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RICHARD HOFSTADTER’S “PARANOID STYLE” REVISITED
The Tea Party, Past as Prologue
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The Bush presidency ended in 2008. It left the country with two long-running, unfinished wars on its hands, a colossal rise in the federal debt, and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Bush’s failed presidency gave rise to ennui among elements of the Christian right, precipitating some reconsideration of the Bush Doctrine and the commitment to the anti-establishment conservative agenda generally. In 2007, for example, in an overt critique of one facet of the Bush administration’s national security doctrine, the board of the National Association of Evangelicals issued a declaration against torture.1 And a few prominent evangelical megachurch pastors began to distance themselves from the Moral Majority/Christian Coalition old guard. Rick Warren, for one, leader of Saddleback Church in southern California, announced that he had left the domestic culture wars behind in an effort to reorient his flock toward the fight against AIDS, poverty, and malaria in the Third World. Even the neoconservatives, in the wake of the Iraq War debacle, let their public profile slip below the radar just a bit, although they continued, when pressed, to insist how correct they had been about Iraq all along. The post-invasion disaster, they maintained, was due to the failed efforts of incompetents such as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority of Iraq Paul Bremer.2 Indeed, neoconservatives insisted it was they who rescued the war effort by their formulation of and insistence on the “surge,” the plan that placed an additional 20,000 troops in Iraq in January 2007.3 Although they might have lowered their public profile a notch, neoconservatives also demanded that U.S. military force be used against Iran – showing that, unlike some of their conservative evangelical compatriots, the Iraq debacle hadn’t altered their outlook at all. For the most part, anti-establishment conservative political sensibilities remained pretty much intact.
Following the election of Barack Obama to the presidency, the quieting of anti-establishment conservatives changed quickly, with the noisy emergence of the Tea Party in early 2009 marking their brisk resurgence. An acronym for “Taxed Enough Already,” the Tea Party name was a deliberate evocation of the colonial American patriotic revolt against oppressive, centralized government. President Obama’s Keynesian-inspired $787 billion stimulus package, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, sparked a few locally organized protests against government spending. The local events were picked up by conservative media, which served to encourage similar protest actions in more communities.4 Tea Party lore has it that the movement took off when deep, but still inchoate, political unhappiness was tapped into by an intemperate on-air outburst from Rick Santelli, a futures-trading-floor television correspondent for CNBC television. Upon hearing reports of possible government programs to rescue homeowners who had taken on unrealistic mortgages and now, with recession and the collapse of home prices, faced foreclosure, Santelli went ballistic on the air, declaring that “the government was rewarding bad behavior.” He asked heatedly, “How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills?”5 The video went viral on the Internet, promulgated by right-wing bloggers and Fox News. Tea Partiers-to-be testified that “Santelli’s rant” set them in motion. The people who participated in various tax protests organized themselves as locals of the emerging Tea Party movement. In addition to challenging Obama’s economic stimulus, they began attending and disrupting congressional town hall meetings in the summer of 2009, particularly those devoted to discussion of health care reform. Irate protesters displayed signs depicting President Obama in whiteface6 and shouted down officials touting the Democratic health care bill. Thereafter, local Tea Party groups, assisted by longstanding national conservative advocacy organizations, dove into the 2010 midterm elections, challenging Republican incumbents from the right and working hard to elect Tea Party-identified candidates.
What the Tea Party protesters shared was a visceral anxiety about President Obama and the Democratic political agenda, an antipathy to taxes and government spending, and apprehension about what they saw as the increasing control by the federal government over virtually all aspects of American life. They stood for limited government and constitutional originalism – getting back to what they saw as the basic role of government as outlined by the Founding Fathers. They scrutinized taxes and government spending not just in economic terms, but in moral ones: taxes and spending not only skewed the performance of the economy, they were also for all intents and purposes evil because they rewarded irresponsible individual behavior and punished virtuous behavior.7 These are, of course, familiar conservative tropes, longstanding components of the critique of modern liberalism. What startled was the Tea Partiers’ style: the fury that accompanied their otherwise substantive critique of government spending; the rage at feeling they were not in control of their lives; the bizarre, blind fixation on President Obama’s citizenship status and religious affiliation, often accompanied by overtly racist rhetoric; the vehement condemnation of the president’s “palling around” with terrorists and his “apologizing” for America; the certainty, sans evidence, that Keynesian economic policies were bankrupt, indeed, the source of America’s ills; claims that the Democratic-sponsored health care reform bill called for “death panels”; the charge that the scientific consensus on climate change was a politicized hoax on the part of leftist elites. “We want our country back!” roared Tea Partiers at meetings and rallies. The Tea Party appeared to represent not just the resurgence of anti-establishment conservatism, but the revival of that set of beliefs in an extreme, enraged form.
Although it was young and its longevity was unclear, the Tea Party’s successes in the 2010 midterm elections and its muscular shove of the GOP to the right were striking. Sixty-three House seats, five Senate seats, and six governorships swung from the Democrats to the Republicans. The GOP won around 700 seats in state legislatures. One must be careful not to over-interpret and attribute this political change to the Tea Party movement alone. After all, there is a well-known pattern in midterm elections wherein the party in power loses seats – especially during bad economic times. Moreover, in the 2010 elections some prominent Tea Party candidates lost their bids. But the Tea Party movement does seem responsible for moving political and ideological goalposts well to the right internally within the GOP and in the public arena in general. Within the party, the rollback of New Deal institutions and programs is back on the table as a serious political option. More broadly, the Tea Party movement abruptly halted the Obama agenda. No longer were citizens and policy-makers debating the range of government stimulus programs, the plight of the unemployed, and extending medical insurance to all; rather, discussion turned to the dreaded socialism of the Obama administration, the catastrophe of federal debt, and the tyrannical power of government elites.
The Tea Party’s sudden impact cried out for analysis. Some intellectuals turned to the ideas of the historian Richard Hofstadter. Hofstadter, as we know, introduced the analytical concept of the “paranoid style” in an effort to understand the mid-twentieth-century movements around Joseph McCarthy and Barry Goldwater. Hofstadter’s new relevance was based on the perception that in many ways the Tea Party looked like those earlier movements. References to Hofstadter or the paranoid style appeared in Tea Party news coverage or political commentary by the score.
Hofstadter and the paranoid style
One of the most influential historians of the post-World War II era, Richard Hofstadter wrote on the nineteenth-century Populist movement, the Progressive movement of the early twentieth century, and the conflicted nature of American liberalism. The implicit and occasional explicit backdrop of Hofstadter’s scholarship was a defense of the New Deal order.8 As he expanded his scholarly purview to the analysis of McCarthyism and the popular movement tied to the 1964 candidacy of Barry Goldwater, Hofstadter displayed uneasiness about the durability of New Deal liberalism in the face of right-wing mass movements. After a brief youthful dalliance with the Communist Party in the 1930s, he grew suspicious of populist mass democracy by the 1950s. Always critical of the Progressive historiography that had depicted the downtrodden, noble democratic people rising successfully against the evil corporate trusts, Hosftadter shifted the analytical focus of reform movements from the economic dimension to the ethno-cultural. He discerned in nineteenth-century agrarian Populism a distinctive nativism and anti-Semitism that other historians had glossed over. Dispelling the myth of the democratic yeoman farmer, Hofstadter crafted an analytical difference between “old” and “new” liberalisms. He categorized the agrarian ideal of opportunity, laissez-faire capitalism, and the removal of government-induced barriers to investment as “old liberalism.” Fundamentally different, the “new liberalism” of the New Deal was the product of a modern, urban movement that championed government intervention to revitalize markets and establish a social safety net to compensate for the failings of capitalism.
This distinction underlay one of Hofstadter’s main scholarly contributions. Previously, most historians had understood Progressivism as the natural lead-in to the New Deal, and, in a parallel historical move backward, the Populists as proto-Progressives – thus drawing a generally straight line of reform from Populism to Progressivism to New Deal liberalism. Hofstadter would have none of this. In his estimation, the reformers of the Progressive Era had not been radicals at all. Rather, they were old-stock middle-class Protestants worried about their diminishing status in the wake of immigration, the horrors of “race-mixing,” and threatened by new ethnic groups seeking place and power in a bewildering modernizing America. The key to Progressivism and Populism was not declining economic fortunes but “status anxiety,” or “rank in society.” Thus the most important issue for the old Protestants of the Progressive Era and the most revealing of their politico-cultural inclinations was Prohibition, with its intrinsic moralism and manifestly anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic overtones. The New Deal, in contrast, marked a striking departure from the Populist–Progressive heritage, in Hofstadter’s view. If the old liberalism had been Protestant and ideological, rooted in a backward agrarian ideal, the new liberalism was urban, ethnic, hospitable to non-Protestants, forward-looking, and results-oriented.9
Hofstadter saw in the McCarthyism of the 1950s and in the Goldwater juggernaut of the 1960s a threat to the legacy of the new liberalism of the New Deal. He understood the right-wing movements as manifestations of a periodic gush of anti-intellectualism in American life that harked back to the prejudiced agrarianism of Populist–Progressive old liberalism. Hofstadter identified three historical pillars of American anti-intellectualism: evangelical religion (which privileged faith and emotion over the skeptical mind), practical-minded business (which valued instrumental know-how over intellectual depth), and the populist political style (enraged, accusatory, uncompromising). These combined to foster a political culture hostile to complexity, to cosmopolitanism, to intellectuals (denigrated as “eggheads”), and to the life of the mind in general.10 Sensitive to the popular roots of authoritarianism, Hofstadter sought a deeper understanding of the historical phenomenon. He turned to the social sciences for help in illuminating the underlying psychological motivations of right-wing movements and actors. His lodestar was Theodor W. Adorno et al.’s The Authoritarian Personality. Published in 1950, this influential study scrutinized the nature of anti-Semitism by identifying the cluster of personality characteristics said to underlie racial or religious prejudice. Based on extensive survey and interview data rooted in a psychoanalytic theoretical model, the brilliant, flawed Authoritarian Personality theorized that the children of authoritarian fathers project their deep-seated, unresolved conflicts onto others, particularly onto safe-to-stigmatize ethnic, political, and religious minorities.11
Hofstadter thus joined the circle of scholars, primarily sociologists, who sought to understand the nature of McCarthyism against a backdrop of unease over presumed, though usually latent, fascist tendencies in America. His essay “The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt – 1954” was collected in the widely noted 1955 volume edited by Daniel Bell called The New American Right.12 In it, Hofstadter acknowledged his debt to Adorno by labeling McCarthyism a “pseudo-conservative” movement. Pseudo, because rather than hewing to the principled but temperate and compromising spirit of “genuine” conservatism, Hofstadter argued that McCarthy and his followers displayed a deep, restless dissatisfaction with the direction of American life and institutions. Feeling unsettled and insecure in the post-war period, McCarthy’s supporters believed themselves to be living in a world in which their liberties were arbitrarily and outrageously invaded. They felt “spied upon, plotted against, betrayed, and very likely destined for total ruin,” Hofstadter wrote.13 Their enemy was communism and its putative defenders. McCarthyism set the tone of the political life in the 1950s and fostered a dangerous, punitive assault not only against communists but also against those of elite status – the “striped-pants diplomats,” Ivy League graduates, high-ranking generals, college presidents, intellectuals, the Eastern upper classes, Harvard professors, and members of Phi Beta Kappa, who were understood to be the source of the nation’s difficulties and failings.14 Hofstadter interpreted the broad vilification of elites as an attack on New Deal liberalism and on the intelligent mind per se.
Consistent with the status-based analytical framework of his earlier work, Hofstadter suggested that McCarthyism was born in part of the rootlessness and heterogeneity of American life in the period just after World War II. Of key salience was its adherents’ fall from status and the peculiar form taken by their search for secure identity. Followers of McCarthy were agitated by fears of the cosmopolitan society that was emerging around them. Why was this? Hofstadter theorized that “interest-based” politics are dominant in periods of hard economic times; “status-based” politics are dominant in prosperous times. The 1950s, a time of rising prosperity, were characterized by the intense status concerns of persons in two main groups: old-family white Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs), whose immediate ancestors had been Populists and Progressives, and, secondarily, Germans and Irish immigrant Catholics. The anxiety of the WASPs was rooted in their cultural decline. The anxiety of the German and Irish immigrant groups derived from their unease about their newfound prosperity and need to demonstrate their fundamental Americanism. With Irish and German immigrants, the politics of religion was a factor. Protestants for decades had bashed Catholics as politically untrustworthy because of their allegiance to the Vatican hierarchy. Declaiming their true Americanism through support of McCarthy was a way for Irish and German Catholics to counter the Protestant charge. In the end, Hofstadter veered toward the kind of social psychology found in Adorno and the scholars whose work appeared in The New American Right. Hofstadter suggested that the hyper-patriotic, hyper-conformist pseudo-conservatives about whom he was concerned were usually the same kinds of people as the anti-Semites whom Adorno examined in his opus. They had the same obsession with authority. “The mechanisms at work in both complexes are quite the same,” Hofstadter wrote.15
For pseudo-conservatism is among other things a disorder in relation to authority, characterized by an inability to find other modes for human relationship than those of more or less complete domination or submission. The pseudo-conservative always imagines himself to be dominated and imposed upon because he feels that he is not dominant, and knows of no other way of interpreting his position. He imagines that his own government and his own leaders are engaged in a more or less continuous conspiracy against him because he has come to think of authority only as something that aims to manipulate and deprive him. It is for this reason, among others, that he enjoys seeing outstanding generals, distinguished Secretaries of State, and prominent scholars brow-beaten.16
Hofstadter revisited the topic eleven years later in the wake of the popular excitement surrounding the presidential candidacy of Barry Goldwater. Somewhat less social psychological and more historical in presentation, “Pseudo-Conservatism Revisited – 1965” still rested on the concept of status anxiety. But whereas the followers of Joseph McCarthy had come from mixed class and mixed religious backgrounds, Hofstadter claimed that the demographic profile of the John Birch Society and other typical Goldwater backers revealed them to be well-educated, middle- and upper-status Republican Protestants who carried into secular affairs the Manichaean, apocalyptic style of thought prevalent in the fundamentalist religious tradition. The result, Hofstadter wrote, was a curiously crude form of anti-communism, one that deprecated presidents as men of wholly evil intent who conspired against the public good, and that denounced New Deal-inspired economic policies as a grave danger to the fabric of free society.17 By 1963, when he wrote his capstone essay on the topic, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” Hofstadter had come to the conclusion that the anti-intellectual conspiratorial style was a steady, ineradicable feature of American life that surfaced periodically in waves of varying intensity.
The mid-twentieth-century paranoid style was similar to older conspiracy theories about the Masons and the Illuminati, in Hofstadter’s view. Like the narrative structure of the religious millenarian formula from which it borrowed – rankest betrayal, then constancy and redemption – the paranoid politics of the mid-twentieth-century pseudo-conservative offered salvation if true Americans stood firm and fought the evil enemy to the finish.18 What was distinctive about the modern right wing in contrast to its nineteenth-century forebears lay in its conviction that “America has been largely taken away from them and their kind.”19 In the eyes of the Goldwater right, liberals had brought the economy under the direction of the federal government to pave the way for socialism or communism. Many Goldwater supporters believed the government and other key social institutions to be infiltrated by a network of communist agents. They interpreted every instance of public incompetence as a deliberate act of treason.
But the paranoid style of the mid-twentieth century was different from earlier incarnations in one central respect. The mass media altered the calculus because, typically, they intensified paranoid movements.
Important changes may be traced to the effects of the mass media. The villains of the modern right are much more vivid than those of their paranoid predecessors, much better known to the public; the contemporary literature of the paranoid style is by the same token richer and more circumstantial in personal description and personal invective. For the vaguely delineated villains of the anti-Masons, for the obscure and disguised Jesuit agents, the little-known papal delegates of the anti-Catholics, for the shadowy international bankers of the monetary conspiracies, we may now substitute eminent public figures like Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower, Secretaries of State like Marshall, Acheson, and Dulles, justices of the Supreme Court like Frankfurter and Warren, and the whole battery of lesser but still famous and vivid conspirators headed by Alger Hiss.20
Hofstadter’s social psychological approach is descriptively arresting. It also holds some theoretical appeal when trying to understand the Tea Party phenomenon. After all, the heat and invective, the heavy dose of persecution and victimhood, the sudden leap to wild, conspiratorial conclusions are rather astonishing and beg explanation. Many, in Hofstadter’s time and today, comment on right-wing rage and resentment. But what is the basis of this fury and umbrage? The Hoftstadter thesis at least hazards an explanation: status anxiety, angry bewilderment over the sense of loss of group rank. What distinguishes the Hofstadter thesis is the effort to link political orientation to social structure (which, in fact, was typical of older sociological approaches to the study of social movements). The problem with the social psychological approach, as we noted in chapter 1, is that it makes it easy to label as irrational and reactionary those political actors and behaviors with which the researcher happens to disagree. Perhaps, skeptics argue, we should just take people at their word rather than try to read the deep, subconscious reasons that lay beneath what they say they believe. Moreover, formulaic conspiratorial readings of events are not just the property of the right wing, as Hofstadter’s critics noted. All kinds of irrationality can be found in political life. Conspiracy theories can be found on the left, as well as on the right. In our time, for example, many believe that the Bush administration or rogue elements of the U.S. military had prior knowledge of or carried out the September 11 attacks, and have devoted years of intense effort to prove this. Other critics found Hofstadter’s historical evidence thin and thus his central thesis flawed.21 The worry of the contributors to The Radical Right, including Hofstadter, always harked back to Nazism: that is, whether this or that mass movement portended the advent of fascism in America – a fear that seemed somewhat overwrought. Perhaps the most consequential scholarly critique, that of Michael Paul Rogin, was that Hofstadter’s central empirical presumption was simply wrong. The groups that sided with McCarthy had not historically been associated with the Populist or Progressive movements. McCarthyism’s roots were in traditional conservatism, not agrarian radicalism.22
Hofstadter revived: Anti-intellectualism and the new paranoid style
Notwithstanding these criticisms of the Hofstadter thesis, observers found a replay of key elements of his central notions of anti-intellectualism and the paranoid style in the political climate of the new millennium. Media treatment of the 2000 presidential campaign tended to depict the irritating and smarmy egghead city slicker Al Gore against the intellectually incurious and lazy, but winsome country boy George W. Bush. As Todd Gitlin, for one, commented, invoking Hofstadter,
In the eyes of half the population, the vice president [Gore] fell prey to a suspicion that he was not only preachy but also a sharpie. In the media’s campaign story line, the standard charge against Gore, shared by the Bush campaign and the comedians, was that, like the traditional confidence man, Gore – too smart for his own good – lied, while Bush was the amiable common man.23
Indeed, candidate Bush’s educational mediocrity and affected anti-intellectual, good-old-boy persona seemed to energize his supporters. Trying to make sense of this phenomenon, commentators noted the heavy presence of southern and midwestern evangelical Protestants in Bush’s electoral base and returned to Hofstadter’s concepts of status anxiety and the paranoid style for explanatory guidance. As the victorious Bush took up the process of governing, many saw evidence of the anti-intellectualism Hofstadter had described decades earlier. Commentators noted the administration’s previously described contempt for science in the debates over climate change and environmental protection, its blithe ignoring of inconvenient contrary evidence with regard to Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction and the supposed link between Iraq and al-Qaeda, and so on. As the historian Jon Wiener observed after giving partial due to Hofstadter’s scholarly critics, Hofstadter may have been wrong about yesterday’s populists, but he was right about today’s Republicans.24
The rise of the Tea Party in the wake of the economic crisis and the election of Barack Obama prompted a further revisit of Hofstadter. Some Tea Partiers’ baffling pronouncements on Obama’s purported non-citizenship, Islamic faith, and treasonous Kenyan socialism were seen by many as the latest display of the paranoid style in American politics. To be sure, these kinds of claims did not emerge simply with Obama’s election and his response to the economic crisis. After all, fears of U.N. storm-troopers taking over America circulated widely during the Clinton years; charges that the Federal Emergency Management Agency had built camps that could detain citizens were rampant after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 – not to mention the belief that the 9/11 attacks were not perpetrated by al-Qaeda operatives but were the result of an “inside job” by some element of the U.S. government. But that was Hofstadter’s point: there is a constant undercurrent of conspiracy and paranoia in American political culture. Yet it clearly did seem to be the case that the number, frequency, and intensity of paranoid outbursts increased markedly after Obama’s election.25 The preoccupation among at least some significant elements of the Tea Party with Obama’s birth, race, and religion (and therefore the legitimacy of his election victory) belied the movement’s claims that its anxieties were solely over economic matters. Race and national identity were also of major concern.
The Hofstadter revival thus rests on the fact that despite the scholarly problems inherent in the social psychological analysis of a paranoid style, Hofstadter’s succinct oeuvre provides a set of tools for help in grasping some of the most baffling features of contemporary American politics. The overweening conservative discourse in the period following Obama’s election was one of a particular kind of restoration, captured in the ubiquitous Tea Party slogan, “We want our country back!” The slogan echoed Hofstadter’s wording on the feeling of dispossession characteristic of earlier conservative revolts. Again, in the historian’s words, describing followers of Joseph McCarthy, “America has been largely taken away from them and their kind.” In the Tea Party political moment, the right wing sees the country as having departed from an original (almost holy) consensus expressed in the Constitution.26 As New York Times columnist David Brooks and others claimed, the Tea Party articulates a fundamental complaint shared by many Americans: the distrust of experts, especially government experts, and the feeling of being controlled by them. The Tea Party movement is made up of people who “are against the concentrated power of the educated class. They believe big government, big business, big media and the affluent professionals are merging to form a self-serving oligarchy – with bloated government, unsustainable deficits, high taxes and intrusive regulation.”27 That governmental control is unconstitutional, the Tea Party declares. Indeed, many Tea Partiers carry copies of the Constitution on their persons and consult and refer to the document, citing it in a rote originalism akin to how Christian fundamentalists carry and quote the inerrant Bible.28
After the 2008 election, local Tea Party chapters appeared to proliferate and well-funded national advocacy organizations – a few new, most longstanding – endeavored to put their stamp on the movement and lay claim to its intellectual basis. Although there are no comprehensive data on how many Tea Party groups were constituted, some research has been conducted. According to an October 2010 Washington Post study, many Tea Party organizations may have been essentially virtual, consisting of a person or two with an Internet address. Only 647 local Tea Party groups could be verified of the 2,300 to 3,000 affiliates claimed by the Tea Party Patriots (the national umbrella organization most closely linked to local Tea Party groups). And 70 percent of the groups said they had not participated in any political campaigning in 2010. At the same time, the research also revealed a great deal of genuine grassroots localism underlying the Tea Party movement. These were not “Astroturf” groups: that is, made to appear as if they were grassroots but in actuality created by existing national advocacy organizations.29
At the core of the movement were hundreds of active local Tea Party chapters and several national organizations: Tea Party Patriots, Tea Party Express, Tea Party Nation, FreedomWorks, Americans for Prosperity. These groups held the public protests and rallies widely covered by the news media, and devoted time and large amounts of cash to the 2010 midterm elections. Although there was no official platform, Tea Party-backed candidates stood united on tax-related issues. They advocated the continuation of the Bush tax cuts, the repeal of the estate tax, and the replacement of the progressive income tax with a flat tax or a national sales tax. Many expressed willingness to allow Social Security withholding to be diverted into private investment accounts and Medicare into a voucher system. Invoking the Tenth Amendment, they called for the repeal of the health care and financial regulatory legislation passed by the Democratic-controlled Congress, and insisted that many government social programs, even entire Cabinet departments, were unconstitutional.30 Some advocated eliminating or lowering the federal minimum wage, others the elimination of the Seventeenth Amendment’s direct election of senators by popular vote in favor of the pre-1913 system under which senators were elected by state legislatures. Many called for a balanced budget amendment. The idea of a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions was anathema because such a system would entail further government control of private enterprise, not to mention the fact that Tea Partiers judged claims and evidence of climate change a liberal hoax.31 Those political candidates who did not stand fast with these positions – even reliable hard-line conservative Republican incumbents – were treated with contempt by the Tea Party movement.
But note that the above summary of Tea Party-linked positions was largely the effort of outsiders to make coherence of them. When articulated by Tea Partiers themselves, in rallies or on the stump or on websites, the positions often were muddled, accompanied by false empirical data and outlandish historical claims. Here again, Hofstadter had relevance. His description of the intensely rationalistic mode of paranoid “scholarship” of earlier historical periods – an obsessive accumulation of facts and evidence and the marshaling of these toward a “proof” that required curious leaps of imagination and an ability to incorporate, thus explain away, conflicting information32 – was also descriptive of much Tea Party and right-wing intellectual work in the 2000s. Indeed, in keeping with their anti-intellectual bent, Tea Partiers often displayed an extraordinary, almost defiant, ignorance of the nature of government and policy, as in the oft-repeated demand articulated during the health care bill debate: “Keep the government out of my Medicare!” Some Tea Party-aligned candidates for the 2010 midterm elections seemed almost to revel in their lack of specific knowledge of policy issues. It was as if ignorance was a badge of authenticity, of being one of the people and not of the reviled expert elite. One’s values were far more important than one’s command of policy details. To underscore this dynamic, the popular stock of Sarah Palin, GOP vice-presidential candidate in the 2008 election and Tea Party heroine, continued to rise despite resignation from office, public gaffes and untruths, and family scandals – in large part because, to supporters, her foibles and apparently unadorned lifestyle trappings made her seem genuine, un-elite.33
Who are these anti-elitists, these Tea Partiers? According to a widely cited 2010 CBS News/New York Times demographic survey, Tea Party supporters – not necessarily the activists – are older, better educated, and wealthier than the average American. They appear to be majority male; they are overwhelmingly white; they are mostly Protestant, and, of those, substantially evangelical. The basic demographics are these: 89 percent of Tea Partiers are white; 59 percent are men; 75 percent are 45 years of age or older; 56 percent have an annual household income of over $50,000 and 20 percent over $100,000; 61 percent are Protestant, 39 percent evangelical; 22 percent are Catholic, and 39 percent report attending religious services weekly; 54 percent identify as Republicans and 41 percent as Independents. More Tea Party supporters live in the South and West than in the Northeast and Midwest. Many are or were small business owners. Unlike their media portrayal as political neophytes, many have political experience, interestingly, in the Goldwater campaign.34 Like the southern California Goldwater activists chronicled by Lisa McGirr in her study Suburban Warriors, women are rather prominent in the visible leadership of the local Tea Party groups.35 The leadership and staff of the national, Washington DC-based organizations such as Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks – the longstanding ultra-free-market advocacy organizations established with funding from billionaire energy industrialists Charles and David Koch – tend to be long-term political operatives (like former House Majority Leader Dick Armey), including lobbyists and young former congressional staffers along with Internet-savvy communication consultants.36 Surprisingly, most Tea Party adherents are not personally affected by the policies they hate. They have not lost jobs and do not feel particularly threatened by the decline of their retirement investments and/or drop in the value of their homes. Seventy percent of Tea Party adherents in the survey reported that their own economic situation is “fairly good,” and only 14 percent testified to experiencing “hardship.” Thus it is reasonable to conclude that their rage may be primarily ideological, not narrowly interest based. Their older age, whiteness, and class position would seem to comport with Hofstadter’s notion of status decline. The “we want our country back” lament conveys a nostalgic loss for “the America we grew up in,” an America in which people like themselves and their old-fashioned values were dominant. Note, however, that the Tea Party’s status anxiety takes place during a period of economic decline, not, going by Hofstadter’s usual historical pattern, during a period of economic prosperity.
The most important stated issue of concern for Tea Party supporters is the size and role of the federal government. Of course, the CBS News/New York Times poll also confirms at least in part the old saw that Americans tend to be ideologically conservative but operationally liberal: Tea Partiers want the big federal programs that benefit them (Medicare, Social Security) largely maintained and defended. And, when pushed, even the supposedly all-important issue of federal deficits yields, at least a bit, to self-interest: ninety-two percent of Tea Partiers support smaller government, but if smaller government would require cuts in Social Security, Medicare, education, or defense, the number drops nearly 20 percentage points. Granted, 73 percent support of smaller government is huge. Still, the drop could be read to show that Tea Partiers’ concern is not simply the state of the economy as a whole but also their own economic conditions and, importantly, the sense of their deservingness. They are sanguine enough to have government assist them – “libertarianism with benefits,” as the historian Ronald Formisano cleverly labels it37 – but they oppose the expansion of government to assist others whom they consider undeserving.
Here it is important to delve a bit deeper. Just who are the undeserving? They are those who at least ostensibly are without an ethic of personal responsibility. Despite the purported animosity toward elites writ large, most of the Tea Party’s anger is directed far less at Wall Street brokers and mortgage lenders than toward, on the one hand, those much lower in the class system, including the overextended foreclosed homeowners reviled in Rick Santelli’s rant, and, on the other hand the “credentialed” – that is, those with higher educations who assume the role of experts and policy-makers. This points to the “producerist populism” examined in the previous chapter as underlying the Tea Party revolt and informing its implicit petit bourgeois class appeal.38 Presumably caught between the personally irresponsible freeloaders below and subject to the government-backed whims and cultural snobbery of the liberal educated elite above, Tea Party followers tend to see themselves as the oppressed middle, the people who work hard, pay taxes, find themselves “regulated to death,” and suffer discrimination because of unfair, unconstitutional affirmative action for (undeserving) minorities. Indeed, Tea Partiers discern a nefarious alliance between the credentialed elite and the undeserving.
Despite Tea Party disavowals of racism, racial minorities count heavily in the “undeserving” category. In a November 2010 poll, 61 percent of Tea Party supporters said that discrimination against whites was a major problem. Indeed, the occasional sign at Tea Party rallies equated the Obama presidency to “white slavery.” Fifty-seven percent of white evangelicals echoed this sentiment, as did 56 percent of Republicans. (Forty-four percent of all people surveyed responded this way.)39 Tea Party rallies often feature racial minorities as speakers in order to show that racism is anathema to the movement. But the heavy inclusion of racial minorities, including Hispanic illegal immigrants, in the category of the undeserving underscores that the Tea Party’s racial attitudes are simply more subtle than overt racism; they define race as a cultural, rather than a biological, category. Racial minorities tend to be undeserving because they tend to want handouts. Young people, who demographically are now far less white than Tea Partiers, also tend to be included in the undeserving category – especially young people asking for help on student loans. And public sector workers, also often more racially diverse than Tea Partiers, are included in the undeserving category because their overly generous benefits and pensions come at taxpayers’ expense.
The political subjectivity which the Tea Party appeals to – and, in turn, produces – is the victimized, dictated-to, predominantly white middle. Big government, referred to by one Tea Party author as “the Leviathan,” à la Thomas Hobbes, irresponsibly funnels tax dollars to “losers.”40 As one typical online responder to the CBS News survey wrote, “One thing that seems apparent though, the real reason you jerks hate them is because they are the very people you lie-berals despise. Hard working, small business owning, tax paying people that make the country work.”41 This is nothing if not a restatement of the 1970s neoconservative critique of the New Class, and confirmation that victimhood is among the most powerful identity positions in American politics – for the left as well as the right. For the Tea Party the oppressor is not the familiar historic demons of left-wing populism, to wit, Wall Street, unfeeling corporations, and the malefactors of great wealth. Rather, the oppressor is the federal government and the smug educated elite that inhabits its swollen bureaucratic ranks. In assigning blame for the economic crisis, Tea Partiers generally pointed to Congress and the Obama administration rather than Wall Street or the Bush administration. Wall Street took some rhetorical hits here and there, but at the end of the day it mostly received a pass from the Tea Party.42 In the final analysis, Tea Partiers’ concern about the U.S. deficit is enveloped within their fear of tax hikes: big government will redistribute their hard-earned dollars to the undeserving. And the Tea Party’s solution to the economic crisis? Cut back government drastically and return to tried-and-true free-market principles.
The ostensible sins of the Obama administration were embodied in three big government initiatives: (1) the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), which addressed the Great Recession by bailing out financial institutions (including the insurance company AIG, and certain large, troubled industrial corporations, notably General Motors and Chrysler, through bankruptcy and the government taking large, even if temporary, ownership positions); (2) the $787 billion dollar economic stimulus package known officially as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act; and (3) the health care reform bill (The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act), which amplified Tea Partiers’ anxiety over the federal government’s intrusive, costly, unconstitutional control over the everyday lives of Americans. The Tea Party denounced these actions as “socialism.” A variation on the socialism charge was “corporatism,” that the Obama administration was merging big government and big corporations into one unholy apparatus of social control. Conservatives of a libertarian bent, including people dear to the Tea Party movement such as Congressman Ron Paul and Fox News host Glenn Beck, articulated variations of this view. One of the clearest statements came from Steven Malanga of the Manhattan Institute:
If [Obama’s] agenda harks back to anything, it is to corporatism, the notion that elite groups of individuals molded together into committees or public–private boards can guide society and coordinate the economy from the top down and manage change by evolution, not revolution. It is a turn-of-the 20th century philosophy, updated for the dawn of the 21st century, which positions itself as an antidote to the kind of messy capitalism that has transformed the Fortune 500 and every corner of our economy in the last half century. To do so corporatism seeks to substitute the wisdom of the few for the hundreds of millions of individual actions and transactions of the many that set the direction of the economy from the bottom up.
The condemnation of Obama economic policy was that it undermined the dynamic nature of the free-enterprise system in favor of “a world managed by the few, the elect, through the state.”43 With the charge of corporatism, the animosity toward corporate CEOs and Wall Street was mostly shifted to the government. Hence the link again to producerist populism’s anger about elites, experts, the New Class: expertise as a hidden, insidious form of liberalism. Obama betrayed laissez-faire entrepreneurial capitalism through dangerous and unconstitutional state interventionism. Bankers surely were not beloved by the Tea Party movement, but in the final analysis even the bankers were pawns in the Tea Party view: liberal government policies coerced banks to award sub-prime mortgages to undeserving minorities.44 At the far rhetorical end of the accusation, Obama’s corporatism was called “crony capitalism,” even “Hitlernomics.” Progressivism is fascism.45
Thus the continued relevance of Hofstadter’s paranoid style analysis. In the 1950s some people needed an explanation as to why America wasn’t winning the Cold War. Here was the most powerful country on earth losing the international struggle to its communist foes. Joseph McCarthy’s explanation was: internal betrayal. America’s political leaders, if not themselves communists, protected and coddled the communist enemy and, in so doing, betrayed America. In the first decades of the twenty-first century, the Tea Party movement demanded an explanation as to why America, the greatest country in world history, found itself beset by a financial crisis and cruel economic recession. The Tea Party explanation was, at least in part: internal betrayal. The current domestic enemy is not communists but elitists, including the privileged, exotic, strangely named “Kenyan socialist” who is perhaps “the most anti-business president” in American history.46 How else to understand the peculiar, undying preoccupation with Barack Obama’s birth and whether he is secretly a Muslim?
Elements of Tea Party ideology and their intellectual roots
The Tea Party harangue about Obama’s socialism underscores the apparent shift in the post-World War II conservative fusionist coalition from dominance by its traditionalist wing back to its libertarian wing – just at the moment when the capitalist economy ran into deep trouble. The traditionalists or social conservatives, as we have seen, came to the fore in the late 1970s when evangelical Christians became politically mobilized by the perception of threats to their institutions and values. Their entrance en masse into the world of electoral politics helped make the Reagan Revolution. Social conservatives held sway within the conservative coalition until the 2006 midterm elections. At the intellectual level, conservative political engagement in the wake of the Great Recession and the election of Barack Obama is in large part a re-fight over the New Deal. It is the libertarians who provide the intellectual firepower in the critique of the current situation and it is they who counsel the restoration of an “authentic” capitalism. Just as Richard Hofstadter has been revived on the left, on the right the sales of the decades-old books by Friedrich Hayek and Ayn Rand are once again on the rise, as is the long obscure 1850 text, The Law, by Frederic Bastiat, which denounced taxes on behalf of schools or roads as “theft.”47 FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity, the established ultra-free-market national advocacy organizations ardent to gather Tea Party activism under their ideological aegis, help provide Tea Party groups with arguments about taxation and deficits. When Tea Partiers protest Obama’s policies as socialistic they are, at bottom, denouncing the level, perhaps even the principle, of taxation, for taxation beyond some very restricted level of collective security is, to them, illegitimate, theft even, which makes the entire thrust of twentieth-century progressive politics essentially criminal. In this regard the Tea Party is heir to the post-World War II exemption of military spending from the conservative denunciation of the state, as well as heir to the state-based tax revolts of the late 1970s, when California voters first rolled back state property taxes.48 To be sure, this is complicated. Tea Partiers do support government entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare – but for themselves: the deserving, the responsible. But in the abstract, this is an attack on the New Deal and the New Deal institutions that have become so much a part of contemporary American life. Indeed, the right-wing intellectual attacks on the Obama administration from the likes of Jonah Goldberg, Amity Shlaes, Ron Paul, and Glenn Beck are simply new (and intellectually shabbier) versions of the 1940s critiques of the New Deal.49
Another conservative intellectual linkage, if only barely acknowledged, is the legacy of the political philosopher Leo Strauss. The “progressivism is fascism” charge stemmed in part from the identification of preexisting and timeless natural rights in America’s founding documents, and the (reprehensible) rejection of these by liberals. Franklin Roosevelt’s renegotiation of the social contract to include economic rights was a particular piece of perfidy. Because government, rather than God or nature, bestowed these economic rights, this precipitous act was said to undermine and repudiate the earlier timeless and universal rights. And that is because, as Strauss and others argued, the basis of political order is acceptance of moral constraints that lie outside the human sphere.50 The consequence of the rejection of natural law is the elevation of the state over and against the citizen, the “progressive” planner/expert over the autonomous individual.
A peculiar, conspiratorial version of this thesis is found in the work of the Mormon anti-communist theorist W. Cleon Skousen. Championed by then Fox News host Glenn Beck and a primary source of the television commentator’s on-air political lectures, Skousen’s The 5000 Year Leap argues that the Constitution was rooted not in the Enlightenment but in the devout, Bible-based Christianity of the Founding Fathers. The founders, according to Skousen, rejected European collectivist philosophies in favor of divinely inspired principles of limited government. God-given natural law is the only reliable basis for sound government and just human relations.51 Much along the lines of John Birch Society scholarship, Skousen’s earlier works, The Naked Communist (1958) and The Naked Capitalist (1971), held forth on the worldwide communist threat and the betrayal of America by the “Ivy League Establishment.”52 Some Tea Party leaders, Glenn Beck prominent among them, lay the origin of progressive apostasy at the feet of Woodrow Wilson, the “original elitist,” who, it is said, believed that university intellectuals should decide how the world should be run. It is the hubristic violation of natural law that aligns liberalism with fascism. Under the tutelage of Beck, a latter-day would-be Father Coughlin, the resurrected understanding of timeless, original rights is joined to the attack on elites and the government institutions championed by those elites. It was under Woodrow Wilson, for example, that the loathed Federal Reserve System and the graduated income tax came to be. Hating Woodrow Wilson is a maxim among intellectually inclined Tea Partiers.53
Glenn Beck has become a leading Tea Party public intellectual, supplementing his lectures on both television (for several years on the Fox News Channel, now on Glenn Beck TV) and radio (distributed to 400-plus stations by Premiere Radio Networks) with an online, for-profit Beck University. Among other things, Beck discusses serious books on the air, sketching diagrams and conceptual maps, and establishing particular interpretations of historical context. His lectures and courses recycle themes from the works of conservative thinkers W. Cleon Skousen, Frederic Bastiat, and others, and condemn the American history taught in schools and universities as false. The conventional version of American history, according to Beck and his mentors, is the result of a conspiracy by ideologically driven liberals. In this, Alexander Zaitchik and Sean Wilentz each have noted, Beck has revived the ideas circulated some fifty years ago by the John Birch Society.54
The turn to Skousen as an intellectual authority for the Tea Party underscores the fact that the apparent dominance of the libertarians in the current version of conservative fusionism is, in the end, not all that significant, for accompanying the Tea Party plea to restore genuine capitalism is also a call to restore genuine Christianity. Skousen’s The 5000 Year Leap is one of many tracts in a decades-long campaign among conservative evangelicals to make clear that the Founding Fathers explicitly intended the United States to be a Christian nation, and that America’s laws and school curricula ought to reflect that historical and genealogical fact. A central figure in this particular effort is David Barton, another Glenn Beck favorite, and a principal textbook is America’s Providential History by Mark A. Beliles and Stephen K. McDowell.55 Presented in large format with many illustrations, America’s Providential History ties biblical passages to the writings and practices of the Founding Fathers. The Constitution, divinely inspired, rests on bedrock notions of individual salvation and individual freedom; liberty is a matter of following the Spirit of the Lord.56 The book’s claim that government-bestowed rights and entitlement programs elevate government over God and thus constitute idolatry is widely held among Tea Partiers. As Sharron Angle put it in a radio interview during her unsuccessful 2010 campaign as GOP candidate for the Nevada U.S. Senate,
Entitlement programs … make government our God. And that’s really what’s happening in this country is a violation of the First Commandment. We have become a country entrenched in idolatry, and that idolatry is the dependency upon our government. We’re supposed to depend upon God for our protection and our provision and our daily bread, not for our government.57
Note the elision of First Amendment to First Commandment. It is not simply un-American to rely on government; it is un-Christian, as well. The linkage of this perspective to American exceptionalism also is clear and direct: What makes the United States the greatest nation in the history of the world and its values universal is the fact that America is based on private enterprise, which is itself the fruit of Christian (specifically Protestant) concepts of individual freedom and responsibility.58 These motifs, by the way, are not very far removed from the religious and political fundamentalism articulated by Carl McIntire in the 1950s. In sum, although there exist some political differences between libertarians and social conservatives on questions regarding the extent of civil liberties, the current Christian right and the libertarians have the identical long-term political goal – to shrink support for government. The new twenty-first-century culture war is waged over the role of government.59
To be sure, certain evangelical leaders expressed some dismay about Tea Party politics early in 2010.60 The Tea Party is funded largely by persons and organizations closely tied to pro-business, ultra-free-market conservatism, not to church-linked social conservatism. But talk of a rift between libertarians and social conservatives is clearly overblown. The ethnographic part of Skocpol and Williamson’s study of local Tea Party organizations revealed that social conservative members generally ran the meetings and propelled the intellectual agenda, and the libertarian members overwhelmingly tended to go along.61 This cooperation extends to the national conservative conversation, as well. At the Values Voter Summit, a key conference where contemporary conservatives meet, debate, recruit, posture, and establish their policy orientations and positions, the religious right fully embraced the Tea Party movement at the September 2010 confab. The announced foci of the summit represented an effort to bridge libertarians and traditionalists: “Protect Marriage; Champion Life; Strengthen the Military; Limit Government; Control Spending; Defend Our Freedoms.” The summit featured many of the old social conservative hands, from Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins to American Values president Gary Bauer, who, while embracing the economically inflected themes of the horror of massive government deficits and Obama’s class warfare, tied these effortlessly to old stances on abortion and human rights for the unborn, judicial activism, and the danger of the homosexual agenda.62 Glenn Beck may have become more dubious of the threat of the homosexual agenda, but his call for a “third Great Awakening” surely fused a social libertarian agenda with that of the religious right.63
In terms of policy, an insistent focus of Republican office-holders at state and federal levels after the 2010 elections was to pare back abortion rights and defund Planned Parenthood, even changing the category of rape covered under the abortion exceptions to “forcible rape.”64 Likewise, political figures usually identified as economic conservatives, such as Paul Ryan, leader of the GOP House majority on budget matters, couched proposed cuts to government “entitlements” in the personal responsibility language common to both social conservatism and libertarianism: “[W]e don’t want to turn the safety net into a hammock that lulls able-bodied people to lives of dependency and complacency, that drains them of their will and their incentive to make the most of their lives.”65 The raucous 2012 GOP primaries revealed an ideological temper that wedded economic conservatism to social conservatism through the culture war on elites and entitlements. The unexpected ascension of the Catholic ultra-traditionalist Rick Santorum as serious challenger to Mitt Romney from the right was due to Santorum’s channeling of the social concerns evangelical conservatives hold dear. Romney, who styled himself as a business conservative, won the GOP nomination, but he was forced to embrace many of the positions of the evangelical bloc. And in choosing Paul Ryan as his running mate for the 2012 GOP ticket, Romney tapped a hard-line conservative, a passionate devotee of Ayn Rand, who bridged both the evangelical and libertarian right. In an interview on the Glenn Beck program, Ryan paraded his fusionist bona fides: “[Progressivism] is really a cancer because it basically takes the notion that our rights come from God and nature and turns it on its head and says, no, no, no, no, no, they come from government, and we here in government are here to give you your rights and therefore ration, redistribute and regulate your rights.”66
In short, this remains the fusionist conservatism of traditionalism and libertarianism described in previous chapters, now embodied in the Tea Party movement. Any who argue that the Tea Party’s influence had run its course by 2012 need only consider its central role in several important GOP primary elections, including the defeat of six-term moderate Richard Lugar in the Senate primary in Indiana and the easy victory of Tea Party challenger Ted Cruz in the Senate primary in Texas.67 Mitt Romney himself articulated a version of Tea Party producerist ideology in a closed-door speech to wealthy donors during the presidential campaign, in which he declared that 47 percent of the people would vote for President Obama “no matter what,” because they are “dependent upon government … believe that they are victims … believe that government has a responsibility to care for them … [and] believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it.” The 47 percent were takers, as opposed to makers, of wealth.68 Although Romney moderated his self-presentation during the campaign, he essentially restated the “47 percent ‘takers’” declaration in a post-election conference call with fundraisers and donors, attributing his loss to President Obama in part to big policy “gifts” that Obama had bestowed on loyal Democratic constituencies, including young voters, African-Americans, and Hispanics.69
Connections to violent groups?
To the extent that the Tea Party movement reflects the fear of the strong state and the rage at feeling controlled, like its historic predecessor movements on the right it hovers between “legitimate” conservative populism and proto-violent conspiracy. The dispersed nature of most Tea Party organizations means that the groups can be quite different, from truly local grassroots newcomers, to essentially GOP front organizations such as the Tea Party Express and market advocates FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity, to allies of a reinvigorated John Birch Society and the Patriot and Militia movements. These latter movements, hard to classify clearly, have hovered at the fringes of anti-establishment conservatism for decades. Since the 1970s, Patriot and Militia groups have wrapped themselves in a discourse of reaction and violence in an effort to renegotiate masculinity in the wake of the U.S. defeat in Vietnam and the challenge posed to traditional culture by minority and feminist political activism.70 The groups were reenergized by the election to the presidency of an African-American man with a foreign-sounding name and suspected Muslim ties. The Patriot and Militia groups hew to an anti-government, anti-tax strict constitutionalism and are sometimes organized along paramilitary lines. They reputedly accumulate weapons and engage in military-type training exercises. A few of their members have engaged in racist violence. Timothy McVeigh, the domestic terrorist responsible for the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995, traveled in Patriot movement circles.
Patriot and Militia groups now operate websites that offer their conspiratorial analysis of current events. In their view, reminiscent of Phyllis Schlafly’s A Choice Not an Echo, governments and economies are controlled by a network of shadowy international elites. The United States itself is on the cusp of a “New World Order” of socialist tyranny. Harking back to an old anti-Semitic canard, the Patriot movement views the “Jewish-controlled” Federal Reserve as the ultimate symbol of New World Order power. Perhaps the greatest concern of Patriot and Militia groups is the perceived campaign of the federal government to confiscate guns and impose martial law. In their view, the government orchestrated the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in order to pursue those diabolical aims.71
The connections between the Patriot and Militia movements and the Tea Party are anecdotal and subject to exaggeration, but the groups engage in some of the same analysis, and share a certain amount of the same rhetoric. Without the intervention of good patriots, declares the Friends for Liberty, a fairly typical Tea Party affiliate based in northern Idaho/eastern Washington, “Those who wish to impose collectivism and tyranny on this nation could prevail.”72 As such, some Tea Party supporters speak of resorting to their guns to meet the threat of tyranny.73 But this may be posturing for reporters and symptomatic of the weird romance of parroting the rhetoric of the fringe groups that float at the boundaries of many populist political movements.74 Other journalists who report on Tea Party rallies speak of their “festive and friendly” atmosphere notwithstanding the tough rhetoric from the stage.75 Whether or not the Tea Partiers have knowledge of William F. Buckley’s historic move to purge the John Birch Society from the conservative movement in the 1960s, some of the larger Tea Party organizations try similarly to police their more wayward members or allies. To the degree that there is an official Tea Party, it dismisses those who dispute President Obama’s citizenship (the “Birthers”) and tries to discipline or create distance from those who display protest signs of Obama as Hitler at Tea Party events (see the billboard photo in chapter 1). And in another nod to earlier political battles on the right, the Tea Party tries to keep its distance from the Republican Party. Much like the Goldwater activists of the early 1960s, Tea Partiers work within the Republican Party but display hostility toward its “establishment” wing and declaim the intention to take it over. Thus Tea Party members may seem in thrall at public rallies to Republican Party celebrities such as GOP vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin or Congresswoman Michele Bachman, but within Tea Party councils they are protective of the independence of the movement from Republican Party takeover. Indeed, many Tea Party locals endeavor to keep their distance from the national organizations that claim to speak for the Tea Party movement.76 The old worry of being absorbed by the establishment runs very deep.
In short, the Tea Party displays characteristics of a collection of generally like-minded, enraged groups rather than a tightly controlled political movement. Indeed, the Tea Party grassroots fashion themselves as leaderless, decentralized, and flexible, patterned after the distributed intelligence of the Internet, or, perhaps closer to their ideological predispositions, the decentralized genius of the market. The Tea Party movement is held together – by design – not by a top-down structure or through centralized leadership, but by commitment to a common set of values.77 The movement’s strength at this historical juncture has lain in its ability to galvanize people to political action outside the customary structures of big-time, established, moneyed politics; again, the local Tea Party organizations often resist being co-opted into those structures. That said, at the same time, the Tea Party has provided a grassroots connection to the Washington, DC Republican-based policy-making organizations that have touted low taxes and reduced government spending, and have denounced regulation for more than thirty-five years. (We might call the latter “established” anti-establishment conservatism.) As noted earlier, the national organizations provide important technical, organizational, and logistic support to the local organizations; they help fund the big rallies and offer speakers and materials and website advice.78 Finally, to return for a moment to the William F. Buckley–John Birch Society story, it is noteworthy that the JBS is now back in the legitimate conservative fold. As for the Patriot and Militia movements, they may influence some Tea Party rhetoric, but they remain at the margins of the movement. Still, in the nebulous and fluid political imagination, the Patriot and Militia groups hover like a bad omen, as if to warn that should the peoples’ righteous anger not be heeded, the groups will descend with force of violence upon the body politic to “refresh … the tree of liberty … with the blood of patriots and tyrants” – a quote from Thomas Jefferson that Tea Partiers are very fond of repeating.
Foreign policy (or the lack thereof)
An important and curious feature of the Tea Party is the absence of substantive concern in the vital area of foreign policy. The Tea Party movement’s focus, at least for the time being, is almost entirely domestic. This represents the most notable break from the pattern of post-war conservative fusionism, which, recall, made its mark by distancing itself from traditional right-wing isolationism and instead embraced the Cold War crusade against international communism. Indeed, what characterized the original fusion was its obsession with the two “rollbacks”: of the New Deal and of international communism. Yet there is barely any talk among Tea Party adherents about foreign policy. To the extent that there is, suggests David Brooks, it is in reaction to what the “elite” believes. Because the educated class is internationalist, isolationist sentiment is now at an all-time high. Because the educated class believes in multilateral action, so the number of conservative Americans who believe we should “go our own way” has risen sharply.79 In this regard, the Tea Party looks like a throwback to the pre-fusionist era. Tea Party thinking on foreign policy perhaps defaults to the libertarian Congressman Ron Paul (and Patrick Buchanan before him), who essentially articulates a paleo-conservative, isolationist view of the world, including opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Glenn Beck has been inching toward this position.80 But while Ron Paul has appeal to libertarians, his condemnation of America’s wars makes many in the Tea Party movement (not to mention the GOP) nervous. Indeed, always keen to “support the troops” and display their patriotism, the Tea Party tends not to make public pronouncements on foreign policy lest those cast aspersions on the armed forces and their missions.
Thus the assumption of a default paleo-conservatism is probably too definitive. Tea Party-affiliated leaders, as they climb the political ladder and are forced to comment on foreign policy matters, seem to be all over the map. Sarah Palin and Marco Rubio, Florida’s 2010 elected U.S. Senator and Tea Party favorite, endorse aspects of George W. Bush’s aggressive neoconservative foreign policy. Palin believes the United States must take the fight to international terrorism (and has sidled up to Israel in order to facilitate that fight, which may also reflect her aim to appeal to the Christian right’s Zionism), but she also offers a variation of the old John Quincy Adams warning, “We don’t go looking for dragons to slay.”81 Rubio more fully echoes the forthright neoconservatism of the recent Republican past, pressing on the Senate floor for still more military intervention against still more enemies in the Middle East. Mitt Romney, characteristically all over the map, articulated both neoconservative and realist foreign policy views during the 2012 presidential campaign. But one thing he reiterated constantly was the Tea Party charge that President Obama had gone around the world “apologizing” for America.82
Perhaps the one common foreign policy article of faith among the Tea Party is the aversion to international organizations.83 In this they continue the legacy of their Bush administration neoconservative forebears. But the neoconservatives are largely in eclipse in the current Tea Party moment. Indeed, neoconservatives are more than occasionally denounced in Tea Party broadsides. A Pew poll found that the share of conservative Republicans agreeing that the United States should “pay less attention to problems overseas” increased from 36 percent in 2004 to 55 percent in May 2011.84 Hence some Tea Party-affiliated congressmen do not blanch with horror at the prospect of budget cuts to the Pentagon, not only because of their overweening commitment to cut federal spending, but also because they don’t mind pulling back on American military commitments abroad. Clearly, the ennui engendered by George W. Bush’s wars and the influence of the Tea Party movement have served to expand the numbers of Republicans returning to the party’s historic Robert A. Taft foreign policy isolationism and quietism.
This neglect of foreign affairs, of course, has consequences. The Tea Party’s (and, it seems, most everybody else’s) preoccupation with the domestic agenda means that the Iraq foreign policy debacle has essentially disappeared from view and its essential failure remains unexamined. And, crucially, that failure is not just a foreign policy failure. The Iraq War was and continues to be an important factor in domestic economic difficulties. Although the tax cuts that favored the wealthy were a Bush administration priority in and of themselves, it is arguable that war deficit spending hid the true cost of the tax cuts and the Middle East wars – transferring the financial burden of the wars from the present onto later generations – and thus made the wars (particularly Iraq) easier to pursue politically. One should not discount the possibility that this was not serendipity but rather a conscious strategy to hide costs, thought through by Bush operatives from the outset. After all, it was the only time in recent American history that taxes were cut during time of war. Moreover, as professors Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes argue, the war contributed indirectly to disastrous monetary policy and regulations.
The Iraq war didn’t just contribute to the severity of the financial crisis, though; it also kept us from responding to it effectively. Increased indebtedness meant that the government had far less room to maneuver than it otherwise would have had. More specifically, worries about the (war-inflated) debt and deficit constrained the size of the stimulus, and they continue to hamper our ability to respond to the recession.85
Recent foreign policy and domestic policy remain inextricably linked. Tea Party and conservative ire at Obama’s spending ignores the fact that the Bush tax cuts added over $2 trillion to the national debt in the first decade of the twentieth century.86 Deficit spending for the Bush wars at the very least ran over $1 trillion and, as estimated by Stiglitz and Bilmes, between $3 and $4 trillion over the long term, with nary a peep from the right. These numbers dwarf the deficits under Obama.
A middle level of analysis: The importance of institutions
There is a legitimate and important debate to be had about the limits of federal deficit spending, the efficacy and size of economic stimulus, how much taxation is enough, the dangers of corporatism, and the like. But Richard Hofstadter was concerned with the style of populist revolt in the mid-twentieth century in large part because it made reasoned debate impossible. As such, in the current period, it is the style of Tea Party anxieties, gripes, and claims that spurs the Hofstadter revival.
Can we use the insight of Hofstadter’s paranoid style to understand the Tea Party movement without succumbing to the reductionist social psychology it inevitably becomes? Hofstadter’s analysis entailed the description of a political style, tied to a grand social psychological theory. A central flaw, I have suggested, is the absence of a middle level of analysis to connect the two. Hofstadter presented a macro argument (social structural conditions that produce status anxiety) and a micro argument (the paranoid style), with nothing in between. Here I suggest a middle level of institutions that work in and through three key contexts. At the broad theoretical level, an institution is a well-established and structured pattern of behavior or of relationships that is accepted as a fundamental part of a culture. At a more concrete level, the organizations that facilitate that pattern are also identified as institutions. Institutions create meaning for individuals, and shape human behavior through rules, norms, and other frameworks. A middle level of institutions permits us to better connect political style, in Hofstadter’s terms, with social structure. It also enables us to grant the existence of a paranoid style while acknowledging the legitimate elements of the political critique that underlay the rage, for it is important to concentrate not just on what is false and worrisome about Tea Party ideology, but also on what it gets right.87
Institutions operate in distinct historical and cultural contexts. The first context to consider in an analysis of the Tea Party is structural: that is, the nature of political power in a two-party liberal democracy built on a mixed capitalist economy and a powerful bias in favor of capitalist institutions. The second context is cultural. Here, appreciating the strength and appeal of particular kinds of political culture characteristic of the American tradition, specifically individualism and suspicion of the state, is crucial. The third context is political and hinges on the decline of the liberal left. For the last few decades preoccupied with identity politics – equity issues concerning race, gender, and sexuality, to name the most prominent – the left no longer effectively addresses fundamental issues with regard to class and political economy. The crucial middle level, then, consists of the institutions that channel anger, anxiety, and critique in particular directions, with kinds of analysis that draw on particular historical resonances, and that produce specific kinds of political subjectivities. As conservatives have always maintained, ideas matter. But that argument, by itself, falls short. For ideas to matter, they must be channeled effectively in and through institutions. At that institutional level, the concrete networks of money, media, and political organizations are key.
The structural nature of political power within a mixed capitalist economy
The “We want our country back” anthem, punctuated by rally posters of President Obama in whiteface or alongside photos of Hitler or Lenin, may very well express both a racist shock that a black man is now the president of the United States and a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of socialism.88 But other aspects of the Tea Party critique of current American politics are rooted in reality. On the one hand, Washington politicians, Democrats nearly as much as Republicans, did do the bidding of Wall Street and the banking institutions over the last three decades, what with financial deregulation and the refusal to extend banking rules to “shadow banks,” the repeal of the Glass–Steagall separations between insurers, investment banks, and commercial banks, and legislation forbidding government oversight of derivatives and similar financial instruments.89 The credit default swaps and insurance schemes that repackaged junk mortgages and uncollateralized loans as prime-rated instruments, earning brokers millions in easy fees and a leading source of the financial meltdown of 2007–8, were unregulated – by design.90 Institutionalized bank lobbying and political contributions, buttressed by ideological campaigns extolling globalization, the virtues of deregulation, and market fundamentalism, quite obviously helped grease the favorable legislative and regulatory treatment of financial institutions and speculative practices over many years. The revolving door and web of personal relationships that tied Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the Federal Reserve, and the Treasury are empirical facts.91 In this regard, the populist sense that Washington and Wall Street have been in bed together reflects political reality. The Tea Party protests registered a genuine hatred for the financial bailout and the politics that underlay it. The Tea Party’s political vocabulary condemning the class bias and unfairness of the bailout had broad political resonance.
On the other hand, the Tea Party critique entailed a flawed understanding of the nature of the structure of institutions and power. The government’s reaction to the financial crisis of 2008, in a classic instance of Keynesian-derived crisis management, resulted in a massive infusion of federal money into the economy via the rescue of banks and Wall Street. To the degree that the state bailed out financial institutions while common people lost jobs and homes, the Tea Party at least in part properly discerned the bias of the state in favor of capitalist institutions. But that bias was reductively and misleadingly characterized as favoring “the elite,” thus personalizing what is a structural relationship. The built-in bias inheres in the fact that banking institutions constitute a crucial part of the economic infrastructure – the institutions and mechanisms and procedures of value, credit, and trust that underlie the American economy. The state is structurally and historically disposed to maintain that infrastructure and, typically in the American case, protect its private nature, not supplant it. In general, the state provides the supports for private capital accumulation and for some level of social welfare, and depends on taxes and borrowing to fund these programs. Occasionally the state needs to step in to protect the infrastructure from itself. Even the George W. Bush administration recognized this. After all, the massive state interventionist Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) was initiated during the final months of office of a stridently conservative administration. The error of the Tea Party and its fellow travelers on the right is to mistake governmental actions to rescue the financial infrastructure as “socialism.” In fact it is anything but. President Bush’s $700 billion TARP and Obama’s $787 billion dollar economic stimulus package were instances of the state engaging in crisis management to rescue capitalism from its periodic failures. A government that fails to engage in crisis management under these circumstances hazards economic depression and corresponding peril to civil order, not to mention the loss of its political legitimacy.92
Of course there was no inevitability as to the specific content of the state’s crisis management. The government could have required banks to take a “haircut”: that is, receive only a percentage of what they were owed by insurers such as AIG. The government could have required the banks’ agreement on new regulatory authority in exchange for getting bailed out. In principle the government could have taken over major banks, for example, and directed their lending practices. The government could have replicated the famous Pecora hearings that investigated the Wall Street crash in 1932, and clawed back corporate bonuses and even prosecuted certain traders and bank executives.93 Had the government gone this route, the Tea Party’s accusation of socialism would at least be a bit more plausible. But upending the structural bias toward large capitalist institutions would have required a remarkable, and hence unlikely, challenge to corporate power, customary political expectations, and legal authority. Still, President Obama, if we can believe Ron Suskind’s Confidence Men, did advocate the restructuring of many of the large, troubled banks, starting with Citigroup, but was overruled by his economic advisers (some of whom had been associated with the deregulatory policies of the past).94 Various parties have disputed Suskind’s account. Notwithstanding, the Obama administration’s unwillingness to go this tough, confrontational route served to cement the outraged sense that Washington and Wall Street continued to sleep together. After its initial broad condemnation of the bailout, the Tea Party moved quickly toward the conventional libertarian critique that capitalism was good and big government was the problem; that corporations and the rich were “ job creators” hamstrung and corrupted by parasitic political elites; and, finally, that, absent corrupt government intervention, America could return to the simple, small heroics of individual entrepreneurial initiative and the timeless free-enterprise verities of supply and demand. This is where the default small business/petit bourgeois sentiments of many Tea Party members were colonized by the ultra-free-market, stridently anti-tax positions of the plutocrat-funded FreedomWorks, Americans for Prosperity, and Club for Growth advocacy organizations. The national organizations largely succeeded in guiding the Tea Party movement back to a conventional libertarian critique.
American political culture
The bias of the state toward capitalist institutions is both structural and a mainstay of political culture. Political culture can be one of those slippery terms that explain too much and hence not much at all. But the concept does have its uses. It can be defined as the reigning beliefs on how political, governmental, and economic life should be carried out and the behavioral norms associated with those beliefs. And America does have a distinct political culture. It has always been characterized by individualism and suspicion of the strong state. Indeed, Richard Hofstadter’s “old liberalism,” rooted in the legacies of Presidents Jefferson and Jackson, championed small producers against the statism of the Hamiltonian elites. The central thesis of Louis Hartz’s The Liberal Tradition in America, that most Americans are essentially Lockean liberals committed to a worldview limiting the state’s role to protecting property relations among equal producers, is not to be taken lightly.95
This longstanding political culture inspires the interpretation proffered by observers such as Mark Lilla. The powerful tropes of individualism and suspicion of the state lie beneath both the anti-authoritarianism of the 1960s and the anti-government populism of the Tea Party, Lilla suggests. For him, the Tea Party is the latest efflorescence of the wave of populist libertarianism that started on the left in the 1960s as the celebration of private autonomy. The new, Tea Party version betrays a key difference. Historically, populist movements use the rhetoric of class solidarity to seize political power so that “the people” can exercise it for their common benefit. Tea Party populist rhetoric does something different. It fires up emotions by appealing to individual opinion, individual autonomy, and individual choice, all in the service of neutralizing, not using, political power. It gives voice to those who feel they are being bullied. They want to be left alone.96 Following the Hofstadter logic through, the current political style of conservative rage reflects not just status anxiety, but a broader, more disturbing sense of the dependence of Americans on government action, a dependence that eats at the longstanding and deeply held American belief in individual autonomy.97 Paradoxically, of course, the very individualism the Tea Party promotes was a principal contributing factor to the current economic and cultural crisis. On the one hand, the no-holds-barred, individualistic “rent-seeking” behavior of the bankers, traders, and mortgage lenders was central to the Great Recession. The financial deregulation that allowed such unaccountable speculative practices embodied, in part, the idea that regulations stifled individual entrepreneurial effort.98 On the other hand, the politics of victimhood endemic to Tea Party rhetoric in the end generates a beggar-thy-neighbor dynamic that undermines the notion of a collective life. The broader point is that in times of grave economic stress, during which the state acts to protect the socio-economic order through an unusual degree of intervention on behalf of capitalist institutions, some significant portion of the American citizenry becomes unnerved about individual autonomy – even when that intervention guards against further economic instability and even depression. Now, pointing out the strength of particular historical tropes does not really prove anything about why the Tea Party would choose one set over others. But the strength of American individualist political culture does, I think, indicate how and why certain tropes have more salience and resonance than others – especially when they are so effectively referenced, appropriated, and channeled by networks of institutions over long periods of time.
The decline of a left alternative
The noisy arrival of the Tea Party and its successes in the 2010 midterm elections underscore a hard question about the politics of the moment: why was the popular response to the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression a distinctly conservative one? This is as important as it is a difficult question to answer. The popular reaction to the Great Depression of the 1930s was generally liberal, even left wing. It was the widespread discontent of the people, manifest in political agitation, protests, and strikes, which pushed the Roosevelt administration to experiment with state intervention in the economy in ways that so departed from the previous laissez-faire orthodoxy.99 In the 1930s the left was energetic, its analyses acute, the movement was not yet discredited by Soviet totalitarianism, and its influence was vital in the popular discontent of the time. But, of course, the communist movement was destroyed in American politics, and destroyed itself as a viable ideology owing to its connection to Soviet despotism under Stalin. The power of trade unionism as a social movement – and hence as the agent of progressive activism – declined in the post-World War II period, initially owing to Taft–Hartley, and subsequently as the manufacturing sector and union density declined and unions’ endeavors shrunk largely to the servicing of their members’ delimited economic needs. It may be an overly harsh judgment, but labor’s political horizons narrowed after, in effect, it got its piece of post-war prosperity. And as the American intellectual left drifted from concern with class and economic policy to concern about culture, group stigma, and identity – and as traditional Keynesianism seemed less able to deal with the drift of the economy by the 1970s – liberalism’s political hegemony came under challenge, its allegiance to and loyalty from the working class weakened, its solutions to socioeconomic dilemmas viewed as problematic. Indeed, in our current period it is the institutions of the New Deal that are the status quo, now subject to the vagaries of bureaucratization and corruption, and hence subject to pointed criticism. Unlike the 1930s, left solutions to the endemic problems of advanced capitalism and the fiscal crisis of the state appear problematic, if not exhausted.
Politically, the embrace of the African-American struggle for equality by the liberal left in the 1960s – a righteous, necessary embrace – had serious political consequences, some foreseen, some unforeseen. The electoral departure of the white South from the Democratic Party was understood as virtually inevitable. And when the federal government began to enforce civil rights in the north through school busing and affirmative action, the result was antagonism on the part of white ethnics toward interventionist government in general and disaffection from the Democratic coalition. The unforeseen drift of the intellectual left from the struggle for political-economic reform to what has come to be known as identity politics largely sundered its historic connection with the working class and the critique of structural power, and diminished the left’s historic project defending the common good and expanding universal values.100 As one commentator put it, liberals “lost sight of the essential element that had made the coalition possible in the first place: the sense that liberalism stood with the common man and woman in their struggle against economic forces too large and powerful to be faced by individuals on their own.”101 Into that breach came a strong conservative critique, which claimed for conservatism the mantle of common sense and commonly held values. Tea Party author John O’Hara encapsulates the critique thus:
In modern times, … the Left has taken the fight for racial equality to be a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval for all their protests. They claim to be fighting for equality, but what the nanny-state proponents want is to legislate everything from your car’s mileage, despite safety concerns, to whether you can smoke in your own home, allegedly due to safety concerns, and much more. Where will it end? What’s worse, the Left does not merely want to inhibit others, it wants to enrich itself while manufacturing consent. While the Right wants to be left alone, the Left wants to take, control, and distribute as it sees fit when it sees fit. Leftists are moochers who depend on the fruits of a harvest carved out by secretive, niche legislation, government mandates, and union dues – force and fraud rather than the successes or failures of individual attempts at productivity.102
The point is that it is impossible to talk about why the Great Recession garnered a conservative political response without acknowledging the weakness of any left alternative. This judgment may itself be provisional in light of the “Occupy Wall Street” phenomenon of late 2011, which reintroduced to the political arena basic questions about inequality and the political power of corporations. But Occupy has hitherto kept its distance from conventional politics.
Institutions: Networks of money, media, and political organizations
The middle level of analysis – highlighting the important institutional role of networks of money, media, and political/intellectual organizations in supporting, directing, and energizing political movements – received some treatment in previous chapters. Recall that in the early 1970s, leading neoconservatives and some corporate leaders called on business to defend itself by entering directly into the realm of public ideas. Since then, conservatives have wielded their muscle through tight networks of foundations, think tanks, and partisan media. The Tea Party movement has benefited from those previous networks and has expanded them. The movement is networked internally and externally, connected through right-wing mass media (particularly Fox News Channel and talk radio), a plethora of Internet sites and blogs, tutored by longtime conservative political entrepreneurs, and bankrolled in part by right-wing billionaires and their foundations. Anti-establishment éminence grise Richard Viguerie dutifully leads Tea Party workshops and offers sage advice. Dick Armey lends his political expertise as former House Majority Leader through FreedomWorks.103 Many Tea Party and ideologically affiliated organizations receive significant funding from Koch-affiliated foundations and other right-wing funding sources. One must be careful here and acknowledge the reality of the social movement’s values and positions. As mentioned earlier, the Tea Party is not a “manufactured” movement; it is not “Astroturf.” It is a grassroots manifestation of genuine anxiety and deeply held political values fueled in particular by opposition to the policies of President Obama and profound unease about his identity.
But one also must understand the movement’s resource base and how its media and corporate backers pursue both material and ideological advantage. The increasingly tightly bound networks of anti-establishment conservative institutions – right-wing mass media and websites, plutocratic right-wing entrepreneurs, foundations, advocacy organizations, and think tanks described in previous chapters – feed the Tea Party, draw upon its vitality, and try to channel its grassroots activist energy. The money from wealthy entrepreneurs that now flows into the Tea Party is from the same sources that have sustained conservative political ideas and organizations for decades. Extensive and largely impossible to track, Tea Party-directed funds were primed to defeat moderate Republicans and Democrats in the 2010 midterm elections.104 Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News gives the Tea Party immense media coverage and its commentators act to orchestrate the movement. And Murdoch, through his News Corporation umbrella, directly engages in sizeable political contributions. The Koch brothers have bankrolled conservative organizations over many years to the tune of many tens of millions of dollars, and pledged hundreds of millions toward the defeat of Barack Obama in 2012. Bob Perry, the Houston homebuilder and key benefactor of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the group that attacked Democrat John Kerry in the 2004 presidential campaign, gave $7 million to American Crossroads, the conservative group founded by former George W. Bush chief adviser Karl Rove. Las Vegas tycoon Sheldon Adelson single-handedly bankrolled Newt Gingrich’s presidential primary campaign. After Gingrich faltered, Adelson donated scores of millions to Mitt Romney or the campaigning groups (“Super PACS”) supporting him.105 And these are the contributions that are known. Under the virtually unregulated campaign finance world set by the Supreme Court in the 2010 Citizens United case, it is as if Frank Capra’s chilling 1941 comedy drama Meet John Doe, in which a proto-fascist newspaper owner finances a naïve, well-meaning social movement in order to hijack it and propel him to political power, has become reality.106 Only in our moment the Kochs, the Murdochs, the Scaifes, the Perrys, the Adelsons have no need themselves to capture political office; their bankrolling of the Tea Party and the GOP means that any nationally prominent conservative Republican will do. Again, money does not create a movement, but it is a key material resource that can shape its positions and talking points, which, in turn, affect the general political discourse.107
The latter point underlies one more crucial change in political context, hinted at in chapter 2: polarizing dogmatism. Until into the 1980s, adherents of most ideological stripes – conservatives, moderates, even liberals – could be found in both political parties. Recall that the old pre-World War II conservative opposition to the New Deal crossed party lines. Because of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the politics of race, the “solid South” was Democratic but largely conservative, certainly with regard to matters of race and organized labor. For much of the twentieth century, Republicans, of the party of Abraham Lincoln, could be liberal on race and other matters, such as protecting the environment and opposing corporate power, and retain their conservative credentials. Conservation, after all, was a Republican issue from the time of Theodore Roosevelt. The passage of the National Environmental Policy Act in 1970 was a bipartisan affair. Strong antitrust policy was the watchword of western and upper Midwest progressive Republicans in the mold of Wisconsin Senator Robert LaFollette. Many Republicans from the Northeast were moderates, some even liberal (which, as we know, is why they were vilified by the anti-establishment conservative movement). In short, for much of the twentieth century, intra-party factions blurred ideological differences. This began to change when the national Democratic Party under the leadership of Lyndon Johnson pursued the civil rights agenda. The Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act initiated a long process of shifting ideological proclivities by political party. Although the transformation was not completed for a few decades, there was a clear shift of conservatives into the Republican Party by the early 1980s. The Democratic Party still retains a certain ideological catholicity, but the Republican Party has become a bona fide conservative political party. The Tea Party movement has accelerated that trend, its electoral activism helping to wipe out more moderate Republicans in the 2010 and 2012 primaries. Republican elected officials, closely monitored by Tea Party activists and right-wing media, find themselves having to behave with unparalleled intransigence toward Democrats – or suffer electoral consequences. A study of congressional voting patterns by the National Journal showed that the 2010 voting record of the most liberal Senate Republican lay to the right of the most conservative Senate Democrat. The 2012 election did not alter this dynamic; indeed, it may have exacerbated it. The GOP lost two Senate seats and eight seats in the House of Representatives. The losers in the congressional races tended to be moderate Republicans, leaving the House GOP caucus positioned even further to the right.108 Now that conservatism is centered in a single party, the GOP can and does exercise tight discipline, engendering breathtaking ideological dogmatism, polarization, and political brinkmanship.109
Contributing to polarization and dogmatism are the media. In the “Paranoid Style” essay, as noted above, Richard Hofstadter posted an observation about the amplifying effects of the mass media. Mass media appeared to exacerbate or expand paranoid tendencies, Hofstadter believed, lending vividness and added invective to the depiction of political villains. If this was true in the early 1960s, it can only be more the case today. Indeed, Fox News and right-wing talk radio are less news operations than they are political advocacy enterprises whose media outlets produce ideological echo chambers.110 Fox and talk radio commentators have positioned themselves as the ideological testing ground for positions designed to move the general political discourse rightward. They have become the ideological driver of conservative politics. They say things and articulate opinions most elected politicians won’t until Fox makes it safe for them to do so. By giving extensive coverage to Tea Party events even prior to the events themselves, they function as recruiters as well as cheerleaders. Fox News hosts have even helped lead Tea Party rallies.111 These same hosts, along with other right-wing media, hold Republican office-holders to account for perceived deviations from the correct political line. It’s not for nothing that David Frum, conservative author and former speechwriter for George W. Bush, remarked ruefully in 2010, “Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us and now we’re discovering we work for Fox.”112 Yet Fox and conservative talk radio are not the whole picture. They hold down just one anchor of the right-wing media universe. With audiences in the scores of millions, Christian radio and television broadcasting hold down another anchor. Both of these wings benefited from the deregulation of electronic mass media, to which we now turn.
To make proper sense of right-wing media as the ideological driver of contemporary conservatism, the political-economic and regulatory context of contemporary communications needs to be understood. Deregulation was not just a phenomenon affecting the banks, of course; it was a powerful movement affecting many American industries and economic sectors. One effect of the deregulation of electronic mass media in the 1970s and 1980s was to open up the airwaves to niche programming. Although fundamentalist religious programming has a long history in American broadcasting, incendiary political opinion and overtly politically partisan news programming had been largely muted because of the longstanding conditions of the regulatory environment: limited broadcast frequencies and the resultant public trusteeship regulatory model, and the vague, veiled, mostly unimplemented regulatory threats of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The public trusteeship model of broadcast licensing in general, and the Fairness Doctrine specifically, obligated broadcasters to air programs of interest and controversy and be balanced in their presentation of such. This generally inculcated a broadcast culture of playing it safe, even of diffidence, with regard to political programming. In those instances when a broadcast licensee engaged in frowned-upon practices, which included politically unbalanced programs, the FCC let its displeasure be known. The offending broadcaster’s license was almost always renewed, but the broadcaster might encounter hassle and expense during license renewal time.113 And left unsaid was the “nuclear” option: the FCC in principle had the power to strip the broadcaster of the license and in rare, extraordinary instances had done so. In fact, the few instances in which the FCC revoked licenses involved small right-wing radio stations that had violated the Fairness Doctrine-related personal attack rules – including Carl McIntire’s WXUR and the small radio station that aired Billy James Hargis.114
With deregulation, entry into electronic media got easier and the public trusteeship model of broadcasting was correspondingly weakened. The deregulation impulse began before Ronald Reagan came to power in 1981, but his administration quickened its momentum and altered its course.115 Under Reagan, the FCC abandoned its policy preventing the quick turnover and sale of broadcast stations (known as trafficking or station-flipping) and determined not to enforce the Fairness Doctrine (the commission formally rescinded the doctrine in 1987).116 These developments helped lead to a new niche of partisan programming primarily on the right side of the political spectrum in the form of talk radio.117 The remarkably raw programming that ensued went unchecked by the FCC, with the exception of a flurry of concern around “indecency”: that is, references to sex and sexuality. But it became clear that no penalty would be paid for general program outrageousness.118 Rush Limbaugh, the leading figure in the slashing, mocking invective style of right-wing talk radio, began his local Sacramento show in 1984 and commenced nationally in 1988. Although precise numbers are hard to come by, Limbaugh’s show has become the most listened-to radio program in the United States, with an audience that ranges from 14 to 25 million.119 The other important beneficiary of deregulation was Fox, the first new television network in decades. In 1996, in the wake of talk radio’s success, Fox launched a news operation that in many respects aped the conventions of right-wing talk radio: highly opinionated, short on facts, quick to engage in partisan attacks. The formula brought audiences. Of course, talk radio and Fox News did not inaugurate broadcast programming that gave voice to the resentments of aggrieved actual and would-be suburbanites. That was pioneered by the legendary broadcaster Paul Harvey, whose idiosyncratic radio show ran from the late 1940s until his death in 2009.120 But Rush Limbaugh et al. sharpened the pitch and invective immeasurably.
Deregulation fostered additional changes in the news. For a variety of political and legal reasons, cable television, which grew significantly in the 1970s, largely escaped FCC regulatory controls. New entry and competition in broadcast and cable set in motion forces that pushed hard at traditional journalistic professional norms of newsworthiness, objectivity, proper sourcing, and balance. Network television news had long served as a loss-leading brand for the three major television networks. But in the wake of competitive pressures and the merger spree set off by deregulation, the television networks cut back their news operations dramatically. By the mid-1980s, NBC, ABC, and CBS all had new corporate owners highly leveraged from these purchases and facing unexpected competition from new media sources. The new corporate owners saw no great benefit in loss-leading news organizations. In addition to cutting news budgets, they imposed profitability requirements on each television program, news programs included. This, in turn, put considerable strain on the traditional norms of broadcast journalism. Critics and scholars lamented the new profitability requirements on news programs and the resulting heightened emphasis on entertainment over journalism in the broadcast media.121 Finally, the advent of the World Wide Web and the practice of easy copying and linking set in motion the deterioration of the traditional newspaper business model and thus amplified the challenge to traditional journalistic professional norms. Following in the pathway of talk radio and Fox News, the Internet and World Wide Web facilitated an explosion of partisan websites and blogs – and a concomitant challenge to professional journalistic editing and vetting.
What is different now, in the aftermath of the deregulation and liberalization of American electronic media and the subsequent growth of the Internet, is that conservative movements have their own media; they do not have to rely, as social movements did previously, on their treatment by “mainstream media” wedded to conventional, professional notions of newsworthiness, objectivity, balance, and the like.122 There is no Fairness Doctrine to compel broadcast stations to hew to the norms of cordial, middle-range debate. The torrent of new partisan electronic media has resulted in an informational universe in which partisanship and position-taking, along with panic-mongering, rumor, invective, and outright falsehoods, compete with and sometimes overrun facts and considered opinion. Professional journalism hasn’t disappeared in the new media environment; it has simply become one (declining) niche among many. Increasingly, some considerable percentage of the populace is able to occupy insular informational silos, reflecting the behavioral phenomenon that people tend to gravitate toward media that confirm and fortify their perspectives.123 This phenomenon can be exaggerated, and I certainly do not want to claim the inordinate power of mass media. Still, it has important, if difficult to specify and impossible to quantify consequences for the shaping of political subjectivity. The importance of talk radio, religious broadcasting, and Fox News to contemporary conservatism is considerable: they advocate and lead ideologically in the guise of news media operations.
Viral conservative media can stoke, in Hofstadteran fashion, ginned-up paranoid campaigns that unite many of the elements of the current right wing in spasms of self-righteous anger and victimhood. One example of this phenomenon was the summer 2010 opposition to the construction of an Islamic community center two blocks from the World Trade Center in New York – but this is just one of innumerable incidents of frenzy that explode regularly and achieve “media event” status for a few days or sometimes weeks, to be replaced by the next item that generates comparable rage. In the case of the Islamic community center, right-wing media stoked anger that the “mosque” would dishonor the hallowed ground of “Ground Zero.” This explosive media-amplified rage is one of the ways that politics are now conducted in the United States. Right-wing talk radio and Fox News are master practitioners of the practice. Seizing upon an incident or the blog of a partisan ranter, talk radio and Fox News repeat an item of outrage so often and in so hyped a fashion that its audiences seethe with anger as their prejudices are confirmed and amplified. Those audiences then become indignant that the mainstream media have ignored the issue – at which point the mainstream media usually do cover it. In this manner, right-wing media manage to force issues into the public sphere that wouldn’t necessarily have the conventional news value to be addressed in the first place. This is an important way they shape the news agenda. Conservative talking heads are then given airtime, followed by responses and further rounds of response. Right-wing media organizations typically act to intensify the controversy while mainstream news outlets are compelled, by their professional norms, to treat the issue in something approaching a “balanced” manner, according neutral credence to both sides. In the mosque controversy, former House Speaker and presidential aspirant Newt Gingrich compared the Muslims wishing to build the center at Ground Zero to allowing Nazis to put up a sign next to the Holocaust museum in Washington.124 The evangelical leader Franklin Graham, who continues to assert that President Obama is Muslim, justified his opposition to the center with the assertion that “[t]he teaching of Islam is to hate the Jew, to hate the Christian, to kill them; their goal is world domination.”125
The mosque controversy highlights how a news explosion can connect to other political meanings and maneuverings. Just as the Tea Party’s stance toward the Constitution is one of (re)sacralization, the mosque controversy served to confirm the claim that September 11 and the ruined site of the World Trade Center have become the political equivalent of a holy day and place of martyrdom, of crucifixion, a communion around the mystical body of a wounded, but avenging republic.126 The mosque controversy coincided with a spike in the number of Americans who said they believed President Obama to be Muslim (from 12 percent in 2008 to 18 percent in 2010), a belief fanned by radio demagogues such as Rush Limbaugh, who constantly refers to the president as “Imam Obama, America’s first Muslim president.”127
Fox News and talk radio steer anti-establishment conservative ideological politics through a dynamic of stoking victimhood and rage. Indeed, they have managed to embed a powerful class-and race-based resentment in the style of their address of their audiences. Glenn Beck takes the process further, in the sense that he doesn’t simply highlight any particular incident that offends particular conservative sensibilities. Rather, the purpose of his history lessons and lectures is to frame the offense in a way that creates a self-reflexive, coherent, if paranoid, worldview.
Illiberal democracy
Hofstadter’s error was to engage in a social psychology that was analytically unsatisfactory, largely because the approach was so prone to reductionism. In the end, social psychology is too problematic a causal explanation because of its tendency to try to decipher unconscious motivation rather than taking people’s political arguments at face value. Whether or not Hofstadter meant to, his approach tended to stigmatize followers of Joseph McCarthy and Barry Goldwater as fanatical, atavistic paranoids. But if we use Hofstadter’s analysis to talk about political culture rather than the mental defects of right-wingers, the insights of the paranoid style analysis can be utilized without the social psychology baggage.
We have already laid the basis for this. It is clear that Tea Party members and sympathizers responded to the genuine economic travails and political difficulties associated with the Great Recession. Their critique of what they labeled socialism or corporatism or crony capitalism displayed an accurate, if skewed, perception that the system favors certain institutions and elites to the exclusion of common people. The older, very conservative white people who populate the Tea Party also in actuality are becoming demographically fewer in contemporary America; at some point in the near future they are likely to be less dominant in the polity. Older white Americans are generally not on a downward economic slope, but they perceive themselves and their children to be, and probably are, becoming less influential in defining or setting the terms of American culture. Thus the demographic data on Tea Party membership can be seen to support elements of Hofstadter’s status anxiety thesis. But it doesn’t really help to label people who are losing their status as paranoid crazies; indeed, the perception of status loss fuels genuine consternation and anger. Rather, legitimate fear and anxiety are channeled to reinforce a particular kind of political culture, one characterized by victimhood, resentment, and anger about the perceived loss of individual autonomy. Paradoxically, at the same time, Tea Party and other conservative institutions push policies of mythic cultural resonance that in practical terms primarily serve the interests of corporate capitalism and the very wealthy. This can be seen in constant GOP efforts to extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest 2 percent of the population. After all the hue and cry in the 2010 midterm elections about the budget deficit being the most important issue facing America, the issue that congressional Republicans pushed hardest in the 2010 lame-duck session was an item that added $81.5 billion to the deficit.128 And after losing the presidential race and failing to retake the Senate in the 2012 election, high-level Republican office-holders concluded that the problem was not their policies, but rather their “tone.” Meeting to talk about the results of the election and the path ahead for their party, GOP governors concluded that they had lost on “strategy,” not on the issues, and vowed, together with Congressional Republicans, to hold the line against President Obama in his second term, especially on taxes. Anti-establishment conservatism lives on.129
Key, here, is understanding how fear and anger are channeled by conservative institutions to create a particular kind of political culture. In this regard, long-established networks of right-wing money, idea-generating political organizations, and mass media have been able to “canalize” the anxieties triggered by economic crisis and the sense of dependence and political inefficacy in a distinctly conservative direction. These networks have been successful in tapping into a particularly powerful strain of American political culture – that is, the fear of the strong state and the need to preserve individual autonomy. In personalizing the structural capitalist bias of the state into the resentment of certain kinds of political elites, conservatives have managed to channel resentment into an attack on government per se.130 As this book has shown, this development is largely the result of a long series of strategic attacks on liberal institutions, be they political or religious, since the 1970s. Liberal institutions were vulnerable to such attacks because liberal-left economic policies were no longer seen to work, and because for complicated reasons the liberal left, after supporting the civil rights struggle, found its politics diverted from the fight for the common good and the expansion of universal values that had made it the champion of social progress since the 1930s. The left’s support of identity politics allowed the right to label it as the party of special interests. One important consequence is that the liberal left’s politics were challenged as elitist and a masquerade for power. Confronting the left, indeed claiming that its own agenda is more universal and true to American tradition, was anti-establishment conservatism.
Truth be told, the Tea Party may be a short-lived political phenomenon, tied more than anything else to the depth of the economic crisis, and particularly the high unemployment woes accompanying the Great Recession. What is of moment is how the Tea Party movement both reflects and reinforces a kind of conservatism and a corresponding Republican political style that has become deeply dogmatic. We can call this style of anti-establishment conservatism “illiberal democracy.” Introduced by the public intellectual Fareed Zakaria in a 1997 article in Foreign Affairs, the concept of illiberal democracy tried to capture the incompleteness of the democratization movement in the former Soviet bloc and in many parts of the Third World, and the shallow nature of freedom under many putative democratic regimes. For Zakaria, an illiberal democracy holds regular elections, but citizens are distanced from knowledge about the activities of those who exercise real power because of the lack of civil liberties.131 Zakaria edged toward applying his concept to the United States, suggesting in his Tocquevillean way that the democratic urge had begun to undermine the liberal institutions that lie beneath democracy. Under such conditions, politics itself becomes dysfunctional.132 I see little reason to edge or hedge. Notwithstanding the reelection of Barack Obama in the 2012 election, it seems eminently reasonable to consider the United States, still under the sway of anti-establishment conservatism, an example of illiberal democracy.
Notes
1 NAE, “An Evangelical Declaration against Torture: Protecting Human Rights in an Age of Terror” (March 2007), at http://www.nae.net/government-relations/endorsed-documents/409-an-evangelical-declaration-against-torture-protecting-human-rights-in-an-age-of-terror as of October 2012.
2 Sam Rosenfeld and Matthew Iglesias, “The Incompetence Dodge,” The American Prospect (November 10, 2005); Larry Diamond, Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq (New York: Times Books, 2005); Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York: Penguin, 2006); David Rose, “Neo Culpa,” Vanity Fair (November 3, 2006).
3 Devised chiefly by Frederick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute, the surge was acclaimed by the administration and Kagan’s fellow neoconservative enthusiasts of the war as prima facie evidence that with proper military doctrine and practice, the Iraq War could be, and was being, won. Frederick W. Kagan, “Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq, Phase I Report” (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute, January 5, 2007), at http://www.c-sspan.org/pdf/20061219_ChoosingVictory.pdf as of October 2012.
4 Kate Zernicke, Boiling Mad: Inside Tea Party America (New York: Times Books, 2010).
5 Video of the Santelli rant at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEZB4taSEoA as of October 2012.
6 No one seems to know the origin of the image, which is sometimes accompanied by the word “socialism.” One clear link that was raised in the various newspaper and online discussions on the issue was to “The Joker” of the Batman comics and films, connoting a figure who is out of control, dangerous, and demonic. Given Obama’s race, it’s also hard not to associate the image with a kind of reverse minstrelsy (it looks like blackface around the eyes and mouth, but in reverse colors), in which, by becoming president, Obama pretends he is white. In the Tea Party context, it connotes that Obama is not one of us; he is demonic and must be feared. The image conveys a kind of racial panic. Of course, meanings such as this can rarely be fixed.
7 Elizabeth Price Foley, The Tea Party: Three Principles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
8 David S. Brown, Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
9 Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (New York: Knopf, 1948); Hoftstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to FDR (New York: Knopf, 1955).
10 Richard Hofstadter, Anti-intellectualism in American Life (New York: Vintage, 1962).
11 T.W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford, The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper, 1950).
12 Daniel Bell, ed., The New American Right (New York: Criterion Books, 1955); Bell, ed., The Radical Right: The New American Right Expanded and Updated (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1963).
13 Richard Hofstadter, “The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt – 1954,” in The Paranoid Style in American Politics, and Other Essays (New York: Knopf, 1965), pp. 43, 45.
14 Richard Hoftstadter, “Pseudo-Conservatism Revisited – 1965,” in The Paranoid Style in American Politics, and Other Essays, pp. 83–4.
15 Hofstadter, “The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt – 1954,” p. 60.
16 Ibid., p. 58.
17 Hofstadter, “Pseudo-Conservatism Revisited – 1965,” pp. 71–3; Hofstadter, “Goldwater and Pseudo-Conservative Politics,” in The Paranoid Style in American Politics, and Other Essays, pp. 100, 117.
18 Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” in The Paranoid Style in American Politics, and Other Essays, pp. 30–1.
19 Ibid., p. 23.
20 Ibid., p. 24.
21 William Appleman Williams, “The Age of Reforming History,” The Nation (June 30, 1956); C. Vann Woodward, “The Populist Heritage and the Intellectual,” in The Burden of Southern History (New York: Vintage Books, 1960), pp. 141–66; David Potter, “The Politics of Status,” New Leader (June 24, 1963), cited in Brown, Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography, p. 117; David Hackett Fischer, Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), p. 195.
22 Michael Paul Rogin, The Intellectuals and McCarthy: The Radical Specter (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967).
23 Todd Gitlin, “The Renaissance of Anti-Intellectualism,” The Chronicle of Higher Education (December 8, 2000).
24 Jon Wiener, “America, Through a Glass Darkly,” The Nation (October 23, 2006).
25 While it is true that the crazy and conspiratorial features of the Tea Party can be much embroidered and inflated by the movement’s political opponents, nonetheless see the remarkable number of racist, outrageous, factually false, and verbally violent speeches, postings, and rallies detailed in Devin Burghart and Leonard Zeskind, Tea Party Nationalism: A Critical Examination of the Tea Party Movement and the Size, Scope, and Focus of Its National Factions (Kansas City: Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights, Fall 2010), at http://justanothercoverup.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/TeaPartyNationalism.pdf as of October 2012, and Will Bunch, The Backlash: Right-Wing Radicals, Hi-def Hucksters, and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama (New York: HarperCollins, 2010).
26 Jill Lepore, The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle over American History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010); Jeffrey Rosen, “Radical Constitutionalism: The Tea Party’s Exotic Ideas about the Country’s Defining Document,” New York Times Magazine (November 28, 2010).
27 David Brooks, “The Tea Party Teens,” New York Times (January 4, 2010).
28 On literal and inerrant readings, and how the Bible and the Constitution work as parallel documents of ultimate authority for fundamentalists and originalists, see Vincent Crapanzano, Serving the Word: Literalism in America from the Pulpit to the Bench (New York: The New Press, 2000).
29 Amy Gardner, “Gauging the Scope of the Tea Party Movement in America,” Washington Post (October 24, 2010), at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/23/AR2010102304000.html?hpid=topnews as of October 2012. Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson found considerably more Tea Party groups (about 1,000) and participation than did Gardner. Skocpol and Williamson, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
30 The Tenth Amendment reads: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
31 Bradford Plumer, “The Revisionaries,” The New Republic (September 23, 2010); Jonathan Weisman, “GOP Hopefuls Fine-Tune Legislative Focus,” Wall Street Journal (October 18, 2010). Recall GOP 2012 presidential hopeful Rick Santorum’s public denigration of climate change as “junk science … an excuse for more government control of your life.” The Rush Limbaugh Show (June 8, 2011), at http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2011/06/08/the_rick_santorum_interview as of October 2012.
32 Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” p. 37.
33 The lifestyle issue and the surprisingly intense resentments attached to class-related markers of consumption point to the close interpenetration of politics and taste and the continuing salience of the work of the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. For Bourdieu, consumption choices and judgments about taste are expressive of social position or class. Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, Richard Nice, trans. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).
34 CBS News, “Tea Party Supporters: Who They Are and What They Believe” (April 14, 2010), at http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20002529-503544.html?tag=mncol;lst;1 as of October 2012; Skocpol and Williamson, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism, pp. 19–44.
35 Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Zernicke, Boiling Mad. A fascinating perspective on the prominence of women in the social conservatism of the 1980s and 90s, and thus relevant to the understanding of the Tea Party, is explored in Linda Kintz, Between Jesus and the Market: The Emotions That Matter in Right-Wing America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997). Kintz argues that the right was able to tap deeply into the emotional politics of traditional women’s sense of the social – and theological – worth of their work as wives and mothers.
36 The direct roots of FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity were Citizens for a Sound Economy, an advocacy vehicle of the Koch brothers created in 1984. Ronald P. Formisano, The Tea Party: A Brief History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), pp. 63–81.
37 Ibid., p. 87.
38 Michael E. Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An America History (New York: Basic Books, 1995).
39 Robert P. Jones and Daniel Cox, “Old Alignments, Emerging Fault Lines: Religion in the 2010 Election and Beyond” (Washington, DC: Public Religion Research Institute, November 2010).
40 John M. O’Hara, A New American Tea Party: The Counterrevolution against Bailouts, Handouts, Reckless Spending, and More Taxes (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2010), p. 4.
41 CBS News, “Tea Party Supporters: Who They Are and What They Believe.”
42 The differences are rather striking between Tea Party and all respondents to the question:
“Who do you think is mostly to blame for the current state of the nation’s economy?”
Percentage all respondentsPercentage Tea Party supporters
Bush administration325
Obama administration410
Wall Street and financial institutions2215
Congress1028
CBS News/New York Times, “The Tea Party Movement: What They Think,” (April 14, 2010), at http://www.cbsnews.com/htdocs/pdf/poll_tea_party_041410.pdf?tag=contentMain;contentBody as of October 2012.
43 “Original Content” (Steven Malanga), “Obama and the Reawakening of Corporatism,” RealClearMarkets (April 8, 2009), at http://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2009/04/obama_and_the_reawakening_of_c.html as of October 2012.
44 Peter J. Wallinson, “The True Origins of This Financial Crisis,” The American Spectator (February 2009), at http://www.spectator.org/archives/2009/02/06/the-true-origins-of-this-finan as of October 2012.
45 Glenn Beck Show, Glenn Beck discussions with Jonah Goldberg, Fox News Channel (June 1, 2009) at http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,524519,00.html. Beck drew parallels between Obama and Hitler on several of his Fox News shows: April 1, 2009, at http://mediamatters.org/video/2009/04/01/after-stating-i-am-not-saying-that-barack-obama/148835; August 27, 2009, at http://mediamatters.org/video/2009/08/27/beck-claims-obamas-civilian-national-security-f/153983; and on his Premiere Radio Networks show: August 6, 2009 and August 12, 2009, at http://www.mediamatters.org/tags/glenn-beck-program?p=165&s=15, all as of October 2012.
46 Dinesh D’Souza, “How Obama Thinks,” Forbes (September 27, 2010), at http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2010/0927/politics-socialism-capitalism-private-enterprises-obama-business-problem.html as of October 2012; Robert Costa, “Gingrich: Obama’s ‘Kenyan, Anti-colonial’ Worldview,” National Review Online (September 11, 2010), at http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/246302/gingrich-obama-s-kenyan-anti-colonial-worldview-robert-costa as of October 2012.
47 Frederic Bastiat, The Law [1850], Dean Russell, trans. (Irvington-on-Hudson, NY: Foundation for Economic Education, 1968).
48 Isaac W. Martin, The Permanent Tax Revolt: How the Property Tax Transformed American Politics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008).
49 Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning (New York: Doubleday, 2007); Amity Shlaes, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression (New York: HarperCollins, 2007); Ron Paul, The Revolution: A Manifesto (New York: Grand Central Publishers, 2008); Albert Jay Nock, Our Enemy, the State [1935] (New York: Arno Press 1972); James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World (New York: John Day, 1941); Frank Chodorov, The Income Tax: Root of All Evil (New York: Devin-Adair, 1954).
50 Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953).
51 W. Cleon Skousen, The 5000 Year Leap: The 28 Great Ideas That Changed the World (Washington, DC: National Center for Constitutional Studies, 2007).
52 W. Cleon Skousen, The Naked Communist (Salt Lake City: Ensign Publishing, 1958); Skousen, The Naked Capitalist (Salt Lake City: W. Cleon Skousen, 1971).
53 Mark Leibovich, “Being Glenn Beck,” New York Times Magazine (October 3, 2010).
54 Alexander Zaitchik, Common Nonsense: Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorance (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2010); Sean Wilentz, “Confounding Fathers: The Tea Party’s Cold War Roots,” The New Yorker (October 18, 2010).
55 David Barton, Original Intent: The Courts, the Constitution, and Religion (Aledo, TX: WallBuilder Press, 1996); Barton, Separation of Church & State: What the Founders Meant (Aledo, TX: WallBuilder Press, 2007). Mark A. Beliles and Stephen K. McDowell, America’s Providential History (Charlottesville, VA: Providence Foundation, 1989) is the standard textbook on American history used in many Christian schools and by the home school movement.
56 Beliles and McDowell, America’s Providential History, p. 20.
57 Cited in Jon Ralston, “Angle: ‘What’s Happening (in America) … is a Violation of the 1st Commandment,’ Entitlements ‘Make Government Our God,’ ” Las Vegas Sun (August 4, 2010), at http://www.lasvegassun.com/blogs/ralstons-flash/2010/aug/04/angle-whats-happening-america-violation-1st-comman/ as of October 2012.
58 “Marco Rubio on American Exceptionalism,” at http://www.Moonbattery.com/archives/2010/08/marco-rubio-on.html as of October 2012.
59 Peter Montgomery, “Fractures, Alliances and Mobilizations in the Age of Obama: Emerging Analyses of the Tea Party Movement” Conference, Center for the Comparative Study of Right-Wing Movements (University of California, Berkeley, October 22, 2010).
60 Ben Smith, “Tea Parties Stir Evangelicals’ Fears,” Politico (March 12, 2010), at http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0310/34291.html as of October 2012.
61 Skocpol and Williamson, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism.
62 Values Voter Summit (2012), at http://www.valuesvotersummit.org/ as of October 2012.
63 Glenn Beck Transcripts, “American’s Third Great Awakening,” Fox News (September 3, 2010), at http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,600802,00.html as of October 2012.
64 Jennifer Steinhauer, “Under Banner of Fiscal Restraint, Republicans Plan New Abortion Bills,” New York Times (February 8, 2011). The restriction of abortion rights to instances of rape, incest, and endangerment to the life of the mother only was further pared back by suggesting that rapes where the woman does not put up a fight are not rapes, or are a different, lesser kind of rape, and that a subsequent pregnancy should not be eligible for abortion. In the 2012 Missouri Senate race, as we noted in chapter 1, the Republican candidate, Todd Akin, further muddied this bizarre issue by suggesting that a woman cannot become pregnant from forcible rape because under such circumstances her body naturally rejects the sperm. Further, in the race for the U.S. Senate seat from Indiana, Richard Mourdock, the Tea Party Republican candidate, said in a debate that he did not support allowing abortions in the case of rape. Pregnancies conceived by rape should not be aborted because the conception was divinely willed. “I’ve struggled with it myself for a long time, but I came to realize that life is that gift from God. And even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something God intended to happen.” Jonathan Weisman, “Remark on Rape Jolts Senate Race in Indiana, and the Presidential Race, Too,” New York Times (October 25, 2012).
65 Arthur Delaney and Michael McAuliff, “Paul Ryan Wants ‘Welfare Reform Round 2,’ ” Huffington Post (March 20, 2012), at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/20/paul-ryan-welfare-reform_n_1368277.html as of October 2012.
66 “Glenn’s Soulmate?” Glenn Beck program (April 12, 2010), at http://www.glennbeck.com/content/articles/article/196/39068/ as of October 2012.
67 Jennifer Steinhauer, “Tea Party Trains Its Influence on Reshaping Senate GOP,” New York Times (August 2, 2012).
68 “Full Transcript of the Mitt Romney Secret Video,” Mother Jones (September 19, 2012) http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/09/full-transcript-mitt-romney-secret-video as of November 2012.
69 Ashley Parker, “Romney Attributes Obama Win to ‘Gifts’,” New York Times (November 15, 2012).
70 James William Gibson, Warrior Dreams: Violence and Manhood in Post-Vietnam America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994).
71 Alexander Zaitchik, “ ‘Patriot’ Paranoia,” Southern Poverty Law Center Intelligence Report (Fall 2010), pp. 27–34; Barton Gellman, “America’s Extreme Patriots,” Time (October 11, 2010), pp. 26–33.
72 Friends for Liberty, at http://www.friendsforliberty.com/ as of August 2012 (link no longer accessible).
73 David Barstow, “Lighting a Fuse for Rebellion on the Right,” New York Times (February 16, 2010).
74 The anti-abortion movement, for example, which does have its violent fringe, plays on that territory. Francis Schaeffer occasionally alluded to violence in his speeches and writings, as did Richard John Neuhaus. Indeed, the section of Neuhaus’s journal First Things on judicial activism included several essays that came close to advocating armed revolution. “The End of Democracy? Judicial Usurpation of Politics,” First Things, Vol. 67 (November 1996), pp. 18–42.
75 David Gergen, “Like Perot Voters,” New York Times online discussion, “What Tea Party Backers Want” (April 15, 2010), at http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/15/what-tea-party-backers-want/?hp#david as of October 2012.
76 University of California, San Diego Department of Communication Ph.D. students Muni Citrin and Reece Peck report on Tea Party convention in Las Vegas, July 2010 (personal communication).
77 In this regard, two books have been of key importance to Tea Party activists and intellectuals: Saul Alinsky, Organizing for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals (New York: Random House, 1971) and Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom, The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations (New York: Portfolio, 2006). Alinsky’s book, written originally for leftist community organizers, provides an appropriable set of tools for any grassroots organizing drive. Brafman and Beckstrom’s book is a popular business management text that extols the power of decentralized, leaderless organizations. The title’s metaphor is a commentary on centralization and decentralization. A spider and starfish are both multi-legged creatures. A spider can be killed by cutting off its head. A starfish has no head per se; its “head,” so to speak, is distributed throughout its “body.” If the starfish is cut, it makes more starfish.
78 Skocpol and Williamson, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism.
79 Brooks, “The Tea Party Teens.”
80 “Ron Paul on Foreign Policy,” at http://www.ontheissues.org/2008/Ron_Paul_Foreign_Policy.htm as of October 2012; Ron Paul, “A Tea Party Foreign Policy,” Foreign Policy (August 27, 2010), at http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/08/27/a_tea_party_foreign_policy as of October 2012; Glenn Beck with Joseph Perry, Glenn Beck’s Common Sense: The Case against an Out-of-Control Government, Inspired by Thomas Paine (New York: Mercury Radio Arts/Threshold Editions, 2009).
81 Sarah Palin, speech to military families May 3, 2011, cited in Tony Lee, “The Emergence of a Sarah Palin Foreign Policy Doctrine?” Human Events (May 4, 2011), at http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=43314 as of October 2012.
82 Ben Armbruster, “UPDATED: A Comprehensive Timeline of Mitt Romney’s Foreign Policy Positions During the Campaign,” Thinkprogress (October 22, 2012): http://thinkprogress.org/security/2012/10/22/1054581/a-comprehensive-timeline-of-mitt-romneys-foreign-policy-positions-during-the-campaign/?mobile=nc as of November 2012.
83 Peter Baker, “Strange Brew: Does the Tea Party Have a Foreign Policy?” Foreign Policy (September/October 2010), at http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/08/16/strange_brew as of October 2012; Walter Russell Mead, “The Tea Party and American Foreign Policy – What Populism Means for Globalism,” Foreign Affairs (March/April 2011), at http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/67455/walter-russell-mead/the-tea-party-and-american-foreign-policy as of October 2012.
84 Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, “In Shift from Bush Era, More Conservatives Say ‘Come Home, America’ ” (June 16, 2011), at http://people-press.org/2011/06/16/in-shift-from-bush-era-more-conservatives-say-come-home-america/ as of October 2012.
85 Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes, “The True Cost of the Iraq War: $3 Trillion and Beyond,” Washington Post (September 5, 2010), at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/03/AR2010090302200.html as of November 2012.
86 Tax Policy Center, “The Bush Tax Cuts: What is Their Impact on Government Borrowing and Interest Payments?” at http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/background/bush-tax-cuts/borrowing.cfm as of October 2012.
87 The social theorist Stuart Hall engaged in the analysis of Thatcherism in this manner. Hall, The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left (London: Verso, 1988); Hall, “The Toad in the Garden: Thatcherism among the Theorists,” in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), pp. 35–74.
88 Jeff Zeleny, “In Iowa, Tea Party Trouble over Obama Poster,” New York Times (July 14, 2010), at http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/14/tea-party-trouble-in-river-city/ as of October 2012.
89 Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999, Public Law 106–102, 113 Stat. 1338 (enacted November 12, 1999); Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, Public Law 106–554, 114 Stat. 2763 (enacted December 21, 2000).
90 The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report: Final Report of the National Commission on the Causes of the Financial and Economic Crisis in the United States (New York: Public Affairs Books, 2011).
91 Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner, Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon (New York: Times Books/Henry Holt, 2011).
92 James O’Connor, The Fiscal Crisis of the State (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1973); Claus Offe, “Structural Problems of the Capitalist State,” in Klaus von Beyme, ed., German Political Studies (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1974), pp. 31–57; Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, Thomas McCarthy, trans. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975); Charles E. Lindblom, Politics and Markets: The World’s Political-Economic Systems (New York: Basic Books, 1977); Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, eds., Bringing the State Back In (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
93 On the Pecora investigation, see Michael E. Parrish, Securities Regulation and the New Deal (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970).
94 Ron Suskind, Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President (New York: Harper, 2011).
95 Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought since the Revolution (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955).
96 Mark Lilla, “The Tea Party Jacobins,” New York Review of Books (May 27, 2010); Lilla, “The Beck of Revelation,” New York Review of Books (December 9, 2010).
97 J.M. Bernstein, “The Very Angry Tea Party,” New York Times Opinionator (June 13, 2010), at http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/the-very-angry-tea-party/?src=me&ref=homepage as of October 2012.
98 As a responder to the CBS News site on the Tea Party wrote, “There are basically two kinds of people in this country: those who want the government to take care of them and tell them what to do, and those who don’t want the government to tell them what to do and only want the chance to take care of themselves.” At CBS News, “Tea Party Supporters: Who They Are and What They Believe.”
99 Lisabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1929–1939 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
100 Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Todd Gitlin, The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America is Wracked by Culture Wars (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1995).
101 Eric Alterman, “Cultural Liberalism is Not Enough,” New York Times (April 8, 2012).
102 O’Hara, A New American Tea Party, p. 142.
103 Richard A. Viguerie, “From an Old School Conservative, Advice for the Tea Party,” Washington Post (May 2, 2010), at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/30/AR2010043001109.html as of October 2012; Viguerie, “Good Riddance to Establishment GOP,” Politico.com (July 16, 2010), at http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0710/39835.html as of October 2012.
104 Mike McIntire, “Hidden under Tax-Exempt Cloak, Political Dollars Flow,” New York Times (September 23, 2010); Jim Rutenberg, Don Van Natta, Jr., and Mike McIntire, “Offering Donors Secrecy, and Going on Attack,” New York Times (October 12, 2010).
105 Jim Rutenberg, “With Another $1 Million Donation, Murdoch Expands His Political Sphere,” New York Times (October 1, 2010).Paul Blumenthal, “Forbes 400 Contribute Record Amounts to Presidential Campaigns, Super PACs,” Huffington Post (November 5, 2012), at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/05/forbes-400-campaign-contributions_n_2047750.html as of November 2012.
106 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 50 (2010).
107 Climate change is but one case in point. The fossil fuel industries for decades have poured money into research institutions that produce studies questioning the science of global warming and challenging the economics of regulation or a carbon cap-and-trade system. Notwithstanding the fact that for all intents and purposes there is a consensus among scientists with expertise in climate issues, the skeptical industry claims are in turn treated as gospel by Rush Limbaugh and on other right-wing media outlets, and are accorded respectful treatment on mainstream media concerned with “balance.” Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010). The industry studies permeate the informational universe of those religious Christians who believe that God gave the earth to humans to use without interference and speak to people already inclined to distrust scientific experts. Just 14 percent of Tea Party supporters believe that global warming is an environmental problem that is having an effect now. John M. Broder, “Skepticism on Climate Change is Article of Faith for Tea Party,” New York Times (October 21, 2010).
108 Doyle McManus, “The Death of the Moderate Republican,” Los Angeles Times (November 18, 2012): http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-mcmanus-column-moderates-in-congress-20121118,0,3364873.column as of November 2012.
109 Ronald Brownstein, “Pulling Apart,” National Journal (February 24, 2011), at http://www.nationaljournal.com/magazine/congress-hits-new-peak-in-polarization-20110224 as of October 2012.
110 To speak of Fox News as a single thing is misleading, of course. Fox News is an amalgam of programs with particular norms, rhetoric, and modes of address. The daytime news shows approximate professional journalistic norms of objectivity and balance. The early morning, evening, and nighttime commentator shows are where Fox engages in direct ideological politics.
111 Skocpol and Williamson, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism, pp. 121–55.
112 David Schoetz, “David Frum on GOP News: Now We Work for Fox,” ABC News (March 23, 2010), at http://blogs.abcnews.com/nightlinedailyline/2010/03/david-frum-on-gop-now-we-work-for-fox.html as of October 2012.
113 David L. Bazelon, “FCC Regulation of the Telecommunications Press,” Duke Law Journal, Vol. 1975, No. 2 (May 1975), pp. 213–51.
114 Fred Friendly, The Good Guys, the Bad Guys, and the First Amendment: Free Speech vs. Fairness in Broadcasting (New York: Random House, 1976); Heather Hendershot, What’s Fair on the Air? Cold War Right-Wing Broadcasting and the Public Interest (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
115 The complex history of the deregulation of American broadcasting and telecommunications is the subject of my book The Irony of Regulatory Reform: The Deregulation of American Telecommunications (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).
116 Federal Communications Commission, Applications for Voluntary Assignments or Transfer of Control, 52 Radio Regulations 2d 1081 (1982).
117 James T. Hamilton, All the News That’s Fit to Sell: How the Market Transforms Information into News (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Robert B. Horwitz, “On Media Concentration and the Diversity Question,” The Information Society, Vol. 21, No. 3 (Summer 2005), pp. 181–204; William R. Bobbitt, Us against Them: The Political Culture of Talk Radio (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010).
118 Patricia Aufderheide, Communication Policy and the Public Interest: The Telecommunications Act of 1996 (New York: Guilford, 1999).
119 Paul Farhi, “Limbaugh’s Audience Size? It’s Largely Up in the Air,” Washington Post (March 7, 2009); Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Joseph N. Cappella, Echo Chamber: Rush Limbaugh and the Conservative Media Establishment (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
120 Harvey’s show, with a weekly reach of 25 million, dispensed suspicion of intellectuals and foreigners, and resentment toward government bureaucrats through anecdotes, stories, and even the advertisements he delivered in his quirky manner. A typical Harvey program could be broadcast from a Tea Party stage today. In a broadcast aired in 1952, Harvey intoned, “No one came to this country originally or since to found a government. We came here to get away from government! They were not cowards … men of failure and frustration … academic theorists. They were successful men of business and agriculture, but they were scared. … They wanted little government … big people. And with freedom in their hearts and old buckskin shirts on their backs they headed off over the mountains. There was no TVA [Tennessee Valley Authority] out there … no price supports … no price control. No job for sure … no guaranteed rocking chair. … It’s 1776 again. Right now!” Cited in Patricia Aufderheide, “Paul Harvey and the Culture of Resentment,” in The Daily Planet: A Critic on the Capitalist Culture Beat (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 37. The TVA was a federally owned electricity provider created by the Roosevelt administration to supply electricity in the South.
121 A perennial complaint, given new relevance by, among others, Robert W. McChesney, Corporate Media and the Threat to Democracy (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1997).
122 Todd Gitlin, The Whole World is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980); Daniel C. Hallin, “The Passing of the ‘High Modernism’ of American Journalism,” Journal of Communication, Vol. 42, No. 3 (September 1992), pp. 14–25.
123 Cass R. Sunstein, Republic.com (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Sunstein, Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
124 Justin Elliott, “How the ‘Ground Zero Mosque’ Fear Mongering Began,” Salon.com (August 16, 2010), at http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2010/08/16/ground_zero_mosque_origins as of October 2012.
125 Cited in Maureen Dowd, “Going Mad in Herds,” New York Times (August 22, 2010).
126 Sheldon S. Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), p. 9.
127 The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, “Growing Number of Americans Say Obama is a Muslim” (August 18, 2010), at http://pewforum.org/Politics-and-Elections/Growing-Number-of-Americans-Say-Obama-is-a-Muslim.aspx as of October 2012.
128 “$860 Billion Tax Cut Deal: Cost Breakdown,” CNNMoney.com (December 10, 2010), at http://money.cnn.com/2010/12/07/news/economy/tax_cut_deal_obama/index.htm as of October 2012.
129 Wade Goodwyn, “GOP Governors Say Party Lost on Strategy, Not on Issues,” NPR News (November 18, 2012): http://www.npr.org/2012/11/18/165379129/gop-governors-say-party-lost-on-strategy-not-issues as of November 2012.
130 I place the word “canalize” in quotes to recall its use by one of the earliest and still most compelling general essays on the limited yet powerful influence of mass media. Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert K. Merton, “Mass Communication, Popular Taste, and Organized Social Action,” in Lyman Bryson, ed., The Communication of Ideas (New York: Harper, 1948), pp. 18–30.
131 Fareed Zakaria, “The Rise of Illiberal Democracy,” Foreign Affairs (November/December 1997), at http://www.fringer.org/wp-content/writings/fareed.pdf as of October 2012.
132 Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (New York: Norton, 2003).
