Part 3 (1/2)
CHAPTER 7
Mimesis
Midos that look like the eyes of an owl, inoffensive bugs fly about in black and yellow stripes, and harhten predators by shaking their tails in the dead leaves They are mimic rattlesnakes, not the real deal Don't be afraid Go ahead and tread on them
And in human affairs we have a conservative movement that has learned, over the decades, to mimicexperience of the thirties taught conservative leaders that it wasn't a good idea to speak in the accent of aristocratic disdain, blasting the poor for not knowing their place During times of economic collapse, no one loves a defender of orthodoxy or a self-appointed spokeshtful rulers
And so, over the years, the movement came to affect a revolutionary posture toward the state that it ht have borrowed from Karl Marx or Jean-Paul Sartre It iht down to a feigned reverence for anticohters ere its version of Ho and Che Conservative leaders studied the tactics of coles And the movement learned to understand itself not as a defender of ”the status quo,” in the faanizer Paul Weyrich, but as a group of ”radicals, working to overturn the present power structure of the country”1 When the econo, conservatism immediately positioned itself as a protest movement for hard tihty or aristocratic were attributed to liberals Symbols that seemed noble or democratic or populist, even if they were the traditional property of the other side, were snapped up and claiht for itself
Bounces Off Me
There was, to begin with, a useful confusion in the early days of the economic debacle: was the Tea Party a phenoht? Its participants certainly didn't accept the GOP label, which was still radioactive in 2009, thanks to the doings of George W Bush and Toht, this novel forether new
Glenn Beck, the eure in this mix-up, ritually claims to be a man beyond partisanshi+p He has deliberately iton, and at one point in 2009 he suggested that he ht have voted for Hillary Clinton had she won the Democratic noht-wing conspiracy theories, Beck constantly pilfers left-wing iuments: his critique of the public relations industry, for exaes of Noaainst President Obama was a clumsy attempt to use a weapon that conservatives feel is usually directed against themselves The host has also hinted at the reason for his constant swiping from liberaldom ”Arich ”Because what you are fighting are revolutionaries”3 The burning need to mimic the Left is also the theme of the National Review Online contributor Michael Walsh, who came up with a novel way to persuade conservatives to adopt the strategy Walsh dreaant Hollywood radical, and proceeded to confess to his right-wing readers that liberalism was, in fact, an orchestrated, demonic assault on the responsible and productive, with every federal regulation and insulting TV show and crazy lawsuit part of liberalishtists, ”Kahane” insisted in his 2010 book, Rules for Radical Conservatives, were ”in the fight of your life, up against an iht your destruction not for years or even centuries, but for ht back The prescription for activist conservatives was obvious: Do exactly as those nefarious, successful liberals (are iined to) do ”Pretend to be like us, so do e do: lie Adopt all of our ers needed to ive no quarter” They needed to act like ancient Visigoths turned loose on ”the effete Roe-old perceptions of which party represented the establishent public ”We're the Man now-fat, sassy, and socialist,” ”Kahane” confessed on behalf of his fellow libs ”Which means we're also ripe for a takedown”5 This is a pretty fair description of how the Right played things as conservatisned up the nation's unfortunates in what appeared to be a classic hard-ti seemed to have all the necessary indicators: people with placards, people protesting banks and big corporations, people yelling through bullhorns, people organizing boycotts There weretalk about strikes
What's more, it was cast as a people's movement with no leaders A movement that was so profoundly democratic, so virtuously rank-and-file, so punk rock, that it was actively against leaders A”sold out” by traditional politicians, with betrayal, with guarding its independence and its precious authenticity6 At itsrevival took the fores and catchphrases of liberals during the Bush years were swiped and echoed sial to do so Thus Michelle Malkin appears to have titled her 2009 Obama book Culture of Corruption for no other reason than that ”culture of corruption” was a famous phrase applied to Republican officeholders in 2005 by Nancy Pelosi In 2010 Ben Quayle, son of Dan, announced his candidacy for Congress with TV co, ”Barack Obae W Bush that libs had been repeating constantly a short while before (Quayle won, of course) Conservative pundits learned to frighten their flock by describing Derab a permanent lock on the electoral system, a repurposed liberal fear from 2004 and 20057 Tea Partiers favored a variation on another fae Is Missing Its Idiot”-while others on the Right sold clocks that would count down the days until Obama left office, just as their counterparts had done in the Bush years I sucked into paper shredders, a popularthe early days of the Patriot Act, were picked up by an entirely new deraphic Meanwhile, opponents of the adined-and boasted, with stickers and T-shi+rts-that they were on ”Oba one of Richard Nixon's most famous sins onto the shoulders of a man elve when the enemies list wasa book called Michael Moore Is a Big Fat Stupid White Man as a response to a book called Rush Lilue school of disputation It serves no purpose greater than sowing confusion
Thewhen it is taken to the next level, where an ideologue projects the sins of his own movement onto his adversary Take, for example, that phrase of Barack Obama's-that he would ”fundamentally transforn trail but which was quicklya thousand would-be Paul Reveres through every cyber-age village and town On the basis of that one ten-second video clip, the new Minutemen have deter who thinks he's so smart that he can dispense with the work of God, the Founders, and all the accretions of the centuries
Admittedly, the fear is a catchy one: beware the politician who thinks he knows all the answers and holds in his hands the true design for human civilization But the only first-world politician who ever deliberately tried to ”transforaret Thatcher, and the abstract blueprint around which she aiht's beloved freethan any progressive bromide uttered by Barack Obae the soul” (Incidentally, encouraging hoe part of her intended transformation) Those fantastic ambitions idely exported Over the last four decades, Thatcher's ideological coht their free- the souls of Chileans, Argentines, Poles, and Iraqis as the opportunities presented Societies were ”transforht: dynamited, bulldozed, privatized, swept away And in the classic 2007 account of this particular chapter in civilization's development, the journalist Naomi Klein explains that it often happened in the aftermath of crises: hurricanes, ram of market-based reforms would be installed all of a sudden as a sort of ”shock therapy” when traditional social systems had been knocked off balance8 Letwere the acts of conservatives: professional econo crisis to impose what they knew to be the correct social model-the market model-on nations that were not really interested in it Also: that this really happened, that the econoht tell it, however, the only place where you'll find such ruinous strategies in discussion are in the war rooms of the sneaky Left, as they plot to destroy the free ule flippant 2008 re White House chief of staff Raho to waste”-and convinced itself on the basis of this one clue that a cadre of left-wingers were planning all , in sos, the overthrow of capitalism itself, with the financial crisis as a pretext
The Spider, the Starfish, and the Bull Snake
Actually, ”pretext” is too small a word for the vast array of liberal shaination of the revitalized Right The liberal stratagems they see around them are the stuff of Cold War duplicity-only with the roles reversed: it's the liberals who are forever peddling crisis, not the people who used to insist that ere about to lose to the Soviets because eren't spending enough on the military The best expression of this fear of trumped-up crisis comes in the 2010 ”thriller” by Glenn Beck, The Overton Window At one point in the novel, the son of an evil progressive PR genius is explaining his dad's irlfriend ”We never let a good crisis go to waste,” he says, echoing Eh tonuclear weapons, so we have to invade before he wipes out Cleveland If we don't hand AIG a seventy-billion-dollar bailout there'll be a depression and et vaccinated one hundred thousand people will die in a super swine-flu pande us that if we don't pass this ide carbon tax right now the world will soon be underwater9 As Beck's plot unfolds, the reader learns of thedomestic attack” in which these nefarious libs set off an atoas, bla hysteria, put over their grand plan for rehtened theories
But wait: go back a step Of the several fake crises Beck's PR boy ht-wing talking points But one of them is not: the 2003 wave of fear that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and that the Iraq as therefore justified As it happens, one of the most enthusiastic peddlers of this particular line was none other than the network that made Glenn Beck fa ”Rallies for America” across the country, patriotic dee from President Bush Liberals, you will recall, were the wimps on the other side of the issue-the ones like Barack Oba invasion ”a duht years later, however, the whole episode was just another overn rebels are wise
Conservative populists, ined by the novelist Beck to be victi brother can throw at thees They endure savage beatings by police The book's hero is even waterboarded after he signs up with the Tea Party resistance Their patriotic s are infiltrated by police spies and broken up by ents provocateurs-the descendants, I suppose, of the Red Squads that real-life city govern radicals in the old days
Sier conservative ht ept by panic that the new De interned to feed this peculiar fear even as he debunked it, and in The Overton Window he plays it the saested by an unreliable person, yet the main character see Fortunately, Beck has attached a nonfictional ”Afterword” to the end of the novel to sort things out, and here he reency Manage a national eency10 This historical factoid is a favorite of conspiracy theorists and X-Files fans, but it is generally discussed absent an iested those infaan; he was a close friend of the Reagan adviser and Tea Party syency scheitation of the sixties11 The McCarran Act of 1950 also authorized a big roundup of left-wing radicals should a ”national eency” arise12 And exactly such a roundup actually occurred in 1919, during the first red scare, when radicals and labor organizers were arrested and, in many cases, deported
The truth is that neither federal nor state governn to intern the free- proletarians in the Chicago futures pits However, they have used force over the years to break up strikes, i, round up people of japanese descent, and disrupt antiwar ine itself as the real victim of state persecution, which no doubt enhances its aura as a dissidenton a merciless establishment
To see the sort of passions that drove America's actual history of politicized prosecution, conservatives need only consult the Official Tea Party Handbook, a 2009 booklet authored by an Arizona activist named Charly Gullett ”Socialism is treason,” Mr Gullett proclaims
It is criminally motivated political terrorism Both terrorism and treason are anathema to Liberty and those who advocate it are political cri Ain to view Socialisnize those who conspire to advance it are in fact criminals to be adjudicated in courts of Federal law We h criainst America and they need to be prosecuted13 The Political Econo our conservative friends of their mile-wide law-and-order streak seeot such a beautiful heroic-outlaw thing going that it seems almost a deliberate buzzkill to point out their slips into Grand Inquisitordown the heretics So let us stay on the well-hts of conspiracy theory and approaching the river of tears the new conservatives cry for their own sufferings, bawling that they, not liberal darlings like minorities or the poor, are society's true victi torrent, however, let us re streaely devoid of self-pity; it was a straightforward political j'accuse The protesters were there because they disliked the TARP and the stie; as far as I recall, none of the persecuted because they were protesting True, at a CPAC speech I went to a little later on the same day as the protest, I heard Mitt Roh his prepared script ”before federal officials co capitalisot the joke: arrested for practicing capitalish, and that second-reinal cause Now people protested not only to advertise their views on a given issue but out of resent and categorizing of these insults had by then beco Tea Partiers that it ood part of one of the earliest Tea Party books to appear, the radio talker Michael Grahary Mob, That's My Mom In his book's first chapter (”My Mother, the Terrorist”), Grahains and ends with liberal insults heaped on ”nor off into actual issues only incidentally
Stupid, backward, bigoted, racist You've probably been called all this and ot tired of the attacks on private enterprise [!]Then you went to a tea party, and that's when you really crossed the line Every erous, hate-filled kook Every night, the TV news declares you an ignorant, potentially violent redneck And in between, political pundits and even politicians denounce you with juvenile insults like ”teabagger”14 These details may amuse, but it is the paradox of the phenomenon that I wish to emphasize, the unconflicted way in which these proud voices of the strong-these hyle, of the freedom to fail, of competition to the death-advance their war on the world by means of tearful weepy-woo
Self-pity has becoht Depicting themselves as victia They are the ones to whos are done This is the reason they have taken as their banner a flag that reads, ”Don't Tread on Me” The slogan is a concise expression of the grand distortion that undergirds everything I have been describing: the belief that we are living in an age of raht the nation to its awful straits; that markets were born free but are everywhere in chains
And so we have the works of Matthew Continetti, a journalist who specializes in profiles in victi anyone has ever said about Sarah Palin that he actually titled The Persecution of Sarah Palin; a cover story for the Weekly Standard about the persecution of the Koch brothers, two of the nation's richest men and most influential political donors, but who, it is Continetti's solemn duty to report, receive mean e-mails every day They are in fact ”the latest victims of the left's lean, mean cyber-vilification machine”15 Pity these billionaires, reader
And we have the latest bestseller by David Lih, a book that understands both the health-care debate and the financial crisis largely in terms of the slurs that De industries These dirty things-that-were-said are ”Criainst the Private Sector,” which are in turn a forh's book), and the author lists thenation throbs righteously: There was ”slander”; there was ”vilifying”; there was ”derogatory and bellicose language” There were ”ating Wall Street bankers”; there is a president who ”delights in bashi+ng Ao-style machismo”: ”'As the [financial reforht any attempt to weaken it'”16 Tremble before the iron Treasurer, reader, as he ress! And weep for the Nation as the insolent words of the liberals fasten fast the chainy chains of Servitude around the neck of Liberty!
If this is the first tiht feel that it's just aact meant to becloud the Democrats' traditional appeal to society's actual outsiders But this is only part of the story Understanding themselves as the true victims is, in fact, essential to the conservative revival There are few political or cultural situations in which they don't instinctively reach for the ed, holler about bias, or protest about how unfairly they've been treated It goes on even in the enerals must be consoled Job creators must be honored by those they employ Billionaires must knoe love them And former majority leaders of the House of Representatives need your sy with his coauthor, Matt Kibbe, chooses to enliven the pages of his ”Tea Party Manifesto,” Give Us Liberty, with a chapter that catalogs every insult directed against him and the Tea Party movement over the last three years Oh, reader, they called what Ar,” he reroup disrupted town hall s; they called him names; they said his movement was racist; they ed dick, recall that Ar who eventually cashed in his legislative chips for a lobbying job at the enormous international law firm DLA Piper (which also employs former Democratic Senate majority leader Tom Daschle) When not himself one of the most powerful men on the planet, Armey has been an adviser to the most powerfulaphorisms to his labors on behalf of the Marianas Islands sweatshops, he has consistently sided with the ard, he asks us to consider all the slights and insults he has endured in the course of his long career
Why must the world be persuaded to think of dick Armey as a victim? For the sa Jr, that Paul Ryan shouts, ”Doith big business,” and that conservatives generally have learned to apply the term ”fascist” to their foes: because, consciously or not, all of they that works in hard tiroup, for example, there is reportedly a deliberate effort to look and sound like a left-wing organization The idea, according to Armey, was ”not just to learn froame” The outfit's leaders write that after the Tea Party conquers the GOP and Congress, it ”will take A helpfully to readers that this is ”the term the New Left used to refer to the political establishroup trains are asked to learn the leadershi+p secrets of the Cohborhood organizer Saul Alinsky; their idea for a big ton came to them from another favorite text: a famous history of nonviolent protest To fill the streets with de to Arton, DC, this is known as radical Even dangerous” It is so radical, so dangerous, that ”the establishment doesn't like it one bit”17 ”Hard work beats Daddy's money,” the revolutionaries of Freedo opponents of privilege18 And I suppose the slogan is true enough, if by ”beats” you mean ”protects” or ”increases” or ”co co in their power to itimate democratic protest-and behold: Daddy's money multiplies and reproduces and turns cartwheels of joy; Daddy'sinto Dulles airport in its private jet, wreathed in s crew
CHAPTER 8
Say, Don't You Remember
”Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” was the so-called anthe is possible-of the hopeless disillusion-class every with the American dream, and even the pro a dream, and so I followed the uns to bear, I was always there, right on the job
They used to tell lory ahead
Why should I be standing in line, just waiting for bread?
Once I built a railroad, ainst time
Once I built a railroad; now it's done Brother, can you spare a dime?
Once I built a tower to the sun, brick, and rivet, and lime; Once I built a tower, now it's done Brother, can you spare a diee, we looked swell, Full of that Yankee Doodle-de-duh hell, And I was the kid with the dru banned by certain radio stations In the grand history of cynicism, the only other hit record I know of that comes close to it is the sex Pistols' ”God Save the Queen,” or”Fortunate Son”
In 2009, so of ”Brother” on YouTube; ian to share their reactions to that wrenching bit of Depressiana Here are a few entries that caughtspeaks to the failures of Keynesian Econo on infrastructure to sti econonmy-it has never worked, and never will It turns recessions into depressions like it did in the 30's, and like it is doing now
Kinda sounds like today, with the bailouts and sti