Yet, what I predicted 3 years ago seems to have come true. The Frankenstein monster the Republican Party created is now running amok across the countryside. It has turned on its maker, and is tearing everything apart. Here is a slight reformulation of what I said 3 years ago:
The GOP's goal is to create a populist wave, driven by
ethnocultural frenzy, to sweep aside everyone who threatens wealth and
privilege. But here are two essential truths: 1) Elite-led projects are always
designed to create a logic for political order, allowing the architects of
the movement to push aside competitors so they can hold on to the nation's
wealth. 2) Populist movements have always been guided by a different logic,
emphasizing the vernacular over the cultured, viewing the elite as corrupt,
contaminated, alienated from and disdainful of popular or folk culture. Populism
seeks to sweep away elites. If I were the party strategists mapping this out, I
would worry that their creation – as always happens in sci-fi films – will turn
on its maker. Or, in the words of Eric Hobsbawm, where populist sentiments are
not created by those who employ them, but only borrowed, those doing the
borrowing "become a kind of sorcerer's apprentice," and they are
deluded to imagine they can entirely control the forces they unleash.
We see two things happening now, I think. Sympathetic voters, those distrustful of government, but not the fervent true-believers that make up the Tea Party ranks in the House of Representatives, look around and see government blocked from doing the things even they accept it should be entrusted to do. Like ranchers in South Dakota, faced with financial losses and the massive work of clearing away 20,000 cattle killed by a freak October blizzard, unable to get help from FEMA because the government is shut down. One rancher told the New York Times:
If this event had happened to one rancher, if he had lost
everything that he owned, you would not hear one word from us. We would pull together and make him whole.
But how do you do that when you’re all in the same boat?
And that, in short, is as clear an argument as anyone could make for why we have government safety nets. And by hating government - all government, and everything it does - Tea Partiers go beyond the sentiments of most Republican voters. Red state voters may have a different view than blue state voters about how much government is enough government, but nearly everyone wants the government to step in when natural disasters sweep away communities. We saw it in New Jersey after Sandy, we see it in Florida after hurricanes and in Missouri after tornadoes, and now we are seeing it in South Dakota.
Second, we see Wall Street, in a panic, calling off their populist allies. The point was made today in a Wall Street Journal editorial. The official newspaper of the investment class said: "It's time to wrap up this comedy of political errors." Another conservative paper, the Houston Chronicle, the voice of big oil in the way the Wall Street Journal is the voice of Wall Street, expressed buyer's remorse, regretting its endorsement of Tea Party conspirator Ted Cruz. The paper waxes nostalgic for Kay Bailey Hutchison, a skillful advocate for the energy industry. Cruz, the paper now seems to realize, is a self-involved politically ambitious lout, unconcerned about what is best for Texans, unwilling to work toward politically necessary compromises.
So rank-and-file voters and the economic elites that have long used the Republican Party to preserve their wealth and privilege are dismayed by the Tea Partiers in the House and Senate. They can't say I didn't warn them.
Update: For a similar view to mine - that the Tea Party is another effort by the elite to construct a vehicle for the preservation of their own wealth and influence - see the new essay by Michael Lind on Salon. His view is a little different - he uses data to show that Tea Party activists are more likely to be drawn from the better-off than the white working class. That seems true, and is unsurprising, but I think that it is also a little beside the point. I think the goal of the Tea Party, like the earlier efforts by the Republican party to appeal to southern racists during the Nixon era, and evangelicals from Reagan through Bush, is to pump out rhetoric that changes the focus of the political conversation, and gets racists and the religious and the agitated to the polls to vote for Republican candidates who historically have had no intention whatsoever to deliver on the promises they made to these groups. The hiccup for the party this time: some of these Tea Party candidates actually believe this stuff. So, when they get to Congress, they actually try to pull the plug on the money machine. The Republican Party doesn't want to shut off the flow of government money, they just want to redirect it to corporations and the well-off.
