-clear when you add the variable of social class — if, and only if, you include the pathologically bourgie social climbers to the conservative end. In the U.S., we equate class with income, and those middle-class people who tend to have no real moral compass beyond imitating wealthy people (usually by living beyond their means, ironically going broke for the trappings.) They don't think about the problems of the nation, and the best course for greatest number; they only picture themselves as having the same problems as the Rockefellers, and cursing the tax increases for the rich.
Poor people used to be liberal, and let the Fed help the farmer, but now all that matters are social non-issues: yes to prayer in schools, no to abortion, yes to the military, no to welfare, no to equal rights, no to gays, etc. They see themselves as moral Christians, and don't think too much about the technicalities. (Add "no to thinking" to their list.)
dominic says:
"If the non- batshit crazy conservatives move into the Democratic party, won't that shift the Democrats even farther to the right?
Would you really want more Blue dogs in the Congress?"
i'm fine with that if they're replacing republicans.
Aslan Maskhadov says:
"If the non- batshit crazy conservatives move into the Democratic party, won't that shift the Democrats even farther to the right?
Would you really want more Blue dogs in the Congress?"
This ultimately advances the conservatives' cause anyway. Just like they constantly attack Democratic presidents and candidates as though they were Communists; if a right-winger like Clinton or Obama is a "radical far-left extremist", than real leftists are shut out of politics altogether.
As for the Tea-Party movement, they are essentially peddling a conspiratorial worldview, and if you have personal experience with groups revolving around such narratives you know that they often don't pay much attention to a person's ideology so long as they espouse the same conspiratorial narrative. Take the 9-11 Truth movement for example. Within their ranks you find people who sound like radical leftists, while also finding people who are flat out neo-Nazis. Nobody seems to care if the culprit is the Illuminati, the CFR, the UN, or The Jooz, all that matters is that you vehemently reject the idea that it was 19 Islamic fundamentalist terrorists.
This is why the Tea-Party movement will never be able to sweep the Neo-Nazis and White Nationalists from their ranks- once you open the door to conspiracies, who's to say it isn't "the Jooz" behind all their woes? Plus neo-Nazis are experienced at hiding their true beliefs in order to recruit in groups they feel comfortable around. They know that the more pissed off a group of middle-class whites are, the less they will ask questions about the occasional allusion to race or da Jooz.