Studies in Political Defamiliarization

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Obama as Arab terrorist, Bush as Hitler. Obama hates white people, Reagan “raises the specter of white sheets.” Janice Wells, Vicki Weaver. The beat goes on.

y81 : It is fairly ridiculous to claim that there is anything even remotely close to “parity” between right wing fanaticism and wingnuttery and left wing fanaticism and wingnuttery in the US. The difference is not in how extreme are the most extreme viewpoints voiced, but how wide the circle of wingnutters and how acceptable and mainstream they are in MSM and their closest mainstream political entities (Repubs vs Demos) .

Henri, I think both things are true. If the tea party were black, mainstream America would be much more scared of them and the media would treat them differently. But that doesn’t mean white people get a pass on challenging the power structure. The tea party are a pseudo-challenge.

“The bottom line is that the Tea Party is more in line with American political values”

You are mistaking populism for American political values.

(This is a structural weakness of a form of argument that’s all too common at CT — John Holbo basically does nothing else. One can accurately, and entertainingly, point out that a mode of argument or political activity is approved in one case, and condemned in another. But that tells you nothing about the almost always more important question of whether it’s valid or legitimate or useful.)

Guys, the tea party had a huge demonstration, just across the river from the capital, with everyone carrying guns, loaded guns being explicitly permitted. People frequently brandish guns at their rallies. When Huey Newton, one person, walked into the state capital building with an unloaded gun, the public image of the Panthers was set forever. Regardless of ideology, there is no way a large group of black people, spouting alarmist and insurrectionist rhetoric and carrying guns would not be seen as a threat. Black people are associated in our culture with violence, and large groups of angry black people (and tea party rhetoric is undeniably angry) are associated with rioting.

Martin, but what if a group of upstanding black citizens (a-la Clarence Thomas/Condi Rice/Ayaan Hirsi Ali), armed with machine-guns, organized a pro-American, pro-free-market, anti-soc1alist, anti-Islamist protest. What do you think FoxNews coverage would’ve been?

Racial stereotypes certainly do exist and are common, but implying that every politically active black person is an equivalent of Cynthia McKinney is not a way to confront them.

@13, #14 makes the key point that the tea party goes way, way farther in terms of anger, threats of violence, and large groups of people brandishing weapons than anyone on the left has anytime in recent memory. The tea party isn’t just a right-wing version of big, angry left-wing protests. That said, the strategy of choice might still be to ignore, shut out, and marginalize. Fearmongering seems to less suited to highly vocal political movements and more suited to large, mostly unconnected populations who don’t voice any collective opinions SO WHO KNOWS WHAT THEY MIGHT BE THINKING.

@16: but what if a group of upstanding black citizens (a-la Clarence Thomas/Condi Rice/Ayaan Hirsi Ali), armed with machine-guns, organized a pro-American, pro-free-market, anti-soc1alist, anti-Islamist protest. What do you think FoxNews coverage would’ve been?

Why the need for the qualifier (i.e., “upstanding”)? The qualifier alone proves the point of the original post.

Moreover, I wouldn’t exactly say that the Tea Party is “pro-American”; they’re pro-whatever-they-see-as-legitimately-American, which incidentally, tends to be quite exclusionary (see Sarah Palin’s comment about “real” America).

This will probably be a drive-by, because I don’t expect much in the way of rational response. I’ll check back just in case, though.

I’m a strong tea-party sympathizer, so I think I can speak representatively for the mainstream of the movement. This particular race-based critique is so multi-dimensionally wrong-headed that even to write the index of a thorough rebuttal would not be convenient. There are about a million handles I could grab in this debate, which means I’m not likely to get the best handle on short notice, and many cogent points will have to be left out. But what the heck:

About 90% of blacks in America are Democrats. This causes heartache to conservatives, because we blame Democrats for the present immiseration of so many American blacks. Whether you agree with this or not, the fact that blacks are overwhelmingly Democrats is not disputed. Black Democrats’ loyalty to Obama, a fellow black, is stronger yet.

The Tea Party is anti-Democrat, and anti-Obama. So, duh, that doesn’t leave a whole lot of blacks to participate. Nevertheless, a few blacks do participate, and at least two of them have gained nationwide attention as Tea Party candidates: Lt. Col. Allen West (running for Congress from Florida) and Cedra Crenshaw (running for the Illinois State Senate). Anyone who takes an intellectually serious interest in the Tea Party, pro or anti, should know this. It’s hard to not know, unless you choose your news sources to avoid any facts that might conflict with your preconceptions (all too easy). Ms. Crenshaw has gained some publicity from Illinois Democrats’ efforts to keep her off the ballot.

Another black hero to us Tea Party types is Clarence Thomas. He is simply the best man sitting behind a bench in this country today. Compared to him, Scalia is a moralizing hypocrite, and Alito and Roberts are non-entities. When conservatives discuss recent Supreme Court decisions, it seems Thomas always gets honorable mention as the guy who took the best line, dissenting or otherwise.

It is exactly as Luther Blissett stated above: the Tea Party is an ideological movement, and will respect or reject any given ideological stance consistently, regardless of race. Nor is it necessary to be anywhere near as radical as Blissett suggests, to gain Tea Party support. The supposed racial underpinnings of the movement are self-induced hallucinations of people too lazy (or frightened of losing) to engage the real debate. That initial post by Tim Wise (did any of you bother to read it?) is a masterpiece of solipsistic fantasy. He credits and exaggerates any smear of the Tea Party, however bizarre and unsubstantiated. He draws no distinctions between the Tea Party, Pat Buchanan, Michael Savage, and some random skinhead waiting for a bus. By that standard, I can smear you with Stalin. Smart people ought not to be fooled by this.

Moe @21 is a solipsist, too. Tea Partiers are brandishing weapons, making specific and credible threats, and being coddled by the media? Say rather, that the media is fabricating allegations of racist/violent Tea Party speech and behavior, but they don’t push the allegations too hard because they won’t bear investigation. Seriously dude, you need to walk out in the street or something. There’s a whole world outside your crazy little head, and most of the people here are nice.

Now let’s examine this little thought experiment: what if the Tea Party was exclusively black? Of course, the real Tea Party is not exclusively white, but hey. What if?

Well, it would have to be an explicitly, overtly racist movement. Black Democrats presumably share much ideology with the white Democrats who outnumber them, so any non-racial ideological movement including most blacks would actually be majority white. Even if the movement was explicitly racial, protesting only blacks’ grievances, in the present day there would be many whites eager to join. To exclude them would require a radical racist agenda worthy of King Samir Shabazz. And yeah, if you get a bunch of armed genocidal maniacs marching together, the result would probably not be pretty. Fortunately, it ain’t gonna happen; genocidal maniacs are the fringe of the fringe, in the black community as well as the white.

That’s a looooong comment, to cover about 1% of the wrongness. I’ll check back tomorrow.

@22: The racial bona fides of Tea Party members are irrelevant. Nobody cares how many black friends members of the Tea Party have, nor does anyone care how deeply members of the Tea Party long to have black Americans join their movement. Saying that “Clarence Thomas is our favorite Supreme Court justice” does not address the claim made by the original post, but it is humorous.

The claim is that the racial makeup of the movement–which is predominantly white, for better or worse, and for whatever reason–affects the perception of the movement, regardless of its ideological bent. A movement as exclusively black as the Tea Party is white, engaging in the exact same behavior as Tea Partiers–surrounding, obstructing, and yelling at lawmakers–would be received quite differently. Rather than being praised by Fox News for their patriotism, our hypothetical group of black protesters would likely be viewed as insurrectionists. Rather than exhorting viewers to enlist in the movement, Fox News would be vilifying our hypothetical protesters for the threat posed to the security of the nation. (I use Fox News because they are the media outlet most closely associated–even aligned–with the Tea Party movement; other media outlets take a more detached approach.)

Is this claim so preposterous? Or would you claim that people do not use race when interpreting the behavior of others? Are you color-blind?

A movement as exclusively black as the Tea Party is white, engaging in the exact same behavior as Tea Partiers—surrounding, obstructing, and yelling at lawmakers—would be received quite differently. Rather than being praised by Fox News for their patriotism, our hypothetical group of black protesters would likely be viewed as insurrectionists.

If by “exact same” you indeed mean the exact same – same rhetoric, same slogans, same ideology – then there is no question in my mind that FoxNews would love this hypothetical movement, and keep praising and promoting it non-stop, very second of the day.

Your point about the tea party having few blacks begs the question of why the tea party movement is the way it is in the first place, why there is such vehement opposition to Obama in particular, as opposed to other Democrats.

First off, the Tea Party is very unhappy with all Democrats, not just Obama. Pelosi is about equally despised, which I suppose makes us sexists. But Obama is objectively the worst. He’s more powerful (or he was, anyway), his agenda is more radical, and the effects of his policies are more damaging. I could make a laundry list, but I’m trying to keep this under fifty million words. I think, though, that some of you will come to regret defending him. You will have harmed your cause and your consciences. He really is a terrible president.

they, in addition to merely opposing Obama, seem to be obsessed with extremely silly conspiracy theories about him (secret Muslim, missing birth certificate, &c.). Or are those also merely slurs against the tea partiers?

To judge from Obama’s behavior, there is almost certainly something embarrassing in his birth certificate (religion listed as Muslim, father unknown, or something like that). I don’t care. Obama is not a Muslim, and he is an American citizen, so whatever. I think some conservatives, desperate to end the nightmare of Obama’s presidency, and noticing his evasions with regard to his birth certificate, have gone a bit Sullivan. I’m pretty sure the Tea Party could get by without them. You don’t need to be a Birther to passionately oppose Obama; it’s the other way around.

It’s conceivable that the Tea Party really is just a bunch of closet Nazis in tinfoil hats, and I’m marching along with them, unable to hear the dog whistles. But what’s far more likely is that you’re the ones not hearing the music. Is it really so incomprehensible that people might oppose Obama not for some conspiracy theory, but for his agenda? For what everyone knows about him and nobody disputes? Are his policies, and the legislation that he’s been pushing, really so flawless in their radiant perfection that no rational person could take issue with them?

If you persist in thinking so, then you’ll find yourselves bobbing in the wake of an historical moment that has passed you by. You’ll go down in history as the People Who Were Wrong.

It’s conceivable that the Tea Party really is just a bunch of closet Nazis in tinfoil hats, and I’m marching along with them, unable to hear the dog whistles. But what’s far more likely is that you’re the ones not hearing the music. Is it really so incomprehensible that people might oppose Obama not for some conspiracy theory, but for his agenda?

Why can’t both be true? The stormtroopers too opposed social democrats for their agenda.

The Musical Mountaineer asks a question that is extremely easy to answer except that “wildly leftist” isn’t a very interesting category in the U.S. due to the absence of leftists in these parts. But to list a few differences between Obama and the merely progressive:

1. Obama is not particularly supportive of organized labor as his lukewarm efforts on behalf of recent legislation shows.

2. Obama doesn’t support same-sex marriage.

3. Obama’s economic policy is barely Keynesian–likening the thinking of somebody as tight with businessmen as Obama as some sort of Marxist merely indicates that you don’t know much about Marxism, which is, after all, a very well defined point of view. All of Obama’s economic advisors and even most of his critics to the left are adherents of neoclassical economics. (Really, you should already know that if you’ve been paying attention.) Obama certainly doesn’t support the nationalization of industries–almost nobody does. (The “nationalization” of the auto industry was a stop gap measure Obama was extremely reluctant to take. He’s trying to get out of the auto business as quickly as he can.)

4. Favoring a national health care system is hardly radical. Indeed, partisanship aside, intelligent Republicans know that we have to fix the system because no matter how indifferent you are to the welfare of underclass people, the current arrangement is going to bankrupt us. The anomaly of the health care debate is this: every industrialized country in the world has a better system than we do if you measure performance in terms of cost and health outcomes. Supporting a national system isn’t radical. It’s sort of like coming out in favor of indoor plumbing. Meanwhile, Obama’s health care package is extremely modest by world standards. It’s just nutty to claim that a system essentially equivalent to what a Republican governor put in place in Massachusetts is some kind of radical scheme.

5. Our tax system has become decreasingly progressive since Kennedy’s time, but Obama has not proposed to do more than go back to the rates under Clinton. Since the Bush tax cuts were a cause for our huge deficits, readjusting the tax rates to a more supportable level is simply prudent from a financial point of view. (From Reagan on, Republican presidents have run up the national debt like a teenager with his dad’s credit card. Is it supposed to be radical to propose that we live within our means?)

6. The Republican opposition to Obama has been nearly monolithic and also quite nasty. It would be humanly understandable and perhaps even good politics to simply say the hell with the rhetoric of bipartisanship and genuinely demonize the conservatives, who, after all, really have been in charge and really have made a mess of everything. If Obama really were a radical or even a genuine New Deal Democrat, you’d expect him to at least borrow from FDR and Truman’s playbook.

7. Obama has made no moves towards seriously cutting American military spending.

8. Obama’s environmental policies are actually to the right of the policies supported by European conservative parties such as the Tories in the U.K. and Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats. I know there is a right-wing narrative about how talk of climate change is a devious plot to promote government action, but the realities of what’s happening to the Earth’s atmosphere aren’t a political question and it doesn’t make you a radical to recognize the facts. By the way, I assume, though I don’t know, that Obama accepts the reality of biological evolution. Does that also mark him as a radical in your book? I know it does from the point of view of many of the Christian right.

9. On the area of financial regulation, Obama has consistently opted for the mildest moves, resisting, for example, efforts to break up the big banks. I guess if you are a true-blue (or red) free marketeer, any regulation amounts to sheer Leninism; but for most of us, better regulation is an alternative to radical measures.

10. To a great extent, the base of the Democratic party has come to be dominated by professional people and knowledge-based business class. The labor unions have no place else to go, but they certainly don’t have the political pop they used to. One of the odd things about the claim that Obama is some sort of radical is the nature of his support.

11. Obama’s education policy actually continues many Bush-era initiatives, including support for charter schools and national testing, which is one of the reasons he’s having trouble keeping the teacher’s unions in line. I personally think the whole No Child Left Behind bit is a huge mistake, but it’s hardly a leftist plot.

12. Obama hasn’t supported new gun control measures. (Gun control is an example of how people’s points of view can differ as much in terms of how much they care as in what they support–most Democrats, I expect, would prefer more stringent gun control, but it just isn’t a big deal for us, which is why the national party stopped talking about it a long time ago.)

13. Obama’s policy on abortion law is pretty much in the middle, i.e. he is in favor of leaving abortion legal but taking steps that make it rarer. Of course the abortion debate is peculiar because the pro choice people are quite happy to see the number of abortions go down, while the pro life people just want to make abortion illegal whether or not outlawing it would reduce the number of abortions: another instance of how the politics of realities has a hard time dealing with the politics of attitudes.

Well, I could go. Maybe it would save time if you identify anything that suggests that Obama is a leftist, that is, a leftist from the point of somebody who doesn’t think that Mississippi is a utopia.

Christopher Phelps @5: Q: Why don’t Proudhonists drink Earl Grey?
alex @15: that’s “Why DO anarchists drink herbal tea?”…

The latter surely canonical.

CP may have erred not in mere logic or transcription as alex charitably supposes, but in thinking that tea adulterated with sickly perfume is quite proper (and, if implicature is any guide, that tea not so-spoilt isn’t).

In reality, tea cannot be proper if it has any additive besides milk, and perhaps – when manual labour requires it – sugar. This is an important point because it determines that Obama bears the hallmark* of one who favours public ownership of the means of production. Musical mountaineer and his pot-warming, kettle-over-the-flame-keeping, loose-leaf-Darjeeling comrades are clearly onto something after all.

*(c) GWOT Syllogisms, Inc.

just enumerate some differences between Obama and “wildly leftist”

It would be more amusing and possibly more instructive if we were to be treated to some similarities.

Henri, it’s hard to say how Fox would come down in such an unlikely scenario, but the public reaction to large groups of machine-gun toting angry blacks, talking of watering the tree of liberty with the blood of patriots and tyrants, yelling “honky” at white Congressmen who failed to vote their way, and suggesting the country was heading for some apocalyptic confrontation would be terror. Even if the right could find it in their hearts to embrace such a group, which I can’t picture, the middle would not. The middle is indifferent or hostile to far right-wing rhetoric, but fears armed black mobs. I don’t think this is even a question of white privilege, per se. Rather than a privilege of whites, it is a detriment (or whatever opposite of privilege you want to use) of blacks (and latinos, at least in the current climate). First of all, whites cannot necessarily act this way; it depends on the ideology they are exposing. A left-wing tea party would be treated much differently, no matter how white its membership was. Blacks and latinos cannot act this way, regardless of ideology. The attitude towards white behavior is conditional, but that towards blacks is not. Also, if the tea party reflected the racial de­mographics of the country, which I would consider the racially-neutral position, I think that would pass. They need not be almost entirely white, but they cannot be predominately black and/or latino.

That doesn’t make the tea party racist, though. Olbermann’s attempts to prove the Tea Party racist by pointing to the lack of black faces is ridiculous. Has the man never been to an environmental demonstration? Also, isolated instances of racism among their members don’t necessarily mean anything. Many leftist demonstrations have a contingent from the RCP (Revolutionary Communist Party), a Maoist outfit, in attendance. They bring their own bullhorns and try to get people to endorse extreme positions. You cannot easily just push them out of your demonstration. The demonstration then becomes an internal fight over who has the right to exclude whom. So you try to ignore them. An observer who characterized your typical anti-globalism rally as Maoist because a few of these clowns were about would be deeply unfair.

What concerns me about the accusation that the Tea Party is racist is that it is an easy way out for the left that we should not be taking. Suppose they were not racist. Is not their ideology something we should be opposing anyway? Isn’t the most important thing making clear to the public why this obsession with cutting taxes, regulation, and spending is destructive the most necessary move? Because the public half buys the Tea Party argument largely because they never hear the other side, and don’t even necessarily realize there is an argument. Yelling racism avoids that very-necessary debate.

@38 You’re right that the presence of a few overt racists and overwhelmingly white membership does not make them racist, but there are other things about the tea party movement you could hang this argument on, like birtherism. Even if one were to argue that birtherism is mainly islamophobic, islamophobia tends to be deeply, robustly racist.

the Tea Party is the political vanguard of an underclass uprising

Funny looking underclass you’ve got there, when it has above-median incomes and is led by Dick Armey.

You’re stepping on the real underclasses in this country and not even seeing them. For example:

All [health care reform] does is increase government power and public debt, and buy several more large blocs of voters.

Oh, and save thousands of lives by providing access to health care to people who can’t afford it under the status quo. Gee, maybe the people who have to choose between going to the doctor and making their rent payment are the real underclass, not small business owners with an overdeveloped sense of entitlement?

Mere words cannot adequately express my scorn for people who take home six figures, don’t have to feel nervous whenever they see a cop, and still consider themselves an oppressed underclass.

Musical Mountaineer didn’t respond to a single one of my points.

Except the one about healthcare. But really, I didn’t want to argue, as I thought I made clear. I’ve been baffled by this notion that Obama is a centrist. Now I have some idea what people mean by it. I could definitely answer many more of your points, but I only have so many monkeys to type for me.

Codevila’s tract is also a fact-free zone. If it does reflect tea party sentiment, it can serve as evidence that no coherent view of the world stand behind the anger and envy of these reactionary populists.

Which, of course, is exactly what you would say if he’s correct. But the bit about envy is telling. Envy of what? Of whom? Codevilla doesn’t say anything about envy, and neither do I. We don’t want to be the ruling class; we want to be free of the ruling class. We don’t want privilege; we want to end privilege.

Some other commenters think that only poor people can be legitimate members of the “underclass”. By that standard, I qualify better than anyone you know. But Codevilla doesn’t use the word, which is probably wise of him. Anyway, this is just another manifestation of the progressive error of thinking that money matters, but power doesn’t. Unequal distribution of money is a great moral crime; unequal distribution of power, even if that power is flagrantly abused, is a non-issue. How people can persist in this blindness is beyond me. At this time, a solid majority of Americans find they have no political power. Their votes and voices count for nothing in decisions of grave and far-reaching consequence to them. The political parties have, in effect, conspired to deny them representation. You may scoff and say they have nothing to complain about, because they enjoy a nice standard of living. But the power now exists to simply take away that standard of living, along with all freedom and dignity for those who don’t suck up to the ruling class. And taking it all away is exactly what they’re doing, exactly what they say they will continue doing. Absent revolutionary change, there is nothing to stop it.

Regarding healthcare, congress had to simmer the books down to paste to get a net-savings estimate from the CBO, and everyone knows it. Anyone who doesn’t see how massive government spending buys things for government, doesn’t see.

Finally, at least one commenter seems not to understand that the Tea Party is emphatically not the Republican party. Screw it. I can only repeat myself so many times.

I’ll leave it at this. MM writes “some other commennters think that only poor people can be legitimate members of the “underclass.” This comment pretty much demonstrates the problem. You have a bunch of people, roughly white Republicans, who have had their way for three decades now and yet want to claim they are the victims even though they aren’t poor and have more power than other folks. The hell with them.

@38, Blacks and latinos cannot act this way, regardless of ideology. The attitude towards white behavior is conditional, but that towards blacks is not.

Well, this is the crux of the matter, isn’t it. You state it as a fact, but I think it’s just your intuition; your intuition against mine.

If there was a significant majority-black populist movement beneficial to the elite, I simply don’t see a reason for the elite to discredit and suppress it. I just don’t.

Finally, at least one commenter seems not to understand that the Tea Party is emphatically not the Republican party.

Well, except when they run candidates in Republican primaries. Then they’re making themselves part of the Republican party.

It’s hard to say what the Tea Party “is” because it’s not a single coherent organization, but their attitudes toward the Republican establishment seem to range from “plague on both their houses” to “enemy of my enemy”. And I presume you know how the latter proverb ends. You may personally be more toward the “plague on both their houses” end of the scale but that doesn’t mean you speak for the whole Tea Party.

Some other commenters think that only poor people can be legitimate members of the “underclass”.

Surely you can’t deny that money talks in Washington? And that therefore the people least likely to have a voice are the ones with the least money?

It’s true that the middle class gets pushed around sometimes (I would argue chiefly by the super-rich, who also have the majority of political power). But getting pushed around *sometimes* doesn’t make you an underclass when there are other people getting the same thing much worse. No person and no class can have their way 100% of the time, except a dictator. Power is relative, and underclasses likewise.

Anyway, this is just another manifestation of the progressive error of thinking that money matters, but power doesn’t.

Money IS power. It’s not the only kind of power, but it’s very important, especially in politics. People with money can occasionally be the victim of other kinds of power — but people without money usually get it worse, at the same time. For example, police brutality. I think it’s a big problem; I’m not sure if you agree, but it’s certainly an example of how nonmonetary power can hurt and oppress people. The poor and minorities are the most likely to be targeted.

Okay, I feel better now.

I joined this discussion with two purposes in mind. First, I wanted to show that the Tea Party is not motivated by racism. I’ve showed you, as well as I can, what the real motivation is. Defending that motivation point-by-point is a bigger job than I intended to take on, and I really should not have let myself get sucked into that discussion. It’s arguably OT, for one thing. For another, it’s mostly wasted effort.

My other goal was to show that you can’t do a thought experiment where you race-reverse the Tea Party, and come up with anything meaningful. I think I nailed that one down pretty tight.

Tim Wilkinson @45 suggests that I should call Obama a fascist rather than a leftist. Now let me see if I’ve got this right. Suppose you have an institution that manufactures cellphones. Call it MCF.

If MCF is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the government, that’s communism, which is “left”.

If MCF is a corporation that enjoys a privileged relationship with government, where government protects MCF’s markets, squelches MCF’s competition, and in return takes most of MCF’s earnings and sits on MCF’s board, that’s fascism, which is “right”.

Well, this is one of the things you’ll have to get used to if you talk with conservatives: we don’t care about these hair-splitting differences. The government effectively owns and controls MCF in both scenarios. So, to us, fascism is left. Government patronage, machine politics, privilege-brokering and market-meddling is left. All that power-grubbing authoritarian for-the-good-of-society stuff is left. Socialism is left, and that includes National Socialism. Left embraces the full spectrum of Democrats, and about 99% of the GOP*. There must be some legitimate objections or exceptions**, but then, I’m not asking you to change your definitions to accommodate me. I’m just telling you what “left” means to conservatives.

* George W. Bush famously said something like, “when someone is hurting, government must act”. That’s pretty Rawlsy for a guy who’s supposed to be a right-wing death beast. You may not have noticed because you were too busy hating him, but Bush strove mightily throughout his tenure to gain acceptance from Democrats and the “international community”. It was a doomed and suicidal effort, very sad to watch.

** It’s pretty hard, for instance, to characterize Huckabee’s brand of bible-inspired authoritarianism as leftist. It’s not exactly inaccurate – the similarities outweigh the differences – but it is confusing.

MM writes that [the] “Left embraces the full spectrum of Democrats, and about 99% of the GOP.” Since all surveys indicate that the tea bag movement is overwhelmingly Republican, the inescapable implication that even MM friends are his enemies. No wonder he is so upset.

Snark aside, I don’t think MM can credibly claim to have enunciated a political position at all. What does he really want to see happen? Denouncing those who disagree with you as “soft-handed pansies” just isn’t a political philosophy.

By the way, a while back, MM wondered why I thought that the tea bag movement evinced envy. The long answer is that when I go on long cross country drives, which is quite often, I listen to AM radio and am struck by the enormous amount of time that Rush and Savage and Beck and the rest spend buttering up their listeners. Pep talks take up as much time as denunciations of liberalism. Even a lot of the tedious hyper-patriotism put out by these guys isn’t so much aimed at praising the nation as at explaining why the ordinary folks tuning in–as opposed, I guess, to the ordinary folks who refuse to tune in–are the greatest people on Earth. What we seem to have here is a monster epidemic of low self esteem, especially when you consider how the complaints against the hated elites come down to the high school bit about how the snobs look down on us.

What we seem to have here is a monster epidemic of low self esteem, especially when you consider how the complaints against the hated elites come down to the high school bit about how the snobs look down on us.

Now here we reach the interesting issue. Is the right — or maybe better, which right? — is a relatively privileged petite bourgeoisie, angry that that the privileges of white skin and testicles and property ownership are not as absolute as they used to be, or they wish the were? And how much are genuinely screwed-over folks who turn to the Limbaughs, etc. only faute de mieux? It’s an important and, I want to stipulate, empirical question. Who’s doing anthropological and/or organizing work among the right-wing rank and file?

how many of those poor people go to Tea Party rallies? How many of them are complaining about paying too much taxes, or that their health insurance is being redistributed to the sick? How many of them are concerned about too much government “help”?

But these are good questions! My priors, Eli, are the same as yours: few or none. But we can’t rely on our assumptions, we have to actually investigate this with an open mind.

Some empirical support of our position is here. But let’s be open to evidence for the other view, if and when it arrives.

No, it makes GWB a leftist :-)

Boy, it WAS a big mistake for me to call the Tea Party the underclass. I was being ironic, people. As Codevilla points out early in his essay, Ronald Reagan and Clarence Thomas would be members of this “underclass”. I thought it would be fun, since we’re on the topic of role-reversals and defamiliarization, to cast the Tea Party in Marxist revolutionary terms.

Also, just so we’re completely clear, I am not of the underclass either. My income, net worth and standard of living are definitely in the bottom five percent for the last couple years, but that’s because I’m a dropout, not because I have no options.

Eli @57 goes a little overboard, but it’s pretty fair to say the Tea Party is no champion of the underclass. I rebut with: nobody is. Or at least, nobody in a position of power. Someone else complains that I haven’t said straight-up what the Tea Party wants. I’m not sure what comment thread you’ve been reading, but if you need specifics, I’ll now present the official MM healthcare reform analysis and proposal, annotated with comparisons to the Democrats’ approach. Read to the end; you’ll probably be surprised.

Healthcare in America is too expensive. Health outcomes are roughly at parity with other Western nations (better by some metrics, worse by others), but at much, much higher cost. Some people take this as evidence that government-run healthcare is inherently more efficient and should be adopted at once. But public vs. private healthcare is only one of many salient differences between America and other countries. It’s like when people argue that gun control will reduce crime, and point to Japan as a place with strict control and very little crime. But Japan is an island with an ethnically homogeneous population and a thousand years of shared culture to define behavioral norms. You can’t control all the variables in that comparison to isolate the effects of gun control.

So, what about America, apart from having private-sector healthcare, contributes to making healthcare expensive? Ruinous torts, for one thing. America is far more litigious than other countries. Everyone agrees tort reform to limit physicians’ liability would help to reduce costs by reducing malpractice insurance premiums. The direct reduction in cost would be significant, though nowhere near sufficient to close the gap. But there is an indirect component to litigation-related costs, which I don’t think has been adequately discussed. As an EMT, I can tell you that legal and liability issues are never far from any healthcare professional’s mind. They form a sizeable chunk of our training. And we do a lot of work which we know will have no effect on patient outcome, just to shield ourselves from liability.

America achieves much better cancer survival rates than England. This is partly because, in England, much of the front-line routine work is done by nurse-practitioners instead of doctors. Doctors cost more, but they’re much better at “making the catch”. And American doctors, with their liability-defensive habits, cost a great deal more and hardly ever miss. They routinely order expensive diagnostics on all their insured patients, even when there is no indication for such diagnostics. This is great news for those patients in the margin, who survive when an English patient would die. But the cost is all out of proportion to the benefit. For every percent survival gain, we’re spending twenty thousand percent on diagnostics*. In this context, Americans are vastly over-medicated.

Tort reform would have to be coupled with reforms to standards of care, in order to fully realize its savings. This de facto lowering of standards of care, if done intelligently, would result in a minimal increase in cancer deaths. The increase is inevitable, but it doesn’t have to be anywhere near proportional to cost reduction. The idea is to let medicine, not liability, guide the way.

It is not possible to overstate Democrats’ opposition to tort reform or strict definitions of malpractice. There is no point whatsoever in even bringing it up with them. Democrats are beholden to the Trial Lawyers’ Association, which prefers vague definitions and unlimited damages. As in everything else, Democrats provide the best government their clients can buy. And the TLA can buy one hell of a lot. What’s John Edwards worth? No, if there’s going to be cost-cutting, it mustn’t be allowed to cut off the revenue streams that flow back to the Democrat party.

The really big cost-drivers in American medicine are hypertension, obesity, and diabetes. These conditions render patients needful of frequent and sometimes expensive care, continuing over long periods of time. One thing an EMT sees every day is what amount to warehouses full of poor, fat, bedridden dialysis patients consuming a respectable salary’s worth of care every year, year after year. Why is America so beset with decrepit lardos?

It may have something to do with our corn-only diet. Thanks to government subsidies (nominally to farmers, but effectively to agribusiness conglomerates), America consistently produces market-glutting quantities of corn. The corn is grown in vast monocultures from patented seed; it consumes tanker-loads of petroleum in the form of fertilizer; the runoff from the cornfields pollutes the rivers and causes a huge dead zone to appear in the Gulf of Mexico every year.

This corn isn’t food. Nobody can eat it. It must be processed to create food, and it is. In America, beef is corn, pork is corn, chickens and eggs are corn, beer is corn, the gasoline in your vehicle is corn, everything sweet or colored or flavored or breaded or fried is corn, and so is the box it comes in and the ink printed on the box. Feeding corn to animals is arguably cruelty; they certainly don’t stomach it well and need anti-inflammatories and other meds to keep them alive until slaughter. And there is a growing body of evidence that corn products, including meat, are injurious to human health. The sweets and soft drinks, in particular, kill.

How much medical cost could be saved by corn reform? We’ll never find out. Neither Democrats nor Republicans have any stomach for that fight. The corn kings are everyone’s best buddy in DC.

When conservatives think of cutting costs, we tend to look to market liberalization and competition. Certainly there is vast room for improvement there. Interstate competition between insurance companies, and decoupling insurance from employment, would give individuals greater choice and force insurance companies to, you know, compete. For some reason these ideas are also no-go with the present leadership. Maybe the insurance companies themselves are to blame, preferring to compete for government-enforced privilege than to compete in the market. How sadly rational of them. But, as always, the willing connivance of the political class is a prerequisite.

Someone on this thread said that healthcare reform would save thousands of lives, of poor people who couldn’t otherwise get care. Now, the actual law functions to serve the poor at the expense of other people, some of whom will presumably die as a result. Progressive politics too often assumes and accepts these kind of zero-sum results, but that’s a topic for another post. What we’d really like to see is the poor getting more, without other people getting less. Which would mean that the overall consumption of healthcare has increased. But is that compatible with reducing costs?

It is, if the unit cost of healthcare can be reduced. And the only real way to reduce unit costs is to increase supply. When you have more of something, any given unit is worth less. So we could help the poor and cut costs at the same time. Well, okay, maybe not. But if we can somehow stimulate the production of hospitals, doctors, nurses, equipment, etc. we could reach a point where we get a lot more healthcare with at least a less-than-proportional increase in total cost.

To stimulate supply, increase demand. Economic demand is when need and purchasing power combine. Poor people don’t have purchasing power, therefore their needs do not constitute economic demand. But if we gave them some purchasing power, they would demand services, and the supply would correspondingly increase. This could be done pretty simply; just give poor people a tax credit earmarked for medical services. Then they could get things like dental fillings and that thing on their neck checked. It’s not all one could possibly ask for, but it’s a lot better than nothing. And even if I was working for a living I’d be willing to pay my share.

Democrat leaders would scream bloody-murder at this plan, because it doesn’t do anything for the people they really care about: themselves. Rather than admit that something is better than nothing, they will insist that healthcare is a moral imperative and that it’s unfair to let anyone go with anything less than “full coverage”, which will have to be defined flexibly because it’s going to shrink over time. Rather than reduce unit costs by way of market forces, they implement price controls. This reduces supply, at a time when there is far more need for healthcare than supply can cover. Rather than liberalizing the insurance market to increase competition and efficiency, they simply dictate what products insurance companies will sell, and at what price. Three products to fit everyone in America, last I heard. To achieve efficiencies, they create a bureaucracy to decide who will get what treatment.

The overall ridiculousness of the Democrats’ approach is conveyed in my earlier post: the plan is to reduce costs by spending much, much more. But if it’s hopeless to expect it to work as advertised, this plan still does wonderful things for Democrats. It creates a bureaucracy of federal employees, reliable pro-government voters. It gives government control of the insurance industry, which means more privileges to be brokered in exchange for political and financial support. And because their dictates to the insurance industry are founded in “moral imperative” rather than an actuarial business model, there is every likelihood the insurance companies will go bankrupt: a crisis the government can exploit to gain even more control. In a move against individual liberty, the law now puts government in control of the doctor-patient relationship. It eliminates the traditional confidentiality of this relationship and reduces treatment options to those the government approves. Now, if the government can oversee your relationship with your doctor, what can it not oversee? Is there any relationship, any aspect of an individual’s life in which the government can take no legitimate interest?

That’s enough for now. If you insist, I’ll tackle the other seventeen* items on Jim’s list later.

* These are not real numbers. I don’t do real numbers. I just make stuff up, to give some intuitive idea of the relations between quantities.

medicine is one of the areas in which markets simply don’t work

I can see why markets don’t really work for infrastructure like roads and power grids. Not so clear on why they wouldn’t work for medicine, unless you work from a moral imperative philosophy and simultaneously demand a pure market totally free from government interference. So, once again, I ask you to enlighten me, and to make it easy I’ll say up front that I intend no counterattack. What’s so special about medicine? Why don’t markets work?

What we seem to have here is a monster epidemic of low self esteem, especially when you consider how the complaints against the hated elites come down to the high school bit about how the snobs look down on us.

I want to riff on this, but not right now. For the moment, I’ll just say you’re onto something. Not quite exactly what you think, but something. And yeah, it’s really goddamn high school.

One way to shorten part of this conversation we’ve had is as follows:

CT: The Tea Party hates blacks.

MM: No.

CT: Okay, the Tea Party hates the poor. (Eli @57)

Not so much. It’s true that conservatives generally oppose welfare and social services. In some cases, this is justified. Welfare creates a lot of perverse incentives. When a woman deliberately has babies for the purpose of increasing her government payout, that’s pretty shameful and not so good for the kids. If a poor guy can get $250 a week in welfare, or be employed at $320 a week, then his incentive to get off his ass and get a job dwindles to $1.75 an hour. It’s not enough incentive; you can’t really blame the guy for being indolent. But at the same time, it’s deplorable that he’s living as a parasite and forfeiting ownership and responsibility in his life.

On social services, conservatives prefer private philanthropy. This is not just a greedy reflex to keep their money from the tax man: conservatives greatly out-contribute progressives in private philanthropy and volunteering, especially if you consider only charities and leave out stuff like land conservation. Whether private philanthropy can meet society’s needs in this area seems doubtful to me, especially in cities. But private philanthropy has huge advantages over public, and it should be encouraged and incentivized. One of Obama’s first moves in office was to try to eliminate the tax deduction for charitable giving. This may not seem like a big deal to you, but to me it seemed incredibly sinister, even vicious. “Your virtue is no good here.”

Anyway, I’m not unwilling to give government money to poor fuck-ups who truly will suffer without it. If possible, it should be done in the tax code, to minimize bureaucracy and phoney-baloney government jobs. In my previous post I suggested an individual medical earmark, which could be established with a minimum of bureaucratic overhead. Usually I hate to see the tax code manipulated to jerk people around and control their behavior, but for the poor I’m willing to make exceptions. Some of them really do need help to use money sensibly.

For social services, you typically need an office and staff, which means some government bloat. This is much easier to accept if the process is transparent and the system stays lean, while delivering services effectively and efficiently. Remember how Obama promised us an open debate on healthcare, a transparent process? The Democrats even pledged to make the content of the bill public for a week before voting. We got the exact opposite: backroom deals, squelched debate, and a final vote on a bill the contents of which were unknown to all.

There’s a reason for this. The bill is designed to enable featherbedding and graft; that’s what its voluminous text mostly consists of. A bill to reform healthcare and expand access, if that was really all it was supposed to do, could have been much shorter. It could probably be read and understood by a human being without an intravenous Ritalin drip.

Featherbedding is theft, plain and simple, and it’s anathema to democracy. Which brings me to the red meat. You want to know what group of people inspires passionate hatred among the Tea Party? The ones we’re really sharpening our knives for?

Public sector unions.

It didn’t have to be this way. Everyone knows you need public employees to paint stripes on the road and stuff. Some public employees, like schoolteachers and police, have long been regarded as everyday heroes. But their unions have become immensely powerful, and are well-practiced at destroying any elected official who messes with them. And their rank-and-file seem to have forgotten who works for whom.

As state budgets collapse under the weight of public salaries and pension plans, as private individuals have tightened their belts to get through tough economic times, public unions have spent millions to demonize anyone who suggests they ought to share in the austerity. They have reacted with cold outrage, as sovereigns reacting to lese majeste, to the slightest hint at pay freezes or other measures to control the costs they impose on the public purse. They have unmistakably conveyed what is baffling and infuriating to Americans: a truly unlimited sense of entitlement to other people’s money. In at least one case, they have expressed that sense of entitlement by physically beating someone who questioned it.

Some of them hold cushy administrative jobs, out of sight of the public and not accountable to any known authority, for which they get paid like rock stars. Their annual raises alone are enough to feed and house a lower-middle-class family. Annual compensation for some of the better players is set to exceed a million dollars this year. Some “retire” and start collecting a six-figure pension, and simultaneously re-enter a different, extremely lucrative public union job, in effect getting paid for two careers at once. It’s impossible that they are generating that kind of value by their work.

Conservatives mostly aren’t bothered by other people being richer than them. We admire successful businessmen and don’t begrudge them the rewards of their labors. But then, businesses mostly deal in mutually-consensual transactions which enrich both parties. By getting rich, a businessman (or woman) can make the world a better place. By contrast, public employees are paid from taxes, which are collected whether you want to buy what the government is selling or not. You don’t have the option of boycotting some government institution whose practices or products you don’t care for. Well, sometimes you can refuse the product, but you still have to pay for it.

So this is one specific thing the Tea Party wants: to put these public-sector pirates out of business. We’ll hire government employees on our own terms. Teachers, cops, and road-stripers probably don’t have much to worry about, but it will be amusing to see whether some of the higher-ups actually have any job skills. Not that they need them. With that kind of boodle in the bank they can just retire, and good riddance.

MM, if I may paraphrase:
– welfare encourages dependency
– philanthropy is best, although it probably isn’t enough
– when possible, social spending should be tax credits
– public unions are destroying America

OK.
– Do people even get welfare anymore? The vast majority of social spending is not welfare at all. Welfare is a *huge* red-herring. Most programs promote self-efficacy.
– philanthropy doesn’t even come close. It is scattershot at best and no where near comprehensive enough to guarantee access to services.
– I could give you an enormous list of programs that could never be done through tax credits. The reason for this is that they require trained professionals to carry out the work.
– As a public school teacher, I can tell you right now that is utter BS. You want to pay cops and teachers less? Fine. I don’t. I think they make little enough as it is. And there are few jobs out there as demanding. You say you respect private businessmen, but not public employees. Go fuck yourself. They come put out your damn fires, clean your streets, lay down their life protecting your neighborhood, maintain your parks, make sure your neighborhood kids are well educated. And you complain that they simply have a reasonable salary, a pension, and an organization that advocates for them as opposed to every other corporation or chamber of commerce? Oh, the horror! You know what? I could go on but it’s making me sick…

Responding to you has made me appreciate the Tea Party even more for what it is: a bunch of selfish, ignorant, hateful douchebags who have no sense of civic responsibility, history, moral courage or priorities. “Government out of my medicare” sums it up perfectly. You have no insight into the privileges you’ve enjoyed as a citizen of this great country and the continuing sacrifices the rest of us have been making to slowly make it a more fair and equitable place in which future citizens may thrive. You live in milk-toast fantasyland full of petty grievances inflamed by the toxic lies of pathological media hosts. Grow up.

Musical Mountaineer is wrong in every one of his assertions about the Tea Party, actual research shows. It’s overwhelmingly white and its activist members are a touch more likely to be college-educated than the pool of likely voters. They’re hugely pro-big business, and their most trusted authority is Glenn Beck. (So it’s no wonder they’re so grossly ignorant and misinformed.) And as others have already said, they’re very hostile to the actual poor and needy, white as well as minority.

Conservatives…are bothered by…people who are better educated than they are or simply those who don’t need to vilify some group or other to validate themselves.

You’ve got that right. I feel much more comfortable hanging with you guys. /snark

I really thought I might be laying it on a little thick with the reference to lese majeste and all, but then Eli showed up to vindicate me. Thanks, dude! Your rant proves my point better than anything I could write on my own. I never said I want to pay cops and teachers less (if anything I specifically implied the opposite), and I’m offended by that characterization of my comment. But only a little offended. What the heck, I’ll run with it. Look about you, Eli. Getting paid less is the latest fashion, it’s the hottest new trend in the country! Everybody’s doing it! Why not you?

Schoolteaching is a tough and admirable job, and for all I know you do it really, really well. But it’s just a job, not a sacred mission from God. Now, in the private sector, when the boss has a bad year, so do the people who work for him. Raises and bonuses get canceled. Sometimes people get laid off. It’s not that the boss hates his workers and wants to make them suffer. It’s just that the money doesn’t exist with which to pay them.

Now, do you know who all these workers are, who have been laid off or had their raises and bonuses canceled this year? They’re YOUR BOSS, Eli. And you have got an absolutely sweet deal, way better then anything you can get in the private sector. Whatever the fruit of your labors, be it brilliance or bullshit, they buy. They buy it whether they want it or not; whether they receive it or not. They can’t lay you off or cancel your raise, either, unless you get them really, really pissed. And they don’t get pissed easily. They respect your work.

Now, if you’re like a lot of public-sector workers in places like California and New Jersey, your boss has politely requested permission to cancel your raise and bonus this year. Because, frankly, your boss is hurting. He’s already had to adjust to his own lowered income. He’s not taking that summer vacation after all, and he was really looking forward to it. Now he’s looking out for the repo men. So hey, whaddya say, nothing personal, I just can’t afford to give you a raise right now.

And if you’re like a lot of public-sector workers in places like California and New Jersey, you come back and tell your boss he’s a spoiled-rotten, poisonous little toad! Why, he would defile you, the very light and essence of civilization, to selfishly squander his money on shoes for his children, homogenized milk, even a second pair of pants! No way in Hell you’re going to let that happen. No way in Hell! If the boss’s pie is shrinking, then he just better cut you a bigger slice, after which he should fuck off and die.

Jesus, now I’m definitely laying it on too thick. Right? I mean, this is crazy talk. Nobody’s really like that, are they? Are they?

I dunno, it’s pretty hard to outflank the public sector unions on crazy right now. Now understand, most of the Tea Party’s anger is directed at the union bosses and at the very top administrative tier of the workers they represent. Not at every member of the union, as I made clear in my previous post. Schoolteachers, cops, and road-stripers still rightly enjoy the respect of most working Americans. But the voters are pissed off, with excellent reason, and frankly you ought to be pissed too. Those union fuckers are stealing real money from the public, and they’re using your union dues to undermine the democratic process. It’s making you look bad. Flaming anyone who points that out, is not helping your case.

truly excruciating length

I get that all the time. But okay, here’s shorter:

If you really want to help the poor, reform healthcare, reward schoolteachers and all that, then you ought to be a bunch of dangerous sleep-deprived implacable paranoid fanatics when it comes to government corruption. Anything that smacks of graft, abuse of services, or anti-democracy ought to bring you on like a blood-spattered horde of berserkers. Because when it comes to arguing against your pet policies, government corruption/incompetence is the only real argument I’ve got. In the present context, that argument is unanswerable. Nobody denies that our present “solutions” are 99% lying cheating and stealing. Is it worth it to get that filth all over you, just because the remaining 1% makes your progressive hearts glow? Wouldn’t it be better for you, and for the people you ostensibly want to help, if that ratio was reversed?

If progressives would just take the lead in demanding clean, transparent, efficient government, brutally punishing institutions and leaders who stray from those standards, it would become difficult indeed to push back against the reforms you want to enact. For half the energy you spend demonizing the Tea Party, you could expose and exterminate the termites who have riddled with holes everything you’ve tried to build in the last hundred years. For myself, I can say there would still be some intractable differences of principle between us, but I would admire and appreciate your efforts. And I would trust you.

In the interim, I’ll continue to breathe normally.

MM, I just want to apologize for losing my cool back there and insulting you. I just get so fed up with what I feel is deliberate misunderstanding from the right. May you continue to keep up the dialogue.