In this analysis, the Tea Party movement – what Lind renames the “Newest Right” – is not merely an “extremist” version of conservatives; nor is it a bunch of ignorant yokels; nor, despite its populist pretensions, is it a populist movement. It is simply the latest iteration of the Jacksonian movement, which was not really populist either.
And what the TP/NR movement is all about is simply preserving these local notables’ local power and privileges from federal interference. They dominated the federal government for decades, but now that predominance is doomed by demographics, and they’re desperate to keep what they have. And they’re using the same tactics they’ve always used: filibusters, disenfranchisement, and pushing for localization/privatization of federal functions.
Seems very convincing to me. It would explain why the TP is mostly silent on social issues – even those that really appeal to a conservative-populist base, such as immigration – but hammers hard on fiscal and biggummint issues. The Contract from America could easily have been written with the local notables’ interests in mind.
So dead-on. My best friend’s wife came from a small, isolated Central Valley town where her father was the Cadillac dealer. One of those thoroughly “nice” women who subsequently weeded my BF’s social circle down to those who qualified; I wasn’t in it. I know the “Rockefellers of Smalltown” very, very well and this portrait is dead-on.
Telling story: Mr. Rockefeller was a classmate of Herb Caen’s. According to Little Rockie, he HATED Caen because (basically) the world-famous columist didn’t show him enough deference at a high school reunion. And here he was, the #1 Caddy salesman in towns under 20k in the whole USA!
Sounds plausible. I have a couple of old college fraternity brothers from PA who are the sort who constantly post right wing Tea Party rhetoric on Facebook.
One is basically Dwight Shrute. He was the biggest jerk in our fraternity, and not in a cool frat guy sort of way.
The other was sort of small-town privileged kid who grew up near the college, went to the college, went to grad school at the college, then raised a family in the same area as the college. The sort who thinks they are hot shit because their parents were in the local “upper class” of affluent professionals and local small business owners and bought him a shitty little red sports car to tool around in.
Not quite millionaires running local businesses. But certainly entitled douches who never had an original non-conforming thought in their heads and think they hit it out of the park because their parents slow-pitched them all the way to the minors.
His analysis starts off rooted in reality. The Tea Party isn’t new. It’s just a new label for people that have always been there. They aren’t dumb. They are more educated and wealthier than average.
They tend to be small business owners and are more likely to be millionaires than billionaires.
None of this is news to anyone who has been paying attention.
But Lind goes quite a bit too far. He takes the fact that the Tea Party is slightly disproportionately southern and somehow infers that to mean a whole lot of things about race that just aren’t true. Of course the Tea Party is more popular in the South. There are more conservatives there. That doesn’t mean that it’s fair to tie the Tea Party to some non-existent roots in “white Southern terrorism” and somehow lay their entire ideology in protecting white power over Blacks and Hispanics.
You don’t need some centuries old conspiracy theory to explain the motivations of the Tea Party. It’s a movement of people frustrated over the ever increasing size and scope of the Federal government and high taxes. Of course these people are conservative, and thus disproportionately southern. Also, of course they tend to be small business owners or “local notables” as Lind calls them. By reading so much more into it than that Lind is going a bit off the rails.
IMO the Tea Party includes those factions, andthose factions approve of the Tea Party, but they are not 100% identical.
That faction of conservatives, and the political minds around them, were quick to hitch on to popular dissatisfaction that actually was starting before Obama arroved on the scene. The Movement Conservatives out in the red heartlands had already become disillusioned with the Neocons late in the Bush years, and the economic downturn was souring both the man on the street and the hometown businesspeople on the wisdom of the NY/DC “mainstream” business/political leaders.
Absent Obama there would still have been an insurrection against “establishment” Pubs who were “not true conservatives”. Obama however was a godsend in that he could be conveniently used by candidates, pundits and string-pullers to say, in effect, never mind that the big screwing of your interests happened before '08, we’ve got this dire threat here now that is what will really ruin your life, and stopping it is all that counts, we need to go hardline.
Some opportunistic conservative politicians, both carreer and upstart, wanted to use the passion of the TP as a tool to regain power, without pausing to consider that this time around they would demand that they immediately act to deliver on the rhetoric. Their problem is all of ours now.
All of which is true. And it’s not only racial minorities they want to dominate/mariginalize/disenfranchise, it’s also lower-class whites; it has always been so, since long before the Civil War.
Nor does Lind posit one. He’s covered this before in his discussions of the power of the national American “White Overclass” – it is not a conspiracy theory, it is only a matter of members of a social class mostly serving their own class interests, an entirely predictable thing that requires no secret collusion.
True, but, N.B.: They are frustrated not because of any financial burden that puts on them, but because it threatens their local predominance.
Now, why is that, I wonder, that the South is disproportionately conservative? I daresay the answer only supports Lind’s thesis.
So, where is the Tea Party these days, anyway? Used to see them all the time, huge rallies numbering in the hundreds. How come they aren’t out there showing the flag, offering their massive support?
In Congress. Hadn’t you noticed?! And outside it, too, threatening to primary Pubs from the right. Apparently the TP has reached the stage of organization where mass rallies are less important.
The origins of the Tea Party are well known to have been purest astroturf. It’s not at all amazing that its base should be the poliltically active conservatives that are the base of the Republican Party. But it IS interesting that the Tea Party has been silent on issues like restricting women’s rights and persecuting gays, very popular with the poorer whites that form the base of the more general Republican Party. And the fact that they try to restrict voting rights maybe indicates a confluence of interest between the Teapublicans and the lower class conservative base: the lower class types like restricting voting rights because of its racist elements, the upper class because it keeps power in their hands. It’s a wonderful thing, democracy: two groups of people with different interests working together to keep a third group from enjoying the fruits of democracy!
Except that federal taxes are at historic LOWS. Hell, the “good old days” many of these people pine for had MUCH higher marginal tax rates. There’s got to be something else going on, the tax thing is a chimera, not based in reality.
Yeah. I know. I read it. Although, I didn’t realize this was the same “white overclass” guy who you often cite. He seems to see everything through a prism of race.
Rates might have been higher before Reagan, but that’s not what people actually paid because of loopholes. The size of government as a percentage of GDP is much higher now and that’s what matters.
Not counting WWI and WWII spending was about 10% of GDP in 1920. 30% in 1960 and over 40% now. It’s clearly trending up and has been for a long time.
I agree that spending as a percent of GDP has gone up, but how is that possible when tax rates continue to drop? I see two causes, you got one of them (closing loopholes - although not enough of them - carried interest anyone?), the other is that more of the country’s income is subject to higher rates now due to the increasing disparity between the Top 1-5% and the rest. Forgive me if I don’t cry for the millionaire’s giant tax burden when my real income (even with tax breaks) has been declining for the past 5 years.
In both that theory and this, race as such is less important than class; but, in American society, there is a historical correlation between the two, which however does not suffice to make all whites upper- or middle-class. From The Next American Nation:
Remember the White Citizens Council? (AKA the Citizens’ Councils of America; NKA the Council of Conservative Citizens.) Founded in the 1950s as an anti-integration organization, known as the “Uptown Klan,” its members were exactly the kind of local notables Lind is talking about. And I daresay they did not think much of the actual Klan, despite a shared agenda; but, because of same, the latter was sometimes useful to them, and there was even some membership overlap.