Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [123]
14
WAKE UP, AMERICA
Breaking the Spell
You’ve got to slap the bully in the face.
—Maureen Dowd
IN THE SPRING OF 2010, President Obama gave an interview on the CBS Early Show. As he and coanchor Harry Smith casually strolled the White House grounds, Smith asked, “I’ve been out and about, listening to talk radio. The kindest of terms you’re sometimes referred to out in America is a ‘socialist.’ The worst of which I’ve heard is called a ‘Nazi.’ Are you aware of the level of enmity that crosses the airwaves and that people have made part of their daily conversation about you?”
“Well, I mean, I think that when you listen to Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck, it’s pretty apparent, and it’s troublesome,” Obama placidly replied with a creased brow. “But, keep in mind that there have been periods in American history where this kind of vitriol comes out. It happens often when you’ve got an economy that is making people more anxious, and people are feeling as if there is a lot of change that needs to take place . . . I don’t get too worried when things aren’t going as well because I know that over time these things turn.”1 If sincere, this opinion suggests a degree of complacency. Obama seems to regard the outbreak of right-wing paranoia as an unfortunate side effect of an economic recession that will eventually clear up on its own.
Democratic consultant James Carville went further, describing the paranoia of the Tea Parties as a political opportunity for the Democratic Party. After the tax day protests, he crowed, “Most Democrats I know are delighted by this . . . I think if anything it was harmless and damaging to Republicans.”2
A Troublesome Movement
One of my purposes in writing this book has been to show these opinions to be false. Those wacky Tea Party candidates may hand an election or two to the Democrats, as Carville would like, but they will also send a few more paranoid Republican fearmongers to Washington, people who may one day become senior senators and representatives chairing powerful subcommittees. The thirty-five-year flowering of the paranoid right has certainly been damaging to Republicans but not in the way that Carville meant. While right-wing conservatives have subjugated the party of Lincoln, their victory has not transformed it into a fringe party doomed to perpetual minority status. Instead, the growth of persecution politics has brought the fringe ideas to the mainstream and turned far-right crackpots into electable candidates.
The long history also contradicts the administration’s idea that the Tea Party hysteria is a product of the recession, a position that I challenged in my critique of the frustration-aggression theory. Glenn Beck and the Tea Parties did not suddenly emerge from the clouds like avenging angels of the financial crisis. They were carefully nurtured for years in a petri dish of fear and hostility. And as successive generations matured and spawned, the colony grew and eventually spilled out into American culture as a potent political force. Glenn Beck inherited the culture war from Bill O’Reilly who inherited from it from Rush Limbaugh who inherited it from Pat Buchanan who inherited it from George Wallace and the New Right.
I don’t mean to suggest that the Tea Parties are the product of some vast right-wing conspiracy. I don’t subscribe to the conspiracy theory of society, and to my knowledge, there is no secret club of omnipotent puppet masters who created Buchanan, Limbaugh, O’Reilly, Beck, and other practitioners of persecution politics. The various right-wing leaders have their own agendas and motivations, and their specific political philosophies often differ. But taken together, their ideas constitute a more or less coherent movement—what I have been calling persecution politics. As with any