More fun as Ivy Leaguers try to come to grips with a Tea Party that won't go away. We have the classic Yalie approach in the post below. For another view of Tea Partiers, equally distorted by a prism of malice but not so ignorant, try Harvard professor Theda Skocpol's interview at Salon. To an impressive degree, she's allowing data about Tea Partiers to moderate her knee-jerk assumptions. For instance, while she spouts the usual line that a streak of racist xenophobia infects the movement, she also acknowledges that the more powerful meaning of symbols like the Confederate Flag is "regional resistance to federal power" and nullification. She also doesn't buy the usual accusation that the movement is Astroturfed, though she's alarmed by the big-money organization that allows a group like Jim DeMint's Heritage Foundation to scare the pants off of squishy Republicans who are thinking of caving on a vote, because the legislators know what's coming at them in the next primary if they do. (The TPs may not have the big numbers, but they're ferociously active in primaries.) Skocpol would like to think that moderate Republicans are going to start pouring money and organization into counterattacks at the primary level, but she's not fooling herself enough to predict it yet. She also warns that it's a mistake to predict a Democratic or moderate-Republican sweep in 2014, because mid-term behavior traditionally favors highly engaged activists.
There's an amusing section in which she struggles to understand what's got everyone's dress up over his head about a benevolent and moderate law like Obamacare. On that subject, she hasn't quite brought herself to look honestly at what motivates her opponents. To her credit, she's gone as far as to understand that the law is fundamentally redistributionist, and that some people don't much care for that aspect. Otherwise she's drawing a blank.
Skocpol closes with a doleful (and slightly sour-grapes) view of the Left's ability to go toe-to-toe with extremist Republicans:
There’s also a whole series of reasons why older conservative voters, backed by ideologues, have this combination of apocalyptic moral certitude with organization that really gets results. Especially in obstructing things in American politics.
I don’t happen to think that the left and the center-left could imitate this. For one thing, they don’t have the presence across as many states and districts. But it’s also not clear it’s a model worth imitating. I think the real problem that you’ve got right now on the left is how to defeat this stuff, how to contain it, how to beat it — given the permeability of American political institutions to this kind of thing. And I don’t think it’s clear what’s going to happen.
Ok, I've had my dose of patronizing for the day.
ReplyDeleteThe big, dirty secret is that the TEA Parties are the natural allies of ambitious American blacks and legal immigrants. They AREN'T radical or racist, and they both read and do math. Oh, but they aren't from the relatively small set of wealthy, self-entitled families who have forgotten how short their pedigree really is.
This woman is grasping at straws, using a plant at rally to bolster a false characterization of a populist movement that is populated by capable, educated people who know how to read and how to use statistics.
I remember another populist movement.
I remember a video clip of a babushka griping out a young soviet soldier in front of a tank shortly before the Soviet Union collapsed. When you get healthy, educated, old people riled up, they can win the argument, provided it is important enough.
Valerie