Misplaced Allegiance-- Why Teabaggers Are Republicans... And Why The Rest Of Us Aren't

Earlier today, in researching a post about corporate shill Artur Davis, I recalled how, when growing up, I first grappled with the idea that poor and middle class people-- and it was Southerners I was thinking about at the time-- could make common cause with conservative politicians and right-wing parties. Conservative parties are-- over and above everything else-- reactions against any semblance of equality for poor and middle class people. That's the raison d'etre for conservatism to begin with. In the case of Southerners-- who were at the time massively abandoning the Democratic party and moving to a the "new" GOP of Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon, the tendency was to chalk it up to naked racism. But naked racism was just part of it. Just like naked racism is just part of the misplaced allegiance of the teabaggers to the Republican Party today. Last week, Digby addressed this for Al Jazeera in a brilliant analysis: Tea Partiers: the self-hating 99 per cent.

I suppose it was inevitable that the burgeoning Occupy Wall Street movement would be compared with the Tea Party, but the level of misunderstanding and myth surrounding the latter's "populist" bona fides is surprising to even the most cynical observer.

There may be surface similarities between the two uprisings, but they actually represent two opposing populist worldviews, whose only philosophical resemblance to one another is their belief that they speak for "the people" against the elites. While both movements are mainly concerned with economic issues, their beliefs about the causes and solutions they propose couldn't be more different.

...[Teabaggery] was never about corporate greed, but was about the usual right wing resentment at the government spending their tax money on people they don't think have earned it. These are not billionaire bankers - they are the people on the lower rungs of the ladder. Unsurprisingly, this attitude turned out to be useful to corporate interests looking to allay any real populist impulses among the citizenry, and they soon moved in through various means to help the "movement" organise itself.

Contrary to various accounts surfacing lately ostensibly to warn the Occupy Wall Street supporters of the dangers of being similarly "co-opted" it was a very happy love match, not a marriage of convenience.

...I'm not sure that the Occupy movement's populism sees Wall Street as the root of all evil, but it does see its reckless destructiveness and craven hoarding of the nation's wealth as the root of our current national distress. Tea party populism, on the other hand, sees an active government that seeks to redistribute some of Wall Street's wealth (to the wrong people) as the problem.

It is very hard to imagine that these movements will find common cause. They may both believe that "virtue resides in ordinary people" and that they have the skills and platform to "bring their would-be superiors down to earth" but their definition of who is ordinary and who is superior is radically different.

The United States has always featured these two different sides of the populism coin and it's tempting to see the two movements arising in virtually the same political moment as representative of a vast uprising of common people in common purpose. 

But while it is vast, and masses of common people are rising up, they are two separate movements with very different worldviews.

In his introduction to The Reactionary Mind, Corey Robin elegantly gets into the timeless psychological explanation for this kind of seemingly self-loathing behavior which we always see in poor people fighting the battles for the forces of reaction-- reaction, of course, against their own economic and political emancipation.

From Hobbes to the slaveholders to the neoconservatives, the right has grown increasingly aware that any successful defense of the old regime must incorporate the lower orders in some capacity other than underlings or starstruck fans. The masses must either be able to locate themselves symbolically in the ruling class or be provided with real opportunities to become faux aristocrats themselves in the family, the factory and the field. The former path makes for an upside-down populism, in which the lowest of the low see themselves projected in the highest of the high; the latter makes for a democratic feudalism, in which the husband or supervisor plays the part of a lord. The former path was pioneered by Hobbes, Maistre, and various prophets of racism and nationalism, the latter by Southern slaveholders, European imperialists, and Gilded Age apologists. (And neo-Gilded Age apologists: "There is no single elite in America," writes David Brooks. "Everyone can be an aristocrat within his own Olympus.")

So, practical matter, how do you know which politician to vote for and which to spurn? Nothing beats paying really close attention-- and knowing which sources to trust and which to ignore. When I was a kid there were still half way decent Republicans-- though fewer and fewer all the time. Now there are none-- like not even one. The "best" Republican in Congress, North Carolina's Walter Jones, may be better than any Republican and may even be better than dozens of Blue Dogs and other reactionary Democrats, but just by belonging to the Republican caucus he is empowering the national freakshow led by the likes of Boehner, Issa, Bachmann and... these two nasty and dedicated servants of the one percent:


But that doesn't make it safe to assume all-- or even most-- Democrats will have your best interests at heart. They don't, particularly not the ones who have managed to grasp onto the political power that requires corporate financing. By the very nature of the system, to find a congressional leader who isn't corrupt and sold out is almost as difficult as it was for Jesus to find a rich man who would make it through the eye of a needle on a camel... or something. Is Steny Hoyer "better" than Eric Cantor? Well, vestigially, for sure, and usually-- though not always-- toes the party line on social issues Big Business doesn't care about. But both Hoyer and Cantor feed from the same trough and owe their successful careers to many of the same shady K Street criminal types.

You can almost always be certain that if two Democrats are running in a primary, the DCCC or the DSCC will be backing the more conservative and-- more importantly for them-- the more corrupt, or corruptible, of the two. Independent PACs, like Blue America, who aren't in it for financial or careerist gain, is a good place to start looking. Here, start looking or here.