Obama's Petard and the resurgent Red Coats
Professor Marcia Pally of New York University on how the US President, like his predecessor, has become a sink for civil resentment
Who hates Barack Obama? The short answer is: the United States. Of course America elected him in 2008 out of optimistic self re-invention. We would “change” and repudiate the failed policies of George W. Bush. But in the nearly two years since, America seems to be changing again, this time against Obama. Why?
Over 46 million Americans lack health insurance; those who have it pay high fees. If you have a “pre-existing condition,” like being the victim of spousal abuse, you can barely get insurance at all. Yet over 50% of Americans opposed Obama's health plan. When, with great political strong-arming, a watered-down health care plan was finally passed, death threats were lobbed against Congressional Representatives who voted for it. A dozen states vowed to sue the federal government to prevent it from imposing the plan on their communities.
Obama cut taxes for 95% of working families. Yet on the day taxes were due in 2009, over 750 anti-tax, anti-Obama “tea-party” protests erupted across America. One sign held by a protestor in Boston called Washington D.C. (District of Columbia) the “District of Communism." Another in Alabama pictured Obama in Hitler-style hair and mustache. Marchers at a mid-Sept protest called Obama a fascist and a communist, comparing him to Hitler, Stalin, Castro and Pol Pot.
It is tempting to say this disaffection with Obama is the fault of Republican bigwigs, who are duping the nation against its own best interests. The Republicans did after all spend $9 million by the fall of 2009 to kill Obama's health insurance plan. Republican lobbying organizations like FreedomWorks offer advice and organizational skills to novice tea-party organizations. Republican politicians visit local groups, trying to win them for the party. Ron Paul, the Texas libertarian congressman, is among the most popular. Rick Perry, in seeking re-election to the Texas governorship, supported the populist movement to secede from the US. Richard Behney, a Republican candidate for the Senate, told Indiana tea-party-ers that, if the 2010 elections did not repudiate Obama, “I'm cleaning my guns and getting ready for the big show….and I bet you are, too.”
But these pols are fanning the flames of those already smoldering at the president. The first tea-party protests were organized at the grassroots, on Facebook and Twitter—an update on Paul Revere's 1775 ride from Boston to Lexington and Concord to warn the townspeople that “the Red Coats are coming.”
The Red Coats are the point, or at least one of them, behind the anger against Obama. For 250 years, since the first agitations against the British, America's deepest dread had been “big government”—government control of one's options and movements. Freedom in the US has always meant absence of restraint. During the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama had the advantage of every political outsider in America: he was running against big government in Washington as the neighbourhood organiser from Chicago. And he was running against someone who was closely associated with the Bush machine. But now that he is government, America's anti-government suspicions aim at him. Worse his economic stimulus, bank bailout, and health care plan expand “big government,” confirming people's greatest fears that more and more of their lives will be regulated by the state.
This was not the UK's fault, you'll be relieved to hear (from an American). Though London was the first target of American anti-governmental suspicion, its expectation that the 13 colonies—quite lightly taxed, in fact—would pitch in towards the costs of the French and Indian Wars was rather reasonable. After all, the Red Coats had saved the Americans from French occupation, not to mention 'dreaded Catholicism.' But unluckily for London, American suspicion of government was already in place, built in 150 years of frontier living, where infrastructure, tradition and authorities were scare and self-reliance necessary for survival. Having matured under benign neglect from Britain and with energetic do-it-myself-ism in their bones, the Americans were poised to bristle at any English demand. Perhaps had London governed the colonies more closely from the beginning, it would have had less trouble at the end of the 18th century. But then, it might have strangled the improvisational vitality that settled America so quickly and made it so profitable to the crown.
In any case, by the 1760s, American anti-authoritarian, anti-state individualism was a done deal, an American creed, and would remain so, across the range of US politics. The individual “common man” and the groups he joins are the coin of the realm. They—not the state--are where the Good resides, along with all the other values Americans prize. America deems the state too incompetent and self-interested to do anything right, yet just competent enough to take away one's rights and freedoms. We concede that it has to do a few things, but this is most unfortunate, and the less the better. Far more productive and safer—it's believed across the continent, class, religion and race—to rely on hard-working, entrepreneurial, self-responsible individuals endeavoring alone or in local voluntary associations (as Tocqueville called them), in which you can keep an eye on the fellows in charge.
These sentiments were the fundament of the federal agreement in 1789, as people felt themselves to belong to the country of Pennsylvania, the country of Virginia etc.--much as Europeans feel they are citizens of their countries, not the EU. That indeed is why America's 50 units are called “states.” 70 years later, they were the ground for the Civil War, fought first over who should decide if states should be slave or free—Washington or the local states themselves? Lincoln rather autocratically said Washington; the Confederacy said the states. (The war was fought secondly over the morality of holding chattel.) In 150 years post-bellum, individualism and localism fuelled—on one hand--the defense of local segregation laws, local anti-labor/anti-union policies, and resistance to environmental protection. On the other, 'do-it-yourself-ism' energized the “creative destruction” that built the country, as historian Joyce Appleby has written (cribbing from Schumpeter). It fuelled local development of progressive education systems, local environmental laws more protective than national ones, and the leftist demand for local control of the economy against globalisation. Anti-statist entrepreneurialism gave America a relatively unregulated, porous economy, where immigrants can get in. In sum, it made America the land of rough, can-do optimism. If you go bankrupt, get over it and start anew. If you get it wrong with G.W. Bush, start anew.
This anti-authoritarian “creative destruction”—this hope over history—is what elected Obama. We would overcome our racism and-- again, indefatigably--reinvent ourselves by ourselves. Moreover, Obama promised change from a government that had failed to realize the ideals that inhere in We-the-People. Americans are supposed to be energetic, hard-working, responsible bearers of liberal economic opportunity and liberal political rights. Yet in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we hardly looked like liberators, Bush's embrace of torture appalled millions, and then our liberal economy tanked. You see, the government can't be trusted. Time for “change.”
In hailing the people's capacity for rebirth and rebuilding, Obama's hymn to “change” was utterly traditional. American elections are full of such hymns: Ronald Reagan, a Republican, had “Morning comes to America” as his campaign slogan. America loved it. But now that Obama is government, he faces a central paradox of American politics: distrust of central government undercuts him.
Who wants “change” now? The pastor, for instance, on National Public Radio who affirmed that it is our moral responsibility to improve health care for the needy—but the government is the last guy you want doing it. They do it badly, he said, and limit individual choice—which is worse. Who else? The lawyer for the National Rifle Association who noted, in a recent Harvard Law Journal article, that gun ownership is “to protect against the tyranny of our own government.” It's hardly a minority view. As Obama expanded government through his bail out, stimulus and health care programs, gun sales rose, in some areas more than 25%. Right-wing shooting-sprees rose as well--populist binges motivated by the fear that the government is taking over the country. The US Department of Homeland Security devoted a 2009 report to the risks of domestic, right-wing—not Islamist—terrorism.
Who else wants change? The vast mosaic of tea-party groups, each different from the one in the next town. Some are racists, who cannot accept a black president and fear the demographic change to a browner America. Obama's erudition and elegance increase the ressentiment. But many tea-party-ers are embarrassed by the racist and anti-immigrant strains in Obama-opposition. "Stupid," a woman said at a February tea-party convention in Nashville. "I thought we came here to talk about taxes and government spending and national defense."
That individualist anti-statism is why they want change: too much government spending means too much taxes means too little money in the pockets of the ordinary guy to fix his problems by himself. In the recession, tea-party-ers (or their friends and families) lost homes, jobs, and dignity. The government bailouts returned profits to banks while joblessness and home foreclosures remain high. The outrage drove many to a “conversion experience,” to the creed that is America's prime faith: government screws up. Worse, in its handshake with big business, it screws the little guy. In April 2009--in the depths of the economic crisis caused by investment-firm high jinks--55% of Americans thought the problem was big government, not big business.
This too is not new. Not only anti-statism but fear of the handshake between elites runs through its history, on the right and left. You'll find echoes in the Shay's and Whiskey rebellions of the late 18th century, when Americans were already rising up against the government they had just formed because it supported the rights of landlords or itself taxed booze. To quiet the Whisky Rebellion, George Washington had to call up more troops than were employed in the revolt against London. You'll find echoes also among the socialists of the 1880s, the Wobbly labor organizers of the early 20th century, and in the works of William Jennings Bryan, the evangelical leftist Democrat and three-time presidential candidate (1896, 1900, 1908). All diagnosed the suffering of the common man in the big-government/big-business gentleman's agreement. Greater similarities are found among rightist populists since the 1970s, who feel that the increasingly elaborate global economy is beyond them. “America was once their country,” the populist politician Pat Buchanan wrote. “They sense they are losing it.” And they are. For 40 years, both Democrats and Republicans have presided as large corporations have moved manufacturing jobs to low-wage countries, for greater profits. Why trust any of ‘em?
In the present iteration of populist complaint, both right and left, Bush and Obama have exceeded Constitutional limits on central government. Both have used the Cloward-Piven strategy of manufacturing a crisis in order to destroy the “common man's” free-enterprise opportunities for the benefit of an international network of the rich. The further-right Patriot movement holds that government is in a handshake with controlling economic elites in the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations. America's bad-boy leftist Michael Moore and many like-minded others would not disagree. The Oath Keepers asks military and law enforcement to disobey orders which they deem unconstitutional. They oppose warrantless police searches, detention camps for civilians, and the arrest of Americans as “enemy combatants” (a classification Bush created to remove terrorist suspects from Geneva Convention and Constitutional protections for prisoners). Human rights activists would not disagree. Richard Mack--an ex-sheriff, ex-Cadillac salesman turned tea-party hero--says only local police can be trusted, never the feds. His idea of an exemplary cop is one who, rather than arresting Civil Rights activists in the 1950s -‘60s would escort them to safety. Who could disagree?
But the diagnosis of a nefarious handshake between elites takes two hands: big business and big government. While today's tea-party-ers see the evils of both, their cure is to limit only one, government. They cannot limit big business because they believe that the liberal market conditions which benefit corporations also provide chances for the “common man,” for themselves. They believe this first from history: 300 years of market liberalism have yielded high national living standards and a flexible, creative economy to which millions of immigrants are drawn. But when market liberalism falters—in cowboy investment schemes or 46 million uninsured--many Americans have believed themselves out of a solution. They cannot tame the dog that threatens them because they believe it's on the inside of their picket fence, protecting their homes. For instance, had McCain been elected president in 2008, he would have bailed out the banks with even fewer requirements that they repay society—the common man—than Obama has demanded. The little guy, uncompensated for the bailout which he paid for with his taxes, would've been screwed worse. But presented under the Republican mantra of “small government” and an open market, McCain's bailout would have felt fair. The very lack of regulation that would have screwed the little guy would've felt like his chance to succeed. It would have felt American.
With this idea of diagnosis and cure, tea-party groups seek to lower taxes so as to give individuals and communities the resources to solve their problems. They also want to balance the federal budget by shrinking government services—which they think is a good idea anyway, since government screws them up. Obama's health care plan seems simply nuts: his bailout program benefited the banks, not ordinary Americans: why now trust it with healthcare?
While the Republican party is actively recruiting tea-party-ers, many in this populist protest detest both parties. They seek to impeach Obama but also to unseat Republicans who have betrayed them (called RINOs, Republicans In Name Only). Mark Steven Kirk, a Republican candidate for the Illinois Senate seat, is a target of populist protest for supporting legislation to curb global warming. Florida Governor Charlie Crist is a target for supporting stimulus spending. Rather than a top-down event, tea-parties-- even with Republican flame-fanning--express beliefs embedded in the American political imaginary. When Republican business interests say that the problem is government regulation—big government—it sounds right because Americans have long thought this anyway. It “clicks.” The conservative Wall St. Journal noted, “all it took to send the whole thing [Obama's health insurance plan] crashing to the ground… were a few groundless rumors and a handful of angry right wingers… on TV.” Business-Republicans don't nefariously create these beliefs; they agree with them. And Americans are persuaded because they believe them too.
Consider the 70-something Pam Stout and 33-year-old Darin Stevens, both profiled by The New York Times. Stout had long worked in federal housing programs and other government services for the poor because she believed government programs could be useful. But when her son lost his job and home in the 2008 recession, she “awoke,” she says, to see that DC manipulates crisis for power. She is now a tea-party-er. “Peaceful means,” she holds, is the best path to change. “But sometimes you are not given a choice.” Darin Stevens had his own business installing wireless networks until the recession, when he had to lay off employees and could barely pay his bills. He came to agree with right-wing populist media host Glenn Beck that D.C. is a conspiracy to rob the little guy. The solution is to stop Washington.
At present, some tea-party-ers participate in small, local groups. They study the Constitution and Federalist Papers individually or together—much as Christians read the Bible or as young socialists read Marx and the Frankfurt School. Others cooperate with organizations further to the right, like Friends for Liberty, the cheekily-titled 9/12 Project (organized by Beck), the John Birch Society (an anti-communist, nativist group dating to the Cold War), and the above-mentioned Oath Keepers. The more established Patriot Movement brings together classic libertarians with arms-stocking militias, anti-immigration advocates, and those who want to close the Federal Reserve. Online, they read critiques of government on Infowars.com (“Because there is a war on for your mind”) and ResistNet.com (“Home of the Patriotic Resistance”), where bloggers warn that Obama is trying to convert Interpol, the international police organization, into his personal police force. They listen to Beck, who warns of a “New World Order” in which Obama has manufactured a crisis, Cloward-Piven style, to destroy the economy and install dictatorship.
For a brief time in US history, the anti-government diagnosis of economic ills was not the national consensus. Facing the appalling labor abuses of the late 19th century, some came to think that government might protect the common man and preserve his opportunities in the market by controlling monopolies and corporate greed. Taking the hard-working, self-reliant fellow still as the basic value, they held that government need not be small but rather big enough to give him a leg up and make it on his own. With this idea, Teddy Roosevelt brought in the reformist legislation of the Progressive Era (1901-WWI). In the economic boom of the ‘20s, this idea faded, but his nephew Franklin, during the 1930s Depression and WWII, revived it in his New Deal economic policies—a vast increase in government to protect the common man.
But the Roosevelt moment, always heterodox, was short-lived. By the 1960s, absent the Depression and WWII, America had returned to its orthodox faith in the individual and locality. Lyndon Johnson's Civil Rights and Great Society aid programs enraged “middle America.” Millions saw it not as government help to the little guy but as “handouts”--as violating the self-reliant individualism so dear to the nation. The Republican comeback had begun.
The Rooseveltian Moment has not returned. Certain academic progressives, like Paul Krugman at the New York Times and Princeton, try to boost Keynesian state involvement in the economy. But it is a minority voice and we easily lose the melody. The majority tune is individualist, voluntary-associationist, and anti-state, and unlike the 1929 Depression, present economic conditions have not out-shouted it. Neither has anger at the rich except in extreme circumstances, like the large 2009 bonuses handed out at corporations which just a few months earlier had taken the government bailout—the common man's tax dollars—to avoid bankruptcy. But these angry moments have been brief. The enduring ire is not at the cowboy banks but at the government bailout: as usual, government messed up. Indeed, ressentiment in American rarely aims at the rich, who are admired for their daring ingenuity. Half of Bush's tax cuts went to the top 5% of the nation, without much protest. By contrast, Obama is a double minority: in race, far from a bygone issue, and in humming the minority tune of bigger government.
At bottom, Obama is hoist on his own petard. He preached America's sermon of populist change: the people could once again right the country. But the anti-authoritarian faith in re-invention that gave him the White House brings anti-governmental animus to his door. The more he acts--the more Americans sense increasing state activity--the more suspect he becomes. Of course, inactivity would not help him. For the only thing self-responsible, energetic Americans hate as much as government is wimpy do-nothing-ness.
For a hint at how to survive the paradox of American government, Obama might look to Reagan. He, like Obama, preached a sermon of change but he was never its victim. He had such confidence in small government—and sang its praises so often and so earnestly--that no one noticed that taxes rose (after an early, much-publicized tax cut) and middle class purchasing-power fell.
If Obama will not channel Reagan, Sarah Palin certainly is. The names most frequently mentioned in her book, Going Rogue, are Reagan and God. Ebullient like her mentor and sure she hums in America's majority key, she is solidifying a base out of the populist rage that is fraying Obama's.
At present, roughly 35-36% of Americans identify as Democrat, 31-33% as Republicans, the rest as independents. Tea-party-ers are only 17% Democrat, 28% independent, and 57% Republican. As they target moderate Republicans for removal, they pull the party's position towards populist positions. But while there may be a tug-of-war inside the party between populists and classic business Republicans, it remains to be seen how much this will affect policy.
Obama in the meanwhile must persuade the two thirds of America that might vote for him that he speaks with the majority voice. As a candidate, he found it in “change.” If he cannot, like Roosevelt or Reagan, find it as president, we'll be singing with the Palin-Beck choir in 2012.