This awesome post by Steve Benen is a good starting point for rebutting this piece of shit Wall Street Journal op-ed by James Taranto. Taranto tries to explain why, in his eyes, liberal elites find Americans (meaning Tea Partiers and know-nothing conservatives) revolting.
What is the nature of this contempt? In part it is the snobbery of the cognitive elite, exemplified by a recent New York Times Web column by Timothy Egan called “Building a Nation of Know-Nothings”–or by the viciousness directed at Sarah Palin, whose folksy demeanor and state-college background seem terribly déclassé not just to liberals but to a good number of conservatives in places like New York City.
In more cerebral moments, the elitists of the left invoke a kind of Marxism Lite to explain away opinions and values that run counter to their own. Thus Barack Obama’s notorious remark to the effect that economic deprivation embitters the proles, so that they cling to guns and religion.
It’s hard to get more elite than Wall Street. The firms there don’t hire people with the educational background of Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, or Sarah Palin. So, it’s a little rich for Taranto to lecture us about snobbery from the pages of the Wall Street Journal. But it’s been a part of the financial elites’ playbook forever to rail against the elitism of the left as they play on the prejudices, insecurities, and fears of the ‘proles.’ This isn’t a Marxist-lite argument. There’s no obvious reason why a Manhattan investment banker would share the social values of the Hill People of Appalachia or the religious fundamentalists of the Bible Belt. In truth, they don’t share their values. They just pretend to. And, in difficult financial times, it’s historically indisputable that financially insecure people flock to leaders who offer scapegoats and pat solutions. Unless you think demagoguery thrives during financial booms, there shouldn’t be any debate about this.
But the reason that liberals (and not just our elites) are revolted by the Tea Partiers is well explained by Steve Benen. When we try to take their arguments seriously, those arguments vanish into thin air. They have no logical consistency. Once you scratch the surface of their calls for liberty and freedom and following the Founding Fathers, it turns out that there is no ‘there’ there. Because their policy prescriptions (insofar as they are ever articulated) are either counter-factual or extraordinarily radical, it is impossible to engage Tea Partiers in intellectual debate or enter into any kind of negotiation with them.
When your idea of religious freedom is to ban mosques, how can we take you seriously? It’s not that the Tea Partiers’ concerns are illegitimate, it’s that their entire movement is a nebula of formless angst. What is it that is bringing people out to protest at this particular moment in time? The budget deficit? The budget deficit ballooned under the previous president and these Tea Partiers didn’t express any dismay.
It’s true that economic conditions have declined, and that probably explains part of the Tea Party phenomenon. But the main thing that changed is that a Democrat became president, and that president is black. That president has an unusual biography and a foreign-sounding name. The reason liberals are quick to throw around accusations of racism, homophobia, Islamophobia, and xenophobia is because the heart of Republican resistance to Obama has been based in attacks on black institutions like ACORN, on court rulings related to gay marriage, on manufactured outrages like the deceit that PARK51 is being proposed for ground zero, and on Latino immigration. The rest of the Tea Party/conservative opposition lacks credibility because they didn’t oppose deficit spending or warrantless surveillance or Medicare Part D or No Child Left Behind when those those policies were carried out by a Republican. Big government is therefore not the reason that Tea Partiers have taken to the streets.
As Benen notes, there are normally ideas behind mass movements, but the Tea Party doesn’t have ideas. What they have are outlets for channeling racial, economic, and cultural insecurity into traditional conservative tropes.
The anti-intellectualism of Tea Partiers (exemplified by the lazy Sarah Palin) is one of its core features, in part, because logic cannot co-exist in the same galaxy with their arguments. But just because someone is revolted by anti-intellectualism doesn’t make your a liberal. Or, maybe it does. The Republicans seem to have been replaced by the idiocracy.
