Our Divided Political Heart (7 page)

Beck took this old, strange, and fanciful book and turned it into a kind of historical bible, calling it “
essential to understanding why our Founders
built this Republic the way they did.” When Beck “
put the book in the first spot
on his required-reading list—and wrote an enthusiastic new introduction for its reissue,” Wilentz notes, “it shot to the top of the Amazon bestseller list. In the first half of 2009, it sold more than two hundred and fifty thousand copies” as “branches of the Tea Party Patriots, the United American Tea Party, and other groups across the country have since organized study groups around it.”

Wilentz’s article undertook the essential work of historians. He showed how so many of the assertions about the American past that were being taken for granted in certain political quarters were flatly wrong. He also brought home what so much of the mainstream commentary ignored: that ideas popular among the Tea Party rank and file could only be characterized as extremist and involved breathtaking fabrications and distortions of the American story. These ideas, associated with the Birch Society and other far-right groups a half century earlier, had been discredited before, and not just by liberals.

And that was Wilentz’s other essential point: how reluctant established conservatives in our time have been to take on crackpot theories. (Beck, it should be recalled, eventually ran into controversy for reasons other than his embrace of these theories.) By contrast, an earlier conservative generation had shown no such reticence. In the heyday of the Birch Society, it had been William F. Buckley Jr., the premier voice of contemporary American conservatism, who denounced its foolishness as dangerous to the conservative cause.

In 1962, Buckley had published a 5,000-word “excoriation” of Welch and the Birch Society, as Buckley called his commentary in a loving retelling of the episode shortly before his 2008 death. “
The underlying problem
,” he wrote in the sixties, “is whether conservatives can continue to acquiesce quietly in a rendition of the causes of the decline of the Republic and the entire Western world which is false, and, besides that, crucially different in practical emphasis from their own.” In a 1965 column, Buckley chronicled the Birch Society’s views on issues ranging from Medicaid to John Kennedy’s assassination, concluding that they amounted to “
paranoid and unpatriotic drivel
.”

By contrast, much of the right in the years after Obama’s election
either was silent about the extremism and distortion or actually played off the ideas put forward by Beck and, by extension, the old Birch heroes. Amity Shlaes, writing from a perch at the Council on Foreign Relations—yes, the institution once seen by the Birchers as a guiding force behind the international conspiracy—defended Beck against the “university guild” of historians and treated Skousen as just another book writer. Praising Beck for breaking the usual television rules, Shlaes wrote: “
He insists viewers read books by dead men
—W. Cleon Skousen’s work on the Constitution, the ‘5000 Year Leap.’ It is all a long way from ‘Oprah,’ ‘The Newshour’ or even much of public television.” Well, yes.
Oprah
or the
News Hour
might have provided a little background on who Skousen was and what he believed. Shlaes, once a writer for the
Wall Street Journal
’s editorial page, was honest enough to note her views might have been influenced by Beck’s plugging of her own anti-Roosevelt history of the New Deal,
The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression.
But she embraced Beck in full:

Every author is glad to sell books
. But the victory is far more Mr. Beck’s than any individual writer’s or publisher’s. His genius has been in his recognition that viewers do not want merely the odd, one-off book, duly pegged to news. They want a coherent vision, a competing canon that the regulated airwaves and academy have denied them. So he, Glenn Beck, is building that canon, book by book from the forgotten shelf. Since the man is a riveting entertainer, the professors are correct to be concerned. He’s not just reacting or shaping individual thoughts. He is bringing competition into the Ed Biz.

By this definition, of course, Skousen, Welch, and anyone else who managed to offer a “coherent vision,” no matter how distorted, qualified as part of “the Ed Biz.” And one “competing canon” was just as good as another. It was, as we have seen, an odd stance for conservatives to adopt, since so many in their ranks (and with some justification, too) had railed against abuses committed in the name of multiculturalism, postmodernism, and “political correctness.” The truth of a historical account suddenly didn’t
matter as much as its political utility—exactly what conservatives had complained about in the days when the left sought to find “a useable past.” And Beck—with his “coherent vision,” his “competing canon,” and, most important of all, the reach his television and radio broadcasts enjoyed at the time—was politically useful to a right desperate to turn back the Obama tide. Some fifty years after they were rejected by responsible conservatives, Welch’s old Birch Society notions had powerful media outlets standing behind them. Much of the conservative movement was happy to go along, at least for a while.

To see how deeply in debt the contemporary far right is to the far right of two and three generations ago, consider the thoroughly contemporary sound of the observations offered by Richard Hofstadter in his justly famous essay “The Paranoid Style of American Politics,” first delivered as a lecture in November 1963. Note his emphasis on the “coherence” of the paranoid view:

The typical procedure of the higher paranoid scholarship
is to start with . . . defensible assumptions and with a careful accumulation of facts, or at least of what appear to be facts, and to marshal these facts toward an overwhelming “proof” of the particular conspiracy that is to be established. It is nothing if not coherent—in fact, the paranoid mentality is far more coherent than the real world, since it leaves no room for failures, mistakes, or ambiguities. It is, if not wholly rational, at least intensely rationalistic . . . What distinguishes the paranoid style is not, then, the absence of verifiable facts (though it is occasionally true that in his extravagant passion for facts the paranoid occasionally manufactures them), but rather the curious leap in imagination that is always made at some critical point in the recital of events.

Hofstadter concluded: “
We are all sufferers from history
, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.”

If Beck and the Tea Party had simply been marginal players on the right end of the political spectrum, their exertions might have been of some scholarly and journalistic interest, but hardly the stuff of a politically transformative movement. Their power came from the willingness of the conservative mainstream to embrace them—and also from fear among more moderately conservative politicians of the movement’s power in the Republican primary electorate. The Tea Party’s 2010 success in ousting the respected conservative senator Robert Bennett in Utah and its defeat of the popular moderate representative Mike Castle in a Delaware Senate primary gave it standing to intimidate Republicans who might otherwise have considered resistance. The fact that Castle lost to Christine O’Donnell, a figure destined to face electoral defeat as well as easy mockery, only underscored the extent to which exotic ideology had trumped any sense of realism on the right. Even Karl Rove was enraged that the stronger Republican candidate had been brought down by the right wing.

The Tea Party’s strength owed to a broader crisis on the right created by the failures of the Bush presidency as well as the rise of an Obama movement that, on election night 2008, seemed destined to sweep the country toward a new, long-term engagement with progressivism.

If it was obvious that the Tea Party signaled a new level and kind of conservative activism characterized by an extreme reading of the Constitution, it was less obvious that its revolt was also aimed at Bush. But the president loathed by so many liberals was the far right’s target, too. The historian Gary Gerstle provided an important clue to the sources of the Tea Party’s disaffection in an essay that described Bush’s “
religiously inflected multiculturalism
,” an approach Gerstle characterized as the “multiculturalism of the godly.”

Gerstle argued that Bush and Rove had set out to develop a brand of Republicanism that they believed “offered groups of minority voters reason to rethink their traditional hostility to the GOP.” Gerstle noted that on “questions of immigration and diversity, Bush was worlds apart from Patrick Buchanan and the social-conservative wing of the Republican Party that wanted to restore America to its imagined Anglo Saxon and Anglo
Celtic glory.” After all, Bush “was comfortable with diversity, bilingualism, and cultural pluralism, as long as members of America’s ethnic and racial subcultures shared his patriotism, religious faith, and political conservatism.” It is particularly notable, Gerstle added, that “during a time in which the United States was at war and Europe was exploding with tension and violence over Islam, Bush played a positive role in keeping interethnic and interracial relations in the United States relatively calm.” Gerstle concluded that Republican politicians are likely someday to return to Bush’s “
multiculturalist project . . . as a way of building winning electoral coalitions
.”

But in the medium term, Bush’s approach created a quiet backlash on the right that came back, ironically, to haunt Barack Obama.

In a
Financial Times
column written shortly after Gerstle’s essay was published, the conservative writer Christopher Caldwell built on Gerstle’s analysis to explain the Tea Party. This is how Caldwell characterized Bush’s multicultural accomplishments, offering the perspective of a critic moderately sympathetic to the Tea Party’s complaints.

His “faith-based initiatives” were not a harbinger
of creeping theocracy, but they did funnel a lot of federal money to urban welfare and substance-abuse programmes. He expanded Bill Clinton’s ill-advised plans to increase minority home ownership. His No Child Left Behind Act, meant to improve educational outcomes for minorities, did so at the price of centralising authority in Washington. Mr Bush hoped for a free trade and migration zone for the Americas, deepening the North American Free Trade Agreement so that it would become more like the European Union. Conservatives’ angry rejection of his 2007 immigration reform—which resembles Mr Obama’s ideas—was the clearest sign that he was losing the ear of his party.

Caldwell argued that “many of the Tea Party’s gripes about President Barack Obama can also be laid at the door of Mr Bush,” and he concluded provocatively that if Obama “
has come to grief through his failure
to realize the electorate is poor soil for cultivating social democracy,” then Bush failed to realize that “Christian Democracy was just as alien a plant.”

Gerstle was on to something important about the Bush presidency, and one did not have to agree with Caldwell’s views to accept the shrewd distinctions he drew between the Tea Party’s ideology and the politics of compassionate conservatism. While white Christian conservatives and Tea Party supporters were in broad agreement on many issues, there was a harder edge to the Tea Party’s views on immigration, multiculturalism, and Islam. There was also a radical character to the Tea Party’s individualism that was missing on the religious right, whose Christian commitments demanded at least some fealty to a more communitarian disposition.

A poll conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute
after the 2010 elections underscored the overlap between the Tea Party and the religious right but also highlighted subtle though important differences. For example, while 57 percent of white evangelicals believed that the values of Islam are at odds with American values, 66 percent of Tea Party members took this view. Sixty-five percent of white evangelicals said that Obama’s religious views were different from their own; 76 percent of Tea Party members said this. While 50 percent of white evangelicals and 46 percent of Christian conservatives said “it is not a big problem if some people have more of a chance in life than others,” 64 percent of Tea Party supporters felt this way. Tea Party supporters were also less likely to back an increase in the minimum wage than either white evangelicals or Christian conservatives.

To the extent that the Tea Party was attempting a “correction” to Bushism, it sought to move conservatism away from its more open and tolerant features. As we’ll explore in more detail later, it was also a revolt against the idea that compassion is a legitimate object of public policy, and against Bush’s modest, religiously based communitarian tilt.

But if the movement was partially a reaction against Bush, the energy behind it came from its fierce response to Barack Obama.

The rise of the anti–Wall Street movement in the fall of 2011 inevitably invited comparisons with the Tea Party, and some of them were appropriate. In the broadest sense, both movements were the product of the anger
unleashed by the country’s economic troubles and the anxiety created by fears of American decline. Both spoke in angry tones. In quite different ways, both condemned the bailouts of bankers and financiers. Each also reflected the cocooning of American sensibilities that Bill Bishop described. Even protest movements were subject to cultural sorting: the Tea Party expressed its rage by reaching back to older right-wing views, Occupy Wall Streeters to some of the protest traditions on the left.

But therein lay the profound difference between the two groups. The Tea Party insisted that the concentrated power Americans needed to fear lay in government. The anti–Wall Streeters argued that most fearsome power was exercised by the masters of the financial world. The Tea Party disliked the bailouts primarily because they involved government meddling with the economy. The Occupy Wall Street movement did not reject activist government as such. Indeed, many in its ranks criticized government for insufficient rigor in regulating the bankers and the large investors. They objected to the
beneficiaries
of the government’s largesse: the financiers who, they believed, already had too much influence on how government was run.