“We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron”, declaimed HL Mencken many years ago.
Sarah Palin’s speech to the “tea party” convention last weekend calls the famous curmudgeon’s lofty aspiration to mind. Certainly, the “plain folks” assembled in Tennessee fitted Mencken’s bill, and they enthusiastically assume that Palin is one of them. The convention included “birthers” who think that Barack Obama is a Muslim alien, many who think the United Nations is a sinister plot and platform speakers who think that the current President is not just a socialist, but an “international socialist” – which does not indicate an esoteric appreciation of the detritus of the fourth international, but is simply two conservative swearwords compounding each other.
Palin might on occasion be an ignoramus, but she is no moron. What is more, she is making money hand over fist – which is more than her “tea party” audience is. Its members paid over their hard-earned dollars to attend the convention, arranged by a for-profit company, which paid Palin a $100,000 speaker’s fee.
Her rhetoric avoids endorsement of the wilder excesses of her supporters, yet her folksy delivery and anarchic syntax is close enough in spirit for them to identify with her. If she did articulate her policies in a clear and intellectually compelling way, she would lose their backing – as John McCain has done with occasional, albeit infrequent, public displays of cerebral activity. Horrified at his temerity in letting reality intrude on the smooth flow of their venomous prejudices, some of the teabaggers are gunning for him at the next primary.
Insofar as is there is a movement, it is fuelled by a rage that depends for its strength and cohesion on its inarticulacy. Yes, there is also a deep racist undercurrent – often quite explicit. There are a lot of whites who still can’t cope with a black President– which is why some of them can’t believe he is an American citizen. It is progress of sorts that they don’t come out and say clearly why he cannot be President, but it is noticeable that the conventions and demonstrations are whiter than a supermarket-sliced loaf.
However, there are more rational premises for their anger – even if the conclusions they draw from them are far-fetched and far-stretched. Working-class (or, in American parlance, middle-class) incomes have been stagnant for decades – since Ronald Reagan was in the White House. Meanwhile, health and higher education costs have soared.
It is a year since Obama picked up the poison chalice from George W Bush and was left with the ruins of the neo-liberal enterprise. There is little doubt that his efforts have stopped things being even worse, but after a year in which he has, in effect, pandered to the perpetrators of the crisis in the name of bipartisanship, it almost paints a large target on his back.
And Obama has not shown the leadership he should have done, whether on the oversight of banks or reform of healthcare. His main fault is that he has left it to the Congressional Democrats, many of whom have been as subservient to the business lobbyists as their Republican counterparts.
“So, how’s that hopey, changey stuff working out for you?” Palin’s flip comment on Obama strikes home at his political failure, which is no less a real one for the President, even though the Republicans have no credible alternative plans at all.
Like Gordon Brown, Obama has gone technocratic on his erstwhile supporters and back-pedalled on charismatic clear leadership while not putting a clear enough line between him and his predecessor. Certainly, the direction and tone of government has changed immeasurably for the better under Obama, although you would never guess that from listening to the leftist mirror images of the teabaggers who accuse the President of betraying principles that he never espoused.
One lesson some have drawn from the surprise Republican victory in Massachusetts is that the teabaggers rule and conservative rage is triumphant. But opinion polls show that no less than 82 per cent of those who deserted Obama and voted for the Republican candidate wanted a public option in the healthcare bill. Similarly, large majorities of voters in all parties disagree strongly with the Supreme Court decision that now allows corporations unlimited spending in elections.
We cynics, looking at how much influence business already has in Washington, are not sure that it could get any worse. But the entirely rational fear of big business and big government is the basis of disaffection from left to right. The genius of Palin and the Republican right is to tie these in a package with “big labour” and present it as creeping socialism, along with undercover anti-minority and
anti-black sentiment, in a way that attracts such dedicated and vociferous support. Of course, this has been done before. Think of Germany’s Brownshirts – until they had served their purpose.
It’s possible that the teabaggers might make the Republicans unelectable nationally – soon the minorities in the United States will be a majority. And the electorate as a whole still shows signs of awareness of the real world. But we need some more therapeutic and constructive anger from Obama and the Democrats to retain traditional supporters and win new ones.
