The Tea Parties and the Sixties
http://newledger.com/2010/05/the-tea-parties-and-the-sixties/
by Francis Cianfrocca
May 9th, 2010
Leftist intellectuals Micah Sifry and Jay Rosen are tweeting about
Tea Party Jacobins, a piece in the New York Review of Books by one
Mark Lilla, as the most accurate piece yet about the tea party
movement. It's an exaggerated example of the typical NY Review piece
a vacuous armchair history rife with basic factual flaws and an
exaggerated fondness for the 1960s. But there's a more fundamental
mistake here, which is worth noting.
Lilla, an academic at the Committee on Social Thought, sweetly
reminisces about how the Sixties, like today, were all about
individual freedom in other words, a rebellion against not being
allowed to f indiscriminately, having to wear a tie to work, having
to go to work in the first place, etc. But in reality, the Sixties
were about something quite different.
The reason protests then were as divisive as they were is not because
people were interested in expanding their own personal freedoms.
Rather, it's because they sought to do so by radically reinventing
American society. And the model they chose was quite explicitly the
Maoist one. The most "advanced" intellectuals of the Sixties had
nothing but contempt for the Marxism that drove the radicalisms of
the Thirties.
Americans, regardless of political affiliation, are deeply
conservative. It's not a particularly ideological conservatism, but
it's one that spans the moderate center and the right.
Americans have a profound expectation that our society is orderly,
and capable of delivering stability and at least some measure of
prosperity to everyone. We know we have a pretty good thing going
here. Anyone who comes along to throw all the marbles up into the air
and let them fall into some different configuration is going to
excite deep fear, and action, among ordinary Americans.
In the Thirties, the economic realities of the day pointed many
people to trust government to stabilize everything again.Today, the
government is seen as a fundamental part of the problem. In the
Thirties, bankers and industrialists were the villains, and FDR wore
a white hat. Today, the villains are still bankers and
industrialists, but the government is deeply corrupt and is seen as
advancing the interests of the villains.
Rebellion against government corruption is the real nature of the Tea
Party. What this article is trying to do is to convince the partisans
of big government that they have nothing to worry about. He's
misreading both history and the current moment as profoundly as he
thinks the rest of us are.
To the Left, "Jacobin" is a magic word because it's one of the few
moments in history in which mass murder was committed by a movement
described in retrospect as right-wing (although "reactionary" would
be far more precise). Nazism is among the others but of course,
these descriptions are profoundly flawed.
Somewhere deep in the left-wing psyche, there has to be a deep-seated
unease about the fact that left-wing movements are responsible for
MOST of history's evil-on-a-grand-scale. The left needs to relieve
its historical guilt by believing that the Tea Parties are all lynch
mobs. That's why they'll always call us Jacobins and Nazis despite
the fact that you find the seeds of this current political movement
not in either corner, but in the work of another obscure Frenchman:
Alexis de Tocqueville.
One other point, about audience: There are plenty of corrupt
big-government types both Democrat and Republican who read the NY
Review of Books. But the real audience is the naïve
pseudo-philosopher-kings who comprise our intellectual elite, and who
never lost their faith in the ability of superior brains to perfect
mankind. Their fondness and their weakness is for a world that works
as well in theory as it does in practice. Nothing scares them more
than people who are suspicious of technocrats bearing gifts.
Those people are distinct from the Democrats and Republicans who see
a threat to their personal power from the Tea Parties. Corrupt
politicians at least understand something about the exercise of
bare-knuckled power, and thus have little ultimately to fear from the
Tea Parties. Now here's a question I'd really like to know the answer
to: is Barack Obama a bare-knuckled pol interested only in power? Or
is he an intellectual besotted with the fantasy of progress? And
don't say "both," because he can't be both. One or the other is
closer to his true heart.
.
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