Tea Party whites, Trumpism and neo-Confederate pseudohistory

In yesterday's post on Arlie Russell Hochschild and her study on Louisiana Tea Party supporters, I mentioned an article of hers that appears in the current (10:1917) Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik, Weiß und stolz und abgehängt.Donald Trump und der Südstaaten-Rassismus (behind subscription at this writing).

Part of her point in this article is that Southern Tea Party adherents - it would be redundant to say "white" adherents - focus on the government as the image and main instrument of the groups they see as the enemy: Yankees, coastal elites, Hollywood, black people, professional women, the mainstream media. In part, this is because of the eternal complaint against alleged freeloaders: "Und zudem gab der Staat Leuten Geld, die nicht arbeiteten, und untergrub damit die mit der Arbeit verknüpfte Anerkennung und Ehre." ("On top of it all, the government gave money to people who don't work and thereby undermined the recognition and honor tied up with work.")

The article notes that it is a translation into German from English, so I'm reverse-translating here without having the English original available.

But Tea Partiers do not view the government as a whole as their enemy. On the contrary, they worship the military and the police, worship in the Christian theological sense of idolatry even. The FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, ICE agents terrorizing Latino parents picking up their children and school - those actual coercive agents of the state, they ones that are charged with using physical violence on behalf of law-and-order, they are big fans of those!

No, it's the civilian government that raises their hatred. And particularly those aspects of civilian government that they imagine to benefit people less fortunate and/or less white than they are.

Hochschild describes a related aspect of Tea Partiers' admiration for Donald Trump's demagoguery and his rejection of "political correctness":

Daher hörten viele mit freudiger Erleichterung einen Donald Trump reden, der offenbar hemmungslos, omnipotent und wunderbar frei von jeglichen Einschränkungen durch politische Korrektheit war. Er äußerte sich verallgemeinernd über alle Muslime, alle Mexikaner, alle Frauen – unter anderem auch darüber, dass Frauen menstruierten, was er „ekelhaft” fand. (So sagte er über Megyn Kelly, die Nachrichtenmoderatorin von „Fox News“, sie „blute aus was auch immer”). Munter imitierte er einen behinderten Journalisten, indem er seine Arme schüttelte und so eine Zerebralparese nachahmte – in den Augen seiner Gegner alles zutiefst abfällige Äußerungen, die jedoch befreiend auf all jene wirkten, die sich durch die Mitleidsverpflichtung geknebelt fühlten. Trump ermöglichte es ihnen, sich als gute, moralische Amerikaner zu empfinden und zugleich überlegen gegenüber Menschen zu fühlen, die sie für „anders” oder unter ihnen stehend hielten.

[From that viewpoint, many listen to Donald Trump speak with happy relief, he being clearly unrestrained, omnipotent and miraculously free from any limitations from political correctness. He made sweeping declarations sweepingly about all Muslims, all Mexicans, all women - including even about women menstruating, which he finds "disgusting." (So he said about Megyn Kelly, the news moderator for Fox News, that she "had blood coming out of her wherever.") He jauntily imitated a disabled journalist by shaking his arms in order mimic cerebral palsy - in the eyes of his opponents, all the most deeply derogatory expressions, which nevertheless had a liberating effect on all those who felt themselves gagged by the obligation to feel pity. Trump made it possible for them to experience themselves as good, moral Americans and at the same time to feel superior to people that they regarded as "other" or beneath them.]

Or, to put it more succinctly, they got a thrill by identifying with Trump's meanness. This is a typical characteristic of authoritarian followers. Trying to understand this in terms of their "deep story," a Hochschild term that is otherwise useful, complicatres rather than clarifies understanding of how this attitude translates into the politics of Trumpism.

We could say that a normative issue imposes itself here. At what point does explaining this kind of collective joy in meanness cross over from understanding it to justifying it?

And this is not jsut a matter of show business. We see in Trump's callous and irresponsible response to Puerto Rico's hurricane disaster right now that this kind of meanness has ugly, real-world consequences. No matter how "liberating" Trump-adoring white people in Louisiana might feel it is to see Puerto Ricans suffer and die due to the kind of meanness Trump practices as President or how much "happy relief" it may give the Louisiana Tea Partiers.

Not to defend Donald Trump, but I couldn't find a report in which Trump used the word "disgusting" specifically in relation to his own genuinely disgusting comment about Kelly; he did use it about Hillary Clinton going to the bathroom during a break in one of the debates. (See: Kayla Epstein, Trump responds to Megyn Kelly's questions on misogyny – with more misogyny The Guardian 08/06/2015; Jacob Sugarman, Donald Trump’s disgusting new attack on Megyn Kelly: She had “blood coming out of her wherever” Salon 08/08/2015

If the reference above to white conservatives' complaints about welfare loafers seems like a throwback to the 1960s, Hochschild is also aware that the throwback goes even further.

In explaining the historical and sociological background of Southern whites, Hochschild relies heavily on the classic by W.J. Cash, The Mind of the South (1941). Cash's book is a standard work and often quoted. But it was published in 1941. It has historical value. But it doesn't directly address the political of white Republicans in the Deep South in 2017. And even her historical accounts rely on confusingly wide descriptions. It likely wouldn't be clear to readers who weren't history with the history of sharecropping, for example, that this system was a post-Civil war institution, not an antebellum one.

But her historical account in this article recounts the neo-Confederate pseudohistory:

Dann brach der Bürgerkrieg aus, und der Norden schlug den Süden vernichtend. Städte wurden niedergebrannt, Felder verwüstet – teils von konföderierten Truppen auf dem Rückzug. Nach dem Bürgerkrieg ersetzte der Norden die Regierungen der Südstaaten durch eigene, handverlesene Gouverneure. Profitgierige Glücksritter kamen als Agenten des dominierenden Nordens. Ausbeuter aus dem Norden, eine wütende, traumatisierte schwarze Bevölkerung zu Hause und von allen Seiten moralische Verurteilung – das war das Bild, das mir die wütenden Südstaatler zeichneten.

[Then the Civil War broke out, and the North pulverized the South. Cities were burned down, fields wasted - partially by retreating Confederate troops. After the war, the North replaced the governments of the Southern state with its own hand-picked Governors. Profit-seeking adventurers came as agents of the domineering North. Exploiters from the North, an angry, traumatized black population at home and moral judgments from all sides - that was the picture that the furious Southerners drew.]

That's my translation from the German. And this is my supplemental translation out of Neo-Confederate-Speak:

Then the Civil War broke out when Southern slaveowners insisted on seceeding to defend slavery when they rejected the democratic results of the Presidential election of 1860. The North pulverized the South in four years of bloody warfare initiated by the white southern planters to defend their "right" to own other human beings as property. Cities were burned down, fields wasted - partially by retreating Confederate troops. And when the Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves in the Confederate states, mass abandonment of the plantations by black ex-slaves, most of them native Southerners by birth, played a massive part in the "pulverizing" of the traitor Rebel government. After the war, the North replaced the governments of the Southern state with its own hand-picked Governors. (That one is too much of a fiction to even qualify.) Profit-hungry adventurers came as agents of the domineering North, according to the WATB grumbling of many former Confederates, even though massive capital investment from the hated North was desperately needed. Many Northern whites also came to act in such roles as schoolteachers, motivated by a patriotic and Christian desire to create a better future for the South that had been wrecked due to the treason of the slaveholding planter class. Exploiters from the North, as Southern white supremacists were wont to call any of their fellow Americans from the North, an angry, traumatized black population eager to become responsible free citizens, voters and full participants in civil life, and moral judgments from all sides - except from that of white supremacists who still hated democracy and Constitutional government, judgments that came because even Northerners who had previously been indifferent to slavery had been confronted with the true horror and destructiveness of the slave system - that was the picture that the furious white Southerners who rejected the American form of government and the American way of life drew, even though a significant number of Southern whites also supported the new democratic governments established during Reconstruction.

A very similar passage appears in her book Strangers in Their Own Land (2016), although she includes a couple of phrases there to slightly distance herself from the narrative, indicating that she's describing the version her Tea Party subjects gave her.

As a native-born white Mississippian, I'm tempted to say that only a Yankee would swallow that white Southerners actually believe that Lost Cause, neo-Confederate version of history. Yankees in my experience tend to be generous-minded in that way.

But for the most part, for any adult white Southerners that present the view of the Civil War and its aftermath that she describes there, one of three things is going on: (1) they are shooting off their mouths without putting their brains in gear; or, (2) they've made no effort to fact-check even the most superficial aspects of that story, even though the information is readily available; or, (3) they know it's hogwash and they are just repeating it because they see it as the White Man's tribal narrative and they identify with it and doing give a flying flip if it's actually true.

All of this points to a basic problem in trying to understand and explain a political phenomenon like the Tea Party or Trumpism in terms of a "deep story" that is heavily based on long-established ideological constructs. And deeply dishonest ones, at that.

Arlie Russell Hochschild, the "Tea Party" and the problem of empathy

I attended a lecture yesterday at UC-Berkeley by Arlie Russell Hochschild, author of the much-discussed Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (2016). Her book has been widely reviewed and a number of her articles and interviews derived from it published, including:

• I Spent 5 Years With Some of Trump’s Biggest Fans. Here’s What They Won’t Tell You. Mother Jones Sept-Oct 2016
• Eric Miller, Rising to Heaven in a Secular Rapture: Trump's Golden Promises Religion Dispatches 11/15/2016
• What Drives Trump Supporters?: Sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild on Anger & Mourning of the Right Democracy Now! Interview 09/28/2016
• Donald Trump in the Bayou TomDispatch.com 08/28/2016
• Arlie Hochschild explains the deep story behind right-wing sympathies - November 25, 2015 Centeral European University/You Tube 01/26/2016
• Weiß und stolz und abgehängt. Donald Trump und der Südstaaten-Rassismus Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik 10:2017 (behind subscription as of this writing)
• From Berkeley to Louisiana: Sociologist Arlie Hochschild Seeks to Understand Conservative America KQED Radio 09/02/2016
• Jessica Zack, Interview with Arlie Russell Hochschild SFGate.com 10/14/2016

In the lecture, she recounted the basics of her project, which as the event announcement summarizes it involved "five years of research in Louisiana’s oil and petrochemical belt where she interviewed Tea Party enthusiasts." This is the area around Lake Charles, Louisiana.

Her findings are interesting and underwhelming at the same time. She did in-depth interviews with self-identified Tea Party supporters in which she deliberately selected as a particularly conservative, pro-Tea Party, pro-Trump area. After five years of research, she determined that a lot of white people there don't like black people very much. And lots of them are dubious about equal rights for women. And those people tend to vote Republican and conservative and love Trump.

These are hardly surprising discoveries.

That's not to say her work and her observations are without value. She's a leading sociologist. She describes her conclusions in terms of a "red state paradox" and a "Deep Story" around which Tea Party supporters coalesce. The red state paradox has to do with the fact that many areas like Louisiana compared to other US states are poorer, with lower life expectancy, with lower quality schools and hospitals, have more serious pollution problems, and receive more funds from the federal government than they contribute. And yet they also tend to vote for Republicans who favor cutting back the income support and most other federal programs on which they are so dependent, oppose national health insurance programs and want to let polluting industries left free to poison the air and water in the name of "freedom."

Hochschild describes thge Deep Story that she formulated to describe the Tea Party view of the world this way in the Mother Jones article linked above (italics in original):

You are patiently standing in the middle of a long line stretching toward the horizon, where the American Dream awaits. But as you wait, you see people cutting in line ahead of you. Many of these line-cutters are black—beneficiaries of affirmative action or welfare. Some are career-driven women pushing into jobs they never had before. Then you see immigrants, Mexicans, Somalis, the Syrian refugees yet to come. As you wait in this unmoving line, you’re being asked to feel sorry for them all. You have a good heart. But who is deciding who you should feel compassion for? Then you see President Barack Hussein Obama waving the line-cutters forward. He’s on their side. In fact, isn’t he a line-cutter too? How did this fatherless black guy pay for Harvard? As you wait your turn, Obama is using the money in your pocket to help the line-cutters. He and his liberal backers have removed the shame from taking. The government has become an instrument for redistributing your money to the undeserving. It’s not your government anymore; it’s theirs.

The problem I see with her approach is that she is addressing a political question - why do poor and middle-income whites vote for politicians who favor policies that can rationally be described as further disadvantaging them - by developing a description of the ideological way the most hardcore white conservatives formulate their worldview. Her Deep Story is a narrative. And narratives are extremely important in politics as in other areas of life. But whether those narrative are true in an empirical sense also matters. And as politicians since forever have been aware, there are overt aspects to political appeals and their are symbolic appeals that speak to emotional attachments that may not be overt in the dominant narrative.

In her lecture yesterday, she stressed the importance of what she calls climbing the barrier wall. And she specifically addressed how people on the left and center-left of the political spectrum can learn to have empathy for people like her Louisiana subjects. Or, to put it another way, for white people for whom racial hatreds and repressive notions of "traditional values" are more urgent political priorities than than their own physical and economic well-being.

She talked about three pillars of what she sees as valuable approaches to developing such empathy in the current context. One is talk about values with broad appeal, like the importance of the President operating within the laws. Another is to advocate for the kind of programs that the left to advocate and explain the kind of programs and priorities they favor. Both of those, she noted, don't require any direct engagement with Tea Party types. Her third pillar was to think through the kind of engagement with the right with whom people want to have a dialogue.

In her advice to those broadly on the left for climbing the empathy barrier wall, in yesterday's lecture and in other contexts, she gives special emphasis to those on the left/center-left making an effort to empathize with Tea Partiers. But, as in other aspects, her descriptions of groups is other frustratingly fuzzy. If the context is politics, then empathy becomes a matter of perceiving what kind of issues and what sort of political framing will appeal the Other Sides votes. Which puts us in the special territory of another UC-Berkeley prof, George Lakoff.

In her lecture, she elaborated on the ways to think about direct engagement. She suggested that attempts direct engagement or empathetic dialogue are probably not very promising. But she talked about how people on the left might be interested in such a dialogue with former Obama voters who switched to Trump in 2016. Or to people who voted for Trump who also expressed some sympathy or admiration for Bernie Sanders.

But those groups are not typical of the kind of people who identify with the Tea Party outlook, and those are the people on whom her Louisiana study centered. Also, I'm dubious about how firm the data are in those polls that show significant numbers of Trump 2016 voters would have voted for Bernie Sanders. I'm sure they were some of them. But those would also tend to be people who didn't feel particularly identified with the Tea Party.

Also, after decades of "bipartisan" Democrats in Congress trying to make nice with Republicans who had no intention of compromising with them - think Merrick Garland - is good reason to wonder to what extent sympathetic empathy on the part of the left to hardcore Tea Partiers can have any significant political effect. After all, with every national disaster Donald Trump illustrates that his own capacity for normal human empathy is severely lacking. So it's more than doubtful that genuine empathy for white workers in poor states played any significant role in his appeal. Empathy can be feigned, of course. But this strikes me as another case where "authenticity" or "sincerity" tend to be highly overrated in politics.

On the level of sociological analysis, I also think its problematic to take the overt narratives provided by people at face value, even in the sense of assuming they truly believe them or emotionally identify with them, without some meaningful fact-checking. In her Tea Party "Deep Story," for instance, is there some kind of objective evidence that black people or women are getting some kind of artificial or unfair advantage over white men in hiring in the area she studied? Facts do matter.

And there is the fact that in America generally, and in the Deep South in particular, that white people define themselves collectively in significant part by ideological images of minorities, and of black people especially. I don't see that Hochschild gave that fact the weight in needed in analyzing the self-descriptions of her white Louisiana subjects.

In her lecture yesterday, Hochschild mentioned a couple of critics on the left, Katha Pollitt and Frank Rich, saying of both that their criticism was respectful, though she disagrees with them.

Pollitt asks these questions critical of Hochschild's approach in Lack of Empathy Is Not the Problem The Nation 06/09/2017:

But here’s my question: Who is telling the Tea Partiers and Trump voters to empathize with the rest of us? Why is it all one way? Hochschild’s subjects have plenty of demeaning preconceptions about liberals and blue-staters—that distant land of hippies, feminazis, and freeloaders of all kinds. Nor do they seem to have much interest in climbing the empathy wall, given that they voted for a racist misogynist who wants to throw 11 million people out of the country and ban people from our shores on the basis of religion (as he keeps admitting on Twitter, even as his administration argues in court that Islam has nothing to do with it). Furthermore, they are the ones who won, despite having almost 3 million fewer votes. Thanks to the founding fathers, red-staters have outsize power in both the Senate and the Electoral College, and with great power comes great responsibility. So shouldn’t they be trying to figure out the strange polyglot population they now dominate from their strongholds in the South and Midwest? What about their stereotypes? How respectful or empathetic is the belief of millions of Trump voters, as established in polls and surveys, that women are more privileged than men, that increasing racial diversity in America is bad for the country, that the travel ban is necessary for national security?

Frank Rich (No Sympathy for the Hillbilly New York 03/19/2017) warns against the empathy-for-the-white-Tea-Partiers approach as a political strategy for the Democrats:

But it’s one thing for the Democratic Party to drain its own swamp of special interests and another for it to waste time and energy chasing unreachable voters in the base of Trump’s electorate. ...

In a presidential election, a revamped economic program and a new generation of un-Clinton leaders may well win back the genuine swing voters who voted for Trump, whether Democratic defectors in the Rust Belt or upscale suburbanites who just couldn’t abide Hillary. But that’s a small minority of Trump’s electorate. Otherwise, the Trump vote is overwhelmingly synonymous with the Republican Party as a whole.

That makes it all the more a fool’s errand for Democrats to fudge or abandon their own values to cater to the white-identity politics of the hard-core, often self-sabotaging Trump voters who helped drive the country into a ditch on Election Day. They will stick with him even though the numbers say that they will take a bigger financial hit than Clinton voters under the Republican health-care plan. As Trump himself has said, in a rare instance of accuracy, they won’t waver even if he stands in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoots somebody. While you can’t blame our new president for loving “the poorly educated” who gave him that blank check, the rest of us are entitled to abstain. If we are free to loathe Trump, we are free to loathe his most loyal voters, who have put the rest of us at risk.

Obviously, politicians are going to be careful about who they claim to loathe.

But that's part of the problem of trying to address the "red state paradox" in terms of reconciliation between the left/center-left, on the one hand, and the hard right on the other. Politics is about fighting out differences, not erasing them. Yes, that requires compromise. But compromise isn't a principle in itself. The notion that we should all get beyond substantive differences in politics is one of the stranger ideas identified with end-of-history neoliberalism.

Can we please stop using "working class" as a synonym for "rightwing"?

Whenever I want a bedrock definition for a term or concept, the Encyclopædia Britannica usually comes to mind early. I learned repeatedly in my basic schooling that it's not fair to use an encyclopedia as a source, at least not in school research papers. But Britannica is still an excellent source. It often includes articles by leading authorities. Famous examples include Sigmund Freud's, "Psychoanalysis," Albert Einstein's "Space-time," James Henry Breasted's "Ikhnaton," Glenn Seaborg's "Plutonium," T.E. Lawrence's "Guerilla," Marie Curie and Irène Curie's "Radium," Bertrand Russell's "Relativity, philosophical consequences of," and Orville Wright on his brother Wilbur.

So, wanting to say something about how sloppily the political press uses "working class," I resorted to Britannica's article Social class:

The upper class in modern capitalist societies is often distinguished by the possession of largely inherited wealth. The ownership of large amounts of property and the income derived from it confer many advantages upon the members of the upper class. They are able to develop a distinctive style of life based on extensive cultural pursuits and leisure activities, to exert a considerable influence on economic policy and political decisions, and to procure for their children a superior education and economic opportunities that help to perpetuate family wealth.

Historically, the principal contrast with the upper class in industrial societies was provided by the working class, which traditionally consisted of manual workers in the extractive and manufacturing industries. Given the vast expansion of the service sector in the world’s most advanced economies, it has been necessary to broaden this definition to include in the working class those persons who hold low-paying, low-skilled, nonunionized jobs in such service industries as food service and retail sales. There are considerable differences within the working class, however, and a useful distinction exists between skilled, semiskilled, and unskilled workers that broadly corresponds with differences in income level. What characterizes the working class as a whole is a lack of property and dependence on wages. Associated with this condition are relatively low living standards, restricted access to higher education, and exclusion, to a large extent, from the spheres of important decision making. Aside from the dramatic rise in living standards that occurred in the decades after World War II, the main factor affecting the working class in the second half of the 20th century was a general shift in the economy from manufacturing to service industries, which reduced the number of manual workers. In the United States and Britain, among other countries, the decline in traditional manufacturing industries left a core of chronically unemployed persons isolated from the economic mainstream in decaying urban areas. This new urban substratum of permanently jobless and underemployed workers has been termed the underclass by some sociologists.

The middle class may be said to include the middle and upper levels of clerical workers, those engaged in technical and professional occupations, supervisors and managers, and such self-employed workers as small-scale shopkeepers, businessmen, and farmers. At the top—wealthy professionals or managers in large corporations—the middle class merges into the upper class, while at the bottom—routine and poorly paid jobs in sales, distribution, and transport—it merges into the working class. [my emphasis]

This view broadly agrees with the approach of classical political economy from Adam Smith to Karl Marx. As James Oakes has written, "Marx was after all, the last of the great classical economists, those who concerned themselves with how wealth was produced and therefore, how labor was organized. We do not think that way anymore, especially not after the revival of market ideology in the 1980s," i.e., the rise to dominance of what is now called neoliberalism. ("The Peculiar Fate of the Bourgeois Critique of Slavery" in Oakes, ed, Slavery and the American South (2003).

While Britannica's definition isn't the be-all and end-all. But it makes the basic distinction that classes are only meaningfully defined in terms of the social and economic system. That's why the popular term "middle class" in the United States, which basically lets 95% of the people plausibly describe themselves as part of the middle class, is so generally useless as a description of any social phenomenon. It shouldn't be too much of an effort to recognize that the the business-owner of a small restaurant chain may actually have a net financial worth less than that of a skilled factory worker who has owned a small house in an major urban area for the last 45 years. But the position of one in the economic order provides a very different viewpoint of the system that that of the other, even if both may agree in favoring some particular set of economic policies. To the restaurant chain owner on the edge of bankruptcy, Donald Trump's idea that American wages are too high may have a more urgent rational appeal than it does to the factory worker with large equity in his house and union-defended pension plan may not see such urgency in adopting such a policy. Which, from the standpoint of the economy as a whole, is deeply irrational, if one believes that the economy should serve the well-being of everyone.

One thing the multiple pathologies of our national press corps are doing is to lazily identify Trump's supporters as the "white working class." Blacks and Latinos are often referred to as ethnic blocs in discussing voting. The fact that a large part of the American working class is black and Latino. The punditocracy thus tends to talk about the white working class as the working class more generally. And they identify this imagined (white) working class as culturally and politically conservative-to-reactionary. Plus, it's a favorite conceit of our Pod Pundits that they speak for this imagined working class. David "Bobo" Brooks periodically indulges this posture. The late Tim Russert made it a part of his thoroughly conventional and Establishment public persona. (See: Michael Carlson, Tim Russert The Guardian 06/15/2008: "Russert, who was born in Buffalo, New York, always defined himself by his working-class Irish roots.")

Molly Ball in The Trumpian Divide The Atlantic Online 05/27/2016 write about a Trump appearance in Anaheim, "the country-club crowd mingled with the Trumpenproletariat."

Even Marcy Wheeler partially falls into this trap in Pat Buchanan, Dick Cheney, and American Exceptionalism Emptywheel 05/29/2016. She's making an important and interesting point about the white supremacist ideology shared by the presumptive Republican Presidential nominee and Spiro Agnew's onetime speechwriters Pat Buchanan: "Buchanan not only talks about declining economic prospects of white working class men, the relatively improved fortunes of people of color, but especially about the plight of white men losing their myths of superiority, losing the myth that white men made this country and led the world without the often-coerced labor and deaths of lots of brown people."

But it's at best an overstatement to assume that the "declining economic prospects of white working class men" is a particularly distinctive feature of Trump's support. The economic prospects of working class men have declined during the long, bipartisan dominance of neoliberal/Herbert Hoover/Angela Merkel economics that began in the US with St. Reagan's Administration. And Trump certainly does attract a significant number of white working class voters.

But like the Tea Party movement, those attracted to Trump are more affluent voters. Nate Silver wrote earlier this month (The Mythology Of Trump’s ‘Working Class’ Support Five Thirty Eight 5/03/2016):

It’s been extremely common for news accounts to portray Donald Trump’s candidacy as a “working-class” rebellion against Republican elites. There are elements of truth in this perspective: Republican voters, especially Trump supporters, are unhappy about the direction of the economy. Trump voters have lower incomes than supporters of John Kasich or Marco Rubio. And things have gone so badly for the Republican “establishment” that the party may be facing an existential crisis.

But the definition of “working class” and similar terms is fuzzy, and narratives like these risk obscuring an important and perhaps counterintuitive fact about Trump’s voters: As compared with most Americans, Trump’s voters are better off. The median household income of a Trump voter so far in the primaries is about $72,000, based on estimates derived from exit polls and Census Bureau data. That’s lower than the $91,000 median for Kasich voters. But it’s well above the national median household income of about $56,000. It’s also higher than the median income for Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders supporters, which is around $61,000 for both.

These figures, as I mentioned, are derived from exit polls, which so far have been conducted in 23 primary states.1 The exit polls have asked voters to describe their 2015 family income by using one of five broad categories, ranging from “under $30,000” to “$200,000 or more.” It’s fairly straightforward to interpolate a median income for voters of each candidate from this data; for instance, we can infer that the median Clinton voter in Wisconsin made about $63,000.

As I indicated earlier, a meaningful structural definition of working class doesn't map simplistically onto income or net worth data. But it's a more useful measure than the customary Pod Pundit definition of working class as people without four-year college degrees.

Silver concludes his column:

This is not to say that Trump voters are happy about the condition of the economy. Substantial majorities of Republicans in every state so far have said they’re “very worried” about the condition of the U.S. economy, according to exit polls, and these voters have been more likely to vote for Trump. But that anxiety doesn’t necessarily reflect their personal economic circumstances, which for many Trump voters, at least in a relative sense, are reasonably good.

And I'll close by suggesting that generalizations about Trump's "working class" support should make a careful distinction between white Southern working-class Trump supporters and those not from formerly Confederate states.

It's important in these things to maintain the ability to walk and talk at the same time. Gender is also fundamental in shaping social consciousness. And "whiteness" is a key part of American political and social consciousness. So both function as distinct influences on political decisions, as Adele Stan reminds us in these two American Prospect articles: Will Trump’s ‘Man Card’ Play to Women? and, White Supremacy and Trump's Battle for the 'Soul of America' 05/06/2016, which also emphasizes the Pat Buchanan tradition.

Religion, the Christian Right and Republican Party/Tea Party politics

Digby flags a Daily Beast article by Jack Schwartz The Tea Party Isn’t a Political Movement, It's a Religious One 07/13/2014, in which he writes:

But when religion is thrown into the mix, all that is lost. Religion here doesn't mean theology but a distinct belief system which, in totality, provides basic answers regarding how to live one's life, how society should function, how to deal with social and political issues, what is right and wrong, who should lead us, and who should not. It does so in ways that fulfill deep-seated emotional needs that, at their profoundest level, are devotional. Given the confusions of a secular world being rapidly transformed by technology, demography, and globalization, this movement has assumed a spiritual aspect whose adepts have undergone a religious experience which, if not in name, then in virtually every other aspect, can be considered a faith. [my emphasis]

Digby notes - maybe with a touch of sarcasm? - "I do think the fact that so many of them are also members of the Christian Right may have something to do with this."

Actually, the phenomenon he's describing has mostly to do with the Christian Right. The Republican Party has effectively adopted a theocratic ideology and merged religion with politics. I do think religion can and should inform politics and vice versa.

But merging religion and partisan politics means that if you make a deal on say, taxes or gun proliferation, that you're not just making the best deal you could get and working a set of tradeoffs. It means you're betraying God Almighty!

I actually don't like the way he frames the article. For one thing, you don't need to argue that a social phenomenon is like religion when what you're analyzing is religion.

I would rather look at this as a question of fanaticism, which doesn't require you do define religion so very broadly as he does here. I'm not sure that religion necessary requires a belief in God(s) or even the supernatural. But defining religion as "a distinct belief system which, in totality, provides basic answers regarding how to live one's life" is definitely too broad a definition. A system of ethics, a club, a political doctrine, a secular philosophy can all serve that purpose without a kind of belief in God or a world beyond the material one or the kinds of rituals we typically associate with religion.

With the Christian Right and the five conservative Catholic guys on the Supreme Court who gave us the Hobby Lobby decision, I would prefer to keep definitions of religion more narrow than the one he gives. After all, segregationist thinking provides "a distinct belief system which, in totality, provides basic answers regarding how to live one's life." If we define that as religion, white folks wouldn't even have to claim a church affiliation or even claim a faith in God to say serving African-American customers was against their "religion."

Also, this is a comment that would be hard to defend: "To question the validity of Moses parting the Red Sea or the Virgin Birth or Mohammed ascending to heaven on a flying horse is to confront the basis of a believer's deepest values."

It's true that the Virgin Birth is mentioned in the Nicene Creed, which the Catholic Church and almost all Protestant churches theoretically claim as a basic statement of the faith. But I doubt most non-fundamentalist Christians would thing that was an essential part of "the basis of a believer's deepest values."

Tags: christian right, tea party

Republican "civil war," or a faction squabble within the counterrevolution? (Updated)

The mainstream press and our Pod Pundit cohort are all excited over John Boehner scolding the Heritage Foundation this past week. I'm more inclined to restrain my enthusiasm. But here's Mark Shields and Michael Gerson on the PBS Newshour of 12/13/2013 gushing about the development, Shields and Gerson discuss the budget breakthrough, Boehner's backlash 12/13/2013:

Here is Gerson's spin:

Well, narrowly, this was clearly a backlash to the manifest failure of the shutdown strategy, which I think most people recognize.

My friend blogger Peter Wehner says that Republicans have apocalypse fatigue. They are just tired of confrontation in this way. But there is something broader going on here. I think the leadership has decided, it tried to appease Tea Party groups, the activist groups. But they are unappeasable. They criticized this deal before it was printed.

And there's very little incentive to accommodate a group that is going to criticize you anyway. So I think the leadership has made the decision that this is an important part of the coalition, but it can't define the Republican Party and it can't bully the Republican Party. And that's -- this is just the beginning of an institutional reaction to Tea Party activist groups, it seems to me.

Molly Ball lays it on thick in Why This Round of the Republican Civil War Was Different The Atlantic 12/12/2013:

Another round of the long-running GOP civil war broke out this week, and you could be forgiven for greeting it with a yawn. House Speaker John Boehner proposed something; conservatives immediately rose up against it, egged on by right-wing pressure groups. News flash: There's disunity in the Republican ranks.

But this chapter of the story turned out very differently than last time, when the clash between the Republican establishment and grassroots memorably ended in a two-and-a-half-week government shutdown. This time, it’s ending with a bipartisan budget deal, brokered by GOP Representative Paul Ryan and Democratic Senator Patty Murray, that will keep the government open for more than a year. The House passed the bill by a resounding 332-to-94 margin Thursday evening, putting final passage in the hands of the Senate.

Sacred Bipartisanship is always a good outcome in PunditLand. Even when - maybe especially when - the compromise produced is heavily tilted toward the Republicans' desired outcomes. Digby provides this helpful visual on how the latest holy bipartisan compromise - the Senate continuing resolution in the graph [Update: Digby reuses the graph in Why is Paul Ryan so darned happy? 12/15/2013 and notes that the recent House compromise amounts to $1,012 billion] - looks in light of recent history (Is embracing the suck better than eating a satan sandwich? 12/13/2013):

Paul Krugman explains in Unprecedented Austerity 12/12/2013 how drastic the austerity policy that holy Bipartiship has given us really is:

You can see that there was a brief, modest spurt in spending associated with the Obama stimulus- but it has long since been outweighed and swamped by a collapse in spending without precedent in the past half century. Taking it further back is tricky given data non-comparability, but as far as I can tell the recent austerity binge was bigger than the demobilization after the Korean War; you really have to go back to post-World-War-II demobilization to get anything similar.

And to do this when the private sector is still deleveraging and interest rates are at the zero lower bound is just awesomely destructive. [my emphasis]

Ball does give us this intriguing piece of news:

There was another, less public development this week that represented a similar turn. The Republican Study Committee, a group of House Republicans who meet weekly to talk about policy and tactics, had long served as a venue for conservative members and outside groups, chiefly the Heritage Foundation, to plot strategy together. But on Wednesday, the committee’s chairman, Louisiana Representative Steve Scalise, fired longtime Executive Director Paul Teller, accusing him of betraying lawmakers’ trust by leaking to outside groups.

That was precisely the point. Republican lawmakers were sick of being at the mercy of outside agitators whose demands they viewed as increasingly impossible. In 2011, a Teller deputy urged conservative groups to oppose the debt-ceiling deal that lawmakers were trying to reach; he was almost fired then. This September, lawmakers believe Teller helped gin up conservative resistance to a government-funding deal that would have averted the shutdown. And during the negotiations for the present deal, even as lawmakers tried to reach accord inside the Capitol, Teller, they charge, was working to undermine the agreement by sharing confidential details with groups like Heritage - which came out against the plan before Ryan and Murray even announced it. The firing sent shockwaves through the conservative-activist community, where Teller is well-known and well-liked. Dozens of conservative leaders signed on to a letter of protest that called him “one of the true heroes of the conservative movement.” He immediately became a sort of martyr, his dismissal a symbol of House leaders’ attack on their erstwhile conservative allies. [my emphasis]

Her use of "outside agitators" to describe the Tea Partiers is a nice bit of irony, whether she intended it as such or not. White Southerners fighting to preserve segregation in the face of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s routinely blamed "outside agitators" for the protests against segregation and in favor of democracy.

The press is remarkably committed to the notion that there is a moderate and conservative faction to be found in the Republican Party today. Partially it's the toxic influence of decades of High Broderism, in which centrism is celebrated as something sacred and wonderful in itself. This orientation generally works to the advantage of the Republican Party, which has been pushing the spectrum of the politically acceptable further and further to the right for over three decades, so that now the Party has embraced segregationist politics as the cutting edge of its political strategy.

Centrism is a function of what kind of spectrum is being used, not a set of distinctive political policy orientations. But part of High Broderism is the practice of presenting every political problem or malfunction in terms of "both sides do it," with the centrists who practice sacred bipartisanship as the heroes and saviors who will deliver us from The Extremes On Both Sides. So the model of which reporters and pundits are so fond requires that there be "moderate" Republicans to offset the conservative extreme, which they currently identify with the Tea Party.

The reality of today's Republican Party doesn't fit well into that model. So our Big Pundits can't consider that the Republican Party is a segregationist, highly nationalistic party bought and paid for by corporate money whose factions are largely about rival fundamentalist Christian denominations and about different billionaires and lobby groups angling for influence, factions that share a remarkable consensus on policy.

John Boehner, in other words, may care a lot if the Heritage Foundation diminishes his power and prestige as Speaker of the House. It doesn't mean that he's defending some "moderate" orientation on policy as against "radicals" in the Tea Party. The bitterest faction fights can occur between people whose substantive differences seem tiny as viewed from those not directly involved, a variation on what Freud called the narcissism of small differences.

And it's not exactly a new thing for people to start pointing fingers retroactively when something they've tried plays badly politically. As Gerson puts it, Boehner's posturing against the Heritage Foundation "was clearly a backlash to the manifest failure of the shutdown strategy."

Republicans adored George W. Bush as their Dear Leader (except on immigration policy) as long as he was in office. When he left the White House highly unpopular, as soon as he was gone he was No Longer A True Conservative. The same happens with failed Presidential candidates. McCain lost, he was No Longer A True Conservative. Mr. One Percent Willard Romney lost, he was No Longer A True Conservative. If they had been more conservative, you see, they would have won. That's just the way the Republicans roll.

Steve M at No More Mister Nice Blog has a good name for what we're seeing the last few days, You See a GOP Civil War. I See GOP Brand Proliferation. 12/13/2013:

John Boehner and Paul Ryan did a fine job this week of reintroducing "mainstream GOP" as a brand. This is an appealing product to a lot of traditional Republicans, as well as to the swing-voter market niche.

The "tea party" brand has lost some appeal among traditional Republicans, but this civil war will actually increase Brand Tea Party's appeal in certain market segments where it remains popular. Those voters will be motivated to turn out for tea party candidates because they're angry once again at the mainstreamers, and want to destroy them.

In some districts and states, this brand competition is going to result in a Brand Tea Party candidate beating a Brand Mainstream candidate. Elsewhere, now that Brand Mainstream has been rejuvenated, mainstream candidates will win more swing votes and will take votes away from Brand Democrat.

But once the Brand Tea Party loyalists have elected a certain number of members of Congress and the Brand Mainstream loyalists have elected others, they're all going to count as Republicans on the party's bottom line. These folks may fight in primaries, but they're going to be one party when the dust settles and it's time to determine who has majorities in the House and Senate. [emphasis in original]

And they won't just count as Republicans in organizing the Congress. They are have striking levels of Party discipline on pursuing ideological goals, as we've since since 2011 in dramatic ways.

The can also afford some Kabuki public squabbling, since major economic policy is going their way.

Steve M also provides links to a couple of Ed Kilgore's Political Animal posts cautioning against interpreting factional squabbles within the Republican Party as some kind of rejection of Tea Party radicalism: Ike's Not Coming Back 12/11/2013 and Nobody Here But Us Conservatives 12/12/2013.

In the former, Kilgore addresses what he calls a "dirty little GOP secret":

... conservative activists are so skeptical of politicians — at least those this side of Ted Cruz or Rand Paul — that they are perfectly happy accepting an unprincipled "pragmatist" who is totally in their thrall via highly public litmus test signatures and specific commitment to future action. By the time he went down to defeat in 2012, Mitt Romney was an absolute prisoner to the very forces in his party who trusted him least. The same thing happened to "maverick" John McCain in 2008; by the end of his campaign, he was basically a figurehead on a ticket led emotionally and ideologically by Sarah Palin.

My iron conviction is that if Mitt Romney had won last year and Republicans had retaken the Senate, we'd be well into a reign of fire and blood characterized by instant reconciliation-enabled enactment of the Ryan Budget, the total destruction of the Affordable Care Act, and for added measure, a "nuclear option" more thoroughgoing that that recently imposed by Senate Democrats. We might also be at war with Iran; that’s a little harder to assume. But I betcha the vast majority of MSM political writers think life under a Republican government led by Mitt Romney would be simply a more efficient version of life as we know it now. And by 2016, the same people will be cheerleading for a Christie presidency as some sort of latter-day Eisenhower Administration. And they'll be dead wrong because they don’t understand what’s going on in the GOP." [my emphasis]

In the latter piece, Kilgore calls our attention to the following things the John Boehner actually said in his now-famous press conference:

Asked if he was officially saying "no" to the tea party, Boehner emphasized the deficit reduction achieved under the budget deal and said there was no reason to oppose it.

"I came here to cut the size of government," he said. "That’s exactly what this bill does, and why conservatives wouldn't vote for this or criticize the bill is beyond any recognition I could come up with."

Boehner also defended his own commitment to conservative principles, which has repeatedly come under fire. This criticism has at times threatened his speakership when he has attempted to negotiate with President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats.

"I say what I mean and I mean what I say," he said. "I'm as conservative as anybody around this place." [my emphasis]

Fantasizing about the moderate/conservative ideological split that the High Broderist model insists must be there whether it is or not without taking into account the severe nature of the actual austerity policies that have been enacted just seems foolish to me.

Kilgore asks the relevant question, "Can you imagine Harry Reid, who occasionally gets criticized by the left, saying 'I'm as liberal as anybody around this place'? No, you can't."

He also writes about the topic in What's Really Going On With The Republican 'Civil War' TPM Cafe 12/11/2013, where he describes the prevailing ideology of the Republican Party as counterrevolutionary !!!):

Sooner or later, and it might as well be sooner, non-Republicans need to accept that the GOP knows exactly where its "soul" is located, and has an agenda that is impervious to significant change. What keeps getting described as a "struggle for the soul" of the party or a “civil war” is generally a fight over strategy, tactics and cosmetics, not ideology. For the foreseeable future, the conquest of the Republican Party by the conservative movement, itself radicalized by the election of President Barack Obama in 2008, is the prevailing reality of politics on the Right, and the GOP’s practical options are accordingly limited to one flavor or another of that persuasion.

Why is that the case? There are a lot of contributing factors, including the GOP’s shrinking but homogeneous “base,” the supremacy of conservative ideological media, and the rise of heavily funded political players determined to root out heresy. But the most important source of rigidity is conservative ideology itself, which does not aim (as do most European conservatives) at “moderating” or countering the bipartisan policies of the past or the Democratic policies of the present, but aspires to a counterrevolution that “restores” what conservatives regard as immutable principles of good government and even culture.

Former DLCer Ed Kilgore is presumably no big fan of the thought of Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse. But that comment of his brings to mind Marcuse's 1972 book Counterrevolution and Revolt, the opening lines of which are:

The Western world has reached a new stage of development: now, the defense of the capitalist system requires the organization of counterrevolution at home and abroad. In its extreme manifestations, it practices the horrors of the Nazi regime. Wholesale massacres in Indochina, Indonesia, the Congo, Nigeria, Pakistan, and the Sudan are unleashed against everything which is called "communist" or which is in revolt against governments subservient to the imperialist countries. Cruel persecution prevails in the Latin American countries under fascist and military dictatorships. Torture has become a normal instrument of "interrogation" around the world. The agony of religious wars revives at the height of Western civilization, and a constant flow of arms from the rich countries to the poor helps to perpetuate the oppression of national and social liberation. [my emphasis]

At first glance, it's kind of stunning how current so much of that sounds. Kilgore says further in that TPM Cafe essay:

The audacity of this agenda, which requires uprooting decades worth of laws, programs and constitutional precedents, many of them supported or even created by Republicans, requires a set of assumptions about electoral victories and defeats that many mainstream media folk or Democrats do not seem to understand. A "victory" that does not lend itself to counterrevolutionary outcomes is far less preferable than a deferred victory that brings down the whole rotten edifice of the welfare state and routs the secular-socialist elites who could survive a RINO administration. [my emphasis]

Tags: angela merkel, herbert marcuse, frankfurt school, radical right, republican party, tea party

John Calhoun and the Tea Party Republicans

Richard Sale has some thoughtful observations about the Fort Sumter Republicans in Concurrent Majority Sic Semper Tyrannis 10/09/2013.

John Calhoun (1782-1850) was the political and intellectual godfather of secession and the Civil War, one of the true villains of American history. And I'm talking Dick Cheney levels of villainy. He has the reputation of being a significant political theorist, largely on the dubious virtues of his snooze-inducing books, A Disquisition on Government and A Discourse on the Constitution and Government of the United States.

John Caldwell Calhoun (1782-1850), by some reports later reincarnated as Dick Cheney

Gerald Capers in his article on Calhoun in the Encyclopædia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite (2012) calls him, not without ambiguity, "a genius unto himself." (The Britannica is my baseline for stolid respectable opinion.) "Calhoun's two books on government, published posthumously, and his many cogent speeches in Congress have gained him a reputation as one of the country's foremost original political theorists. He has been credited with preceding Karl Marx in advancing an economic interpretation of history." Richard Hofstadter famously portrayed Calhoun as "the Marx of the Master Class."

And Calhoun certainly was influential. But however sophisticated or creative his political ideas were in some kind of larger picture, their focus was preserving the institution of slavery in the American South. Sale explains his theory and how it broadly relates to current events - oddly without the word "slavery" appearing in his post, though race does - as follows:

It was John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, who in 1833, invented the idea of the "concurrent majority," the strategy being used by the Tea Party today. As a person, Calhoun was a dour, humorless intractable man. He was entirely addicted to complex abstractions. His thought had a white-hot and relentless intensity. He would wander about and mutter, "This indeed is a real crisis." As he was dying, a friend asked him to sum up his life, and he replied, "I see nothing to repeat and little to correct," practically the same words President George W. Bush used in describing his presidency. But make no mistake and don’t be distracted. Intellectually, Bush wasn't within shouting distance of Calhoun.

As a thinker, Calhoun was concerned about the power of section versus section, obsessed by the waning power of the South which he felt was being increasingly overwhelmed by the growth of the North. As a result, Calhoun pronounced the South "a fixed and hopeless minority." In other words, the white people of the South were being denied the means to make their power nationally felt, thanks to the majorities of the North. If you think of the shrinking numbers of white people that will live in America in ten years, the growing number of Asians, Hispanics, gays, etc. the "white" Right Wing Republicans and Tea Party people would probably say the same thing about America today that whites in America "are a fixed and hopeless minority." Think of the eve of last year’s election when Bill O'Reilly cried out in anguish that America wasn't "white" any more. That observation encapsulates the major Tea Party fear.

The concept of the concurrent majority was a device to boost certain interests at the expense of others. We have all read items that have highlighted the role of Right Wing billionaires who are funding and supporting certain candidates who are working to restrict weaken and hamper the rights of minorities to prevent them from becoming majority voices. To the Tea Party, any minority that enjoys any degree of majority support is an enemy. We usually think of minorities as a group laboring to become part of the majority. A Virginia politician, William H. Roane, in the 1850s said that he thought that chief right of minorities was that of "freely, peaceably and legally converting themselves into a majority whenever they can." To prevent certain rising minorities becoming part of the national majority is the aim of the Tea Party program.

The brilliant American historian, Richard Hofstadter, said that the concurrent majority was designed specifically "to protect a vested interest of considerable power.["] [my emphasis]

Capers describes the Calhounian theory in its original historical context this way:

In the summer of 1831 he openly avowed his belief in nullification, a position that he had anonymously advanced three years earlier in the essay South Carolina Exposition and Protest. Each state was sovereign, Calhoun contended, and the Constitution was a compact among the sovereign states. Therefore, any one state (but not the United States Supreme Court) could declare an act of Congress unconstitutional. The proponents of the nullified measure, according to the theory, would then have to obtain an amendment to the Constitution — which required a two-thirds vote of each house of Congress and ratification by three-fourths of the states — confirming the power of Congress to take such action.

Although the tariff was the specific issue in the nullification crisis of 1832–33, what Calhoun was actually fighting for was protection of the South's "peculiar institution," slavery, which he feared someday might be abolished by a Northern majority in Congress. The tariff, Calhoun put forth in one of his public letters, is "of vastly inferior importance to the great question to which it has given rise…the right of a state to interpose, in the last resort, in order to arrest an unconstitutional act of the General Government."

Hofstadter in From Calhoun to the Dixiecrats Social Research 16/2 (June 1949) noted an important and revealing feature of Calhoun's eventual conception:

Actually, the South had little recourse except to the threat of leaving the Union in order to gain a formal constitutional guarantee of the concurrent majority. Calhoun's final version of this device was a dual executive; each section was to elect one member, each member was to have veto power. This concession could be won, he reminded southerners, only if they abandoned internal party division and manifested complete solidarity and militancy.

This would presumably guarantee the ultimate in the bipartisanship that our star political commentators in the US today cherish so much.

Richard Current in his wonderful 1963 biography, John C. Calhoun, reported that the defender of slavery had a high opinion of his own significance: "Obviously Calhoun ... thought of himself as the Newton, the Galileo, of political science." (p. 110)

But he also writes of Calhoun's political theory:

Probably he was the most systematic thinker among the active American politicians of his time. His argument was, and remains, persuasive. Once his assumptions are granted, his reasoning proceeds pretty well from one step to another, and his conclusions follow almost, but not quite irresistibly. Thus his basic postulates regarding sovereignty lad to his conception of the constitutional compact, and this in turn to his position on nullification, secession, and slavery in the territories.

Even if his assumption be accepted, however, his argument reveals gaps, inconsistencies, contradictions, and downright errors once it is closely examined. If his assumptions are challenged, the whole structure begins to shake. And if they are rejected, it falls in a heap. (P. 112)

This lack of coherence and cynical flexibility in argument is something his spiritual heirs share.

Calhoun's theory revolved around the defense of slavery. Period. As Current puts it, "He was taking a concept that had been invented to defend the divine right of kings and he was using it to defend the divine right of slaveowners." (p. 113) And his theory that ostensibly was meant to protect the rights of minorities, the only minority he was focused on protecting was that composed of white slaveowners. The minority of black Americans, slaves and free, was not one Calhoun had the least interest in protecting. Just the opposite. As Capers puts it, "Although Calhoun is remembered as the defender of minorities, he had no use for any minority — certainly not labourers or abolitionists — except the Southern one. His solution to the problem of the preservation of the Union was to give the South everything it demanded." Hofstadter in 1949 observed:

... although Calhoun has been frequently hailed as a pluralist, his political analysis was essentially dualistic~ So long as he could talk in terms of the protection of "the minority," against the tyranny of "the majority," his ex parte pleading for the southern cause could masquerade plausibly as a universal concern for political restraint, balance, and the general good.

It's pretty obvious how that kind of thinking would be attractive to today's Fort Sumter Republican Party. The whole point of his political theory was to give the white slaveholding minority of the South a veto power over anything and everything the national government might want to do. Which is what today's Republican Party is trying to do in the current government shutdown/debt ceiling fight. Hofstadter wrote of the Dixiecrats in 1949:

Their essential strategy hinges upon the effective marshaling of a minority [pro-segregation Southern whites] in a solid bloc, but they must condemn the same strategy when it is adopted by enfranchised and politically self-conscious Negroes. Thus Governor [Fielding] Wright [of Mississippi], in his speech accepting the vice-presidential nomination of the Dixiecratic party declared: "Government by bloc, by vociferous minorities, is a cowardly thing. It is a disgrace to America. It paves the way for ultimate dictatorship or socialism."

1947 campaign poster for Fielding Wright (1895-1956)

As Current explained in 1963, Calhoun's race-based strategies of resistance found their true heirs in segregation and its strategy of massive resistance to integration, i.e., to adopting the American form of government:

Wherever a White Citizen's Council meets in Mississippi, or a similar group in another of the Southern states, there is to be sought, nowadays, the true spirit of Calhoun. It is to be sought in the activities of conservative - or reactionary - Southern whites. The way they use the lobby, the bloc, the party constitution, and other political devices can be considered as essentially Calhounian.

These white Southerners now face problem quite similar to the one that Calhoun faced more than a hundred years ago. They talk of maintaining white supremacy and he talked of protecting slavery. The problem remains that of defending, against external attack, institution based upon a belief in human inequality. (p. 148; italics in original)

Hofstadter in 1949 emphasized the reactionary nature of Calhoun's basic political theory: "Although Calhoun was notable for his realism as a social thinker, there was little place in his philosophy for social change."

Tags: john calhoun, republican party, tea party, segregation, white racism

Drawing lines and setting narratives

Sam Tanenhaus reviews three recent books on the Tea Party in Will the Tea Get Cold? New York Review of Books 02/09/2012, including The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism by Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson. The material he cites from their book give credence to the notion that "cultural" issues like race far outweigh economic issues for those who identify with the Tea Party. Which is another name for the Republican base, which is also largely the same as white conservative Christians or the Christian Right.

Those who identify with the Tea Party are the least likely to be potential Obama or Democratic voters. But the data he cites makes me wonder how many of them pay any attention at all to actual policy issues directly affecting their lives.

... fully 83% of South Dakota Tea Party supporters said they would prefer to "leave alone" or "increase" Social Security benefits, while 78% opposed cuts to Medicare prescription drug coverage, and 79% opposed cuts in Medicare payments to physicians and hospitals.... 56% of the Tea Party supporters surveyed did express support for "raising income taxes by 5% for everyone whose income is over a million dollars a year."

And he reports their more anecdotal observation:

With one exception, Skocpol and Williamson write, "not a single grassroots Tea Party supporter we encountered argued for privatization of Social Security or Medicare," pet projects of a conservative legislator like Paul Ryan and of organizations like FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity. The Republican aspirants have adapted to these internal contradictions. They attack Obama for increasing government spending and at the same time for trimming $500 billion from Medicare.

Tanenhaus makes the argument that culture war issues override such concerns.

But if those numbers are true on their face, it suggests that a clear Democratic message of defending Social Security and Medicare and exploiting Republican proposals to reduce benefits could be effective in disrupting the Tea Party message and isolating them from actual independents.

But it's been true for decades that voters in general have strongly agreed with Democrats more than Republicans on a wide range of major issues. And yet Democrats seem to be constantly cringing in fear of Republicans' appeal.

I suspect there is something wrong with those poll numbers. We know from other polling that those identifying with the Tea Party in polls tend to be older and more affluent than average. I suspect that if a poll drills into these issues in more depth, the support of Tea Party supporters for Social Security, for example, would look a lot more squishy. There would probably be more of an attitude of "I've got mine and I want to keep getting it" involved. And along with a statement of support for Social Security, you would also probably get a lot of endorsement of the claims and ideological assumptions that the anti-Social Security activists and lobbyists use.

Tanenhaus' piece is the first of two, so we'll see later what his further conclusions are. And I guess this is Groan About Conventional Wisdom Day for me here. But this first part really seems to draw heavily on the very conventional assumption that the Republican Presidential contest is being fought between moderates and conservatives. He professes to find a continuity back to Wendell Willkie's nomination in 1940.

The reality of today's Republican Party is it no longer has a moderate faction in any meaningful sense of the word. Governor's Willard Romney in Massachusetts and Arnold Schwarzenegger in California could be seen as a last gasp of moderate Republicanism. But even that is misleading. Ten and fifteen years ago, the national Republican Party could swallow having someone run for Governor in blue states on a seemingly "moderate" basis on pragmatic grounds that it gave the Democrats a big pain. But Willard and Arnie as governors were outliers in a Party that had become "movement conservative". George W. Bush's "compassionate conservatism" was little more than a marketing slogan.

Tanenhaus is also painfully (in my mind) conventional in citing, yes, Richard Hofstadter. At least he also draws on a piece of his from the 1950s rather than just "The Paranoid Style in American Politics". I'm convinced that for some large portion of the American commentariat, that "Paranoid Style" piece by Hofstadter is the only analytic work longer than three pages they've ever read about the Radical Right. It's still relevant. I used to cite it myself until I saw how our Pod Pundits ran to it to try to understand the Tea Party. Just in the last ten years, there has been a flourishing scholarly and journalistic studies of the Radical Right.

Martin Marty and Scott Appleby edited a multi-volume series on religious fundamentalism in the 1990s. The first volume includes an essay by William Dinges, "Roman Catholic Traditionalism and Activist Conservatism in the United States". Given the role that Catholic conservative activists Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich are playing right now in the Republican Party, I'm guessing even a star pundit might learn something useful from that. But it would mean reading over 50 pages not counting footnotes, so don't expect to hear Sleepy Mark Shields to be citing it when he wrings his hands over the wounded religious sentiments of the 2% or whatever portion of American Catholics give a flying flip about what the bishops say about birth control. Mark would have to have 10 or 15 siestas to get through it.

But this is an important observation, one that escaped most of the mainstream reporters who covered the Tea Party hoo-hah:

The early accounts of the Tea Party phenomenon often depicted its adherents as apolitical citizens disturbed by the recession and mounting debt and roused from their apathy to do something about it. This may be true of some, but others are seasoned activists long involved in politics. This is certainly the case with organizers like Dick Armey, the former House majority leader who heads FreedomWorks, a 2004 offshoot of an organization set up in 1984 by the billionaire Koch brothers. Jenny Beth Martin affects a pose of naiveté in her book: "If someone had told me [in 2009] that I would soon be writing a book about American politics, I would have laughed," she writes. But only a few pages later, when recounting her expert use of "Facebook, Twitter, and other social media," Martin explains that "I already had a political network, having been involved at the local and state level for many years"—and since the early 2000s she was "a full-time blogger and Republican activist." So too with the lower-profile Tea Partiers interviewed by Skocpol and Williamson: "An extraordinary number dated their first political experiences to the 1964 Goldwater campaign."

And since you would have to have been probably 15 or so to have a real political experience in the 1964 Presidential campaign, it implies that an "extraordinary number" of the Tea Parties they found would have be qualified for senior citizen discounts. Old Republican white people, in other words.

Rick Perlman commented in a speech or post I heard from him that in his research on far-right groups during the early 60s - those 1964 Goldwater campaign folks - he found that it was common for participants in their meetings to claim to the press that they were getting involved in politics for the first time. It's just kind of stuff they say.

Tags: 2012 election, radical right, tea party

Documentary on the Tea Party

This is an Aljazeera English Fault Lines episode, Politics, Religion and the Tea Party YouTube date 12/13/2011:



I especially like the way this report discusses the Tea Party in the context of Christian Right domination of the Republican Party. Our political press in the US developed the habit of talking about the Tea Party as though it is somehow distinct and separate from the Christian Right. This documentary puts in a more realistic context, which is that both the Tea Party and the Christian Right are separate but near-identical manifestations of the Republican base.

I would add that both manifestations are obsessed with the same key enemies: black people, hippies, foreigners, gubment programs that might help some black or brown person somewhere somehow, to name some of the more prominent ones. Of course there are Muslims and the Kenyan radical anti-colonialist Marxist President who wants to impose Sharia law, Jews who don't celebrate Christmas, George Soros, liberals, Democrats, gays and lesbians, Nancy Pelosi, etc., etc., etc.

The report does pick up one favorite but incorrect piece of the Christian Right's founding story. What started the Christian Right in the organized, political form that we know it today was not the abortion issue. It was the Carter Administration's decision to deny federal tax breaks to racially segregated schools like Bob Jones University.

Tags: christian right, tea party

Glenn Beck discovers white racism among Tea Party supporters

Will Bunch points out how a political myth has taken root that recasts the Tea Party in the image of Occupy Wall Street (The accidental truth-teller: Glenn Beck, the Tea Party, and race in America Attywood 12/12/2011):

In recent months, a myth has been allowed to fester and take root about how the Tea Party Movement came about, and what it stands for. In particular, it is the falsehood that the Tea Party came about because of anger against the 2008-09 bailout of big banks and Wall Street. It was disturbing to see this lie repeated so often -- usually in the context of trying to make forced and ultimately confused comparisons between the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street -- and not just in the usual conservative media sources, either.

He cites instances of this spin from the New York Post and FOX Business.

He doesn't cite this instance, from President Obama speech at Otawatomie a week ago:

But in 2008, the house of cards collapsed. We all know the story by now: Mortgages sold to people who couldn’t afford them, or even sometimes understand them. Banks and investors allowed to keep packaging the risk and selling it off. Huge bets -- and huge bonuses -- made with other people’s money on the line. Regulators who were supposed to warn us about the dangers of all this, but looked the other way or didn’t have the authority to look at all.

It was wrong. It combined the breathtaking greed of a few with irresponsibility all across the system. And it plunged our economy and the world into a crisis from which we’re still fighting to recover. It claimed the jobs and the homes and the basic security of millions of people -- innocent, hardworking Americans who had met their responsibilities but were still left holding the bag.

And ever since, there’s been a raging debate over the best way to restore growth and prosperity, restore balance, restore fairness. Throughout the country, it’s sparked protests and political movements -- from the tea party to the people who’ve been occupying the streets of New York and other cities. [my emphasis]

But Bunch does refute the story with a bit of recent history:

The rise of the Tea Party had nothing to do with bank bailouts.

Remember, the federal government and the Bush administration (remember them?) started bailing out Wall Street and the banking industry in the fall of 2008, six months before the first Tea Party rally, or anything remotely like it. There was no great outpouring of anger from the rank-and-file of the American right. The $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, was signed into law by Bush on Oct. 3, 2008. It was supported by Bush's successor, then-Sen. Barack Obama, but it was also supported by Sen. John McCain, his running mate and future Tea Party queen Sarah Palin, Herman Cain, and even by none other than Glenn Beck. Simply put, there was no Tea Party movement, and no public protests by conservatives (or liberals for that matter) in 2008.

Instead, the Tea Party formed within days of Jan. 20, 2009, the date that Barack Obama became America's 44th president. The famous "Tea Party rant"by Rick Santelli credited with helping to launch the protests wasn't about bailing out banks or Wall Street but the idea that Washington would provide relief for middle-class homeowners who were under water. Another seminal moment came less than a month into Obama's presidency when a young Seattle conservative activist named Keli Carender organized a public protest. Against the bank bailouts and TARP? No. It was against the first major action of the new president, the $787 billion stimulus proposal that included infrastructure projects, saving blue-collar government jobs, and tax cuts (yes, tax cuts) for the middle class. [my emphasis]

Bunch did a considerable amount of original reporting on the Tea Party, including a book about it, The Backlash: Right-Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters, and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama (2010).

Glenn Beck, weirdly enough, managed to say on FOX Business last week that some Tea Party sympathizers were motivated by white racism. Which, of course, is not supposed to exist any more in the Republican Party.

Not that this represents some newly-found reality-testing skills on Beck's part. He brought this up in the context of accusing Newt Gingrich of being the same kind of "big government progressive" that he calls Obama. Go figure.

But, as Bunch puts it, "any dose of honesty is a breath of fresh air, even if emerges from the fetid swamp of Beck, Inc." And he explains:

But whatever his reason, the idea that Beck re-injected into the national conversation -- that race and the Tea Party are linked -- is an important one. The media needs to re-ground itself in the fact that on the playing field of social movements, Occupy Wall Street, despite its flaws, is rooted in a reality of billionaire-bought economic injustice, while the Tea Party is based heavily on an emotion. The ideology that was created in the wake of that emotion -- distrust of any government steps to ease a jobs crisis, distrust of elites even if that means not believing in established science such as man-made global warming -- continues to steer the current debate, even if actual Tea Party activists have all but vanished the scene. [my emphasis]

Tags: occupy movement, tea party, will bunch

The Daily Howler's Tea Party crush Pam Stout - and what she's up to now

Bob "the Daily Howler" Somerby went from being an irreverent but perceptive liberal media critic to a cranky "concern troll" scolding liberals for not agreeing with Republicans.

Somerby was bowled over by the charms of a Tea Party activist named Pam Stout quoted in a New York Times article (David Barstow, Tea Party Lights Fuse for Rebellion on Right 02/15/2010). And he scolded George Packer, Kate Zernike and Steve Benen, and Digby for suggesting that the lovely Pam Stout might be anything more complex than an earnest citizen concerned about all the scary things these here libruls in Washington might be doin' to the country.

In the article that began the Howler's crush, Barstow wrote:

Pam Stout has not always lived in fear of her government. She remembers her years working in federal housing programs, watching government lift struggling families with job training and education. She beams at the memory of helping a Vietnamese woman get into junior college.

But all that was before the Great Recession and the bank bailouts, before Barack Obama took the White House by promising sweeping change on multiple fronts, before her son lost his job and his house. Mrs. Stout said she awoke to see Washington as a threat, a place where crisis is manipulated — even manufactured — by both parties to grab power.

She was happily retired, and had never been active politically. But last April, she went to her first Tea Party rally, then to a meeting of the Sandpoint Tea Party Patriots. She did not know a soul, yet when they began electing board members, she stood up, swallowed hard, and nominated herself for president. "I was like, 'Did I really just do that?' " she recalled.

Then she went even further.

Worried about hyperinflation, social unrest or even martial law, she and her Tea Party members joined a coalition, Friends for Liberty, that includes representatives from Glenn Beck's 9/12 Project, the John Birch Society, and Oath Keepers, a new player in a resurgent militia movement.

When Friends for Liberty held its first public event, Mrs. Stout listened as Richard Mack, a former Arizona sheriff, brought 1,400 people to their feet with a speech about confronting a despotic federal government. Mrs. Stout said she felt as if she had been handed a road map to rebellion. Members of her family, she said, think she has disappeared down a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories. But Mrs. Stout said she has never felt so engaged.

"I can't go on being the shy, quiet me," she said. "I need to stand up."

The Tea Party movement has become a platform for conservative populist discontent, a force in Republican politics for revival, as it was in the Massachusetts Senate election, or for division. But it is also about the profound private transformation of people like Mrs. Stout, people who not long ago were not especially interested in politics, yet now say they are bracing for tyranny. [my emphasis]

Barstow - and Somerby - should have known to be a little more reserved at taking Sweet Pam's self-description as a political neophyte when they saw that she was happily affiliating herself politically with the John Birch Society, the mother ship of most paranoid rightwing conspiracy theories for the last 50 years, and the Oath Keepers, a hard right outfit, which Barstow even noticed is part of "a resurgent militia movement." No one not already pretty accustomed to and sympathetic with far-right ideas and attitudes is likely to be instantly swept away by suddenly discovering such fringe groups.

Barstow:

Tea Party leaders say they know their complaints about shredded constitutional principles and excessive spending ring hollow to some, given their relative passivity through the Bush years. In some ways, though, their main answer — strict adherence to the Constitution — would comfort every card-carrying A.C.L.U. member.

But their vision of the federal government is frequently at odds with the one that both parties have constructed. Tea Party gatherings are full of people who say they would do away with the Federal Reserve, the federal income tax and countless agencies, not to mention bailouts and stimulus packages. Nor is it unusual to hear calls to eliminate Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. A remarkable number say this despite having recently lost jobs or health coverage. Some of the prescriptions they are debating — secession, tax boycotts, states “nullifying” federal laws, forming citizen militias — are outside the mainstream, too.

At a recent meeting of the Sandpoint Tea Party, Mrs. Stout presided with brisk efficiency until a member interrupted with urgent news. Because of the stimulus bill, he insisted, private medical records were being shipped to federal bureaucrats. A woman said her doctor had told her the same thing. There were gasps of rage. Everyone already viewed health reform as a ruse to control their medical choices and drive them into the grip of insurance conglomerates. Debate erupted. Could state medical authorities intervene? Should they call Congress?

As the meeting ended, Carolyn L. Whaley, 76, held up her copy of the Constitution. She carries it everywhere, she explained, and she was prepared to lay down her life to protect it from the likes of Mr. Obama.

“I would not hesitate,” she said, perfectly calm.

People in the John Birch Society orbit often describe themselvbes as "constitutionalists" and treat the Constitution as a patriotic icon. That doesn't mean they know or care about anything in it, other than the far right interpretations of the Second and Tenth Amendments. No, their notions of the Constitution would not "comfort every card-carrying A.C.L.U. member."

Barstow continues later in the piece:

Pam Stout wakes each morning, turns on Fox News, grabs coffee and an Atkins bar, and hits the computer. She is the hub of a rapidly expanding and highly viral political network, keeping a running correspondence with her 400 members in Sandpoint, state and national Tea Party leaders and other conservative activists.

Mrs. Stout forwards along petitions to impeach Mr. Obama; petitions to audit the Federal Reserve; petitions to support Sarah Palin; appeals urging defiance of any federal law requiring health insurance; and on and on.

Meanwhile, she and her husband are studying the Constitution line by line. She has the Congressional switchboard programmed into her cellphone. “I just signed up for a Twitter class,” said Mrs. Stout, 66, laughing at the improbability of it all.

Yet for all her efforts, Mrs. Stout is gripped by a sense that it may be too little too late. Yes, there have been victories — including polls showing support for the Tea Party movement — but in her view none of it has diminished the fundamental threat of tyranny, a point underscored by Mr. Obama’s drive to pass a health care overhaul.

She and her members are becoming convinced that rallies alone will not save the Republic. They are searching for some larger answer, she said. They are also waiting for a leader, someone capable of uniting their rebellion, someone like Ms. Palin, who made Sandpoint one of the final stops on her book tour and who has announced plans to attend a series of high-profile Tea Party events in the next few months.

“We need to really decide where we’re going to go,” Mrs. Stout said.

These questions of strategy, direction and leadership were clearly on the minds of Mrs. Stout’s members at a recent monthly meeting.

Their task seemed endless, almost overwhelming, especially with only $517 in their Tea Party bank account. There were rallies against illegal immigration to attend. There was a coming lecture about the hoax of global warming. There were shooting classes to schedule, and tips to share about the right survival food.

The group struggled fitfully for direction. Maybe they should start vetting candidates. Someone mentioned boycotting ABC, CBS, NBC and MSNBC. Maybe they should do more recruiting.

“How do you keep on fighting?” Mrs. Stout asked in exasperation.

Lenore Generaux, a local wildlife artist, had an idea: They should raise money for Freedom Force, a group that says it wants to “reclaim America via the Patriot movement.” The group is trying to unite the Tea Parties and other groups to form a powerful “Patriot lobby.” One goal is to build a “Patriot war chest” big enough to take control of the Republican Party.

Not long ago, Mrs. Stout sent an e-mail message to her members under the subject line: “Revolution.” It linked to an article by Greg Evensen, a leader in the militia movement, titled “The Anatomy of an American Revolution,” that listed “grievances” he said “would justify a declaration of war against any criminal enterprise including that which is killing our nation from Washington, D.C.”

Mrs. Stout said she has begun to contemplate the possibility of “another civil war.” It is her deepest fear, she said. Yet she believes the stakes are that high. Basic freedoms are threatened, she said. Economic collapse, food shortages and civil unrest all seem imminent.

“I don’t see us being the ones to start it, but I would give up my life for my country,” Mrs. Stout said.

She paused, considering her next words.

“Peaceful means,” she continued, “are the best way of going about it. But sometimes you are not given a choice.” [my emphasis]

But this did not make her an activist of the far right to Bob Somerby. Somerby was also impressed by her subsequent appearance on Letterman (Nikki Gloudeman, Tea Partier Appears on Letterman Mother Jones 03/31/2010; video of the interview is available there.) Here was Somerby's take on that performance:

We said we’d like to hear Stout’s account of the Tea Party movement—her account of her political views.

The silly children on MSNBC failed to jump to our tune. Last night, they played their schoolyard games as Letterman interviewed Stout! You can watch the bulk of the segment here, unless CBS has had the tape taken down. (The last few moments are not included.) We thought Letterman did a good job with the interview in certain ways. In other ways, his lack of political savvy showed.

But then, you’ve already grown accustomed to that if you watch our progressive channel.

Go ahead—take a look at that tape. If you prefer (and many will), you’ll be able to find some ways to insist that Stout is a snarling racist. (Though you’ll have to struggle a bit.) If you’re alternately disposed, you may notice that Stout could play the title role if some producer ever decides to cast Santa Claus as a woman. For our part, we aren't inclined to agree with Stout's views—at least, with the emphases she places. And the interview only ran nine minutes. And, of course, it only involved one member of a large movement.

Question: Can you watch that interview and imagine that Stout is a decent person? By now, many liberals quite likely cannot.

In his blast at Packer, Somerby described Sweet Pam this way:

“Government-run health care!” The sound of those words scares people away. Do you think our side [he means the Democrats, speaking in "concern troll" mode] has asked people why? Do you think our side has busted its keister trying to articulate sounder ideas?
We’re just asking.

In our view, our side rarely asks people about what they’re thinking. This brings us back to recent profiles in the New York Times about those Tea Party adherents. These people lack our sound ideas—but why is that? In a more rational world, it seems that our side might ask.

In his lengthy profile in the Times, David Barstow, for whatever reason, chose to feature Pam Stout, a 66-year-old Idaho woman. It sounded like she has been influenced by Glenn Beck, though Barstow’s profile was sketchy.

How does Pam Stout see the world? What do others around her think? We’d be curious to see her interviewed. But within the aeries of High Manhattan, a high noble lord had a different reaction to Barstow’s report in the Times. At the New Yorker, his highness, the noblest Lord of Packer, condescended to ponder the mind of the hapless commoner Stout.

In a further blast at Digby, Somerby gave her a classic "concern troll" scolding, related to the fact that Sweet Pam professed to take Glenn Beck very seriously:

Digby doesn’t watch Beck a whole lot. Yes, he’s one of the biggest nuts and/or frauds ever seen on TV—but he can’t be dismissed quite that simply. Most of his work comes from fever swamps — but some of his work is quite erudite.

No, Beck is not erudite. Or honest.

Well, there's a new report out about what Sweet Pam's been up to lately: Devin Burghart, Tea Time with the Posse: Inside an Idaho Tea Party Patriots Conference (Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights) 04/18/2011. He writes:

An inside look at a recent Tea Party event organized by Stout shows a very different side of the Tea Parties, and highlights a disturbing direction taken by many local groups.

Little talk of repealing “Obamacare” or of modifying objectionable provisions of healthcare legislation took place at Stout’s “Patriots Unite” event, held March 26. The impending possibility of a government shutdown due to an impasse over the budget was hardly mentioned. Nary a word was spoken about bailouts or taxes. Instead, speakers at this Tea Party event gave the crowd a heavy dose of racist “birther” attacks on President Obama, discussions of the conspiracy behind the problem facing America (complete with anti-Semitic illustration), Christian nationalism, anti-environmentalism, and serious calls for legislation promoting states’ rights and “nullification.”

Stout, the Idaho state coordinator for Tea Party Patriots attracted around seventy Tea Party activists from Idaho, Montana, and Washington to the Coeur D’Alene Inn for the conference. The goal: to bring isolated Tea Party groups together.

Nothing that Burghart reports about that conference sounds erudite. Or pro-democracy.

Tags: bob somerby, daily howler, john birch society, pam stout, tea party