The Tea Party Jacobins

[RoyGBiv]

I highly recommend reading this entire article.

Not that this means anything (and I apologize for the implied arrogance) but this mirrors much of my thinking over the past few years, yet it does so with much more eloquence than I have managed to muster. In fact, my own thoughts have been somewhat disjointed as I have attempted to find a cohesive theme. My only quibble with it on a first and second read is that I do not believe it goes far enough back in time, although I do understand this is as much by necessity as design since this is a comparative review of several books for which this review develops a unifying subject and that the books themselves are concerned primarily with more recent times.

I mention all that because I have used the term "Jacobins" or more insultingly "Robespierre-wanna-bes" often to describe those among the left who seem to have descended ideologically toward nihilism and anarchy. Within the context of this article, this explains clearly why people like that Hamsher person and some of her allies on the left have found bits of common cause with the Tea Party movement. It also explains why others on the left will in one breath denounce the dirt upon which people like Tom Coburn walk yet in another praise him for some bit of legislative trickery he has attempted or rhetorical nonsense he has uttered.

It also helps begin to explain why it is sometimes so difficult to be a "Democrat" (big "D") on Democratic Underground. (A more thorough explanation would take a different tangent, but this article might provide a helpful foundation.) A lot of people here aren't Democrats (nor are they "Greens" or "Republicans" or "Socialists) and indeed have little concept of what it means to have joined a political party and be supportive of it. Many of those who criticize Obama so ardently, day in and day out, are in fact independents, though they may take the mantle of a party of some sort at a given moment.

Anyway ... enough of my blabbering

The Tea Party Jacobins
May 27, 2010
by Mark Lilla

A little over a decade ago I published an article in these pages titled “A Tale of Two Reactions” (May 14, 1998). It struck me then that American society was changing in ways conservative and liberal commentators just hadn’t noticed. Conservatives were too busy harping on the cultural revolution of the Sixties, liberals on the Reagan revolution’s “culture of greed,” and all they could agree on was that America was beyond repair.

The American public, meanwhile, was having no trouble accepting both revolutions and reconciling them in everyday life. This made sense, given that they were inspired by the same political principle: radical individualism. During the Clinton years the country edged left on issues of private autonomy (sex, divorce, casual drug use) while continuing to move right on economic autonomy (individual initiative, free markets, deregulation). As I wrote then, Americans saw “no contradiction in holding down day jobs in the unfettered global marketplace…and spending weekends immersed in a moral and cultural universe shaped by the Sixties.” Democrats were day-trading, Republicans were divorcing. We were all individualists now. . . .

So what is the new populism about? That depends on who grabs your lapel. Glenn Beck, Keeper of the Grand Narrative at Fox News, fills his blackboard with circles and arrows mapping out the network of elites who have been plotting to seize control of our lives for over a century—from Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson to George Soros, the Federal Reserve Board, the G7, the UN, and assorted left-wing professors. The economic collapse and financial bailout they have exploited (or more likely caused) have woken the American people from their slumbers and now they are “taking their country back,” which apparently involves anesthetizing the government and buying gold (which Beck promotes on his program). In his lurid book Republican Gomorrah, Max Blumenthal of the Nation Institute sees an entirely different sort of cabal on the Republican right, whose leaders he portrays as sadomasochistic, porn-addicted, child-beating Christian fanatics who share with their Palin-loving followers “a culture of per- sonal crisis lurking behind the histrionics and expressions of social resentment.” (“Gingrich grew his hair long, emulating the style of the counterculture that he secretly yearned to join.”)

If either Beck or Blumenthal is right about the new populism, then it’s not worth taking seriously. My own view is that we need to take it even more seriously than they do; we need to see it as a manifestation of deeper social and even psychological changes that the country has undergone in the past half-century. Quite apart from the movement’s effect on the balance of party power, which should be short-lived, it has given us a new political type: the antipolitical Jacobin. The new Jacobins have two classic American traits that have grown much more pronounced in recent decades: blanket distrust of institutions and an astonishing—and unwarranted—confidence in the self. They are apocalyptic pessimists about public life and childlike optimists swaddled in self-esteem when it comes to their own powers.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/may/27/tea-party-jacobins/?pagination=false

[quiet.american]

1. Very good read. Thanks for posting. nt

[Cha]

2. Mindless greed for power & money is the driving force..

Jacobin Teabaggers/Domestic Terrorists are the vehicles and the engine is people like ginny thomas who is married to the Extremist judge clarence(that should be a tell).

'A new strain of populism is metastasizing before our eyes, nourished by the same libertarian impulses that have unsettled American society for half a century now. Anarchistic like the Sixties, selfish like the Eighties, contradicting neither, it is estranged, aimless, and as juvenile as our new century. It appeals to petulant individuals convinced that they can do everything themselves if they are only left alone, and that others are conspiring to keep them from doing just that. This is the one threat that will bring Americans into the streets.

Welcome to the politics of the libertarian mob."

And, I'm in the minority again..I don't feel the government is controlling my life..in fact, I like it now that the Obama Admin is trying to correct the tragedy of the bushcheney coup.

<snip>

"And so is the Eighties principle of economic autonomy. For three decades now a consistent majority of Americans has agreed with the following statements when asked: “when something is run by the government, it is usually inefficient and wasteful,” “the federal government controls too much of our daily lives,” “government regulation of business usually does more harm than good,” and “poor people have become too dependent on government assistance programs.” Yet there is no widespread desire to push the Reagan agenda of the Eighties further. The ideological polarization between Republicans and Democrats that surveys pick up is owing almost entirely to the radicalization of those belonging to the shrunken Republican base. (As of 2009, only a quarter of Americans identified themselves as Republicans, the lowest figure since the post-Watergate years.)"

[Uzybone]

3. great post. Thank goodness I can still learn new things on DU