Our Divided Political Heart (8 page)

Polling on support for the two movements showed just how different they were.
A
Washington Post
/Pew Research Center Poll in late October 2011
found that while 64 percent of the supporters of the Occupy Wall Street movement were either Democrats or independents leaning toward the Democrats, 71 percent of the Tea Party’s supporters were Republicans or Republican-leaners. Among the Tea Partiers, 56 percent called themselves conservative; only 21 percent of the Occupy Wall Street supporters did. Interestingly, given efforts to discredit the anti–Wall Street movement as extreme, a plurality of its supporters (45 percent) described themselves as moderate; only 31 percent called themselves liberal. Occupy Wall Street supporters were only slightly younger than Tea Party supporters, but the Tea Party sympathizers were somewhat more likely to be southerners. The idea that there was a large overlap between these two movements was simply wrong: among Occupy’s supporters, 64 percent said they opposed the Tea Party, while 25 percent supported it. Among the Tea Party’s supporters, 52 percent said they opposed Occupy Wall Street, while 31 percent supported it. When these findings were combined, it turned out that 14 percent
of all Americans opposed both movements and
only 10 percent said they supported both the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street
. Such limited overlap hardly provides the basis for cooperation between these very different protest initiatives.

The survey also traced what other polls were showing: a steady decline in sympathy for the Tea Party outside conservative circles, a reflection, perhaps, of the growing unpopularity of the new House Republican leadership. In the
Post
/Pew survey, only 32 percent said they supported the Tea Party, while 44 percent opposed it. Occupy Wall Street fared somewhat better: 39 percent supported the movement, according to the
Post
/Pew research, while 35 percent opposed it.

Why did it take so much longer for a left-of-center protest movement to gather strength comparable to the Tea Party’s? Some of the answers were obvious. The right felt closed out of government after 2008 and in desperate need of new forms of organization and activism. The left thought it had won the 2008 election. With Democrats in control of the White House and both houses of Congress, stepped-up organizing didn’t seem quite so urgent. The administration was complicit in this, allowing Obama’s vast organization to atrophy and viewing the left’s primary role as supporting whatever the president believed needed to be done. Dissent to his left was discouraged as counterproductive.

In certain respects, the Obama response was understandable. Facing ferocious resistance from the right, Obama needed all the friends he could get. He feared that left-wing criticism would further weaken him as it joined in the public mind with right-wing assaults. But in the end, what seemed sensible as a tactical matter proved to be a strategic mistake. The absence of a strong, organized left made it easier for conservatives to label Obama a left-winger. It gave the Tea Party a temporary monopoly on the symbols of populism. And it deprived Obama of the sort of productive interaction with outside groups that Franklin Roosevelt enjoyed with the labor movement and Lyndon B. Johnson had with the civil rights movement. Those movements pushed FDR and LBJ in more progressive directions while also lending them support against their conservative adversaries.

Curiously, the absence of a left was also bad for the cause of moderation itself. With the Tea Party steadily pushing the political dialogue toward
the right, the dominant political narrative became unbalanced—and, from the point of view of Obama and those to his left, unfair as well. Because the voices laying blame for the nation’s troubles in the failures of the financial system were muted, responsibility for the continuing economic stagnation fell to Obama and “big government.” In the short run, individualism had a powerful hold on the public debate. Those more sympathetic to the cause of community, including Obama himself, were placed on the defensive.

Understanding the tension between individualism and a more communitarian view helps explain the ferociousness of the Tea Party’s anti-Obama backlash in a way that a focus solely on left and right, liberalism and conservatism, does not. Obama’s critics understood instinctively that his ascent to power was a communitarian correction to a long individualistic era that could be traced back to both the 1980s and the 1960s. Calling him a “socialist” was a convenient if inaccurate way of protesting this shift. Of course, this wasn’t the only reason the right opposed Obama. But it was an important and insufficiently appreciated cause of the Tea Party’s rise.

It’s true, of course, that Obama’s election was made possible by the specific failures of the Bush administration in both foreign policy and economic policy. It was a reaction to the war in Iraq and the economic collapse. But Obama’s larger message—that we had been off track for a long time and that it was “time to turn the page”—was rooted in a more sweeping critique of a country that had become too selfish and too self-involved. Obama sensed that Americans felt increasingly disconnected from each other and sought stronger social bonds. He pledged to change Bush’s policies, yes, but his larger promise was to mix a stronger social glue, to link Americans to each other, to roll back extreme individualism. Consider this early Obama speech, given in 2006 before he formally launched his presidential campaign:

Each day, it seems, thousands of Americans are going about their daily rounds
—dropping off the kids at school, driving to the office, flying to a business meeting, shopping at the mall, trying to stay on
their diets—and they’re coming to the realization that something is missing. They are deciding that their work, their possessions, their diversions, their sheer busyness, is not enough. They want a sense of purpose, a narrative arc to their lives. They’re looking to relieve a chronic loneliness, a feeling supported by a recent study that shows Americans have fewer close friends and confidants than ever before. And so they need an assurance that somebody out there cares about them, is listening to them—that they are not just destined to travel down that long highway towards nothingness.

Obama’s politics, including his open sympathy for religion’s role in American life, have been mystifying to those who viewed him only as a conventional liberal. In fact, he is at least as much a communitarian as he is a progressive. What could be more appropriate for a former community organizer?

He made this absolutely clear in his inaugural address, proposing to reverse two kinds of extreme individualism that had permeated the American political soul for perhaps four decades. He set his face against the expressive individualism of the 1960s that defined “do your own thing” and “if it feels good, do it” as the highest forms of freedom. Against this view, Obama spoke of responsibilities, of acting on behalf of others, even highlighting that classic bourgeois obligation reflected in “
a parent’s willingness to nurture a child
.”

But he also rejected the economic individualism of the 1980s, which he diagnosed as a principal cause of the nation’s economic implosion. Discounting “
the pleasures of riches and fame
,” he spoke of Americans not as consumers but as citizens. His references to freedom were glowing, but he emphasized our “duties” to preserve it as much as he extolled the rights it conveys.

A good case can be made that Obama would have placed himself in a stronger position to battle for his program had he given a more practical and focused inaugural address that highlighted the depth of the economic difficulties the country faced. Such a speech would have explained the causes of the downturn, emphasizing the flawed policies of the recent past.
And in describing the long struggle the country faced in emerging from the financial wreckage, he could have prepared the country for what would prove to be a more difficult recovery than many Americans expected at the time. He might usefully have linked candor about the medium-term difficulties with his signature emphasis on hope for the long run. It can be seen as a lost opportunity.

Yet the speech he did give plainly laid out Obama’s moral challenge to the country. His criticism was directed against flaws in the forms of individualism embraced by each of the country’s ideological camps. He took on a large rhetorical challenge, since rights are so much easier to talk about than duties, and freedom’s gifts are always more prized than its obligations. He was also fighting against the prevailing narrative of our history as one long march toward individualism.

Glenn Beck, Dick Armey, and partisans of the Tea Party understood this as well as anyone. A deep belief that individualism is the one American value that counts lies at the heart of the Tea Party. Like similar groups at other moments in our history, the Tea Partiers claim a direct lineage to Jeffersonian notions that only small government is compatible with liberty, individual initiative, and individual responsibility. Freedom Works, former representative Dick Armey’s organization that latched onto the Tea Party, described its goals compactly: “
lower taxes, less government and more economic freedom for all Americans
.” The rhetoric of the Tea Party and its allies typically speaks of heroic individuals under siege, the central theme of Ayn Rand’s novels. And sales of her books soared after Obama’s election.

Glenn Beck’s extreme and at times rabid conservatism eventually led to his departure from Fox News (though not before he had helped Republicans win the 2010 elections). But in the first year or so of the Obama administration, he built a large audience as one of the primary voices of the rising Tea Party opposition. It’s important to remember how influential Beck’s voice was during Obama’s first two years in office.

And Beck nicely summarized the Tea Party’s view of American history during a radio conversation in the spring of 2009 with a young woman who described herself as a student at a Baptist college. She had called in to
complain about a professor’s sharp criticisms of capitalism. Beck spoke in direct reply to the caller’s instructor:

Mr. Professor: Do you believe this country was founded on divine providence
? Do you believe that George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, Madison, Adams, do you believe those men were enlightened men? I do. Well, their crazy idea was to allow men to be free and free in their own business to allow them to be able to engage in capitalism. I didn’t think a bad tree could bear good fruit. I didn’t know a good tree could bear bad fruit or bad trees bear good fruit. I didn’t think that was possible. I’ve read that some place in some big thick book. You’d know better than I do because you’re a professor, and the elite professors always have the right answer.

Beck is by no means eccentric in seeing the nation’s founders as committed to a view that men should be “free in their own business to allow them to be able to engage in capitalism.” And the conservative habit of criticizing supposedly know-it-all college professors had a particular resonance against a former law school professor named Barack Obama, and also against Beck’s other great historical nemesis, the former Princeton professor Woodrow Wilson.

But if Beck, Limbaugh, and Skousen are guilty of distorting American history for their own purposes, they did not invent the idea of revisiting and reinterpreting the past. On the contrary, Americans’ understandings of ourselves have changed over the course of our national life. Parts of our story have been contested as fiercely as any contemporary political issue. New political eras have opened our eyes to parts of our past that we had ignored—and, on occasion, have also closed our eyes to aspects of our story we once understood clearly. There has always been a politics of history.

If so many public controversies during Barack Obama’s first term seemed part of an extended American history course, many politicians consistently got failing grades. Speaking in New Hampshire at an event sponsored by the Republican Liberty Caucus in the late winter of 2011, Representative Michele Bachmann tried to establish a link with the local folks by declaring: “
You’re the state where the shot was heard ’round the world
at Lexington and Concord.” The problem for Bachmann: the Concord where the battle happened was the one in Massachusetts.

A few months later, Sarah Palin got into the news by offering a rather peculiar gloss on a story familiar to every American schoolchild. Speaking in Boston, she declared that Paul Revere had “
warned the British that they weren’t going to be taking away
our arms, by ringing those bells and making sure as he was riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be secure and we were going to be free.” Palin was determined to turn America’s best-known silversmith into a Second Amendment hero, and historians spent several days debating exactly what was true and what wasn’t in her unusual account of Revere’s famous ride.

The routine botching of the American story by politicians is not unique to this era, nor has it been confined to politicians on the right. But the gaffes may be more a habit of the right at the moment simply because the Tea Party so insists upon rooting itself in the American past. The movement’s
very name goes back to the signal event in Boston Harbor on December 16, 1773. Whether they intend it or not, their name suggests that the current elected government in Washington is as illegitimate as a distant, un-elected monarchy was two and a half centuries ago. And it hints that methods outside the normal political channels are justified in confronting such oppression.

But the Tea Party is far from alone among American political movements in trying to establish a consistency with the past. It is an important truth about history
within
our history: when large matters are at stake, Americans have a habit of searching for precedent and identifying useful heroes. We all claim to be sons and daughters of our Revolution. We all desperately want to be
American
and devoutly wish to avoid being labeled otherwise. It’s hard to imagine another country having a committee within its legislative branch bearing a name akin to that of our House Un-American Activities Committee, which did its work rooting out un-Americans from 1938 to 1975. Even the American Communist Party, HUAC’s main target, was moved during the crisis of the 1930s to proclaim Communism as nothing more (or less) than “
twentieth century Americanism
.”