Making Sense of the New Political Anger

Making Sense of the New Political Anger
By SAM TANENHAUS
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: January 23, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/24/weekinreview/24tanenhaus.html?hpw


Like so many good narratives, political stories often unfold along simple lines but invite multiple, at times conflicting, interpretations.

And so it happened last week. First came the upset victory by Scott Brown, a Republican, in the special Senate election in Massachusetts, widely deemed a populist uprising and symbolized by the mile-weary pickup truck that became a feature of Mr. Brown’s campaign.

Only two days later, the Supreme Court, in a more sweeping ruling than many expected, undid the bipartisan campaign finance reform of 2002, freeing corporations, labor unions and other organizations to spend unlimited sums at election time.

President Obama, taking up his own newfound populist theme, said the decision favored “powerful interests” that threaten to "drown out the voices of every day Americans.”

Republicans countered that Democrats also have their moneyed backers — in Hollywood as well as in the drug companies that support Mr. Obama’s imperiled health-care reform bill.

Either way, the two surprises highlighted a widening divide in American politics, exemplified by the Tea Party brigades who helped engineer Mr. Brown’s victory and also by liberals who have been voicing their disillusionment with the first year of the Obama presidency.

The post-partisan consensus that seemed possible a year ago has given way to a curious harmony of dissent — as both sides denounce government bailouts and Wall Street bonuses. But in fact, two different protests are under way. One, most visible on the left, is rooted in traditional populism that favors increased government. The other, on the right, springs from a purist strain in American politics that distrusts government altogether.

During the Great Depression, populist sentiments were captured by figures like Dr. Francis Everett Townsend, who mounted a national campaign for old-age pensions; the idea helped shape the Social Security Act.

The period’s most gifted populist politician, Huey P. Long, spoke movingly of the “criminal” farm foreclosures he had seen as a boy in rural Louisiana, and advocated that all Americans received a “homestead allowance” and guaranteed annual income. Contrast this with the televised eruption by Rick Santelli, the CNBC reporter who is often said to have spawned the Tea Party movement early last year. In his widely replayed rant, Mr. Santelli vented his ire not at bailouts of Wall Street firms or the Detroit auto makers, but rather at Mr. Obama’s plan to assist homeowners unable to pay their mortgages.

“This is America,” Mr. Santelli said. “How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills?”

A parallel dislike of the elite animates both populism and purism. But the two find that elite in different places. Populists deplore the rich, for instance the corporate executives now reaping large bonuses. Purists dislike the governing class — politicians who readily abandon core principles and strike deals with the other side.

Thus, purist rebellions have repeatedly been directed at elites within the Republican Party — whether the “me-too” centrists of the 1950s and 60s or the “Republicans in Name Only” under assault today.

In times of disarray, Republican leaders have drawn on insurgents, who refresh the party’s principles and supply it with grassroots energy. But the purists don’t always reciprocate. Mr. Brown’s election seemed to offer the prospect of a truce, since Tea Party activists and the National Republican Senatorial Committee had joined forces to secure his win.

But the Massachusetts election could be a special case — a battle whose timing may have upended President Obama’s health care campaign by snatching away a seat the Democrats had held for nearly six decades. In places where conservatives are more entrenched — in Florida and Colorado, for instance — Tea Party insurgents and established Republicans remain at odds, quarreling over candidates and platforms.

This conflict recalls the tensions that arose during the conservative movement’s first truly successful insurgency — the drive to nominate Barry Goldwater for president in 1964. Then, too, grassroots activists, including members of the John Birch Society — a group as extreme in its day as the “birthers” are in 2010 — declared war on the Republican establishment, “a small group of secret kingmakers," as Phyllis Schlafly described them in her election-year manifesto “A Choice Not an Echo.”

Movement conservatives “want to mass the nation’s conservative strength in one party,” the political scientist James MacGregor Burns observed of the Goldwater crusade. “They do not really care which party, but at this point the G.O.P. seems the best vehicle for their hopes.”

Goldwater lost the general election, but the insurgents gained control of the party, and their efforts at purification eventually succeeded when Goldwater’s heir Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980. “Me-too” Republicans, many from the East Coast, either were marginalized or left the party altogether.

The result was the more ideologically unified party still intact in 2010, most obviously in Congress, where House Republicans have formed a rigid bloc and Senate Republicans have made the threat of a filibuster their instrument of obstruction — further honed, no doubt, by Scott Brown’s victory on Tuesday.

And yet, even though they have steadily opposed Mr. Obama, these same Republicans are now under assault. The new insurgents accuse them of complicity with the administration in big-spending, big-government ways.

How did this happen? One explanation is that with so few moderates left, the only plausible targets for angry purists are conservatives tainted by the occasional heresy — someone like Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who voted to confirm Justice Sonia Sotomayor, or Gov. Charlie Crist of Florida, who endorsed Mr. Obama’s stimulus package.

An added complication is that it is increasingly difficult to say precisely where private life ends and government begins. The two have become so deeply, and at times confusingly, interrelated that is now possible to be both for and against big government, sometimes at the same moment.

A memorable example occurred last summer when Bob Inglis, a House Republican from South Carolina, drew the ire of insurgents at a town hall meeting. One voter angrily told him, “Keep your government hands off my Medicare.” Mr. Inglis replied, “Actually, sir, your health care is being provided by the government.” At the time, this incident was widely cited as a sign of public ignorance about health care. But it can be interpreted differently — as a reflection of the helplessness many Americans feel at a time of growing dependency on a growing government: one that gives health-care coverage, and can take it away or reduce its benefits.

The most conservative recent presidents, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, both presided over expansions of the federal bureaucracy. Mr. Bush, in particular, angered many purists with spending programs like his massive prescription-drug bill.

In such an environment, it is no surprise that neither party commands much loyalty. Populists are losing patience with Democrats even as purists wrangle with Republicans.

Mr. Brown seems acutely aware of this. In his victory speech he credited the will of “the independent majority.” Whether such a majority exists is another question.

Looking back at the Great Depression, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote that even in that period of profound political and economic crisis, Americans held fast to “the desperate inner conviction that somewhere an answer could be found.” It is in that pursuit, perhaps, that populists and purists can find common ground.