Nixon’s ghost or why the Tea Party won’t be going away any time soon

Poll after poll shows that whatever they claim to be, whatever the Media makes them out to be, whatever we’re afraid they might be, what the Tea Partiers turn out to be are Republicans.

They are loyal members of the Grand Old Party of longstanding of the type Richard Nixon rebuilt the party around, whose angers, fears, and resentments he tapped into and stirred up and exploited brilliantly because they mirrored his own, suburban, middle-class, conservative mainly in the sense of wanting to keep a tight grip on what they regard as rightfully theirs and deeply suspicious that someone is trying to steal it from them, and convinced other people, other undeserving people, are having a good time at their expense.  And they want what Nixon taught them to want, low taxes but expensive and comprehensive government services for themselves, punishment of the undeserving, and the coming of God to reassure them and admonish the rest of the world that they are his real chosen people.

Nixon convinced them that they were the party---and the real majority of Americans, but he impressed upon them that they were a silent majority, which meant, among their other alleged virtues, that they knew enough to keep their mouths shut and not question or criticize the real leaders of the Party, the corporate elites who got to run everything because, after all, they owned most of it.  Nixon’s middle class, working stiff, middle management and small business owner Republicans were content to let the corporate elites run the show because they understood that their livelihoods and social standing depended on Big Business doing well.

The Tea Party types don’t seem to be quite as comfortable with the idea of trusting their fates to their bosses’ bosses.

I’m not sure why.  I suspect some of it is due to a change in which moneyed interests are running the show.  In Nixon’s day it was easy to imagine that the men who ran Big Business were like the men who ran the businesses in your town, the owners of car dealerships and insurance agencies and small factories and large but not chain department stores. 

Today it’s obvious that the money and the power is in the hands of the bankers and the brokers on Wall Street and the people calling the shots look and act like what they are, which as it happens is what Nixon taught Republicans to fear and despise, Ivy Educated, East Coast/Big City elitists who think they know better than you and are quiet comfortable letting you know that they know better than you and who reward themselves excessively for knowing better than you, when clearly they don’t.

The Tea Party is a faction of the Republican Party, a ginned-up and angrier and less easily cowed by the Big Business types that run the show than other Republicans faction, but still a faction.  The question is will the faction take over the Party, be co-opted or corrupted by its current leadership, or break away to form its own party.  

If Politico is to be believed on this, members of the Party’s current leadership are afraid that the Tea Party, rallying around Sarah Palin, will take over in time for 2012 and she will lead the GOP to electoral disaster but that’s all they’re afraid of.

I’ve read some speculation that they’re also afraid she will actually win and they don’t want that to happen because they know she will be a terrible President, which is nicely patriotic of them, although I suspect that their idea of a terrible President is only one who costs them money they don’t want to spend or lose and that it’s not the future of the nation under her leadership they’re worried about as much as the future of the Party.  Sure, voters seem to be forgetting just how awful George Bush was, but a second Republican incompetent in a row could jog their memories and get them thinking that Bush’s and Palin’s Republicanism might have something to do with their awfulness.

There’s debate about how well the Tea Party did Tuesday.   All their high profile candidates lost, Angle, O’Donnell, Miller, and Buck lost their bids for the Senate, although only O’Donnell got trounced.  Carl Paladino was humiliated in his attempt to become governor of New York.  Among the winners, I don’t count Pat Toomey and Marco Rubio, since both rose to prominence within the Party’s establishment and had strong establishment support before Sarah Palin jumped on their bandwagons.  Nikki Haley is a questionable case because of the weirdnesses of South Carolina’s politics.  I think Rand Paul is a phenomenon all his own.

I gather that the results were mixed down the ticket.

But time and experience will change things.  There were a lot of terrible candidates running.  Some were terrible because they were inexperienced and had no competent staff support to guide and protect them.  They’ll be back.  Others were terrible because they were incompetent or nuts or both.  They won’t go away, not all of them, but they will have more trouble getting nominated not just because they will be known for incompetents and nuts but because eventually smart, ambitious, competent and not crazy or not obviously crazy Right Winger politicians on the make who feel stymied by the Party powers-that-be will see the Tea Party as their way to success or earlier success.

There will be more Marco Rubios and fewer Christine O’Donnells coming up.

Sarah Palin scares the establishment, possibly because of what she might do, but more for what she is, the avatar of Richard Nixon’s ghost.

She speaks for his Silent Majority, the angry, resentful, and aggrieved base of the Republican Party.  These are the people Karl Rove counted on to get George W. Bush elected and maintain an expected permanent Republican majority.  And he’s in danger of losing them---of losing control.

Rove, one of Nixon’s eager and evil elves from way back, learned from his master that the rubes were to be used to get the corporate elite’s stooges elected, but they were never to be allowed to think that they actually ran the show.

Here comes Palin who truly seems to believe that if she gets elected queen she will be the queen and the elites who are meant to run things will have to answer to her.

The problem is how to stop her without angering and alienating the base?

And now there’s a new problem.  All these Tea Party zealots in Congress.  How much and real a piece of the action are they going to want?  Michelle Bachmann’s talking about a leadership position for herself, for crying out loud!  And if I’m John Boehner or Eric Cantor or Mitch McConnell, I’m not thinking Barack Obama is my enemy as much as my ally in dealing with Jim DeMint.

There’s a fight brewing within the Party but it’s not over its soul.  That’s immutable.  Nixon sold it to the devil along with his own decades ago.  It’s a fight over the spoils.  It’s over who gets the perks and to dole out the patronage and the pork.

When it’s all over, though, even if the establishment wins, which I expect it will---nobody is as easily co-opted or corrupted as the permanently resentful and continually aggrieved---the Tea Party will still be there.  It might not call itself that.  It might not have to.  It will be fine for its members and for everyone else to call it what it is.

The Republican Party.

And Nixon’s ghost will raise its arms in that well-known double-handed victory salute.

Essential Reading: Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America by Rick Perlstein.

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Comments

[Kat]

Probably not this one, but maybe this will do for now:

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/gop-catfight-rove-and-hannity-smackdown.html

GOP Catfight

by digby

Oooh. Daddy Karl and Uncle Sean had quite the spat tonight. How long before they drum Rove out of the party?

embedded video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AeJzpjefH4&feature=player_embedded

Sorry Karl, you and your friends birthed this hideous monster and now it's turning on you. Did you think you would be immune?

Update: Reader ST reminds me that for all his tut-tutting in that segment, O'Donnell learned her gay baiting from Rove himself --- he's the one who beat Ann Richards with a lesbian whisper campaign. (Not to mention decades of Republican innuendo about Democrats' manhood.) She was a little crude about it, but she was following a well used GOP playbook. They just don't usually use it on each other.

9/14/2010

Hullabaloo is a lot harder to search than I expected. It didn't like my boolean the least bit -- kept sending me to the home page. *sigh*

Kat

[Bill Hicks]

For what it's worth, "down ticket" effects were felt significantly in NC, a state which drifts back and forth betwixt red and blue, and gave history both Terry Sanford and Jesse Helms within a decade. Here's my take on this post electoral moment, from an NC perspective. There is indeed an elephant in the room, and a lot of blind mice trying to figure out what the heck it looks like:
http://fiddlerbill.blogspot.com/2010/11/day-after.html

[FormerlyApostate]

Interesting. I hadn't heard of Nikki Haley until now, but I just watched some videos of her on YouTube, and you know, she's charming and intelligent. And a very talented politician. Sarah Palin may have defeated her own chances of becoming president by lending Haley her support. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see her win.

[actor212]

Lance, it is in the uncertainty over who their corporate overlords are now that the defeat of the Teabaggers lies. If we on the left can somehow get them to see that they are working at cross-purposes by supporting the very people who seek to remove their freedoms mantle by mantle, we can pull apart the coalition and maybe even steal a few of the more reasonable ones...admittedly, a small number...to the left.

[El Jefe]

Bill,

Thanks for that -- I grew up east of you and went to college at that obscure public school just over the county line (bicentennial class.) Good to get some ground truth.

FormerlyApostate,

You're on to something, I'm afraid. She's great in person and, if she's politically savvy enough to survive slut-shaming in the modern Republican Party of all places, she's a future force to be reckoned with. While I don't want either, given the choice between someone who would be dangerous because of who their friends are (Haley) and someone who'd be dangerous because they've deified their own ego and don't know what the hell they're doing (Palin), the first option sounds like the lesser evil to me.

Lance,

Great essay. I want to pick out, or pick at, a few things in my usual rambling tangential way :)

You're absolutely right that Nixon sealed the marriage, at the presidential level first, between these folks and and the Republican Party (of course it'd been a dark fever dream ever since Mark Hanna, but no-one had ever gotten it right.) But another level, and it seems to me like this may be important to their culture and their nature, that these are George Wallace's children as much as Nixon's. The difficulty with my saying that is that then, lots of people will answer on cue, "oh, so they really are all racist rednecks." Well, many of them are. But there are broader characteristics at work, for people who've forgotten the rest of Wallace's agenda. Opposed to sweeping cultural change, over-entitled middle class kids, and uppity women: check. Deeply nationalistic: check. Really just fine with several kinds of entitlement program as long as it does what it's supposed to and benefits "our" tribe not others: check. As someone with strong ties to Boston, you might recall not just the level of informal segregation there, but the "hard hats vs. longhairs" brawls and the strenuous efforts of Democratic ward-heelers to keep some of these (mostly) guys on side. The wierd thing with the Tea Party folk, and this I think is where Nixon winning them over towards the Republican Party in slow measures (first "silent majority," then "Reagan Democrats," by Bush Sr.s time a chunk of the Republican base) is that they've absorbed several other strains that, in the Sixties, were still kind of disparate. One is the strong Bircher streak, all that Constitution-intoning and wacky libertarianism and conspiracy theories shushed in public for fear of group embarrassment, which was always compatible with the emotional grist of the Wallace folks, just not always with the thought-through positions. (Wallace folk were fine with a tribal welfare state up to a point, so long as you didn't call it that, while the Birchers not only wanted to wipe out the secret Congolese army in the Everglades -- a slave revolt the Wallace voters got instinctively -- but also wanted to know where John Galt got his business cards and what color yellow was in your world.) In all that Nixon was a modern glue chiefly, I think, because Republican campaigners made a strenuous effort to tie Wallace to his Southern roots just as he was broadening his appeal, and because he got inconveniently shot right when Dick was copying his playbook.

For something Bill said over at his blog, it's important to remember something I haven't heard mentioned much, ever, but that goes to how un-self-aware these folks are about their very deep cultural roots. It's this: from their perspective, legalized abortion has given them back the blood libel. Now, that itself long predates medieval anti-Semitism (for example you had rival god-cults in Hellenistic Alexandria slinging blood libels at each other as an opening bid in Alexandria's favorite sport, ethnic cleansing by riot.) And today it's again become uncoupled from literal anti-Semitism in places (not always; "Hollywood elites" has been the polite way to say "Jewboys" in America since the 1920s.) But many of the ingredients of that virulent view of the world are present: growing scarcity and uncertainty, envious hatred that somebody may be getting one over on you, unclean outsiders and, for a bonus round, unruly women.

That last one touches on another place where blood libels cross over with the culture of "Nixon's children": witchcraft. And another tangent. For some time now, when people bring up American redneck culture, the ethnic label "Scots-Irish" gets attached to it. Quick shorthand for journalists claiming an interest in sociology (excuse me while I giggle), sold well as a book for Jim Webb. Now there are plenty of Ulster Proddies in America who'd qualify as rednecks, and they're certainly an important component of Southern and Appalachian culture (and elsewhere too, Syracuse's mascot wasn't always a fruit. But there are other breeds of Scots too, like my Highland forebears who were Catholic until the Great Awakening and fought on the other side from the mostly-loyalist Ulstermen in the Revolution.) But they just don't breed enough to equal "generic redneck" as a whole and the last names don't match up, nor do they tell you anything useful or interesting about the strong streak of German redneckery in the Midwest, Northwest, and bits of rural California. So, who are all these folks and where do they come from? I think there's a book out there waiting to happen -- one with footnotes, even :) -- because the results look pretty interesting. Most of the Anglo rednecks have roots in early colonial migration, and so came from particular bits of England in particular: Lancashire, Dorset down on the south coast, bits of East Anglia, and so on. The only two things that knit those dispersed bits of England together are these: there were strong streaks of charismatic low-church Protestantism there in the 1500s and again during and after the English Civil War, and they're also the areas that saw the most intensive prosecutions for witchcraft in early-modern England. As for the German strain, lots of those settlers came from western and Low Saxon parts of Germany that had 1) seen some of the most violent Reformation-era "Judenhass" (the Germans, to their credit, just call it "Jew-hatred") and 2) the most prosecutions in the bloody "Hexenjagd" (witch-hunting) that, according to court records, executed maybe twenty thousand women for witchery in the 16th and 17th centuries. That's all going back a long, long way, but it still seems to me very interesting.

[Dirk]

I've been wondering just how far to the right we've drifted over the last 30 years or so.
For some reason, I took off on an Obama-Nixon comparison kick and discovered some things that surprised me.

Nixon, it turns out, was far more socially progressive and, dare I even use the word, LIBERAL, than Obama has ever been or likely will ever be. Or be allowed to be by his plutocrat handlers.

Here, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Nixon#First_term
snip:
Initiatives within the federal government

Noam Chomsky remarked that, in many respects, Nixon was "the last liberal president."[104] Indeed, Nixon believed in using government wisely to benefit all and supported the idea of practical liberalism.[105]

Nixon initiated the Environmental Decade by signing the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Air Act of 1970 and the Federal Water Pollution Control Act amendments of 1972, as well as establishing many government agencies. These included the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA),[92] and the Council on Environmental Quality.[106] The Clean Air Act was noted as one of the most significant pieces of environmental legislation ever signed.[107]

In 1971, Nixon proposed the creation of four new government departments superseding the current structure: departments organized for the goal of efficient and effective public service as opposed to the thematic bases of Commerce, Labor, Transportation, Agriculture, et al. Departments including the State, Treasury, Defense, and Justice would remain under this proposal.[108] He reorganized the Post Office Department from a cabinet department to a government-owned corporation: the U.S. Postal Service.

On June 17, 1971, Nixon formally declared the U.S. War on Drugs.[109]

On October 30, 1972 Nixon signed into law the Social Security Amendments of 1972 which included the creation of the Supplemental Security Income Program, a Federal Welfare Program still in existence today.

Nixon cut billions of dollars in federal spending and expanded the power of the Office of Management and Budget.[110] He established the Consumer Product Safety Commission in 1972[106] and supported the Legacy of parks program, which transferred ownership of federally owned land to the states, resulting in the establishment of state parks and beaches, recreational areas, and environmental education centers.
The first national desegregation of public schools also happened on Nixon's watch.

Plus, there's this, snip:
In addition to desegregating public schools, Nixon implemented the Philadelphia Plan, the first significant federal affirmative action program in 1970.[120] Nixon also endorsed the Equal Rights Amendment after it passed both houses of Congress in 1972 and went to the states for ratification as a Constitutional amendment.[121] Nixon had campaigned as an ERA supporter in 1968, though feminists criticized him for doing little to help the ERA or their cause after his election, which led to a much stronger women's rights agenda. Nixon increased the number of female appointees to administration positions.[122] Nixon signed the landmark laws Title IX in 1972, prohibiting gender discrimination in all federally funded schools and the Equal Employment Opportunity Act. In 1970 Nixon had vetoed the Comprehensive Child Development Act, denouncing the universal child-care bill, but signed into law Title X, which was a step forward for family planning and contraceptives.

It was during the Nixon Presidency that the Supreme Court issued its Roe v. Wade ruling, legalizing abortion. First Lady Pat Nixon had been outspoken about her support for legalized abortion, a goal for many feminists (though there was a significant pro-life minority faction of the Women's Liberation Movement as well). Nixon himself did not speak out publicly on the abortion issue, but was personally pro-choice, and believed that, in certain cases such as rape, abortion was an option.[123]
Interesting also is that all the manned Moon landings of the Apollo Program took place during Nixon's first term of office.

Here's another interesting article:
http://www.nixonera.com/library/domestic.asp
Here's a snip from the final paragraph:
"Almost thirty years after his resignation, Nixon's progressive stance on many of the country's domestic problems remained one of most positive aspects of his administration, as both parties moved far to the right of his reforms on social service spending and affirmative action."

And cocaine-addled Glenn Beck claims progressives to be the antichrist's minions!

When Richard Nixon is looking like a liberal when compared to the present neoliberal president, it's easy to start to wonder what's happened to us as a Nation and where this ideological drift is ultimately taking us. Perhaps we're already there.

I get the impression that Dwight Eisenhower would be drummed out of today's Republican Party. And so would Nixon.