My esteemed Uncle Bob, a retired professor, forwarded to me a copy of Charles Blow's Op-Ed in yesterday's NY Times, Whose Country Is It?
It suggests that the anger and frustration of the Tea Party movement is largely due to irreversible changes in our culture:
A woman (Nancy Pelosi) pushed the health care bill through the House. The bill’s most visible and vocal proponents included a gay man (Barney Frank) and a Jew (Anthony Weiner). And the black man in the White House signed the bill into law. It’s enough to make a good old boy go crazy.
Blow is right to an extent, but I believe he misses the larger reason for the rage:
Our democracy, where each adult citizen has one vote, has been gradually transforming into something else. Something that increasingly resembles, dare I say it, an oligarchy. And we have all been conveniently distracted and have failed to recognize it. Our elected leaders on both sides of the aisle have contributed to the distraction, but certainly not in equal measures.
The currently front-paged diary Too Big to Live addresses the central issue:
The Wall Street influence was not just in the money that was driving campaigns, it was in the people. Wall Street was no longer just exerting pressure on Washington, Wall Street was Washington
Unfortunately, it fails to make the connection to the Tea Party rage.
Why the rage?
A substantial portion of the Tea Party rage is derived not so much from racism, bigotry, and xenophobia, as it is from a misdirected sense of loss: loss of jobs, loss of economic security, loss of voice in government, and to an extent, the loss of freedoms. I attribute these losses to the corporate takeover of our representative democracy, and except for the ultra-wealthy 0.1% at the top, these losses accrue to all of us, on the left and on the right.
Ever since Barack Obama clinched the Democratic nomination in 2008, the leaders of the extreme right (mostly on the radio and TV, but increasingly in elected government as well) have latched on to this misunderstood sense of loss and labeled it as communism, socialism, fascism, and any number of other ideas that represent something that must be fought against at all costs. Many of our brethren on the right have swallowed these memes, hook, line, and sinker. We are all, as humans, emotional animals that are sadly susceptible to misinformation and manipulation.
The political divisions that exist between left and the right are overwhelmingly artificial constructs. Sure, liberals and conservatives have different points of view, but we have much more in common as Americans.
The leaders on the right (mostly in the media) are deliberately and cynically redirecting, stoking, and channeling the sense of loss into a misguided rage for their own financial and political ends. To say that these people are acting irresponsibly is a gross understatement.
The real enemies from which we need to "take our country back" are the outsized influence of money in our elections, the media empires that are all too effective at molding our opinions to fatten their bottom lines, and the banks that are "too big to fail." Unfortunately, given the recent Supreme Court decision (Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission), I am sad to say that the enemies are winning.
Citizens have the right to free speech. But a corporation is not a citizen, does not have the right to vote, and does not have the right to free speech. What our country really needs is a voice that can educate all of us, on the left and on the right, about the real sources of loss we are feeling. When that happens, we can all unite in overwhelming numbers, enact real campaign finance reform, and get our representative democracy back.