Tea Parties and Slime Moulds

I’m glad someone else noticed the Grover Norquist parallel.

For all the talk of decentralization, the Tea Party has been remarkably easy to steer. Their strange positions on net neutrality and the seventeenth amendment come to mind, where they are arguing against their own rights to coordinate and vote, and in favor of the power of a privileged few to rule over them.

As near as I can tell, the Tea Party is merely a new output for a political machine with a very well-established political input: the unceasing Radio Rwanda of AM radio, with minor assists from FOX and the internet. And again, we’re back to Norquist. The talking points go out, become conventional wisdom, and then you’ve got Tea Partiers acting like it was actually their idea to take away their right to vote or make it harder to organize through the internet.

What we’re looking at is merely the latest iteration of a longstanding corporatist operation to leverage their political position by appealing to ethnic and religious solidarities. The Tea Party merely provides and outlet, whereby their mostly passive audience can pretend to themselves that they are active, in a series of increasingly small rallies. This system is imploding, as the populist right grows ever more desperate to see results from an elected elite, which has already degenerated into a vapid search for authenticity and the willingness to elect a ham sandwich, just so long as it’s not a career politician. I shudder to think what happens when the base gives up on their elites, but that’s where this is headed.

In the meantime, their brutal primary victories have left the GOP splintered in several areas, as bad as the Massachusetts Dem.’s were in the special Senate election. The Tea Party has already cost the GOP a chance at the Senate.

Aaaaaaaaaand, since I’ve still got the floor to myself, let me just add that the move to large, largely decentralized operations that rely on volunteerism and erstwhile political operatives was absolutely inevitable, when in the early 90’s the two major American parties decided that the bigfoot TV buys that ruled national politics in the 80’s were determined to be inferior to on-the-ground operations that exploited new data gathering and distributing technologies. GOTV became more important than TV, which is probably good news for Democrats, considering the insidious consolidation of media ownership that began in the early 90’s as well.

Democrats got off the couch because they were disappointed in Democratic politicians who have been paid to disappoint them, and Republicans got off the couch because they were disappointed in Republican politicians who were never serious about delivering on smaller, cheaper government and abortion bans.

How long the two parties can continue to string along the bases they each despise remains to be seen. SCOTUS has made it even easier to purchase American policy on the open market, which means there’s even more stress in an unsustainable system. Violence is already common.

What if the Tea Party is just a hoax? While actual Tea Party events are poorly attended, campaign money once again is breaking all records in this election cycle. Those money interests are anything but disorganized, anything but decentralized.

…this feedback loop is going to break down at some point, and very possibly sooner rather than later.

Seeing as how Bob Inglis of South Carolina said that Reagan would be considered persona non grata by the Tea Baggers, were he alive today, I’m betting on sooner. There’s a lot the Koch bros. and other GOP moneyed elites will tolerate from the rabble but besmirching the name of Saint Ronny ain’t one of them. Also,: if your political movement thinks Ronald Effing Reagan is too much of a $ocialist, you’ve already got one foot off the cliff.

revisions, not recisions, obviously

Somehow I gave up on Texas a long time ago. Prove me wrong, please.

Two things. Republicans don’t know their enemies. Alinsky never accomplished all that much, nor did ACORN. Paranoia about powerful enemies can be energising but it can also lead to mistakes. All these movements suffer from a gross over estimate of the fraction of people who would agree with them if only they heard the message (less with Dean than with the others).

Also what’s this GOP which brokers “its internal deals between religious types, business interests and government-starvers (Grover Norquist’s Wednesday breakfast meetings etc )” I’m pretty sure that the religious types were not allowed floor time in Norquist’s meetings (“no sex talk” – G Norquist). Also you left out the hawks. I’d say Norquist brokered business interests, business interests and business interests.

I mean what have the Republicans ever actually done for religious interests ? Abstinence only sex education and DOMA is all I know of them actually delivering. No wonder the religious right is revolting in Delaware.

Why are we treating an astroturf collaboration between the Koch brothers and Murdoch as though it were a genuine movement?

Deleted comment from banned commenter.

I mean what have the Republicans ever actually done for religious interests ?

…stoked and validated their persecution fetish? It’s not like the rank and file among the “religious interests” are policy wonks. See also August Pollak

Street theater

Rallies where they dress up like Paul Revere, and campaign speeches, and blog rants — all that, by itself, is just theater. Theater that is, to be sure, not any less meaningful than the major parties’ conventions. But that’s my point, those conventions have become pure window dressing and theater.

We’re not going to know if this Tea Party phenomenon will ever amount to more than just a season of heavily subsidized, rent-an-actor, street theater until and unless they get a fair number of Tea Partiers into Congress, and these people start to do non-politics-as-usual things. They’ve got Boehner at least talking about going for some fairly extreme constitutional hard-ball, in the form of this scheme of theirs to effectively repeal the ACA by denying it any discretionary funds.

Normally, of course, we think that you need the same assent of both chambers plus the president (or 2/3 in both chambers) to repeal a law, that you needed to pass it in the first place. The idea behind this scheme of theirs is to let the House alone, which is the only element of the three that they will probably control, repeal laws all by itself.

This power grab, by itself, would be hardball enough. But this maneuver would also raise all sorts of constitutional confrontations. We would have laws still on the books creating obligations on the govt, but no funds appropriated to meet those obligations. We would have mandatory funding still flowing to programs for which the cut-off of discretionary funding would mean that there were no govt employees able to administer the use of those mandatory funds.

The administration would be forced to react in ways as innovational as the actions of the Tea Partiers to redirect funding or govt workers to deal with the mismatches that result. These folks would than have some actual overreach by the Kenyan Usurper on their plates to chew on, as opposed to the stuff they now have to make up to glumly munch on.

The resulting season of constitutional hardball, if such materializes, is the only thing that will keep the Tea Bagger phenomenon from rapid retirement to the ash-heap of history. It could easily get out of hand, of course, and they could easily all end up dead, taking a lot of the rest of us with them, of course, but the more immediate threat facing whatever of them make it to Congress, will be the sure political extinction that will result in the absence of at least constitutional brinksmanship. You can’t predict an apocalypse, and promise an Armageddon style battle of Right vs Evil, and then deliver only politics as usual and accommodation. If there’s enough of them that get elected, and the momentum seems with them enough that they get effective control of the House, there will be at least near-blood. History will replay the farces they now stage on the street as tragedy.

> Jonathan Bernstein touches on an interesting question below: Who, exactly, speaks for the Tea Party movement?
A question about language. What is the meaning/function/purpose of “exactly” in such a sentence? A contrast with “Who, _exactly_, speaks for the Democrats?” would help me, I think.

For all the talk of decentralization, the Tea Party has been remarkably easy to steer. Their strange positions on net neutrality and the seventeenth amendment come to mind

You think they were “steered” into opposing the 17th amendment? By whom?

That’s a longstanding cause on the fringe right. It’s also a lost cause, and I can’t imagine any plutocrat worth his salt spending money to organize a movement around it.

“Why are we treating an astroturf collaboration between the Koch brothers and Murdoch as though it were a genuine movement?”

1. It’s now fairly obvious that our oligarchs are more or less uniformly behind the effort, even if Murdoch is taking point.
2. This time the oligarchs own the demagogues and the demagogues and their audience actively prefer it that way.
3. I don’t think it makes sense to say that it isn’t genuine in some sense. We have to start wrapping our minds around understanding that the Enlightenment project has failed – a lot of the demos really likes this stuff.

The Tea Party is a grassroots movement that spontaneously came into existence after Glenn Beck and other Fox News hosts told their viewers to spontaneously create a grassroots movement.

The National Journal is giving the astroturf version of the story. Not once does the article mention the role of Fox News in organizing and publicizing the ‘grassroots’ rallies. In fact the string ‘Fox’ does not appear in the article at all.

As for the Tea Party rallies being inconceivable in the past. They are considerably smaller than recent liberal rallies and since it is impossible to get a parks service permit for an event on the mall without planning etc, someone must have performed the planning or they would not have happened at all.

So far the impact of the Tea Party has been limited to the GOP primaries. It is not too difficult to see how a movement like the Tea Party can have a big impact in a primary, particularly when the ‘grassroots’ Tea Party picks are being backed with $600,000 checks from the people who really run the show like the Koch brothers.

Replacing Castle with O’Donnell is the easy part. All that is necessary is to press the emotional button for ‘throw the bums out’. They are both GOP, all the Tea Party needs to do is to persuade the primary voters that O’Donnell is a credible candidate. Persuading people to vote for the GOP over the Democrats is an entirely different proposition.

The Tea Party will not crash after the election though. On the contrary it will either claim credit for the GOP triumph or engage in Bennite logic of ‘we were not extreme enough’. While the Tea Party has taken some scalps, Angle and O’Donnell are running for seats the Democrats already hold. It can never be proven that the party would have won with a different candidate. The dynamics in Florida and Alaska are different, there the blame will be placed on the untrustworthy establishment traitors who ran against the GOP candidate.

If you look at the raw polls without the voter intentions, they have barely moved all summer. The Democrats appear to have momentum at the moment and are closing the poll gap because they are closing the enthusiasm gap. I think that the GOP is going to find that they make little progress if any. But it won’t make any difference. Sarah Palin is now the all-but-inevitable GOP nominee for 2012.

Like Goldwater, she will tank completely in the general election. But the GOP establishment will back her as they need he patronage power to win their own primaries. The only way to get back control of their party is to give her the 2012 nomination and hope she doesn’t take them with her when she crashes and burns.

Is the tea party any different from moveon.org or code pink and other left wing grassroots organisations that are loud, raucous and they really do not like their political opponents for reasons that causes them to overplay their hand?

In the end, any article about these guys has got to ask and answer one question:

Where the f*ck were all of these ‘love my country, fear my government’ demonstrators when Bush et. al. were gleefully trashing the country?

For at least 90% of them, the answer would be ‘kissing their *sses and reveling in their power to do as they pleased’.

Henri pretty much nailed it. And his comment puts in perspective how self-destructive the Democratic Party’s refusal to do anything beyond lip service for unions has been.

Never mind, it mysteriously started working.

You think they were “steered” into opposing the 17th amendment? By whom?

You didn’t get the Grover Norquist reference?

But it does seem to me to have assumed a life of its own.

Sorry, I’m not buying that- they couldn’t even get their Las Vegas convention off the ground. The supposed “tea party primary candidates” are just garden variety nutso extremists (Birchers, in a former age) who would appeal to the shrunken, crazy GOP base just as much if nobody had ever heard of the Tea Party. I’m extremely skeptical about the existence of any self-sustaining organization independent of the string-pullers.

“particularly when the ‘grassroots’ Tea Party picks are being backed with $600,000 checks from the people who really run the show like the Koch brothers.”

It also helps when the “anti-establishment” tea Party candidate is a mega-millionaire doesn’t it?

“The supposed “tea party primary candidates” are just garden variety nutso extremists (Birchers, in a former age) who would appeal to the shrunken, crazy GOP base just as much if nobody had ever heard of the Tea Party. I’m extremely skeptical about the existence of any self-sustaining organization independent of the string-pullers.”

I think you’re overly comfortable about this: we have too many bad precedents to dismiss the Tea Party so easily.

1. Remember, there was not much that was completely new within the PNF or NSDAP either. Almost all of NSDAP’s support came from people who were earlier in the volkisch movement (Kershaw argues that Hitler modeled himself consciously on Karl Lueger). Many of the PNF’s supporters were simply the same employers who had always been looking for ways to break labor unions.
2. Remember also that a lot of conservative capitalists in inter-war Europe were also thinking that they could keep control of the new authoritarian movements, too. Indeed, they were quite convinced of this until they were destroyed.
3. I think you underestimate how radicalized the American oligarchs have already become, even compared to the traditional conservatives of inter-war Europe. There are all sorts of anecdotal evidence that a substantial proportion of the American oligarchy isn’t simply only pursuing their class interests, but really is ideologically convinced by extremely radical ideas that they would pursue even if it hurt them monetarily (the amounts of time and money the Coors and Koch family have dumped into politics is unlikely to be directly recouped by them in future monetary profits).
4. I would go farther than Bruce and argue that there is no longer any meaningful distinction between corporate conservatism and religious conservatism. Partially, that’s because the religious conservatives now all believe that their religions mandate capitalism and explicitly ban all other economic forms. We should further note that this has occurred throughout most faiths in the US: while the Low-Church Protestants were first, the Catholics have now followed their lead. American Christianity incorporates neoclassical economic theory as a central tenet of it’s beliefs.

Of course, Tom Tomorrow says it so much better than I can:
http://www.credoaction.com/comics/2010/09/the-tea-crumpets-party/

Anti-globalization movement, anyone?

There’s plenty of anthro/sociology literature out there dealing with the decentralized social movements of the past 20 years. Are Jonathan Rauch (and the bloggers who responded to his article) unaware of the history of social movements? Certainly the organization of the tea party is interesting, but I see nothing to suggest that it is new.

“But in order to combat it effectively it’s important to understand that it’s a problem of astroturf and not of grass roots.”

While that’s a possibility, we should remember that many people on the left in inter-war Europe also believed that the new right was simply another version of traditional conservatism. But that was distinctly not the case, and European leftists who did view the situation that way often paid for that mistake by political failure and often the loss of their lives. European traditional conservatives who believed that the new right was under their control often paid for that mistake by political failure or the loss of their lives.

Traditional conservatives are quite different from new right movements. The question is if the Tea Party is different from traditional conservatism. I would argue that it is. The Republican Party was traditionally the same as the upper tiers of the business elite. That business elite tended (and still tends) to be technocrats. They viewed themselves as sort of business experts or business scientists. That’s why the Republican party was essentially sidelined once the economists became Keynesians (and the business elite largely became very moderate Republicans in that era).

Here’s the frightening bit: now the economists are in confusion, but there’s every reason to assume the neoclassicals will not dominate economics in the future. But we see that the Tea Party is not interested in how the business elite will continue to rule as a technocracy. Rather, they see neoclassical economics as a sort of religious principle or as a will to power- they have little interest in neoclassical economics being true in any empirical sense.

Which is in absolute opposition to how American business elites traditionally have seen economics. That business elite wants to be empirically right about economics – if they themselves are empirically incorrect about economics, they will lose their own money to others who are empirically more correct. There’s now a great deal of interest in the business elite about behavioral and heterodox economics because those things might be empirically correct. Conversely, the Tea Party literally doesn’t care whether their economics are right or not. If you examine their rhetoric, they don’t seem to support neoclassical economics because they believe it is empirically correct. Instead, they seem to support it because it is part of “their country” that they want to “take back”. I view this as fundamentally a volkisch concept and explicitly anti-rational.

To expand: at the moment, the business elite and the Tea Party are in very close alignment. Both currently agree that the oligarchs should rule. But their views on what legitimates that rule has entirely different foundations. The oligarchs could easily lose control (or possibly, the oligarchy itself might split into warring factions revolving around the issue of who can control or appeal to the Teabaggers).

Sorry, I will continue to disagree. The people who go to tea party rallies have beliefs indistinguishable from their forebears going back decades if not centuries in US history.
It’s the puppet masters who- with grave danger to the rest of us- are now far more mainstream than the eccentric millionaires who once funded the John Birch Society. It’s to them that our attention needs to be directed, rather than to their dupes, who are only dangerous to the extent that big money can mobilize them.

Of course the problem with the above rambling (sorry) theory is liberalism has had the entire monied establishment against it, whereas the Tea Party has its support.

Frankly given the enemies arrayed against it, it’s amazing that any form of liberalism exists today…

I found the Rauch article astounding in the way it ignored the orchestration of the Tea Party by major right-wing oligarchs with extensive political organizing experience. It was almost like a deliberate piece of propaganda in the way it ignored public-record facts to spin this sentimental stuff about spontaneous grassroots uprisings. I agree it’s an oversimplification to say the tea party is *only* manipulated from the top — there’s genuine public confusion and anger here — but I don’t see any argument that it isn’t *significantly* manipulated by Fox News, the Kochs, and the like.

I’m surprised Henry fell for it.

Rather, they see neoclassical economics as a sort of religious principle or as a will to power- they have little interest in neoclassical economics being true in any empirical sense.

Well, yes, but that’s not unreasonable. Politics actually really is aboout power and not about some kind of quest for empirical truth. If you want to turn the U.S. in a small-government libertarian direction, you can do it. You will pay a real cost and it will almost certainly be “suboptimal” in some sense, but it’s not like you’re violating the laws of physics or something. I don’t think the majority of the public would support such a move, but the tea party are free to call for it.

“Politics actually really is aboout power and not about some kind of quest for empirical truth.”

And the best way to retain power is to reject empirical truth in principal? And if you’re in power to do things that objectively hurt yourself, actually gaining that power will be bad for you. That’s why the TP gaining power will be the worst thing for them.

“I don’t think the majority of the public would support such a move, but the tea party are free to call for it.”

They aren’t calling for it in the sense that you mean. You’re portraying a rational discussion: two interlocutors disputing about what economic truth is. That’s not what this discussion is: from what I can tell, the TP is making some sort of volkisch statement, which is neither a discussion nor rational.

The psychological effect of being in the echo chamber for more than an hour a day. Programming the brain with kneejerk hatred of anything remotely identified with liberalism, or of government regulation, over a period of a decade or more has got to have a pretty serious effect.

Indeed, AM talk radio is the reason we can’t trace this back “centuries” as suggested upthread, and its effect has been far more pernicious than the web — you can’t listen to the Internet while you drive your tractor around.

Is the anti-war protests a decent thing with which to compare?

We saw anti-Afghanistan War protests very early in the post-9/11 environment. While it’s certainly true that one could point to the Free Mumia signs or the Hamas flags and jump to conclusions about the “real” motivations of the so-called “anti-war” people (ANSWER!!!! ANSWER!!!!!!!), isn’t there a much simpler explanation…

One that also explains why the Tea Parties didn’t really start showing up until after 2006 *AND*, at the same time, explains why the anti-war protests disappeared right around the same time?

My take is that an anti-war protest would be seen, at this point, as counter-productive to what people on “our side” (or who are, at least, against the people on “their side”) (according to those most responsible for organizing protests, anyway) might want to accomplish.

And it’s the same in the days that followed 2002 and 2004 for the Tea Parties/Republicans.

There are a bunch of people out there who are alienated from their government but they are so alienated that they don’t have any idea what they could possibly do to deal with it. The anti-war protests appealed to one group of them. The tea parties appeal to a different (minimally overlapping) group.

To focus on ANSWER, Hamas flags, and Mumia signs is to miss the point of the anti-war protests, no?

Because I believe that until very recently everyone – from as early as the Bolsheviks (‘Cinema is for us the most important of all arts’), to the Nazis with their parades and Der Sturmer caricatures, to the HCUA with their Hollywood purges, and including dystopian predictions, from 1984 to Clockwork Orange – they all felt that visual media is the most effective propaganda tool.

Yeah, radio’s a recent invention, and I think it took a long time for the right people to figure out that it’s the only media people can pay half-attention to while working. Which is really, really key. Which brings me to:

I also suspect that TV must have had even more of a brainwashing effect on the US public than radio.

Well, okay, go look up at AM listenership ratings versus 24/7 cable news watchership ratings. Then do the same for 1990. Only tuned in political junkies watch political jank in their leisure time, but which are you more likely to do while working all day: listen to the radio or watch TV?

Well, ok, now office folks have “surf the Internet” as an alternative to AM radio, of course. But I think it’s worth noting that “we’ve moved from AM radio to more diverse options of AM radio or Internet” is much more correct then “in the beginning there was no propaganda outlet targeting these folks, and then let there be Internet, which changed everything.”

Oh, and AM radio let people feel like they could get involved. It really was a (coincidental) prototype for blogs, I think. Comments section = Let’s go to the phones!

Glenn,

I think that the Harzburg Front is actually the closer analogy, because the TP is a volkisch movement, while your analogues in the early days of the French Revolution were not.

It is true that you can find any number of analogies – a frequent course of events is that the traditional elite conservatives think they can keep the new right under control and are unable to do so. The experiences of the German, Italian, Japanese and other interwar traditional elite conservatives had that commonality. Ok, don’t use things that violate Godwin’s law. Do you think the history of Italian or Spanish interwar conservatism didn’t have the same similarities?

One thing that has rarely been highlighted among the elite bloviation over the past 80 years about how even the most moderate socialist will support Stalin, traditional conservative elites have repeatedly shown that they are perfectly willing (and often eager) to overthrow actually existing governments for extremely radical new right experiments (so much for all that pretense about tradition).

What I would argue is precisely problematic is that the Anglosphere conservatives have spent the past 80 years pretending that they were entirely different from the continental conservatives. We on the left have ourselves bought into this narrative. What we’ve found out to be the reality over the past two years, is that there’s not as much difference between the American Right of 2010 and the German Right of 1930-1931 (or the Spanish Right before the Civil War) as we eagerly fooled ourselves into believing. Murdoch is, in fact, not really that different from Hugenberg. Which means that our pretense that the Anglosphere is really so different was always self-congratulatory nonsense.