[Peace-discuss] Anti-elitism

[C. G. Estabrook]

"...even if we can’t really trust the Tea Party’s contempt for the rich or share 
their hostility to immigration, both these emotions are of more political 
interest today than any produced by the Democrats or establishment Republicans. 
The Census Bureau recently announced that 44 million Americans are living below 
the poverty line. Meanwhile the top 1% – about 3 million people – control half 
the nation’s wealth. An American political party that was actually serious about 
blaming the rich for their wealth and then took the unprecedented step of not 
blaming the poor for their poverty would be something new."

Challenges for the establishments in US midterms
‘We the people’
A new strand of rightwing populists in the US, represented by talk show host 
Glenn Beck and his Tea Party followers,
fear al-Qaida less than they do socialism. But in particular all Tea Partiers 
despise the Republican rich and the elites
by Walter Benn Michaels

Over the summer two stars of the American right had a friendly argument about 
who poses the greatest threat to the United States. Fox News host Bill O’Reilly 
went with the conventional wisdom: al-Qaida. During the Bush administration, it 
was the clash of cultures that organised the way American conservatives saw the 
world. When they worried about issues like illegal immigration, what they were 
afraid of was al-Qaida operatives mingling among the future valet parkers of 
Chicago and meatpackers of Iowa. But O’Reilly’s new colleague and ratings rival, 
Glenn Beck (1), had a more surprising answer: it’s not the jihadists who are 
trying to destroy our country, it’s the communists. When Beck and the Tea Party, 
the rightwing populists most closely tied to him, express their deepest worries, 
it’s not terrorism they fear, it’s socialism.

What’s surprising is that worrying about communists was more characteristic of 
the Eisenhower years than of post-9/11. Even more surprising is that Beck is a 
generation younger than O’Reilly. He hadn’t even been born in 1963 when 
Eisenhower’s secretary of agriculture, Ezra Taft Benson, gave the speech about 
Krushchev’s promise to keep “feeding us socialism” mouthful by mouthful until 
one day (today, according to Beck, who cites this speech frequently) we wake up 
and realise we’ve “already got communism”.

Most surprising of all is that this reinvention of the cold war is working. Tea 
Partiers rush to expose the communists in the Democratic Party; on Amazon’s 
bestseller lists, the highest ranking political book is FA Hayek’s The Road to 
Serfdom, and even the celebrated radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh has started 
worrying about the “communist” spies “who work for Vladimir Putin” (2).

Why communism? And why now? Islamophobia at least has some pretext based in 
reality: jihadists really did kill thousands of Americans. But not only were 
there no communists on the planes that hit the World Trade Centre, today there 
are virtually no communists anywhere in the US, and precious few in the former 
USSR. Indeed, if there’s one thing Vladimir Putin and Barack Obama can agree on, 
it’s their enthusiasm for what Putin (at Davos!) called “the spirit of free 
enterprise”. And yet, like anti-semitism without Jews, anti-communism without 
communists has come to play a significant political role on the right, 
especially on what we might call the anti-neoliberal right.

Beck’s own biography suggests how this has happened. His parents divorced in 
response to stress caused (as his biographer tells it) by the recession of the 
late 1970s; his early success in radio was a product of the ratings wars set off 
by the deregulation of the radio industry begun in 1982; and his successes and 
failures have been in a broadcasting industry increasingly fragmented and driven 
by the demands of the deregulated market. Before politics became central to his 
performance, he was known primarily as a master of marketing, and many believe 
his current political views aren’t deeply held: they’re just another marketing 
device.

But, if we’ve learned anything from the last 30 years, it’s that marketing is 
itself a kind of politics. Beck is a pure neoliberal baby, coming of age with 
the disappearance of communism and now – confronted with the Great Recession – 
making his career through its reappearance. To him and his millions of viewers, 
it cannot be the triumph of capitalism that has produced our problems, so it 
must be the return of communism. And it’s the “immigrants and socialists” – not 
Saudis on planes but Mexicans on foot – who have spearheaded that return.

Angry Tea Partiers

You can see this structure in the stories that both Democrats (Barack Obama) and 
Republicans (Congressman Bob Inglis) have told about angry Tea Partiers 
denouncing what they take to be Obamacare’s socialising of medicine while 
demanding that the government “keep its hands off Medicare.” Inglis says: “I had 
to politely explain that ‘Actually, sir, your health care is being provided by 
the government’, but he wasn’t having any of it” (3). The reason is he can see 
that Medicare and even Social Security have been put in jeopardy; what he can’t 
see is that it’s the drive to privatisation that has put them there. What he and 
his comrades really want is to be rescued from neoliberalism (they don’t want to 
lose Medicare), but what they think they want is to be rescued from socialism 
(Obamacare).

In reality, there’s nothing the slightest bit socialist about Obamacare, much 
less about immigration. In fact, unlike the Tea Party, Chicago-school economists 
identify open borders with free markets and argue that it’s not immigration but 
“immigration controls” that are “a form of socialist central planning”. Even 
more to the point, there’s nothing communist about illegal immigration which, 
from an economic standpoint, is preferable to legal immigration because it 
“responds to market forces in ways that legal immigration does not” and thus 
“benefits both the undocumented workers who desire to work... in the US and 
employers who want flexible, low-cost labour” (4). So when Beck, speaking for 
all the Tea Partiers, pronounces his judgment – “Immigration good; illegal 
immigration bad” – he may think he’s opposing communism, but what he’s actually 
opposing is neoliberalism in its purest form. The thing the Tea Party regards as 
the greatest threat to capitalism is capitalism itself.

Which is not to say that anyone supports illegal immigration as a principle. 
That would be a contradiction in terms – why not just defend the legality of 
open borders? But what doesn’t make sense as a principle has made very good 
sense as a policy: it was the policy of the Bush administration and the Obama 
administration too, until the Tea Party began to call its bluff. For what the 
policy has done is allow both Democrats and Republicans to encourage a massive 
increase in the supply of very cheap labour, while at the same time condemning 
that labour for the very thing (its illegality) that makes it so cheap.

Thus the American way of dealing with illegal immigration – talk like a border 
guard, act like a hiring committee – has made a significant contribution to the 
redistribution of wealth (upwards) which closed borders used to inhibit, but 
which the new mobility of capital and labour brilliantly enhances. Increased 
mobility of labour, just like increased mobility of capital, and just like the 
deregulation that enables them both, are core components of that neoliberalism 
which, as David Harvey says, has made “increasing social inequality structural 
to its whole project” (5).

And there’s every reason why this should produce anxiety in the US, at least 
among those American workers whose meagre share of the national income has 
continued to decline. As recently as the first Reagan administration (1981-85), 
the bottom 80% of the work force was taking home a little more than 48% of the 
nation’s income; now it’s now taking home a little less than 39%.

But it’s puzzling that Glenn Beck and the Tea Party should be so indignant. For, 
as the Tea Partiers are relatively wealthy and belong disproportionately to the 
top 20%, neo-liberalisation has been good for them (6). Illegal immigration is 
one of the very things that has made rich Americans rich! We’re used to the idea 
of poor people opposing their own interests: rich people taking to the streets 
to protest the very policies that produced their wealth is a more novel 
phenomenon, but not inexplicable. For if the good news for the Tea Party is that 
the top 20% has increased its share of the national income, the bad news is that 
virtually all that increase has gone to the top 1%. Where the top 1% made 12.8% 
of all money earned in 1982, the figure almost doubled by 2006 (21.3%). 
Meanwhile the top 20% increased only by 1% (from 39.1% to 40.1%). So when the 
Tea Party sees immigration as a threat, they’re not totally delusional. What 
they’re seeing is a new set of economic norms that has taken the traditional 
inequalities of American life and intensified them – a capitalism in which they 
were winners turning into a capitalism that threatens to make them losers.

Anti-elitism

What this has produced is an anti-elitism that is a little less of a sham than 
it usually is in US politics. Usually the millionaires who run the Republican 
Party manage to portray themselves as closer to the people than the millionaires 
who run the Democratic Party just by wearing cowboy boots, disapproving of 
abortion and talking a lot about Jesus. But this year, in primaries in places 
like New York, Delaware and of course Alaska, Jesus (though still essential) 
hasn’t been enough. What enabled the Tea Party candidate Christine O’Donnell to 
defeat her conservative opponent in the Delaware Republican primary was not that 
she is even more Christian than he is (although she is; she used to be director 
of the Saviour’s Alliance for Lifting the Truth Ministry, a group that advocates 
sexual abstinence up to and including no masturbation). It was her attacks on 
“the ruling class”.

At a recent rally O’Donnell said, to sustained applause: “The small elite don’t 
get us. They call us wacky. They call us wingnuts” but “we call us ‘We the 
people’.” And, turning her attention from rich Republicans to rich Democrats, 
she contrasted herself to former presidential candidate John Kerry, recently 
accused of trying to avoid the taxes on his brand new $7m yacht: “I never had 
the high-paying job or the company car... I never had to worry about where to 
dock my yacht to reduce my taxes... And I’ll bet most of you didn’t either.”

Of course, the fact that Christine O’Donnell can win some votes by making fun of 
rich politicians doesn’t mean that in office she would do any better than they 
have. In the unlikely event she’s elected, she’ll almost certainly do worse. And 
the Tea Party is already being bankrolled by billionaires like David Koch, whose 
most recent contribution to the welfare of “We the people” was laying off 118 of 
them in North Carolina.

But even if we can’t really trust the Tea Party’s contempt for the rich or share 
their hostility to immigration, both these emotions are of more political 
interest today than any produced by the Democrats or establishment Republicans. 
The Census Bureau recently announced that 44 million Americans are living below 
the poverty line. Meanwhile the top 1% – about 3 million people – control half 
the nation’s wealth. An American political party that was actually serious about 
blaming the rich for their wealth and then took the unprecedented step of not 
blaming the poor for their poverty would be something new.


Walter Benn Michaels is a professor of English at the University of Illinois at 
Chicago, and author of The Trouble with Diversity: How we Learned to Love 
Identity and Ignore Inequality, Metropolitan Books, New York, 2006.

(1) The long-established O’Reilly tends to get around 3 million viewers, the 
up-and-coming Beck, also a Fox News host and host of The Glenn Beck Program, a 
nationally syndicated talk-radio show, around 2 million.

(2) “Limbaugh: "Russian communist" spies easily blend in with journalists, 
academics — "a communist is a communist"”, MMTV, 8 July 2010.

(3) The Washington Post, 27 July 2009.

(4) Richard N Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, preface to 
Gordon H Hanson, The Economic Logic of Illegal Immigration, Council on Foreign 
Relations Press, New York, 2007.

(5) David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford University Press, 2007.

(6) Only 35% of them identify themselves as making under $50,000 a year and thus 
being below the national median; 20% identify themselves as making more than 
$100,000.