The Rush to Limbo: The Rise of Reactionary Zealots

The vitriolic assaults on Democrats by Republicans are as alarming as they are disgusting. (Let us not be “bipartisan” on this: 99 % of the vitriol comes from the right, not the left.) Republicans and conservatives, in and out of office, have implicitly adopted (or adapted) Nancy Reagan’s slogan, “just say no,” originally directed at drugs, and later at premarital sex, and applied it to anything emanating from the White House or Democratic policy makers. The nastiness and brutishness of this partisanship is symbolized by the empty tables in the private dining room where members of both parties used to eat. The Congressional Quarterly confirms what our eyes and ears tell us, calling 2009 the most partisan year ever, at least since it began this kind of analysis in 1953.

The acrimony goes far beyond ordinary politics. The Tea Party “patriots” denounce President Obama as soft on, if not sympathetic to, terrorism, an illegal President born in Indonesia and demand his impeachment (without there being any misconduct that is usually a prerequisite for this extreme procedure). We appear to have the beginnings of a genuine, but dangerous “conservative” and “populist” movement, out to oust Republican moderates as well as Democrats. In the 23rd Congressional District of New York, a far right candidate not only caused the moderate Republican, Dede Scozzafava, to drop out of the race, but led her to support the Democrat, who eventually won, becoming the first Democrat to represent this area east and north of Syracuse in more than a century. That effort backfired, but Tea Party hero, Marco Rubio, is attempting in Florida to wrest the Republican Senate primary from Governor Charlie Crist and he may well succeed. Crist’s crimes: he appeared on stage with President Obama and he supported his stimulus plan. Horrors.

How are we to understand this rise of right wing fanaticism? I would posit that the roots of modern political ugliness, and extreme partisanship, was touched off by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, signed by Lyndon Johnson, who is purported to have said to an aide, “We have lost the South for a generation,” an understatement (alas). Before 1965, it was much harder for the solid but conservative Democratic South to attack liberals in the North, since both were in the same party. An almost solid Republican South (Obama’s victories in Virginia and North Carolina notwithstanding) makes it easier for conservatives to be more partisan since they now they all sit on the same side of the aisle. By 1993, every Republican in both houses of Congress voted against President Bill Clinton’s tax increase, designed to reduce the deficit and lower interest rates. It passed the senate only with Vice-President Al Gore’s tie-breaking vote in the Senate and squeaked by in the House, 218 to 216.

But ultimately it is the failings of the economy that have probably made Tea Party feelings so strong. In their fear and rage, the Tea Baggers (and others like them) long, it would seem, not only for prosperity but for the America they once felt at home with, in which blacks (and, for some, women) knew their place and gays were in the closet. To these persons, a black President is symbolic of everything that has gone wrong.

The precipitating cause of Tea Bagging seems to be the severe economic decline of the last few years, known by many as The Great Recession, and the fact that an eloquent President has not been able to snap his fingers and restore our prosperity, his blackness increasing their wrath. Their seething may also reflect the fact that many Americans cannot face the fact that our country is no longer “beautiful” and unique, but flawed like all others. But the long term cause is probably the continued economic weakness that has plagued America ever since the early 1970's. For example, male income, adjusted for inflation, is about what it was three and a half decades ago, in 1974–a blip upwards during the late 1990's, due to the dot-com bubble, followed by a decline since then. Real wages–wages adjusted for inflation–are lower now than what they were in 1972.

Income inequality is increasing by leaps and bounds. Berkeley Professor, Emmanuel Saez--2009 winner of the prestigious John Bates Clark Medal, given every other year to that economist under 40 who has made a significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge–calculated that in 1928 the top 1/100th of one percent of American earners took home 5% of total income. This was a peak that in the earlier post-war years seemed freakishly out of line. That is, from about 1943 to 1978, this group earned “only” 1 % of the total, not the 5% it garnered just before the Great Depression. But by 2007, the earnings of this group rose to an even higher level, 6 % of the total–an all-time high.

And many are even unable to earn any income at all, or very little. Unemployment, measured by the publicized figure is about 10 %. But this gauge excludes those who have given up looking for jobs and those working part time who would like to work full time. “Real” unemployment is almost twice that of the figure given in the headlines. In essence, we have a nation in which a substantial proportion of our society is living as many lived in the Great Depression of the 1930's. Nor is there any end in sight. No wonder there are Tea Parties and extreme expressions of frustration, with covert racism and loony but dangerous ideas rising rapidly to the surface.

The economic origins of the present crisis is reminiscent of the movie, Network. It might be said to be a fictionalized version of the Tea Party movement, without its political partisanship. In it the newscaster, Howard Beale, induces untold numbers to go to their windows and shout, “We’re mad as hell, and we’re not going to take this anymore.” (Glenn Beck, the conservative talk-show host, has, on more than one occasion, compared himself to Howard Beale.) The film itself (which appeared in 1976) points to the reasons why Beale’s harangue was so appealing: the high unemployment associated with the severe downturn in 1974-75, the high inflation associated with OPEC’s pushing up the price of oil and the humiliating defeat of America in Vietnam.

Tea Party ferment varies. “It is an amorphous, factionalized uprising with no clear leadership and no centralized structure,” to cite David Barstow, whose two and a half page article in the New York Times (2/16/10) is probably the best account we have of what the Tea Party is all about. It includes libertarians who, following Ron Paul, would like to abolish the Federal Reserve; anti-immigration advocates; those who believe people who warn of global warming are frauds in the pockets of elitists; Ayn Randists, John Birchers and Lyndon Larouchers; secessionists; subtle or not so subtle racists such as birthers; militia groups who not only oppose gun controls, but flagrantly display guns at meetings; anti-government types who opposed the stimulus and oppose Social Security and Medicare; and on and on–patriots all, of course. Some Tea Partiers wear T-shirts, on which are written “Proud To Be A Right Wing Extremist.”

Those inclined to allay our fears argue that there have always been fascistic fringes that gain a degree of prominence, and point to McCarthyism or George Wallace, or reaching back to the 1930's, Huey Long and Father Coughlin. These movements, it is argued, flare up but invariably recede and disappear. But there are differences that should be cause for deep concern. Most of these movements had a central figure at the helm, and while there are Tea Party and right wing figures of national prominence–Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Dick Armey, and Rick Perry (governor of Texas)–to name a few, the movement is not solidified around a Savior. It exists independently of any one individual and is thus likely to have greater durability as it is not subject to the mistakes and idiosyncrasies of a leader that often cause a political “Crusade” to unravel. On the other hand, leaderless it may (hopefully) only remain a powerful thorn, unable to take power, but capable of great social pain.

But more important, what brought to a close previous periods of American “Poujadism” were the elements that helped create these movements in the first place. In the thirties, it was the relative success of Roosevelt, in lowering unemployment, and the complete restoration of prosperity that came with World War II. McCarthyism ends partly because its leader over-reached, and attacked the army, but its premise that our government was controlled by traitors–linking “Acheson, Hiss, and Truman”–could hardly be maintained once Eisenhower took power and appointed a known and conservative anti-Communist, John Foster Dulles, to be his Secretary of State. Nor could the Wallace movement continue–not only because he was shot–but based on overt racism, it was mostly sectional and simply out of fashion.

But the current mass movement of the right, which ultimately stems from the failures of the economy (and partly, perhaps, from the continuing remembrance of our humiliation in Vietnam and even more important our evident inability to impose our will on the world, by force, and stop terrorism or “insults” by Iran, China and others), can only disappear if our economy rights itself.

Unfortunately, no saving grace–no prosperity–is on the horizon. To the contrary, most indicators suggest that not only will our recovery be weak, but that we are in the early stages of an endless stagnation, a precedent being the “lost decade” in Japan. Even worse, it may last longer than a decade (apart from temporary bubbles). For years, we have been importing far more than we export, with no signs of correction. Our manufacturing, as a percentage of our GDP has dropped to incredibly low levels (about 10 %, compared to Germany’s 20 %) and no hint that technological prowess in services can take up the slack. What needs to done politically–a 2nd stimulus; infrastructure appropriations; Federal aid to developing “greenness,” distributed in a way that the jobs created are created here, not overseas; implementation of technological advances that use American workers (not Chinese workers); fundamental repair of pre-college education; and other “salvations”–appear unattainable, as gradually Federal ungovernability grows, just as it already exists in states like California.

If genuine prosperity continues to elude us, the political dangers are obvious. Can we, in such a world, maintain our democracy? How, in such a world, can we contain the Glenn Beck’s and Howard Beale’s, and the Sarah Palin’s and Rush Limbaugh’s, and all who seek to transform our society in unknown but clearly frightening ways?