The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [128]
“He’s telling it like it is,” said Harold, who incidentally was also a devout Christian—as much as he liked Edwards’s views on Washington corruption, he disliked his use of the phrase “give ’em Hell.” The evangelical Christian who turned up at speeches of reformist Democrats like Edwards and Dennis Kucinich was another phenomenon I would see a lot that fall. This was something I certainly did not see in 2004, when the makeup of Republican and Democratic crowds was far more predictable.
Beyond Edwards, you found some off-the-farmers at the speeches of Barack Obama as well. While Obama almost certainly represented the same kind of obscenely funded insider Democrat who’d let down generations of party members over the years—he raised almost $100 million before the Iowa caucus alone, with heavy support from Wall Street and the other usual corporate villains—it was the tone of his campaign that was different. Maybe it was because Obama, with his natural charisma, felt he didn’t need it, or maybe that’s just the way he is, but the Buck Fush/unseat-the-Republican-devil stridency was completely absent from his whole approach. “I’m so tired of Democrats waving Bush in front of me and thinking I owe them my vote,” one woman in Nashua, New Hampshire, told me. “Just tell me who you are and let me think about it, okay? I don’t need to be hating someone else. I’m really tired of all that. It’s tiring, you know? Why do I need to hate some dolt in Alabama? I don’t even know those people.”
At the peak of its intensity, in 2004, the blue-state/red-state split represented, in a way, an enormous triumph for mainstream politics. It was a time when huge masses of the population could be organized into two rival groups, each trained to hate the other intensely. But what’s happening now is that many people are beginning to resent being lumped simplistically into shallow, media-created Crossfire-style categories of “left” and “right” on the one hand they distrust the very media that celebrates those simplistic distinctions, and on the other they see that the elected politicians who ostensibly represent those would-be opposing ideologies actually do no such thing.
So now they are not only seeking their own far more individualized identities, they’re actually demanding that those identities be recognized. And some of these new politicians are responding—by running against the economic betrayal, like Paul and Edwards, or by rejecting the left-right partisan hatred deal, à la Obama. It’s not much, but it’s at least providing a few more choices. And the more things move in that direction, the more the original problem of a monolithic, corrupt political orthodoxy withers away. Because a mass Balkanization of the political landscape in this country would, of course, be enormously dangerous to that kind of dug-in, corrupt elite. When the country is split not into two neat sides but in a million little pieces, how do you tie up the population with hatred for the “other half” while you burgle the national treasure and run Congress like a medieval Khannate? How do you get families hating each other at Thanksgiving over trifles while you cook up phony wars and pad the Pentagon budget with billions in political kickbacks? The answer is, you can’t. When the Crossfire paradigm loses its force, all that’s left is a bunch of people with different views all sitting together in a room, wondering why they’re all paying three bucks a gallon for gas, why they have no health insurance, why their tax rates are higher than Warren Buffett’s. If we’re all equally a bunch of suckers, how could any of us be worth hating? Only a madman wastes his time hating a sucker. And increasingly, the J.C.s and the Terences are realizing that we all of us have been suckers all these years.
MAYBE THAT SIMPLE OBSERVATION is our path back to reality, if it’s not too late.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THANKS TO S&G editor Chris Jackson