With the carnage of the recent midterm elections safely behind them, what remains of the American left has begun to reflect on its losses. Although some have tried to explain the country’s swing to the populist right as an inevitable consequence of the financial crisis, a few commentators have suggested that the humbling of the Democrats is in fact an indication of the terminal decline in traditional Liberal America. This charge has been made most forcefully by the journalist Chris Hedges, who argues that roughly since the Nixon years, corporate money has progressively poisoned American politics, encouraging successive administrations to ignore working and middle class interests and to propagandize free-market fundamentalism. As a result the American public has been persuaded that globalization is practically inevitable and consented to neoliberal ideas like NAFTA, which were excellent for corporations but disastrous for American workers.
Hedges suggests that while this was happening, under both Republican and Democratic administrations, the bastions of traditional liberalism – unions, churches, universities, the Democratic Party – allowed themselves to become part of the corporate buy-out, until they had nothing left but rhetoric, most recently about Hope and Change. “The liberal class is guilty,” he writes, “[and] the virulent right-wing backlash we now experience is an expression of the liberal class’ flagrant betrayal of the citizenry.” Stuck with an “obsolete language of policies and issues” liberal institutions have refused “to concede that power has been wrested so efficiently from the hands of citizens by corporations that the Constitution and its guarantees of personal liberty are irrelevant. [The liberal class] does not act to mitigate the suffering of tens of millions of Americans who now make up a growing and desperate permanent underclass.”
One of Hedges’ most telling points is the prevalence of magical thinking in the ranks of the angry electorate, its baffling detachment from the realities of modern politics. The results of the recent elections bear this out. Many post-mortems of the midterms have focused on elderly white voters who supported Tea Party and Republican candidates because they promised to scale back government interventions in the economy. Ostensibly these voters were driven by fears that reckless stimulus spending and the hated reforms of “Obamacare” would diminish funds for Medicare and Medicaid programs on which so many of them rely. But properly considered these messages are contradictory. For if the empowerment of the Tea Party was meant indicate a preference for free-market policies, lower taxes, and a devil-take-the-hindmost economic philosophy, then the new Republican majority in congress will soon find itself trying to square a political circle. The medical entitlements which so concerned the elderly voters cannot be salvaged without massive government spending, the very thing for which the Democrats have supposedly been punished.
Tea Party politics is ripe with paradoxes about which most true believers seem to have remained wilfully oblivious. A few weeks ago, after attending a Tea Party rally at which Sarah Palin spoke, the Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi asked an elderly couple in the audience to explain their distrust of big-government. They warned him that the welfare state was out of control, that “too many people are living off the government” and that the government often spent money on people “who don’t deserve it.” When he learned that the speaker’s wife was moving around on a Medicare-funded scooter and that the man himself was a tax assessor, Taibbi had an epiphany. “[T]he Tea Party is a movement that purports to be furious about government spending,” he observed, “… [and] the average Tea Partier is sincerely against government spending — with the exception of the money spent on ‘them.’ In fact, their lack of embarrassment when it comes to collecting government largesse is key to understanding what this movement is all about…”
Seen in this light the anger which sent the Tea Party candidates to Washington is likely to end up consuming its own before long. For one of the sobering truths which the new Republican majority in Congress will soon confront is that there is no short cut out of the country’s present economic crisis. Post-industrial America simply cannot create jobs as quickly as neoliberal America made them disappear. A housing crisis in which nearly 8,000 people are defaulting on mortgages each day cannot be reversed in a few years, perhaps not even in two presidential terms. A country that has disempowered its liberal institutions in order to embrace a brave new world of free global markets must be prepared for a long and slow recovery when those markets fail. Given the size of the challenges that lie ahead, to say nothing of the foreign policy complications beyond these national crises, nominal control of the government may end up mattering far less than either party would like it to. After the midterms it is certainly clear that the American public is angry, but it is also clear that much of this anger is confused, based on misinterpretations and essentially unappeasable.
