Just read a good diary on the community spotlight list that speaks especially to me: The diarest, like me, feels so beaten down by the stream of lies and false equivalencies that he can hardly tread water. As good as Obama's chances would seem, given his leads in swing states, I won't be surprised to feel that awful sinking feeling on election eve, when some network or another announces that, say, Florida has gone Romney. But I'd also like to offer some cheerier thoughts on the politics of the irrational that is making life so difficult for liberals right now.
Now the French Revolution part. For a decade or so before 1789, all sorts of dark fantasies about the king and queen circulated among the French people. The French royals weren't niggerized, like Obama, but they were sexualized. The underground press made the king into a pervert and the queen into a nymphomaniac. And that was for starters. People found the royals to be titillating and vile by turns. Never mind that there was little, if any, truth in the stories. The royals found that they could not refute the stories because doing so was beneath them. Too, refutation would draw attention to the lies; it would help them circulate. I think Obama would understand their frustration. And as for the rest of us, we might want to think about where the French paranoia led. It created a modern republic with a commitment to human rights, but it also created the Terror of 1792.
More than a decade earlier, the Americans had risen against the British king. Though we think of our revolution as being rational (the founding generation was influenced by Locke, Hume, Montesquieu, and all that), it too had roots in irrational fears. Two of my favorite books on the Revolution, both by Bernard Bailyn, are The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution and The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson. They are two halves of the same analysis. In Ideological Origins, Bailyn argues that the colonists believed that Parliament--likely with the king's help--wished to enslave Americans. Even though colonists had the lowest tax burden in the North Atlantic world, they believed wholeheartedly that Parliament's taxation after 1765 was designed to make them into beasts of burden.
No less than the Germans of the 1930s, with their hatred for the Jews, American colonists (a goodly proportion of them) saw politics and economics through a glass darkly. In Massachusetts, they became certain that Thomas Hutchinson, their Lieutenant Governor in 1765 and subsequently, briefly, their governor, was working with Parliament to bring about their enslavement. So they tore down his house--utterly destroyed it and everything within--and might have killed him, had they caught him. All because they blamed him for the Stamp Act, an act he opposed.
Even in our "good" revolution, then, irrationality played a role. Conspiracy ... rumors ... fears. We weren't just rebelling against taxation without representation; we were rebelling against enslavers. (And of course many Americans at that every moment held actual slaves, much to the delight of Samuel Johnson and others who decried American hypocrisy).
The American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the rise of Hitler ... the politics of irrationality are as old as humanity. Now we have the Tea Party, with its conspiracy theories, its idea that liberals want to enslave producers to pay for welfare and socialized medicine. Or that a Muslim who wants sharia law is our president. Or, the latest from today: Obama will turn over our sovereignty to the United Nations if he's reelected. No mountain of fact can move these paranoids. They believe what they believe. They are paranoid not in the clinical sense, but in the sense of other social actors in past historical movements.
My colleague who teaches Russian history suggests that irrational social movements are, in general, a good thing. They place limits on power. They accomplish reform. True though that may be, the Tea Party movement is as much akin to the German paranoia of the 1930s as to the colonial paranoia of 1775. I am not calling the Tea Party a Nazi movement. It isn't. Not even close. However, its answer to paranoia is to put in power a team that will lead us (possibly) into war (with Iran) and back toward imperialism, give unfettered power to corporations that outsource jobs, and strip us of Social Security and Medicare, assuming Congress can't block them. All so that we can get rid of this "foreigner," this "Muslim," this "welfare king" who is president.
A few of these paranoids even threaten to wage a revolution, using the guns and ammo they have stockpiled since Obama was elected (and before that).
Now for the good news: Fortunately, revolutions are fought by young people. Some two-thirds of all Americans at the time of the American Revolution were under 25. The same demography applied to the French Revolution. What's the average age of Tea Partiers? 55? 60? Not 25, at any rate.
So, is the Tea Party "revolution," as my colleague suggests, somehow a good thing, a check on power? I don't think so. What I do think is that it won't last forever. It's propagated by Fox, by Rush, et al., and the vast wealth of the Koch brothers and their fellow billionaires, but it appeals mostly to the middle aged and the elderly. There are probably more conservatives in the baby boom generation than liberals. The youthful liberals of the baby boom had their "revolution" in the 1960s; and the conservatives have had theirs more recently (esp. with the election of George W. Bush). But their politics, I think, is going to die with them.
I'm not sure where that leaves us. I guess what I'm saying is despite our frustrations at the lies and the smears and the false equivalencies, let's not be discouraged. The progress we want may come slowly, but it will come.