Regionalism And The Tea Party

The more I study the political history of the United States, the more obvious it is to me that regionalism has played and continues to play a significant role.  This is not so much a case of Red States vs. Blue States but of regions that cross state lines, and in some cases do not even dominate a particular state.  (For example, electoral maps from the last election show solidly Democratic territory in the Midwest in counties bordering the Mississippi River, even in conservative states like Iowa.)

That regionalism can do a lot to explain the Tea Party.  Earlier this year many pundits (and establishment Republicans) announced its demise, but recent events show that in certain parts of the country, the Tea Party is still going strong.  Most who follow politics are aware of how Tea Party candidate Chris McDaniel has been giving the plenty conservative Thad Cochran the fight of his life in Mississippi.  Less commented upon, but of perhaps greater significance, in the Texas Lieutenant Governor race Tea Party favorite Dan Patrick beat incumbent David Dewhurst.  In Texas this typically symbolic office is actually very important, and considering that Texas is effectively a one-party state, immense power will soon be wielded by a man who calls himself "a Christian first."

At the same time, Tea Party nominees are practically absent in the Northeast and Midwest, while those making waves hail from the South and West.  This is actually part of a much older story in the Republican Party where those regions have been the engine of the GOP's shift to the hard right.  Goldwater came from Arizona, Reagan from California, Jesse Helms from North Carolina, Strom Thurmond from South Carolina, Newt Gingrich from Georgia, etc.  The population shift to the Sun Belt in the past 50 years has helped make Republicans from that region dominant in the party, and has also amplified their presence in the House of Representatives, with states like Texas and Florida now sending huge delegations.

There is a strange irony, of course, in the fact that the two regions that are the most Tea Party-centric are also the regions that rely the most on government support.  Through the TVA, agriculture subsidies, and various other projects and giveaways, FDR sought to economically develop and modernize the South.  World War II and the Cold War brought oodles of bases and dollars to both regions, now crisscrossed by Interstate highways.  The federal government built up the infrastructure in both places, and then they very deftly used "right to work" laws and low wages to lure Northern companies down there that could now actually do business with the more modernized infrastructure in place.  Moreso that the South, the modern West is practically the creation of a federal government that killed and displaced its original inhabitants, and has long subsidized railroads and highways through practically empty areas that have also made convenient locations for military bases, bringing money to places with little economic base.

I must say it gets tiresome to live in a state like New Jersey, where we give more than we take from the feds, and then hear Tea Party hacks in places like Alaska and Alabama bitch about the size of the government.  It confirms a thought I've had for a long time, namely that the Tea Party is less about reducing the size of government than in making sure the government's largesse flows in a certain direction.  The rather grey supporters of the Tea Party don't want to part with their Social Security or Medicare.  They still want the government to build highways and to keep its military bases open.  However, they don't want tax money going to "moochers" and "takers" (we all know who they are, wink wink), or anyone who's "not like us."  That also means "securing the border," but not punishing corporations that hire cheap, undocumented labor.  I'm hardly the first person to point out that the whole Tea Party thing often seems to be a kind of white identity politics for hardcore conservatives.  Looking through a regional lens, and knowing the history of the South (and to an extent of the West), it's hardly surprising that those places are the hot beds of Tea Party activity.

In the future I doubt we will see the likes of Carl Palodino getting nominated states like New York anymore, but Mississippi will still keep producing Chris McDaniels, and Texas will still manufacture Dan Patricks.  If anything, we are about to witness a replay of the GOP's regionally-divided internal battles of the 1950s and 1960s.  Last time around the political style of the South and West won out; this time, if the party is to not fall into irrelevance due to generational replacement, the less radical conservatives might need to win.

Right Wing Bolshevism

Despite their professed hatred of all things "collectivist," the recent government shutdown points out yet again the links between the Tea Party worldview and that of the Bolsheviks.  Of course, both sides would be revolted by the comparison, but I am not making it on the basis of ideology. (Ideologically they are almost polar opposites.)  I had long seen their tactics and mentalities to be similar, and just today I was validated when reading an article by Rick Perlstein, who noted that anti-tax loon Grover Norquist admires Lenin's tactical skill so much that he has a picture of him in his office.

It's not just tactics (more about that later) but also of mental habits.  The root of all evil in the world is reduced to one thing whose elimination will bring about a paradise on earth: capitalism in the case of the reds, "big government" in the case of the rightwingnuts. Whether its the revolution or the free market, both are claimed to have magical properties that will somehow solve everything from global hunger to the problems of higher education.

Like a good party apparatchik of the days of yore, your average rightwingnut sees the world through a binary prism: the good guys who are with us and the bad who are against. This I think helps explain the staggering levels of hatred being spewed forth onto public employees these days, by working for the government they are modern day kulaks. If they aren't able to get paid, all the better, they deserve it.  The same goes for those snobby college professors. (In either system intellectuals can't catch a break.) The animus against these people has nothing to do with anything they've done, and everything to do with what they represent. They are simply pure, unadulterated evil. Hence the current crop of governors can fire all kinds of state workers in the name of "job creation": those who work for the state are not considered to have "real" jobs, they are parasites.

When a narrow, fanciful ideology eventually fails catastrophically, be it Leninist or Reaganist, its adherents tend to do anything they can to blame something else. In America an unrestrained financial sector created a massive, unsustainable real-estate bubble whose bursting has destroyed our economy. That fact (and it is a fact) does not conform to the rightwingnut narrative, and so they blame government incentives for home ownership, completely passing over the fact that the banks were giving out mortages to anyone with a pulse so that they could create mortages to cut up and speculate upon under the assumption that they would always retain value. Even more glaringly, they attack taxes on the wealthy, saying that if those wonderful "job creators" get more dough, the wealth will rain down on the rest of society.  The wealthiest segment of the country now gets a bigger share of the pie than ever before, but the promised trickle down hasn't happened.  Supply side has been a thirty year failure, but their only response is more gutting of the safety net and more tax breaks for their plutocratic allies.

Likewise, in the face of the obvious and complete failure of the command economy of the Soviet bloc, one still hears Marxists who claim that it just wasn't done the right way under the right conditions. These ideologues, no matter if they carry icons of Lenin or of Reagan, are seriously deluded. (And they do mindlessly worship their heroes, don't they? So many who claim to love "The Founders" seem to have little to no idea of what they were actually like.)

Yet these ideologues get constant reaffirmation of their worldview from a propaganda machine that has an easy explanation for every complex problem, and a new set of villians to pour hatred upon each day. They are told that a snowstorm negates the scientific consensus on global warming, that union workers rather than corporations are benefiting most from our economic system, that all Muslims are supporters of terrorism, that modern-day progressives are a cancer to be expunged from the body politic, and that the current budget crisis is the responsibility of the president and him alone. They and their allies are internal enemies who threaten "real America," be it through the first lady's anti-obesity campaign or history textbooks that fail to present a triumphalist, ultra-nationalist interpretation of the American past.

Perhaps worst of all, those motivated by extremist ideology, be it on the left or on the right, tend to take an "ends justify the means" approach in order to bring about their utopia. Just witness the fillibusters, Swift Boat lies, birtherism, threats of government shutdown, "town hall" screamfests, and unilateral stripping of collective bargaining rights.  The last three years of Tea Party mobilization have made our nation almost ungovernable.  That is not an unintentional byproduct of their activities, but a wholly intentional outcome of a cynical and reckless strategy.

Obviously, I do not think that Bolsheviks and today's rightwingnuts are moral equivalents. However, I do think that our political system no longer works according to the old rules where two centrist, corporately compromised parties vie for power with some compromises along the way. Instead we have one centrist, corporately compromised party willing to work with the other side, which has been transformed into a vehicle for a messianic, nationalist, laissez-faire political movement that will stop at almost nothing to get what it wants. Historically a fight between weak centrists and strong ideologues ends badly, which is why I am glad that the president is holding the line.  Extremists cannot be allowed to win.

An Attempt to Explain Louie Gohmert By a Former Resident of His Congressional District

With Michele Bachmann leaving Congress, no one seems more primed to take her crown as the most demented member of Congress than Texas Republican representative Louie Gohmert.  Unlike the rest of America, I knew of him well before his idiotic remarks and harebrained theories catapulted him into the public eye.  I had the misfortune to live in his district in East Texas for three years, and have come to the conclusion that he cannot be explained without understanding the electorate that puts him in Congress.

I am of the opinion that jerko politicians often represent the very worst of the regions they hail from.  For example, Chris Christie's loud-mouthed uncouth bullying exemplifies a certain mean streak here in the Garden State.  In his two-facedness, arrogance, and fast-talking torrents of bullshit, Anthony Weiner embodies the worst of New York City.  The aforementioned Michele Bachmann is a more photogenic version of the crazy-eyed fanatical Midwestern churchladies of my youth.  Rahm Emmanuel is the quintessential sharp-elbowed Chicago asshole on the make.  Much the same could be said of Gohmert, who combines the worst of East Texas in one person.

As much as I disliked my time in East Texas, I can readily acknowledge the good things about the state.  Hell, Austin and Houston are two of my favorite cities; too bad I was living in a reactionary rural 'burg. Wendy Davis' filibuster represented a lot of what I liked about Texas, mainly the large number of tough people who are willing to fight hard against long odds for progressive causes on hostile ground.  You will not find folks on the political left more clear-eyed and brave than in Texas; Molly Ivins and Ann Richards are probably the two best known examples of the type.

That said, a disproportionate number of Texans, especially behind the pine cone curtain in East Texas, are absolutely vile in their political, religious, and social outlooks, and not afraid to let other people know.  One church in Nacogdoches actually has its white supremacist interpretation of the Bible posted prominently posted on its website. Of course, plenty of churches implicitly hold such beliefs, but the culture of the area is so messed up that people feel free to say it openly.  The same town where the church is located only has a population of 30,000, but hosted a Tea Party rally in 2009 that numbered in the thousands.  Believe it or not, it's a college town, and probably the most liberal in the whole Congressional district, if by liberal you mean slightly to the left of George Wallace.

The place is just generally retrograde.  In the biggest city in the district, Tyler, you can't by booze, which reflects the cultural hegemony of evangelical fundamentalism.  Tyler still has a high school named after Robert E Lee.  Despite being a relatively small city, Glenn Beck was able to speak there and draw a huge, supportive crowd.  The same venue, the Oil Palace, also hosted large gatherings for Sarah Palin and Sean Hannity.  At the Beck event, a different Texas representative, Leo Berman, proclaimed "Obama is God's punishment on us."   If thousands in a small community will turn out and enthusiastically support dopes like this, is it any surprise that they would elect a complete dimwit like Gohmert?

And Tyler and Nacogdoches are sophisticated compared the more rural environs of East Texas, where the Klan is still active.  For years, police in Tehana routinely pulled over drivers for the crime of being black, and even shook them down for money.  Most horribly, Jasper was the site of the infamous dragging death of James Byrd.

In this place so full of overt racism, Christian dominionism, and general oppression those who are critical are completely ostracized.  They have so little power that Gohmert has been able to run unopposed on multiple occasions.  There are plenty of good people in this area who I had the pleasure to know, but they are outnumbered, outgunned, and constantly face severe ostracism and hostility from the squareheads who surround them.  There are some folks in the middle, too, but they just end up voting for whoever the Republicans put on the ballot, since they're just going with the cultural flow.  I've escaped living there, but I feel horribly for the large percentage of people whose interests are the polar opposite of the man who supposedly "represents" them.

In a democracy, elected officials reflect their electorate, and Louie Gohmert is no exception.

Kris Kobach and Glenn Beck Need a History Lesson

In case you don't know, Kris Kobach is the Secretary of State for Kansas, and the architect of the extremely harsh "show us your papers" anti-immigrant laws (that are also effectively anti-Latino, immigrant or not) that have been passed in Arizona and Alabama.  He is trying to get similar legislation passed in Kansas, and in response, a group of protestors showed up at his house, leaving black shoes on his doorstep to symbolize absent family members who have been deported from their kin in the United States.  It was probably a little annoying to have protestors on his front lawn, but you'd think that a man who spouts incendiary rhetoric and pushes draconian laws would expect a little blowback.

But no, Kobach termed these protestors a "mob" whose tactics resembled the KKK.  That's right, a man who is an unabashed nativist actually said that.  As if hearing the siren call of insane, Glenn Beck echoed Kobach in their interview.  This makes Kobach and Beck either a morons or liars of the highest order (and perhaps both.)  During the 1920s, at the height of its popularity, the Klan wedded its traditional terroristic enforcement of white supremacy with an intense nativism directed at immigrants, Catholics, and Jews.  Their slogan was "100% Americanism," which is interesting because Kobach denounced the protest on his front lawn as "anti-American."  (He also discussed using his "second amendment rights" to defend his lawn from peacefully protesting brown people, which makes me wonder who here is making the threats of violence.)  In fact, Kobach is part of a long lineage of white supremacist, nativist nationalism that dates back to at least the Know-Nothings also includes the Klan.  When Beck tries to claim that supporters of a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants are "the same" as the Klan, he actually means the exact, total opposite.

I would also add that if the Klan came to visit a person they didn't like, they typically didn't have a peaceful protest.  Oftentimes, their targets ended up dead.  The protest at Kobach's house was nothing like the Klan, but a lot like the civil rights movement of the 1960s in its use of direct, non-violent action.  There was absolutely no threat of violence against him or even intimidation.  On the other hand, Kobach's implicit threat of violence against such protestors is rather reminiscent of Bull Connor or George Wallace.

The rise of the Tea Party right has brought with it many lies about the past, which are used to justify extremist policies in the present.  Glenn Beck and Jonah Goldberg have likened liberalism to fascism, conservatives have distorted the legacy of Martin Luther King, and Kobach has now likened peaceful immigration protestors to the Klan.  This practice is just about the most Orwellian thing I've ever seen, whereby extreme nationalist white supremacists claim the mantle of the civil rights movement and call their opponents fascists.  Up is down, black is white, lies are facts.

The Tea Party obsession with metaphors from the past has long dumbfounded me, but now I think I understand.  This is not merely a matter of legitimizing one's own perspective by recalling the past.  I think the people behind these outrageous statements are aware that their ideas are echoes of the same ones that have been defeated by history, in Kobach's case, extreme nativism based on racial hierarchy.  The only way to make these ideas palatable beyond the true believers is to distract people from reality by making the opponents of nativism into the very thing, the KKK, that modern day nativists resemble, but can't risk being compared to.  The same works for messianic nationalists like Beck, who are the closest thing to fascist agitators that exist in this country's political mainstream.  His beliefs align with historical figures like George Wallace and James Eastland, but those men are stock villains in the historical narrative nowadays.  The hard Right's war on the past is necessary, because if people are aware of the realities of American history, the Right's ideas look like warmed over versions of ideologies long repudiated.

I've said it before, and I will say it again: the abuse of the past by Kobach and others requires that historians directly refute this garbage in public, lest it be taken for truth.  My brethren, we must get out of the library and take to the streets and fight these crimes against the past.

The GOP's Devil's Bargain With the Tea Party Has Come Due

Four years ago the Republican Party had just been thumped hard in the 2008 elections.  They lost the White House and Democrats had large majorities in both houses of Congress.  The voters had roundly rejected George W. Bush's policies and the party that maintained them.  Republicans were in desperate need of a makeover, and os something to rally a conservative base that also felt let down by the former president.  That's when the GOP began their dual strategy: to complicate, block, and frustrate the new president by any means necessary on Capitol Hill and in state governments, and to whip up their hard core followers by Astro-turfing the Tea Party.

The latter arm of their strategy was a devil's bargain, because they were openly stoking extremism of the kind that had once threatened to derail the conservative movement after World War II.  More pragmatic conservatives like William F. Buckley expelled the whacko Birchers in the 1960s, and the charismatic and appealing Ronald Reagan became the face of the movement.  Ironically, in light of today's developments, it was the Left that proceeded to tear itself apart over ideological differences.  The Right became a disciplined machine well-oiled by corporate money and assisted by the decline of the old Fordist economic model.

After the 2008 election, lots of pundits wondered whether conservatism's thirty-year hegemony over American politics was finally coming to an end.  I must admit, I was one of them.  To prevent such an outcome, the Republican leadership resorted to the nuclear option of unleashing the formerly hidden whacko wing of the part, now rebranded the "Tea Party" and supposedly reflective of broad popular outrage.  Stoked by open racial resentment, its lips dripping with the word "nullification," and dominated by a paranoid, extremist mindset, the new radicals may .  These were the types of people that the conservative movement had kept in the closet, so as not to freak out moderate voters, but now they were the Republicans' biggest asset.

While the Tea Party strategy worked in the short term, getting Republicans back into power and giving the party faithful a sense of purpose and momentum, it was not a strategy meant to last forever.  Unfortunately for the party leadership, the Tea Partiers, emboldened by their apparent show of force, do not want to go back to the shadows.  In 2012, the Tea Party quickly became a liability, with the likes of Michele Bachmann and Louie Gohmert making the Republicans look like the "stupid party," in the words of Bobby Jindal.  It could even be argued that Tea Party candidates like Todd Akin kept the party from regaining the Senate, something that Karl Rove now appears to agree with.  His attempt to organize support for establishment candidates has led to brutal internal warfare in the conservative ranks, with the establishment now being threatened by a permanent insurgency.

Of all people, Karl Rove ought to know what happens when you sign a deal with the devil: he always gets his due.  Rove's more intelligent and less reckless forbears like Buckley understood that you can't keep political extremists under control.  Fanatics of all stripes will stop at nothing to get what they want, which is why they are to be kept from the levers of power.  It would be easy for me to gloat at the Right's problems, but by enabling fanaticism, the conservative establishment has been like the sorcerer's apprentice, unleashing dangerous forces beyond its control.  For a short-sighted bit of cynical strategy, we all now must suffer.

The GOP's Devil's Bargain with the Tea Party

The recent Todd "legitimate rape" Akin debacle is just another episode in the continuing saga of the Tea Party getting its candidates nominations for important races, only to have them embarrass the Republican Party.  In 2010 there was Sharon "pay for health care with a chicken" Angle, Christine "I am not a witch" McDonnell, and Carl Paladino (who was so ridiculous that I can't use a singe phrase to define him.)  This year we have Akin and Ted "the UN wants your golf course" Cruz with Senate nominations, and Rick "man on dog" Santorum took second place in the presidential primaries.  Many of the Tea Party candidates who did win, like Florida governor Rick Scott and Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, have alienated their constituencies with their radical conservative policies.

As much as this stuff hurts the Republican brand, there's no going back with their pact with the Tea Party.  The party establishment needs the support of enthusiastic foot soldiers, and in return must tolerate their extremity and nuttiness.  The Republicans might lose a couple of races they should have won due to the likes of Akin, but they will have die-hard conservatives in other positions that may have been held by moderate Republicans.  In a narrowly divided electorate such as ours, it is smart strategy to abandon appeals to the middle in favor of turning out one's base to the polls, especially if you can use the law to limit the turnout of your opponents.

Without the Tea Party, the Republicans would be in some seriously deep shit right now.  The Bush administration was such a complete catastrophe that even Republicans could not deny it.  After the election of 2008, the Democrats controlled the House and Senate by wide margins, and put the first real liberal since LBJ into the White House by a comfortable margin.  The old party leadership looked completely lost and rudderless.  Instead of trying to work within this situation, conservatives obstructed every Democratic initiative that they could and whipped their masses into a frenzy.  Aided by a cruddy economy and a young president who had not yet learned how to fight fire with fire, they stormed back into power and managed to pass extreme measures at the state level that they could not have dreamed of accomplishing even in the Bush years.

So far the alliance with the Tea Party has not sunk the GOP because most independent voters still view it as a center-right party and legitimate alternative.  In 2010 many voters in the middle went to the polls and told themselves "the economy's still bad, let's see if the Republicans can do better."  The Tea Party-GOP pact might ultimately destroy the Republicans if voters no longer see the party as a center-right alternative, but a faction of crazed wingnut wackos who hate homosexuals, want to control women, impose evangelical Christianity, and rip the social safety net to shreds in the process of redistributing money upwards to the wealthy.  A look at the Republican Party platform would go a long way to confirm this view, and it would behoove Democrats to point that out.

Like all such gambling strategies, the GOP's embrace of the Tea Party will lead to either political glory or political disaster.  In the glorious scenario, the conservative base will come out to vote in droves and will squeak Romney into the White House while securing both houses of Congress and several state houses.  The House and Senate will be full of conservative ideologues willing to push the right-wing agenda forward at all costs.  On the flip side, the extremity of the Tea Party could mean a further hemhorraging of the votes of women, people of color, and independents to the point where the Republicans only hold power in what they call "Real America."  I can only hope that the latter scenario comes about.

The Revenge of the Birchers: the Republican Party's Current Woes in Historical Context

As Karl Marx once quipped, history repeats itself: first as tragedy, then as farce.  Way back in the 1950s, the John Birch Society and other affiliated paranoiacs threatened to gain control of the Republican Party and the conservative movement at large.  Prominent conservative leaders like William F. Buckley and Barry Goldwater managed to keep the wolves of conspiracist insanity at bay, forging a powerful new conservative wing of the GOP in the process, culminating in the election of Ronald Reagan.  Hard to believe, but the Gipper looks positively moderate compared to the wackos on the hard Right decried by Buckley and company.  Represented by Father Coughlin and other anti-Semitic, quasi-fascistic hate mongers in the thirties, and by McCarthyite witch-hunters in the fifties, they saw wicked conspiracy everywhere, to the point of labeling Dwight Eisenhower a Soviet puppet.

Venerable historian Richard Hofstader once famously defined a "paranoid style in American politics," and the Birchers, McCarthyites, and Coughlin devotees certainly fit the bill.  They are the political grandchildren of the Anti-Masons and Know Nothings.  That paranoid style has never died out in this country, and seems to have stormed its way back into the mainstream with the rise of the Tea Party.  Having once swept the tinfoil be-hatted crowd into the closet, the Republicans let loose the dogs of paranoiac politics in order to win the elections in 2010.  Like the proverbial sorcerer's apprentice or Victor Frankenstein, however, they have lost control over their creation, which now threatens to destroy them.

This week, amidst the annual barking at the moon at CPAC's conference and Rick Santorum's trifecta of wins in states where he did not have to face tidal waves of corporate advertising against him, it has become totally obvious that lunatics are running the asylum in the Republican party.  Confirming this assessment, the New York Times reports this week that many Tea Party groups have been acting locally to derail sustainable energy and public transportation, proclaiming both to be part of a UN plot for world domination.  Ron Paul, a candidate who has the biggest grass roots support among the young Republican activists, is a classic paranoiac whose old newsletters preached coming armageddon, and whose devotion to the gold standard reflects the long tradition of anti-bank paranoia in American politics.  Steve King, one of the party's more prominent members, today spouted fear and paranoia at CPAC over the eradication of old-fashioned, inefficient lightbulbs, which for some reason has become a cause celebre in certain corners of the Right.  His obsession seems wacky to me, but it has taken on the quality of common sense in the conservative media.

The rhetoric of even the mainstream sectors of the party reflects the paranoid style.  Like the Know Nothings of yore who depicted Catholics as puppets of a foreign pope, Barack Obama's political opponents consistently portray him as a foreign force out to corrupt and alter America.  Newt Gingrich has claimed that the president is a Kenyan socialist hostile to Western (i.e. white) civilization.  Mitt Romney, supposedly the moderate option, warns that he needs to be president in order to "keep America American," as if the current president were conspiring to change the nation's very being.

My one hope is that all of this paranoid raving and lunacy will push the GOP so far out of the mainstream that voters will strongly rebuke it at the polls.  My fear, however, is that many Americans dissatisfied with the current economic situation will vote for Republicans assuming that they represent a centrist alternative, not a vehicle for extremist ideology.