Bloviations

When I was in the shower the other morning, I’m not ashamed to say that I got to thinking about political theory and behavior. Two lines of thought crossed in my sudsy brain: one deriving from an article called “The Rise of the New New Left” that has been getting a good deal of attention lately, and the other related to my ongoing curiosity about what motivates Tea Party behavior.

"The Rise of the New New Left,” which I’ve been passing around to my friends and co-workers, maintains that much of the electorate, and particularly the young electorate, is turning away from the centrist, small-government, business-celebrating philosophy that has dominated both the Democratic and Republican parties for the past 30 years and toward a more traditionally leftist perspective that is skeptical about business and more receptive to governmental solutions. The catalyst? The Great Recession, which gave the lie to the free market’s claim to superior wisdom about ordering society. It makes sense: If you graduated from college in the last five years into a world ravaged by an economic collapse that followed on the free market run amuck, a world in which job opportunities were limited or non-existent, you wouldn’t have much faith in the genius of unfettered capitalism – and you might look somewhere else for opportunity (or health coverage).

So, I was thinking, that would apply to the graduating classes of 2008, 2009, 2010…Wait a second: 2010 -- that was the year the Tea Party burst fully on the political scene, in the midterm voting that gave control of the U.S. House to the Republicans (in a very low-turnout election, but that’s a subject for another day). And suddenly, as I was rinsing my beard, it occurred to me that the Tea Party phenomenon is also a reaction to the Great Recession -- just in a different form.

I was political editor for The New Orleans Times-Picayune in 1991, when David Duke ran against Edwin Edwards for governor. Edwards won in a landslide, but the Duke threat was very real: He finished a close second to Edwards in the open primary, beating out the incumbent governor, Democrat-turned-Republican Buddy Roemer, and took 55% percent of the white vote in the general election (in case you don’t know, Duke, who ran as a Republican, is a white supremacist and was an avowed Klansman and neo-Nazi, with the newspaper photos to prove it; Edwards, a Democrat, was a former governor widely regarded as corrupt who ultimately went to federal prison).

At the time, I was as bemused (in the strict sense) by the Duke supporters as I am by the Tea Party types today: What makes them tick? What are they thinking? As Thomas Frank put it, “What’s the Matter With Kansas?”

Louisiana was not in good shape in 1991. It’s an Oil Patch state, and the oil boom of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s had gone bust a few years before, in a major way. And from what I saw in 1991 on TV and heard and felt, the emotion Duke tapped into was anger: anger that les bon temps did no longer rouler, that the American Dream as mass-marketed to ordinary folks by the consumer economy seemed to be slipping from their grasp. When people get angry, when they feel beleaguered by circumstances they neither control nor understand, they often look for someone to blame (a very human reaction, I think we can agree, and more satisfying than blaming yourself, even if that is merited). In 1991, Duke gave to despairing white voters blacks and affirmative action as objects of their wrath; in 2010, the Tea Party channeled recession-spawned rage in the direction of big government, the Muslim socialist in the White House and socialism in general.

Maybe this is not an original idea, but it was a better subject of contemplation than I sometimes chance on in the shower.