The bien-pensant Obamist liberals have a problem with the tea party. They were delighted to have it emerge so that they could run against it in order to gather the political class (the 20% of the population with a degree from a good college) with the threat of raving yahoos form the other 80%. But then they discovered that, small and even cynical as the tea-party organizations are, they've attracted the sympathy of the majority of the population.
As Michaels has pointed out, American liberals have spent a long generation now acquiescing to neoliberalism by saying, "We really didn't mean any of that '60s-'70s stuff about the social control of means of production, redistribution of wealth, etc. We just wanted to be sure that the rich kids include different colors..." For thirty years now, real economic equality has been given up as a goal while diversity in an increasingly (and acceleratingly) unequal society was ever more frenetically insisted upon as compensation for an abandoned ideal. (That was e.g. the real back-story to "What's the Matter with Kansas?")
Now as the Great Recession makes things increasingly bad, the repressed economic desires - the "American dream" - return as a symptom and takes outre forms in the tea party. Nativism and monetary crankiness becomes the socialism of fools as antisemitism once was.*
And you know perfectly well that McCarthyism was only synecdochically related to a dipso Republican senator. It's the general name for the post-WWII ideological rectification campaign - beginning in a Democratic administration (with Truman's loyalty program) - to forestall the demand for social democratic reforms of the sort appearing in Europe.
Mutatis mutandis, the anti-teaparty campaign is similar to the anti-communist orthodoxy of 50 years ago. In each-case the whipping boy - CP and TP - is used and abused by right-thinking liberals to show us the awful fate that those same liberals are saving us from. Not just a return to earth, but a real nostalgie de la boue...
Regards, Carl ____________ *Chomsky on Democracy Now!, 30 November:
"...the Tea Party movement itself is maybe 15, 20 percent of the electorate. It’s relatively affluent, white, nativist ... it has rather traditional nativist streaks to it. But what is much more important, I think, is its outrage. I mean, over half the population says they more or less support it or support its message. And what people are thinking is extremely interesting. I mean, overwhelmingly, polls reveal that people are extremely bitter, angry, hostile, opposed to everything. "The primary cause undoubtedly is the economic disaster. It’s not just a financial catastrophe, it’s an economic disaster. I mean, in manufacturing industry, for example, unemployment levels are at the level of the Great Depression. And unlike the Great Depression, those jobs are not coming back. U.S. owners and managers have long ago made the decision that they can make more profit with complicated financial deals than by production ... this goes back to the '70s, mainly Reagan escalated it, and onward - Clinton, too. The economy has been financialized. Financial institutions have grown enormously in their share of corporate profits. It may be something like a third or something like that today. At the same time, correspondingly, production has been exported. So you buy some electronic device from China. China is an assembly plant for a Northeast Asian production center. The parts and components come from the more advanced countries, and from the United States, and the technology. So, yes, that’s a cheap place to assemble things, sell them back here. And it's ... rather similar in Mexico, Vietnam and so on. That’s the way to make profits. "It destroys the society here, but that’s not the concern of the ownership class and the managerial class. Their concern is profit. That’s what drives the economy. And the rest of it is a fallout. People are extremely bitter about it but don’t seem to understand it. So, the same people who are a majority, who say that Wall Street is to blame for the current crisis, are voting Republican. Both parties are deep in the pockets of Wall Street, but the Republicans much more so than the Democrats. And the same is true on issue after issue. So the antagonism to everyone is extremely high ... They’re against big business. They’re against government. They’re against Congress. They’re against science...."
On 1/12/11 9:47 PM, Doug Henwood wrote:
> On Jan 12, 2011, at 9:23 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
>
>> The Tucson shooting is fast becoming a Reichstag fire for American liberals - a crime perpetrated by a crazy person, employed to pillory those who have unacceptable political ideas - in this case, libertarians, anti-abortionists, and populists. The actions of a madman are interpreted to restore the limits of allowable debate. Standby for the list of unacceptable political asseverations in this new McCarthyism.
>>
>> Berlet enacts a version of the move neatly described some years ago by Walter Benn Michaels in "The Trouble with Diversity." Those calling for equality outside the liberal consensus are fobbed off as threats to diversity. The real concerns (recognized by Chomsky et al.) of those sympathetic to the tea-partiers - a majority, apparently, of the US population - are dismissed as fulminations of racists.
> Huh? Loughner is indisputably crazy - what's your point? We disagree on the anti-abortionists, no doubt, but the TP is full of raving nativists and monetary cranks. They'd be happy to see the likes of you& me in jail. And what's with this "McCarthyism"? McCarthy was a Senator with subpoena power. Who among us is that?
>
> Equality outside the liberal consensus? Who are you talking about? Not Loughner, certainly. Palin? Really, could you return to earth for a moment?
>
> Doug
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