Astounding article in the Times the other day: a think piece on the underlying psychology of Teabaggers. While it's true the movement is an astroturfed phenomenon, it caught fire for an unexpected reason, one that ultimately will backfire on Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck and the Republican party:
Tea Party anger is, at bottom, metaphysical, not political: what has been undone by the economic crisis is the belief that each individual is metaphysically self-sufficient, that one’s very standing and being as a rational agent owes nothing to other individuals or institutions.
In other words, what happened under the Bush administration was the dismantling of the illusion that we are all self-sufficient, that we can get by on our own, that we can, ultimately, make it on merit.
Who would get angriest at this causation? Not the reality-based community, who have known all along that each of us relies heavily on an unseen network of peers and support from people wholly unrelated to your capacity as a citizen in your community. Yes, the teachers you grew up listening to, but also the auto mechanic who built your car, the utility person who repairs your phone lines before you even know they're out, the fisherman who lands that net of shrimp that contains your dinner.
Warren Buffett's Responsible Wealth does yeoman work trying to remind people of this every day.
Who would get angriest at this causation? The very people who enabled the dismantling, which is why you see fervent Bush accolytes suddenly grumble about how "liberal" he really was. Ironic, isn't it, that the prophet of the Ownership Society would see it crumble under his very feet, his name now mud on both sides of the aisle.
The Teabaggers want to see the budget balanced but no taxes raised and they certainly don't want to see spending cut on things they like, such as defense, highways, water, farm subsidies, infrastructure that serves them, ad nauseum, ad infinitum. They want the government to stay away from the people but please leave Medicare alone, don't regulate Wall Street, but banks ought to be able to lend to small businesses on demand.
A little paranoid schizophrenia, in other words.
Here's the thing: as J. M. Bernstein points out, the notion of self-sufficiency is an artifice, a creation of society, an institution. It is no different than marriage or a corporation, no different than being Republican or Democrat. It is granted by mutual consent and can be taken away unilaterally if one party to the agreement holds power over the other.
And society, far and away, holds power over the individual. This was the whole raison d'etre of unions, if you recall. They are a way to give individuals power and influence in an wholly unbalanced equation of at-will employment.
Events of the first decade of this century proved that this artifice is in need of some adjustment. We saw a growing threat of international terror, coupled with the climax of a long term degradation of that thing that makes it all worthwhile to get up in the morning and head to work: a paycheck. Housing values became wildly unstable, creating a game of musical chairs that saw you land in a house you could afford when the music stopped, or in deep, desperate trouble. And finally, we saw a government, now two, confront a crisis that it was unprepared and ill-equipped to handle.
Mostly because politicians pandered to our baser instincts of giving us mo' money each week in our paycheck, and damn the debt the government was running up!
The bill is coming due, and people are angry. They can't be angry at themselves, no, so they take it out on the most visible icon of this mess, the government. And this anger comes at a moment when, indeed, any rational person can only see that MORE government intervention in the world is needed, not less. We need the government to step into the markets and protect consumers and we need the government to intervene and help homeowners and banks work out their differences and we need the government to create work for those who are long-term unemployed and we need the government to protect us from the predations of corporations who gamble not only their economic futures but the very lives of American citizens on a short-term profit.
And we need it now, but a significant portion of this nation hasn't woken up to smell the tea.
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