Frank Rich writes about Glenn Beck and the teabaggers:
[T]here is a national conversation we must have right now — the one about what, in addition to race, is driving this anger and what can be done about it. We are kidding ourselves if we think it’s only about bigotry, or health care, or even Obama. The growing minority that feels disenfranchised by Washington can’t be so easily ghettoized and dismissed...
Beck has notoriously defamed Obama as a "racist," but the race card is just one in his deck... [His ideology is] the same crazy-quilt cosmology that could be found in last weekend’s Washington protest, where the marchers variously called Obama a fascist, a communist and a socialist, likening him to Hitler, Stalin, Castro and Pol Pot. They may not know that some of these libels are mutually exclusive. But what they do know is that they need a scapegoat for what ails them...
Beck captures this crowd’s common emotional denominator...in his best-selling book..."Glenn Beck’s Common Sense." Americans "know that SOMETHING JUST DOESN’T FEEL RIGHT," he writes, "but they don’t know how to describe it or, more importantly, how to stop it."
This festering class and cultural resentment is as American as apple pie. It's the same strain of populism tapped into by Father Coughlin during the Great Depression and by George Wallace in the 1960s.
"Wall Street owns our government," Beck declared in one rant this July. "Our government and these gigantic corporations have merged." He drew a chart to dramatize the revolving door between Washington and Goldman Sachs in both the Hank Paulson and Timothy Geithner Treasury departments. A couple of weeks later, Beck mockingly replaced the stars on the American flag with the logos of corporate giants like G.E., General Motors, Wal-Mart and Citigroup (as well as the right’s usual nemesis, the Service Employees International Union). Little of it would be out of place in a Matt Taibbi article in Rolling Stone. Or, we can assume, in Michael Moore’s coming film, "Capitalism: A Love Story," which reportedly takes on Goldman and the Obama economic team along with conservative targets.
I have a certain amount of sympathy with the economic and anti-corporatist part of their grievance. I can't help thinking that these working-class people should be natural allies of progressives, at least on this particular front. The teabagger/Beck movement has tapped into broader economic discontents than the pure Hofstadter-described paranoid anti-Communist Bircher strain itself, thanks to the reach of Fox News and the right-wing blogosphere.
Many of them don't have health care coverage. They've been left behind economically and who is to blame? I can't help wondering if there would still be the same amount of lunatic fury on the right, at least in terms of numbers participating, if Main Street had been bailed out instead of Wall Street, and if the stimulus had gone much more heavily toward easing unemployment instead of cutting taxes, and if health care reform had zeroed in from the start on opening Medicare to all Americans instead of finding convoluted ways to try to force 30 million new customers into the death grip of the private insurance corporations, using precious public resources to prop up their bloody and bloated profits.
The grassroots right has its cultural grievances - race, abortion, religion in the public square, the changing ethnic makeup of the country - where little common ground can be found with progressives. But the economic grievances they have are not that different from those on the left (except the hating on unions part). The corporate abuses of public funds and public trust are fueling tremendous anger. It's a terrible irony if Republicans - the people most responsible for unfettering the corporatist beast - are the ones who end up being most successful at tapping into that anger to benefit their own political fortunes.
The Democrats used to be the party of the working class once upon a time. Could you really call them anything like that now?
If Obama wants to heal the divide in the country, maybe he should stop coddling the banksters and their ilk and start figuring out ways to help level the playing field for the working class. It might pay better dividends for him than trying to find that elusive bipartisanship he so craves from the Republicans in Congress.