BY MICHAEL
LIND
To judge from the commentary inspired by the shutdown, most
progressives and centrists, and even many non-Tea Party
conservatives, do not understand the radical force that has
captured the Republican Party and paralyzed the federal government.
Having grown up in what is rapidly becoming a Tea Party
heartland–Texas–I think I do understand it. Allow me to clear away
a few misconceptions about what really should be called, not the
Tea Party Right, but the Newest Right.
The first misconception that is widespread in the commentariat is
that the Newest Right can be thought of as being simply a group of
“extremists” who happen to be further on the same political
spectrum on which leftists, liberals, centrists and moderate
conservatives find their places. But reducing politics to points on
a single line is more confusing than enlightening. Most political
movements result from the intersection of several axes—ideology,
class, occupation, religion, ethnicity and region—of which abstract
ideology is seldom the most important.
The second misconception is that the Newest Right or Tea Party
Right is populist. The data, however, show that Tea Party activists
and leaders on average are more affluent than the average American.
The white working class often votes for the Newest Right, but then
the white working class has voted for Republicans ever since Nixon.
For all its Jacksonian populist rhetoric, the Newest Right is no
more a rebellion of the white working class than was the original
faux-populist Jacksonian movement, led by rich slaveowners like
Andrew Jackson and agents of New York banks like Martin Van
Buren.
The third misconception is that the Newest Right is irrational. The
American center-left, whose white social base is among
highly-educated, credentialed individuals like professors and
professionals, repeatedly has committed political suicide by
assuming that anyone who disagrees with its views is an ignorant
“Neanderthal.” Progressive snobs to the contrary, the leaders of
the Newest Right, including Harvard-educated Ted Cruz, like the
leaders of any successful political movement, tend to be highly
educated and well-off. The self-described members of the Tea Party
tend to be more
affluent and educated than the general public.
The Newest Right, then, cannot be explained in terms of abstract
ideological extremism, working-class populism or ignorance and
stupidity. What, then, is the Newest Right?
The Newest Right is the simply the old Jeffersonian-Jacksonian
right, adopting new strategies in response to changed
circumstances. While it has followers nationwide, its territorial
bases are the South and the West, particularly the South, whose
population dwarfs that of the Mountain and Prairie West. According
to one
study by scholars at Sam Houston State University in
Huntsville, Texas:
While less than one in five (19.4%) minority non-Southerners and
about 36% of Anglo non-Southerners report supporting the movement,
almost half of white Southerners (47.1%) express support….
In fact, the role that antigovernment sentiment in the South plays
in Tea Party movement support is the strongest in our analysis.
The Tea Party right is not only disproportionately
Southern but also disproportionately upscale. Its social
base consists of what, in other countries, are called the “local
notables”—provincial elites whose power and privileges are
threatened from above by a stronger central government they do not
control and from below by the local poor and the local working
class.
Even though, like the Jacksonians and Confederates of the
nineteenth century, they have allies in places like Wisconsin and
Massachusetts, the dominant members of the Newest Right are white
Southern local notables—the Big Mules, as the Southern populist Big
Jim Folsom once described the lords of the local car dealership,
country club and chamber of commerce. These are not the
super-rich of Silicon Valley or Wall Street (although they have
Wall Street allies). The Koch dynasty rooted in Texas
notwithstanding, those who make up the backbone of the Newest Right
are more likely to be millionaires than billionaires, more likely
to run low-wage construction or auto supply businesses than
multinational corporations. They are second-tier people on a
national level but first-tier people in their states and counties
and cities.
For nearly a century, from the end of Reconstruction, when
white Southern terrorism drove federal troops out of the conquered
South, until the Civil Rights Revolution, the South’s local
notables maintained their control over a region of the U.S. larger
than Western Europe by means of segregation, disenfranchisement,
and bloc voting and the filibuster at the federal level.
Segregation created a powerless black workforce and helped the
South’s notables pit poor whites against poor blacks. The local
notables also used literacy tests and other tricks to
disenfranchise lower-income whites as well as blacks in the South,
creating a distinctly upscale electorate. Finally, by voting as a
unit in Congress and presidential elections, the “Solid South”
sought to thwart any federal reforms that could undermine the power
of Southern notables at the state, county and city level. When the
Solid South failed, Southern senators made a specialty of the
filibuster, the last defense of the embattled former
Confederacy.
When the post-Civil War system broke down during the Civil Rights
Revolution of the 1950s and 1960s, the South’s local notable class
and its Northern and Western allies unexpectedly won a temporary
three-decade reprieve, thanks to the “Reagan Democrats.” From the
1970s to the 2000s, white working-class voters alienated from the
Democratic Party by civil rights and cultural liberalism made
possible Republican presidential dominance from Reagan to George W.
Bush and Republican dominance of Congress from 1994 to 2008.
Because their politicians dominated the federal government much of
the time, the conservative notables were less threatened by federal
power, and some of them, like the second Bush, could even imagine a
“governing conservatism” which, I
have argued, sought to “Southernize” the entire U.S.
But then, by the 2000s, demography destroyed the temporary
Nixon-to-Bush conservative majority (although conceivably it could
enjoy an illusory Indian summer if Republicans pick up the Senate
and retain the House in 2016). Absent ever-growing shares of the
white vote, in the long run the Republican Party cannot win without
attracting more black and Latino support.
That may well happen, in the long run. But right now most
conservative white local notables in the South and elsewhere in the
country don’t want black and Latino support. They would rather
disenfranchise blacks and Latinos than compete for their votes. And
they would rather dismantle the federal government than surrender
their local power and privilege.
The political strategy of the Newest Right, then, is simply a new
strategy for the very old, chiefly-Southern Jefferson-Jackson
right. It is a perfectly rational strategy, given its goal:
maximizing the political power and wealth of white local notables
who find themselves living in states, and eventually a nation, with
present or potential nonwhite majorities.
Although racial segregation can no longer be employed, the
tool kit of the older Southern white right is pretty much the same
as that of the Newest Right:
The Solid South. By means of partisan and racial
gerrymandering—packing white liberal voters into conservative
majority districts and ghettoizing black and Latino
voters–Republicans in Texas and other Southern and Western states
control the U.S. Congress, even though in the last election more
Americans voted for Democrats than Republicans. The same
undemocratic technique makes the South far more Republican in its
political representation than it really is in terms of voters.
The Filibuster. By using a semi-filibuster to
help shut down the government rather than implement Obamacare,
Senator Ted Cruz of Texas is acting rationally on behalf of his
constituency—the surburban and exurban white local notables of
Texas and other states, whom the demagogic Senator seems to confuse
with “the American people.” Newt Gingrich, another Southern
conservative demagogue, pioneered the modern use of government
shutdowns and debt-ceiling negotiations as supplements to the
classic filibuster used by embattled white provincial elites who
prefer to paralyze a federal government they cannot control.
Disenfranchisement. In state after state
controlled by Republican governors and legislators, a fictitious
epidemic of voter fraud is being used as an excuse for onerous
voter registration requirements which have the effect, and the
manifest purpose, of disenfranchising disproportionately poor
blacks and Latinos. The upscale leaders of the Newest Right also
tend to have be more supportive of mass immigration than their
downscale populist supporters—on the condition, however, that
“guest workers” and amnestied illegal immigrants not be allowed to
vote or become citizens any time soon. In the twenty-first century,
as in the twentieth and nineteenth, the Southern ideal is a society
in which local white elites lord it over a largely-nonwhite
population of poor workers who can’t vote.
Localization and privatization of federal
programs. It is perfectly rational for the white
local notables of the South and their allies in other regions to
oppose universal, federal social programs, if they expect to lose
control of the federal government to a new, largely-nonwhite
national electoral majority.
Turning over federal programs to the states allows Southern
states controlled by local conservative elites to make
those programs less generous—thereby attracting investment to their
states by national and global corporations seeking low wages.
Privatizing other federal programs allows affluent
whites in the South and elsewhere to turn the welfare state into a
private country club for those who can afford to pay the fees, with
underfunded public clinics and emergency rooms for the lower
orders. In
the words of Mitt Romney: “We pick them up in an ambulance, and
take them to the hospital, and give them care. And different states
have different ways of providing for that care.”
When the election of Lincoln seemed to foreshadow a future national
political majority based outside of the South, the local notables
of the South tried to create a smaller system they could dominate
by seceding from the U.S. That effort failed, after having killed
more Americans than have been killed in all our foreign wars
combined. However, during Reconstruction the
Southern elite snatched victory from the jaws of defeat and
succeeded in turning the South into a nation-within-a-nation within
U.S. borders until the 1950s and 1960s.
Today the white notables of the South increasingly live in states
like Texas, which already have nonwhite majorities. They fear that
Obama’s election, like Lincoln’s, foreshadows the emergence of a
new national majority coalition that excludes them and will act
against their interest. Having been reduced to the status of
members of a minority race, they fear they will next lose their
status as members of the dominant local class.
While each of the Newest Right’s proposals and policies might be
defended by libertarians or conservatives on other grounds,
the package as a whole—from privatizing Social
Security and Medicare to disenfranchising likely Democratic voters
to opposing voting rights and citizenship for illegal immigrants to
chopping federal programs into 50 state programs that can be
controlled by right-wing state legislatures—represents a coherent
and rational strategy for maximizing the relative power of
provincial white elites at a time when their numbers are in decline
and history has turned against them. They
are not ignoramuses, any more than Jacksonian, Confederate and
Dixiecrat elites were idiots.
They know what
they want and they have a plan to get it—which may be more than can
be said for their opponents.
http://www.salon.com/2013/10/06/tea_party_radicalism_is_misunderstood_meet_the_newest_right/
...I predict
the new minority whites will break into at least two groups:
diverse whites, those who are culturally aware and multiculturally
proficient, and reverse whites, those who will fight
doggedly to hold on to whatever superior status they
can...Whites
will have the choice of retreating into fear and loathing or
embracing their new status with understanding and grace. The
integration of whites is not their sole responsibility. Gracism is
the powerful assertion that each group should extend grace toward
other groups, including minorities extending it to their former
oppressor and whites extending it to others rather than
protectionism out of fear...
http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/22/opinion/anderson-white-minority/index.html
