[Peace-discuss] Class basis of the Tea Party movement

Sat Apr 17 23:48:35 CDT 2010

I suggest people read Cockburn's piece and see if they find "some facts/data" 
there - and judge for themselves whether he's on to something.

On 4/17/10 11:36 PM, Morton K. Brussel wrote:
> Good history and journalism are supposed to depend on some facts/data to
> support their story telling, something lacking from Cockburn's piece…  --mkb
>
> On Apr 17, 2010, at 11:27 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
>
>> Of course the other names for storytelling are history and journalism.  The
>> question is, Are the stories accurate?
>>
>> It's certainly an advance to recognize that the basis of the Teaparty
>> movement is neither a few conniving member of the RNC nor the Ku Klux Klan,
>> for all the fervent prayers of the Democrats that that be so.
>>
>> The petit bourgeois has held a recognized class position in two centuries
>> of socialist thought, where class is defined by a particular role in the
>> process of production.  The modern world is one where production is carried
>> out in a ongoing war between (a) those who are able to assert their claim
>> to "own" productive property (farms, factories, or the financial
>> instruments that control them) and (b) those who have to rent what makes
>> them human - their purposeful work of head and hands  - to the first group
>> in order to live.
>>
>> But the system is not perspicuous, and there are other roles within it.
>> Understanding the Teaparty movement as consisting of representatives of the
>> petite bourgeoisie - with legitimate grievances - gives us some idea of
>> what to do about it. And how to avoid falling into the Democrat-facilitated
>> corporate embrace.  --CGE
>>
>>
>> On 4/17/10 10:56 PM, Morton K. Brussel wrote:
>>> Hardly worth the trouble.  Storytelling which poses as analysis. --mkb
>>>
>>>
>>> On Apr 17, 2010, at 10:19 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
>>>
>>>> "Today's left no longer believes in revolutionary change but despises
>>>> the petite bourgeoisie out of inherited political disposition and
>>>> class outlook. Ninety-five percent of all the firms in America hire
>>>> fewer than ten people. There's your petite bourgeoisie for you: not
>>>> frightening, not terrifying and in fact quite indispensable. And ...
>>>> legitimately pissed off ... Under the leadership of Obama - cheered
>>>> into office by 99.9 percent of the left - and a Democratic Congress, we
>>>> have a whole new war and no antiwar movement of any heft; a bailout for
>>>> Wall Street; an awful health bill connived at by both parties; the
>>>> prospect of loan guarantees for new nuclear energy plants; a huge hike
>>>> in defense spending, particularly nuclear weapons; and, at least at the
>>>> rhetorical level, an impending onslaught on Social Security.
>>>> Constitutional abuses endorsed or instigated by the White House
>>>> continue in a straight sequence from the Bush years."
>>>>
>>>> Move Over, Axis of Evil Beat the Devil By Alexander Cockburn This
>>>> article appeared in the March 22, 2010 edition of The Nation.
>>>>
>>>> Welcome, "Axis of the Obsessed and Deranged." This was the title of a
>>>> hysterical column, vibrant with class hatred, by Frank Rich in the
>>>> February 28 New York Times. Rich shrieked that "the acrid stench of
>>>> 1995 is back in the air." The militias are on the rampage. The sky is
>>>> dark with the threat of Piper Cherokees being flown by populists into
>>>> government buildings. To match the virulence of Rich's language you'd
>>>> have to go back to the tirades flung at David Koresh and the Branch
>>>> Davidians, some eighty of whom were burned alive outside Waco, Texas,
>>>> on April 19, 1993, on orders from Attorney General Janet Reno. It was
>>>> this crime that Timothy McVeigh said he was avenging when he blew up
>>>> the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City exactly two years later.
>>>>
>>>> As one might expect, Rich had a handy citation to the Southern Poverty
>>>> Law Center, which plumps up its $170 million-plus asset portfolio with
>>>> regular alarums about the rise of "hate groups," defined as those "with
>>>> beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people,"
>>>> which pretty much covers the whole ballpark. That's the same SPLC whose
>>>> Mark Potok sensitively said after the incineration of the Branch
>>>> Davidians and children, "The antigovernment movement, the militia, hate
>>>> groups are absolutely going to get a boost out of this, and I think
>>>> it's really a tragedy for that reason."
>>>>
>>>> This brings us to the American class system, which Russell Baker once
>>>> beautifully defined in terms of access to lawyers. Having a lawyer on
>>>> permanent retainer "is the very essence of richness." That's the upper
>>>> class. Those in the upper middle class hire a lawyer when they feel
>>>> they need one to handle wills, contracts and so forth. Middle-class
>>>> people know they ought to employ lawyers but can't quite afford them.
>>>> Members of the lower middle class believe they can defend themselves
>>>> better than any lawyer, and can't afford one anyway. To lower-class
>>>> folk, public defender and prosecutor look identical.
>>>>
>>>> The lower middle class is what we're focusing on here, the people who
>>>> own auto repair shops, bakeries, bicycle shops, plant stores, dry
>>>> cleaners, fish stores and all the other small businesses across
>>>> America--in sum, the "petite bourgeoisie," stomped by regulators and
>>>> bureaucrats while the big fry get zoning variances and special clause
>>>> exemptions. The left always hated the petite bourgeoisie because it
>>>> wasn't the urban proletariat and thus the designated agent of
>>>> revolutionary change. Today's left no longer believes in revolutionary
>>>> change but despises the petite bourgeoisie out of inherited political
>>>> disposition and class outlook. Ninety-five percent of all the firms in
>>>> America hire fewer than ten people. There's your petite bourgeoisie for
>>>> you: not frightening, not terrifying and in fact quite indispensable.
>>>>
>>>> And the petit bourgeois are legitimately pissed off. Whatever backwash
>>>> they got from the stimulus often wasn't readily apparent. They can't
>>>> afford health plans for themselves or their employees. They're three or
>>>> four payrolls away from the edge of the cliff, and when they read
>>>> about trillions in handouts for bankers, trillions in impending
>>>> deficits, blueprints for green energy regs that will put them out of
>>>> business, what they hear is the ocean surge pounding away at the bottom
>>>> of that same cliff.
>>>>
>>>> The conventional parties have nothing to offer them. The left disdains
>>>> them. But here comes the tea party, whose spirit is very well caught
>>>> by David Barstow, the Times reporter whose long piece on February 16
>>>> prompted Rich's mad column. Rich refers to Barstow's "chilling,
>>>> months-long investigation of the tea party movement," as though the
>>>> reporter had gone undercover, watching Klan rituals through binoculars
>>>> somewhere in a cow pasture. This is a silly mischaracterization of
>>>> Barstow's perceptive and rather sympathetic account of tea partydom, in
>>>> which he significantly doesn't quote the SPLC but pops in, right at the
>>>> end, an obligatory quote from an Idaho lawyer who sued the Hayden Lake
>>>> Aryans into extinction.
>>>>
>>>> Of course, there are many flavors in the tea party blend. There are
>>>> nuts and opportunists, as in any political formation. You can trace
>>>> some of its ideology back to the nineteenth-century Know-Nothings, a
>>>> typical platform of which, in 1841, called for extending the term of
>>>> naturalization to twenty-one years, restricting public office to the
>>>> native-born (there's your birther movement), keeping the Bible in
>>>> schools and resisting "the encroachment of a foreign civil and
>>>> spiritual power upon the institutions of our country." Back then this
>>>> meant the Vatican; today it's Davos, Bilderberg, the UN, the IPCC.
>>>>
>>>> At this point leftists invariably start quoting Richard Hofstadter's
>>>> 1964 essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." They should put
>>>> aside that snotty essay and reflect on their own dismal failures. Under
>>>> the leadership of Obama--cheered into office by 99.9 percent of the
>>>> left--and a Democratic Congress, we have a whole new war and no antiwar
>>>> movement of any heft; a bailout for Wall Street; an awful health bill
>>>> connived at by both parties; the prospect of loan guarantees for new
>>>> nuclear energy plants; a huge hike in defense spending, particularly
>>>> nuclear weapons; and, at least at the rhetorical level, an impending
>>>> onslaught on Social Security. Constitutional abuses endorsed or
>>>> instigated by the White House continue in a straight sequence from the
>>>> Bush years.
>>>>
>>>> Response from the left? No twitch in the morgue. The AFL-CIO was bought
>>>> off from resistance to the health bill by getting relief on its
>>>> Cadillac health plans. Because of alleged anthropologically prompted
>>>> global warming, the green movement has sat on its hands, hopelessly
>>>> split on nuclear power, whose real, baneful effects have been
>>>> irrefutably demonstrated, starting with nuclear waste. There's been
>>>> near total silence on the huge nuclear weapons budget boost (the
>>>> largest for Los Alamos since 1944). Total silence on the Patriot Act,
>>>> reauthorized February 27. What to do? Rally round the flag and
>>>> scaremonger about the right, where's there's actual political ferment.
>>>>
>>>> http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100322/cockburn
>>>>
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>>>
>

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