Tea Party Politics: Flirting with Fascism
The rapid national organization of the Tea Party has become one of the most extraordinary developments in American politics since the election of Barack Obama. Depending on one’s perspective, it is either a diverse movement or a confused one. In truth it is both, but only because it is a cover for more than one movement. What we may be witnessing is a momentary intersection of two nascent movements, a populist one and a fascist one. Which of these movements will prevail will depend on what happens to the US economy in the near future. The future power of the Tea Party will crystallize, disintegrate, or morph in direct relationship with the so-called “real” economy of “Main Street.” The economic recovery will have to feel real to ordinary US citizens to succeed. So far it hasn’t. If there is no real recovery on Main Street, if ordinary Americans do not begin to feel like things are getting better in ways that really matter to them; if its middle-class majority becomes convinced that liberal capitalism has permanently malfunctioned then it is quite possible that the fascist elements of the Tea Party will coalesce into more extreme forms of antagonism.. It appears we are at that threshold now.
In a recent New Yorker, Ben McGrath implies the Tea Party is nothing more than a hodge-podge of paranoid, right-wing populists. Likewise, Jonathan Raban’s expose in The New York Review of Books describes the convention in Nashville as a “loose congeries of unlike minds” united only by a common “contempt” of Obama. Both articles observe that many of the members subscribed to a wide range of counter-narratives concerning American power, such as the “birther” insistence that Obama isn’t an American, or the “truther” insistence that there are serious holes in the story of the 9/11 commission. There are evangelical wings and libertarian advocates. And then there is the surprising fact that the Tea Party movement is so old, and the unsurprising fact that it is so white.
The Tea Party’s suspicion of Washington, Obama, and the liberal media, however, is justified. The current financial crisis has conclusively exposed the real ties between Wall Street and Washington. The resolute self-censorship of the mainstream media to investigate that relationship has severely degraded many people’s faith in corporate journalistic integrity. This goes not only for CNBC, which championed the financial insanity during the bubble, but also for liberal publications like the New York Times and The New Yorker. Both the Times and FOX News are equally as likely to derisively dismiss interpretations from the right or left that don’t fit their ideological lens as a form of conspiracy theory. The recent crisis has opened an enormous rift between information that appears to explain the world and the information in the mainstream media, which seems merely to describe it. The abject failure of the mainstream media to investigate the potential conflicts in the relationships of the power elite on Wall Street and in Washington continuously opens a vacuum that progressives and conservatives must fill with their own research.
As Ben McGrath and others have noted, the Tea Party does a lot of its own research. Liberals dismiss their ideas with the same group-think arrogance found in the Tea Party itself, but one must at least give the Tea Party some credit for originality. The recent explosion of so-called conspiracy theory is not the product of the Internet’s ability to provide cheap access to fringe thinking. It is due to the degraded ambitions and responsibilities of mainstream American journalism and its complicity within the tiers of power it follows. Mainstream journalism actively participates in the simultaneous silencing of alternative media and the promotion of bounded debates that exclude openings outside the political mainstream. The resentment of Tea Party members for this silencing parallels progressive resentments of the same institutions. This silencing is a form of corporate censorship, not unlike that which the Chinese regime uses to edit Google searches. The difference is that the Chinese government uses censorship to edit stories, suppress information, and punish journalists for publishing anywhere. In the US, one can publish one’s thoughts online, for free. They are just not honored by those in power, and thus only “believed” by a small circle of one’s readers. Censorship in the United States instead takes the form of active derision, humiliation, and snobbery towards individuals promoting alternative narratives about the world. The Tea Party exists because of this information vacuum, however, and not simply because gullible people are excited by novel accusations and wacky ideas. This vacuum also serves the purpose of matching information to the emotions of one’s life, which is a necessary link one must make in order to explain the world to oneself.
The self-censorship within the corporate mainstream media is all the more problematic because the narratives they’ve inherited from their own political wing—their White House—just aren’t selling. What David Brooks, David Axelrod, Timothy Geithner and the Times fail to understand is that Obama’s pragmatic ideology is not one of compromise, but a compromised ideology. Obama’s intellectual principles have traded originality for power. From the beginning of his 2008 presidency campaign, he defined himself by his slip-shod fidelity to being “smart” without being “ideological.” His refusal to address the real ideological underpinnings of his own worldview has thus turned into his greatest weakness. He has no organizing principle for the world, and that’s why he’s become the perfect cipher for the real tiers of American power working around him. The most insidious part of Obama’s presidency is his blindness to his own beliefs. He’s the smartest guy in the room, but his lack of originality—his failure to think outside the box—stems directly from the fact that he doesn’t believe he’s in a box to begin with.
His decisions have thus become a synthetic gumbo of liberal policy decisions without the benefit of a liberal ideology—no Great Society, no Works Progress Administration. Obama’s form of pragmatic liberalism denies itself as liberalism, and thus Obama and his supporters constantly claim the righteous high-ground of compromise; all they want, they say, is smart power. What they don’t realize is that the real ideological and economic foundations of liberalism are dead. The collapse of the US economy is not only the fault of the Republicans, but is equally the fault of Obama and Bill Clinton, and Barney Frank and Chuck Schumer. Democrats have used US power in past decades as a platform for neo-liberal free-market policies like NAFTA and deregulation, as well as neo-conservative foreign policy adventures like Iraq. For Obama, things working right means a surge in Afghanistan, business-as-usual bonanza bonuses for the banking barons, and no single-payer or even public option healthcare system. It shouldn’t continue to surprise progressives that Obama doesn’t seem passionate about gay marriage, troop withdrawals, or financial reform.
In the face of Obama’s ineffectual leadership, it’s not surprising that Scott Brown was able to pull independent votes in the Massachusetts special election. Obama was correct to surmise that the populist tides that carried him into office also carried Brown into his. This populist tide also fertilized the Tea Party. It exists because the past financial collapse has killed liberalism—itself a contradictory mish-mash of capitalist exploitation and partial government programs. It’s dead because the United States has recently either escaped or forestalled economic collapse, but many regions in the United States are still experiencing the full shock of that catastrophe. Entire communities are socially and economically dead. For all practical purposes, these regions are currently sitting on the edge of the extreme social decay that follows economic depression. They are merely surviving while financial markets cautiously resume the practices of lending, leverage, and bonuses that contributed to the origins of the crisis. The economy has not recovered so much as it’s been revived, but the corpse that’s talking on CNN still looks, to everyone, like Frankenstein’s monster.
The Federal Reserve, not the Treasury Department, electrified this monster back into existence. The Fed’s policies absorbed and soaked up the worst of the credit crisis through quantitative easing, money printing, and the trillions of dollars of toxic securities it purchased. Those actions make the bailout seem trite. They have received very little attention in the mainstream media, although organizations like GATA (Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee) and websites like Zero Hedge have filed lawsuits and uncovered documents to pinpoint vast schemes of corruption, influence, and manipulation at the Fed now and in previous decades. The Fed serves as the lynchpin of liberalism because it creates money. By softening the effects of recessions through monetary expansion—that is, by creating credit bubbles—it reduces the possibilities for social revolt against the ruling elite. This is because middle-class wealth depends on an addiction to that credit and money. It thus prevents the social consequences of financial risk. Run by a cabal of banks, the Fed usurps the constitutional mandate for the Treasury to print money and instead prints it for the government, all the while controlling interest rates. During recessions and depressions it follows the Keynesian proscription to “spend” out of a recession. This is the world Obama wants to find pragmatic solutions to sustain.
The true litmus test of liberalism for a wobbly progressive is an opinion about the Fed, because a real liberal has either never questioned it or flat-out supports it. The failure of progressives to imagine a financial system post-liberalism is one of its main intellectual weakness, and thus one of the reasons for the continued success of the Tea Party. The Tea Party libertarian argument for free-markets without the Fed is not identical to the free markets proposed under the banner of neo-liberalism. The Tea Party’s argument against government spending includes a sustained critique of the Fed, embodied by Texas representative Ron Paul. This is one of the reasons why the Tea Party appeals so well to populist sentiment: it has actually persuaded working and un-employed Americans that another economic system is possible, even if that other system is a species of capitalism. But non-liberal capitalism is a de-centralized, utopian idea. It bears as much relation to contemporary financial capitalism as Chinese communism does to the Soviet kind.
This is where the Tea Party might one day intersect with the progressive green movement. Both movements could favor de-centralized economies that exchange commodities and non-fiat currency between local producers and consumers. Without the Fed’s cheap money, economies wouldn’t grow as fast. This slower growth would have great benefits ecologically. Thus the Tea Party and the greens may imagine similar alternatives to corporate globalization, in that neither imagines the enormous institutions necessary to support corporate forms of growth and support – primarily the state itself. There is thus a fascinating logic in the desire to shrink government, were it to actually work: since the state is the central agent of support for capitalist firms, there’s a chance a weak state might lead to weaker corporations. On the other hand, it might lead the way to ever more horrible forms of corporate control. This is the conversation that should be taking place right now between progressive greens and Tea Partiers. If they can find a consensus around environmental pollution, they might unite in their mutual opposition to mass industry, consumption by debt, and centralized economies run by corporate lobbyists. This conversation isn’t happening, of course. And so the points of commonality between the Tea Party and certain progressive and green skepticism around Obama and liberalism may never grow into an even wider populist tent.
This may also never happen because there are very real problems with the Tea Party. The common dissatisfaction with Obama always seems hung on phrases that suggest violence. There is more xenophobia than conspiracy theory in the birther vitriol. At the Nashville conference, important Republican demagogues such as Tom Tancredo and Sarah Palin were crowd favorites. Their style of charismatic, cartoonish patriotism make them leading political figures in what could become a newly indigenous American fascism.
In his book The Anatomy of Fascism, Robert Paxton notes that Italian and German fascist movements blossomed during the collapse of their respective liberal capitalist states, and that both national movements came to power explicitly on anti-communist and anti-socialist slogans. They directed popular enthusiasm into dictatorships against the left, and mobilized passions already inflamed by the collapse of those capitalist economies. Crowds formed in order to inflict and threaten violence against specific targets, and legitimated it by simultaneously victimizing themselves and claiming ‘chosen-people’ status. The movement worked as an “anti-political politics,” or a politics that sought to use democratic techniques and extra-legal violence to destroy enemies of the people. Noam Chomsky uses similar language to describe the fanatic anti-political, anti-government perspective of Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber.
What distinguishes the Tea Party thus far from these earlier fascisms is its failure, thus far, to explicitly self-identify as a racist movement, or as a group itself victimized by an enemy. The vague idea of liberals or big government isn’t concrete enough to stir violence against groups, only institutions—like the IRS or the Pentagon or any federal agency. The fact that it is a white movement with some racists within it doesn’t make it a racist movement—not yet. Instead, angry whites dominate the group without elevating their whiteness as a condition of belonging. If it is racist, then, it advocates a weird kind of white power that other races are free to join. It has also failed to identify another “identity” group it holds primarily responsible for its problems. They rally against Mexican immigration without explicitly expressing disgust with Mexicans themselves. Tea Partiers have an obvious problem with “radical Islam,” but they aren’t organizing violence against Muslim-Americans. Different parts of the Tea Party seem angry at different enemies, and they project onto Obama a synthetic caricature of their fears. Even stranger, the Tea Party’s appeal as a fascist party has been clarified by its avowed declaration that Obama is a totalitarian, socialist, communist, and finally fascist dictator. It appears at times to be the very movement it proclaims to organize against.
The Tea Party is not yet the dependable vehicle of any coherent fascist policy, then, even as the politicians associated with it channel its emotions into threats of violence. Tea Party candidate for Texas governor, Debra Medina, was reported not to advocate “bloodshed” herself but rather to invoke it as “inevitable” if the constitution isn’t properly defended. In a stunning admission, she also told Glen Beck that she believed there were “good questions” about the role the Bush administration may have played in 9/11, and that the American people had not “seen all the evidence.” Her candidacy attracted attention and positive coverage from readers and listeners of Alex Jones’ “Prison Planet” and “Infowars” websites and radio shows. His popularity has also recently reached new heights; he was interviewed on the Geraldo Rivera’s FOX news program after the media tried to link John Patrick Bedell, the so-called Pentagon shooter, with the 9-11 truth movement. Jones is the leading American skeptic of the 9/11 commission and, whatever his excesses and paranoia about issues like global warming, he is perhaps the most interesting figure in alternative media for bridging progressive and Tea Party politics together. He is also the greatest beneficiary of the mainstream media’s descent into corporate censorship, for better or worse.
But at this stage of its ascension, the movement’s failure to find a sustainable target for its anger has weakened the Tea Party. It will need a common enemy for the fascist wing to succeed and grow. This enemy cannot be Obama indefinitely. Still, their abject hatred of him is the closest the country has seen to a lynch-mob mentality in decades. Forty years ago, this same aggression would have led to open violence against African-Americans, especially in the south.
The reason the Tea Party has become legitimate for many Americans is because there is real anger right now. No one has been punished for the credit crisis except the middle and working classes. There is no sense that our laws apply to people in power. The elite have made statements expressing open contempt for ordinary Americans. Obama has appeared as a scapegoat for the right because the justice system hasn’t articulated a case against the real criminals, and because he has participated in that failure. His decision not to investigate the previous administration over torture and war crimes reveals a moral weakness under the deceptive guise of his “pragmatic” ideology. He wants to unite Americans but not address the forces that are tearing them apart. The truth is that Americans are divided more than ever by class, and those that are exploited deserve to feel angry. Geithner and Obama claim to have made the hard decisions in rescuing the economy, but they did so by saving the very institutions responsible for destroying it. In consequence, Obama’s desire for bi-partisan unity is as fatal an intellectual idea as it is a strategic one. He wants the parents to stop fighting so that they can keep beating the kids, or else to beat them softer and then give them health care.
Obama has surged twice in Afghanistan in the name of “nation-building” at a time when US infrastructure is falling apart at home. He rapidly expanded US drone strikes and covert operations in Pakistan in total violation of international law. He endorsed both real and proxy involvement of the US military in Yemen and Somalia. Even more ominously, his war strategy in Afghanistan continued even after a scandalously dubious election there, and just as Afghanistan’s now illegitimate President Hamid Karzai’s brother was exposed as a prominent drug trafficker on the CIA payroll. Everyday stories break about the clandestine involvements of the intelligence services and military contractors, and war with Iran seems increasingly likely. In combination with the role of the Fed, it’s clear that the US presidency doesn’t actually have the power necessary to change the country. Strangely, at the moment when executive power has never appeared stronger, a fascist wing of a populist movement has emerged because there is actually a power vacuum in the democratic machinery of this country. Fascist sentiments arise when government isn’t working. And if it continues not to work, one way or another there will be blood.
5 Responses to “Tea Party Politics: Flirting with Fascism”
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[...] are grouchy, too, although they’re not throwing anything. Justin Rogers-Cooper’s Tea Party Politics: Flirting with Fascism connects the dots between Obama’s ‘compromised ideology’ and the rise of the Tea [...]
You actually need an education in corporatism. I can only agree with Jane Hamshers of Firedoglake.com, the Obama Health Care Bill is a piece of classic fascist legislation. If you are a student at CUNY or SUNY, do some work on the subject before you speak. In fact, you can read her article in on Firedoglake.com in an article from March17th on forcing Kucinitch to pay back contributors that were promised he would continue to fight for universal health care. Read the blog that follows that article. We need new definitions of right and left. New allliances….
The Obama HealthCare bill is in no way fascist. While fascism holds the fascist state as the supreme authority and the race/nation as the supreme ideal, it’s really quite a display of exaggeration to claim a government health-care bill is fascist. A little socialist, maybe. Fascist? Do you ever stop and wonder how dumb you sound? While strongly statist, fascist regimes allowed traditional conservative apparatus to handle the economy for the most part; indeed fascism was pro-corporatism. Eventually all fascist states go to war, and when they garner public support for a war and have the people convinced, then the state takes total control over the person’s life. Prior to the war, the state only had half control. This is from a TCNJ graduate, and a psychology major. Please go get yourself an education, Ted.
[...] lore. Former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi likened the tea party folks to Nazis, many more equate them with fascists, infinite others to racists, and…that pretty much covers the worst things you [...]
Smart tnhkiing – a clever way of looking at it.
[...] lore. Former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi likened the tea party folks to Nazis, many more equate them with fascists, infinite others to racists, and…that pretty much covers the worst things you [...]
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