The New Insurrection

One question that often animates contemporary political debates is how the South and large swaths of Middle America became such willing advocates for the conservative revolution, most recently found in the Tea Party. In What's the Matter with Kansas?, Thomas Frank argued that wedge issues were at the heart of the matter, with abortion, religion and battles over other social issues surrounding how to save a fictitious “American culture” brought to the fore by the triangulation strategy of Clinton and the New Liberalism (essentially removing the liberal adherence to the belief that government could solve social problems and replacing it with neoliberal ideology). Yet Larry Bartels provided a rather compelling empirical refutation of this claim in his famous essay What's the Matter with What's the Matter with Kansas?, even as I believe there is still some truth to Frank’s argument. Others have argued that the victory of conservatism relates more to a backlash against the New Deal and particularly  the Great Society of LBJ and a belief America had gone too far down the road toward equality. A more balanced argument suggests that it is a combination of these trends, with the falling quality of life for many white, middle class Americans in the 70s reframed as the result of government overreach and the victories of the Civil Rights movement, feminism and liberalism in general.

Scapegoating is certainly at the heart of the new conservative discourse with affirmative action, feminism, gays, immigrants, the “liberal” media, educational progressivism and progressivism in general blamed for our collective decline. The discourse is decidedly values-based and equally founded on a series of displacements that move blame from corporations and economic transformation (including the abandonment of manufacturing toward a service-based economy with extensive outsourcing and overseas production, declining real wages and benefits and the accumulation of wealth in the hands of financial, media, corporate and entertainment robber barons together with the decline in government intervention in markets and abdication of its role in addressing social problems) toward the aforementioned evils that conservative talking heads constantly attack with the vitriol of fascists. This displacement is arguably effective mainly because it feeds on deep historical trends in American culture including a distrust of government, racism and religious transcendentalism.

Another argument centers on the ideological end, claiming people are simple pawns unable to discern fact from fiction in the new spectacle society. It is easy to argue that many people vote against their economic interests because they have been bamboozled into doing so by the values agenda or the displacement of blame. But the reality is decidedly more complex. For one thing, the poor and working class do often vote for Democrats and more and more upper class whites vote for Republicans, thus reflecting their narrow personal interests perfectly. For another, the American voters have elected a Black president by decent margins in two successive elections and could very well make the legislative and executive branches Democratic next year. And finally is the rather interesting argument about where federal and even state funding goes and how this might elicit political cynicism over time (accented by the media’s framing of social crisis as the new normal and the selling of government as innately corrupt and inept in film after film since the 80s). But this still leaves the question of poor and working class whites in the South, Central and Midwest states who do vote for a party that not only works against their economic interests, but seems to hold them in deep disdain? Why are they so easily transformed into the corporate-sponsored armies of the Koch brothers (aka the Tea Party) or such willing advocates for right wing lunatics in the media and political arenas (7 Crazy Right Wing Statements Last Week)?

Henrik Hertzberg of the New Yorker offers further thoughts for consideration in his comments for the upcoming issue (Impeach Obama), claiming that we are witnessing a new insurrection that can be compared to the Confederate South. While the old South wanted to destroy the government, Hertzberg claims the new one merely wants to decimate it – based not on violent civil war but “mendacity, demagoguery and obstructionism.” Yet he also points out a number of similarities between the old separationists and the new including their belief that federal law need not be repealed to be nullified (a belief also reflected in the obstruction of the Brown decision in 1954) and an inability to reconcile with the will of the people reflected in an election. Rather than licking their wounds, doing some soul searching and figuring out how to convince more citizens in this democracy to vote for them, the party has instead decided to hold the government and country hostage until their demands are met. As I’ve noted over the past two weeks, this undermines the idea of representative democracy and the will of the American people, replacing it with blind fundamentalist and the belief their agenda is right no matter what America wants.

As Hertzberg notes, however, there is not even a consistent message of what this conservative fundamentalism wants. At first it was appeal of “Obamacare,” the 40^th time the House has voted to overturn the act. Then it moved on to include a whole host of GOP pet projects including still more tax cuts for the rich, Medicare means-testing, loosening of environmental regulations, financial regulation rollback and the end of Net Neutrality. In essence, the GOP is attempting to undermine democracy completely to further their agenda, even as they only control one of the three bodies that make and enact laws.

Yet the current political grandstanding has finally seemed to snap many people out of the gilded haze that has colored their politics for so long. Sure some will continue to vote for the corporate-sponsored party attempting to destroy America one cut in spending or regulation at a time, but many more might finally be waking up to what they are voting for. If that is the case, maybe we can finally move beyond considering What’s the Matter with Conservatives to invoking real and reasoned debate on what Americans want and how we can get there.