The Tea Party Sideshow

by Mickey Z. / May 3rd, 2010

Let’s say America has a Democratic president who, inexplicably, is viewed as much different from his predecessor. His policies are business at usual but the country’s right wing portrays him as a dangerous leftist. Hate speech increases and threats rise, until ultimately, it all manifests itself in act of horrific violence.

Of course, I’m talking about Bill Clinton, the rise of right wing militias, and the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City almost exactly 15 years ago. In the words of the immortal political philosopher, Jon Bon Jovi: “It’s all the same. Only the names have changed.”

Just as in 1995, the right wing movement (sic) inevitably lures in many who will use it as platform to express their simmering hatred for blacks, gays, immigrants, women, and most non-Christians.

Just as in 1995, we have things in common with the right wing protestors, starting with the fear, anger, isolation, frustration, and marginalization that results from living within a culture based on material consumption by any means necessary. As long as our culture—our system—is allowed to stay unchanged… we will be dealing with false conflicts between potential allies. The victims will stay divided while the top 5% remain above the fray

Yes, many of the Tea Partiers are victims of predatory capitalism just as we are and could even be comrades if they weren’t so woefully and dangerously uninformed.

They talk about taxes but don’t mention the military budget (where 53% of our tax dollars go to die). They complain about “the nanny state,” but ignore corporate welfare. They perceive a Wall Street-funded politician like Mr. Yes-We-Can as a “socialist” and blame everything on “the government” while disregarding corporate power (in this equation, the government is clearly the lesser of two horrendous evils).

The Tea Partiers exist because corporate media propaganda has convinced them equality, justice, and tolerance is a threat to their alleged freedoms. Just as bad: it’s also convinced them George W. Obama represents this threatening form of equality, justice, and tolerance. They were tricked… but make no mistake about it, so was the Left.

A radical response to this so-called movement requires balance. We have to challenge right wing hatred and intolerance at every turn, of course, but do so without defending President Obama who is little more than Ronald Reagan in blackface.

A first step could be to fully appreciate the urgency. Even though I’ve explained that this dynamic isn’t new, it’s still not exactly same as 1995. The societal downward spiral is much worse now and that could mean the backlash will also be much worse. You can get started appreciating this urgency by simply rediscovering the subversive pleasure of thinking for yourself.

Reactivate your natural, instinctual bullshit detector so when someone tells you we live in a big melting pot, the land of the free/home of the brave, you’ll say bullshit. When they rant about immigrants taking our jobs and not paying taxes, you can say bullshit. They tell you marriage can only be between man and woman? You say bullshit. It’s acceptable that women are paid 77 cents for every dollar a man makes? Bullshit. They’re okay with racial profiling and the racist war on drugs and racist death penalty. We can all say bullshit. They wish to condone the use of words like bitch, faggot, and nigger, and feel free to use “illegal” as a noun? You scream: bullshit.

This system cannot be reformed. It must be dismantled and there’s no time like now. This is our moment so let’s make it count.

Of course, we must stand up to Tea Party ignorance and bigotry but creating solidarity with their “targets” (the poor, the immigrants, all those oppressed due to sexual preference, gender, or ethnicity, etc.) is far more important. It’s not easy to free our minds from propaganda, stand up to those seeking scapegoats, and fight for the future. But I guarantee you this: it’s worth it. This is our chance to create both community and a legacy.

Howard Zinn once said: “To live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”

As you seek out your own marvelous victories remember to trust your bullshit detector so no matter what you hear coming out of Washington, you’ll know the truth remains:

Action is always better than hope.

Mickey Z. is the creator of a podcast called Post-Woke. You can subscribe here. He is also the founder of Helping Homeless Women - NYC, offering direct relief to women on New York City streets. Spread the word. Read other articles by Mickey.

This article was posted on Monday, May 3rd, 2010 at 9:00am and is filed under Capitalism, Militarism, Tea Party movement.

14 comments on this article so far ...

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  1. JE said on May 3rd, 2010 at 1:35pm #

    Mickey you’re the epitome of a pontificating, sanctimonious leftist.

    1st predatory capitalism is a redundant term. Aren’t you a journalist….do edit your crappy writing before you e-mail it out?

    Second, those tea partiers are reactionaries because they want to maintain some semblance of white culture and white identity…if they were an actual minority you would be defending their ignorance to the death. Instead you prefer to champion the cause of the ignorant minorities because it makes you appear to be the voice of the voiceless.

    It’s because overcompensating bigots like yourself who seem to think only minorities have the right to maintain their own culture. The values you place on that culture should be irrelevant if you are for universal justice as you claim…

    Lastly, you’re are a rip-off artist…Self Defense for Radicals??? Hmmmmm, where have I heard something similar to that before? Noam Chomsky and Intellectual self-defense ring a bell?

    You’re not the next Noam Chomsky and you’re not the next Howard Zinn…get over it.

  2. Don Hawkins said on May 3rd, 2010 at 2:03pm #

    Second, those tea partiers are reactionaries because they want to maintain some semblance of white culture and white identity…

    So that’s what the tea party is about JE. Ignorant minorities and those minorities and all of the human race are about to find maintaining their own culture is nothing but illusion viva Morales.

    “[The skeptic community overwhelmingly embraced what they formerly dismissed as] New Age claptrap … We give up! The nuts were right.”
    Nostradamus

    Mickey I will use bullshit and use it often in this time of Universal deceit on a mass scale.

  3. JE said on May 3rd, 2010 at 2:53pm #

    I don’t doubt there is a white nationalist element to the tea partiers. I also think the “movement” is much smaller than Faux News and CNN let on. But my question is this…is it understandably from a psychological and sociological standpoint and I say, without being an apologist, it is.

    I just think it’s telling that a lot of “leftists” are cultural and even moral relativists…except for white people. Yes I recognize the elite of this country have a committed innumerable atrocities in our name and we hold culpability but I don’t think it’s race issue anymore it’s a class issue. And as I would expect, the people who thought they were in power (working class whites) are gonna be the last ones to figure out they’ve been duped. Sadly these people seem to think power comes from cultural dominance when in fact cultural dominance stems from having power. No one has proven that better than US Jewry…

  4. lichen said on May 3rd, 2010 at 3:07pm #

    Great article, Mickey. We do need a wide-reaching solidarity, with undocumented immigrants and others that the racist corporatist tea party tries to push down.

  5. hayate said on May 4th, 2010 at 12:13am #

    The teabaggers are not worth all this fuss. They are just neocons. Tools of zionists. The zionists need some foamers to make their obama look liberal so liberals will rally round the quisling.

  6. GLloyd Rowsey said on May 4th, 2010 at 6:30am #

    What Matters
    Walter Benn Michaels

    * Who Cares about the White Working Class? edited by Kjartan Páll Sveinsson
    Runnymede Perspectives, 72 pp, January 2009, ISBN 978 1 906732 10 3

    In the US, there is (or was) an organisation called Love Makes a Family. It was founded in 1999 to support the right of gay couples to adopt children and it played a central role in supporting civil unions. A few months ago, its director, Ann Stanback, announced that, having ‘achieved its goals’, Love Makes a Family would be ceasing operations at the end of this year, and that she would be stepping down to spend more time with her wife, Charlotte. Our ‘core purpose’, she said, has been ‘accomplished’.

    It’s possible of course that this declaration of mission accomplished will prove to be as ill-advised as some others have been in the last decade. Gay marriage is legal in Connecticut, where Love Makes a Family is based, but it’s certainly not legal everywhere in the US. No one, however, would deny that the fight for gay rights has made extraordinary strides in the 40 years since Stonewall. And progress in combating homophobia has been accompanied by comparable progress in combating racism and sexism. Although the occasional claim that the election of President Obama has ushered us into a post-racial society is obviously wrong, it’s fairly clear that the country that’s just elected a black president (and that produced so many votes for the presidential candidacy of a woman) is a lot less racist and sexist than it used to be.

    But it would be a mistake to think that because the US is a less racist, sexist and homophobic society, it is a more equal society. In fact, in certain crucial ways it is more unequal than it was 40 years ago. No group dedicated to ending economic inequality would be thinking today about declaring victory and going home. In 1969, the top quintile of American wage-earners made 43 per cent of all the money earned in the US; the bottom quintile made 4.1 per cent. In 2007, the top quintile made 49.7 per cent; the bottom quintile 3.4. And while this inequality is both raced and gendered, it’s less so than you might think. White people, for example, make up about 70 per cent of the US population, and 62 per cent of those in the bottom quintile. Progress in fighting racism hasn’t done them any good; it hasn’t even been designed to do them any good. More generally, even if we succeeded completely in eliminating the effects of racism and sexism, we would not thereby have made any progress towards economic equality. A society in which white people were proportionately represented in the bottom quintile (and black people proportionately represented in the top quintile) would not be more equal; it would be exactly as unequal. It would not be more just; it would be proportionately unjust.

    An obvious question, then, is how we are to understand the fact that we’ve made so much progress in some areas while going backwards in others. And an almost equally obvious answer is that the areas in which we’ve made progress have been those which are in fundamental accord with the deepest values of neoliberalism, and the one where we haven’t isn’t. We can put the point more directly by observing that increasing tolerance of economic inequality and increasing intolerance of racism, sexism and homophobia – of discrimination as such – are fundamental characteristics of neoliberalism. Hence the extraordinary advances in the battle against discrimination, and hence also its limits as a contribution to any left-wing politics. The increased inequalities of neoliberalism were not caused by racism and sexism and won’t be cured by – they aren’t even addressed by – anti-racism or anti-sexism.

    My point is not that anti-racism and anti-sexism are not good things. It is rather that they currently have nothing to do with left-wing politics, and that, insofar as they function as a substitute for it, can be a bad thing. American universities are exemplary here: they are less racist and sexist than they were 40 years ago and at the same time more elitist. The one serves as an alibi for the other: when you ask them for more equality, what they give you is more diversity. The neoliberal heart leaps up at the sound of glass ceilings shattering and at the sight of doctors, lawyers and professors of colour taking their place in the upper middle class. Whence the many corporations which pursue diversity almost as enthusiastically as they pursue profits, and proclaim over and over again not only that the two are compatible but that they have a causal connection – that diversity is good for business. But a diversified elite is not made any the less elite by its diversity and, as a response to the demand for equality, far from being left-wing politics, it is right-wing politics.

    The recent furore over the arrest for ‘disorderly conduct’ of Henry Louis Gates helps make this clear. Gates, as one of his Harvard colleagues said, is ‘a famous, wealthy and important black man’, a point Gates himself tried to make to the arresting officer – the way he put it was: ‘You don’t know who you’re messing with.’ But, despite the helpful hint, the cop failed to recognise an essential truth about neoliberal America: it’s no longer enough to kowtow to rich white people; now you have to kowtow to rich black people too. The problem, as a sympathetic writer in the Guardian put it, is that ‘Gates’s race snuffed out his class status,’ or as Gates said to the New York Times, ‘I can’t wear my Harvard gown everywhere.’ In the bad old days this situation almost never came up – cops could confidently treat all black people, indeed, all people of colour, the way they traditionally treated poor white people. But now that we’ve made some real progress towards integrating our elites, you need to step back and take the time to figure out ‘who you’re messing with’. You need to make sure that nobody’s class status is snuffed out by his race.

    In the wake of Gates’s arrest, among the hundreds of people protesting the injustice of racial profiling, a white cardiologist married to a black man put the point best when she lamented that even in the ‘diverse area’ where she lives (Hyde Park, Obama’s old neighbourhood) she’ll hear people nervously say, ‘Look at those black guys coming towards us,’ to which she replies: ‘Yes, but they’re wearing lacrosse shorts and Calvin Klein jeans. They’re probably the kids of the professor down the street.’ ‘You have to be able to discern differences between people,’ she went on to say. ‘It’s very frustrating.’ The differences she means, of course, are between rich kids and poor kids, and the frustration she feels is with people who don’t understand that class is supposed to trump race. But while it’s easy to sympathise with that frustration – rich black kids are infinitely less likely to mug you than poor black kids or, for that matter, poor white kids – it’s a lot harder to see it as the expression of a progressive politics.

    Nevertheless, that seems to be the way we do see it. The neoliberal ideal is a world where rich people of all races and sexes can happily enjoy their wealth, and where the injustices produced not by discrimination but by exploitation – there are fewer poor people (7 per cent) than black people (9 per cent) at Harvard, and Harvard’s not the worst – are discreetly sent around to the back door. Thus everyone’s outraged that a black professor living on prosperous Ware St (and renting a summer vacation ‘manse’ on Martha’s Vineyard that he ‘jokingly’ calls ‘Tara’) can be treated with disrespect; no one’s all that outraged by the social system that created the gap between Ware St or ‘Tara’ and the places where most Americans live. Everyone’s outraged by the fact that Gates can be treated so badly; nobody by the fact that he and the rest of the top 10 per cent of American wage-earners have been doing so well. Actually, it’s just the opposite. Liberals – especially white liberals – are thrilled by Gates’s success, since it testifies to the legitimacy of their own: racism didn’t make us all this money, we earned it!

    Thus the primacy of anti-discrimination not only performs the economic function of making markets more efficient, it also performs the therapeutic function of making those of us who have benefited from those markets sleep better at night. And, perhaps more important, it has, ‘for a long time’, as Wendy Bottero says in her contribution to the recent Runnymede Trust collection Who Cares about the White Working Class?, also performed the intellectual function of focusing social analysis on what she calls ‘questions of racial or sexual identity’ and on ‘cultural differences’ instead of on ‘the way in which capitalist economies create large numbers of low-wage, low-skill jobs with poor job security’. The message of Who Cares about the White Working Class?, however, is that class has re-emerged: ‘What we learn here’, according to the collection’s editor, Kjartan Páll Sveinsson, is that ‘life chances for today’s children are overwhelmingly linked to parental income, occupations and educational qualifications – in other words, class.’

    This assertion, unremarkable as it may seem, represents a substantial advance over multiculturalist anti-racism, since the logic of anti-racism requires only the correction of disparities within classes rather than between them. If about 1.5 per cent of your population is of Pakistani descent, then if 1.5 per cent of every income quintile is Pakistani, your job is done. The fact that the top quintile is four times better off than the bottom quintile – the advantage the children of rich Pakistanis would have over the children of poor ones – is not your problem. Which is why, in a society like Britain, whose GINI coefficient – the standard measure of income inequality – is the highest in the EU, the ambition to eliminate racial disparities rather than income inequality itself functions as a form of legitimation rather than as a critique. Which is also why, when an organisation like the Runnymede Trust, which has for years been devoted to promoting ‘a successful multi-ethnic Britain by addressing issues of racial equality and discrimination against minority communities’, starts addressing itself to class, it’s undergone a real change. Racial equality requires respect for racial difference; class equality requires the elimination of class difference.

    In the event, however, what Who Cares about the White Working Class? actually provides is less an alternative to neoliberal multiculturalism than an extension and ingenious refinement of it. Those writing in this collection understand the ‘re-emergence of class’ not as a function of the increasing injustice of class (when Thatcher took office, the GINI score was 0.25; now it’s 0.36, the highest the UK has ever recorded) but as a function of the increasing injustice of ‘classism’. What outrages them, in other words, is not the fact of class difference but the ‘scorn’ and ‘contempt’ with which the lower class is treated.

    You get a perfect sense of how this works from Beverley Skeggs’s analysis of a story told by one of her working-class research subjects about a trip she and her friends took to Kendals in Manchester: ‘You know, where the really posh food is, and we were laughing about all the chocolates, and how many we could eat – if we could afford them – and this woman she just looked at us. If looks could kill … It was like it was her place, and we didn’t belong there.’ The point Skeggs makes is that ‘the gaze that embodies the symbolic reading of the women makes them feel “out of place”, thereby generating a sense of where their “place” should be,’ while her more general point is that ‘the middle class’ should be ‘held accountable for the levels of symbolic violence they enact in daily encounters’ with the lower classes.

    The focus of her outrage (indeed, insofar as we can tell from the story, the focus of the women’s own outrage) is not the fact that some people can afford the chocolates and others can’t, but that the ones who can are mean to the ones who can’t. And this represents something of an innovation in left politics. While everyone has always disapproved of adding insult to injury, it’s traditionally been the right that’s sought to treat the insult as if it were the injury.

    It’s thus a relevant fact about Who Cares about the White Working Class? that Ferdinand Mount, who once advised Thatcher, is twice cited and praised here for condemning the middle class’s bad behaviour in displaying its open contempt for ‘working-class cultures’. He represents an improvement over those who seek to blame the poor for their poverty and who regard the culture of poverty rather than the structure of capitalism as the problem. That is the view of what we might call right-wing neoliberalism and, from the standpoint of what we might call left-wing neoliberalism, it’s nothing but the expression of class prejudice. What left neoliberals want is to offer some ‘positive affirmation for the working classes’. They want us to go beyond race to class, but to do so by treating class as if it were race and to start treating the white working class with the same respect we would, say, the Somalis – giving ‘positive value and meaning to both “workingclassness” and ethnic diversity’. Where right neoliberals want us to condemn the culture of the poor, left neoliberals want us to appreciate it.

    The great virtue of this debate is that on both sides inequality gets turned into a stigma. That is, once you start redefining the problem of class difference as the problem of class prejudice – once you complete the transformation of race, gender and class into racism, sexism and classism – you no longer have to worry about the redistribution of wealth. You can just fight over whether poor people should be treated with contempt or respect. And while, in human terms, respect seems the right way to go, politically it’s just as empty as contempt.

    This is pretty obvious when it comes to class. Kjartan Páll Sveinsson declares that ‘the white working classes are discriminated against on a range of different fronts, including their accent, their style, the food they eat, the clothes they wear’ – and it’s no doubt true. But the elimination of such discrimination would not alter the nature of the system that generates ‘the large numbers of low-wage, low-skill jobs with poor job security’ described by Bottero. It would just alter the technologies used for deciding who had to take them. And it’s hard to see how even the most widespread social enthusiasm for tracksuits and gold chains could make up for the disadvantages produced by those jobs.

    Race, on the other hand, has been a more successful technology of mystification. In the US, one of the great uses of racism was (and is) to induce poor white people to feel a crucial and entirely specious fellowship with rich white people; one of the great uses of anti-racism is to make poor black people feel a crucial and equally specious fellowship with rich black people. Furthermore, in the form of the celebration of ‘identity’ and ‘ethnic diversity’, it seeks to create a bond between poor black people and rich white ones. So the African-American woman who cleans my office is supposed to feel not so bad about the fact that I make almost ten times as much money as she does because she can be confident that I’m not racist or sexist and that I respect her culture. And she’s also supposed to feel pride because the dean of our college, who makes much more than ten times what she does, is African-American, like her. And since the chancellor of our university, who makes more than 15 times what she does, is not only African-American but a woman too (the fruits of both anti-racism and anti-sexism!), she can feel doubly good about her. But, and I acknowledge that this is the thinnest of anecdotal evidence, I somehow doubt she does. If the downside of the politics of anti-discrimination is that it now functions to legitimate the increasing disparities not produced by racism or sexism, the upside is the degree to which it makes visible the fact that the increase in those disparities does indeed have nothing to do with racism or sexism. A social analyst as clear-eyed as a University of Illinois cleaning woman would start from there.

  7. GLloyd Rowsey said on May 4th, 2010 at 6:44am #

    I work out at a gym where the white, angry, man who cleans the lockers is the epitome of the outsided Tea Party member, or soon-to-be member. The above article from the current London Review of Books pretty much explains why he’s so pissed-off.

    Consider it closely, ye self-satisfied liberals who would slam Mickey Z because he knows “class” means something other than what you go to when the bell rings.

  8. kalidas said on May 4th, 2010 at 8:30am #

    Mother Nature is the biggest racist of them all.

  9. JE said on May 4th, 2010 at 12:47pm #

    I like to slam Mickey because he is a pompous hypocrite and an unoriginal bitter…but I guess I should lay off because it’s gotten too easy…

  10. dan e said on May 4th, 2010 at 1:13pm #

    JE it is you who is the pompous hypocrite. Mickey Z is nothing if not original. I don’t always agree with or like what he writes (this piece I admire a great deal) but he’s always original, a guy with a unique take on contemporary reality that he expresses in a unique personal style. Which is more than can be said for yall, JE:)

  11. dan e said on May 4th, 2010 at 1:50pm #

    Thank you to Lloyd R for posting that excellent article on a most difficult subject. If I was a DV editor I’d think about reposting it as an article, promoting it from a “comment” to the more visible status of an article, so more readers would see it & hopefully read it?

  12. GLloyd Rowsey said on May 4th, 2010 at 3:08pm #

    Thanks, dan e. But easier said than done. I too was extremely impressed by the article from the LRB, but to my knowledge DV’s software does not provide a “quick link” capability. Which (to my knowledge) is to say: even a DV editor cannot post the comment as an article.

    If it seemed worthwhile, I could spend time here comment-linking pieces from the London Review of Books, but (to my knowledge, again), Dissident Voice prefers to be an outlet for it’s own writers. The upside is that only these writers actually appear as authors of articles at DV, and DV maintains the “purity” of its message. The downside is that websites like OpEdNews, which has software to accommodate a wide range of opinion and facts, have a wider variety of readers, and can go with the flow and keep linking to new and different voices, as public opinion changes in America. This, presumably, enables websites like OEN to be like shrews in the forests of the committed dinosaurs of political opinion, and OEN is where I’ve been contributing for almost two years exclusively.

    Again, thank you for sharing my politics. It’s a sin and a shame that white, working class folks think the left has never had their interests at heart, when Marx himself had very little to say or write about darker skinned folks.

  13. JE said on May 4th, 2010 at 9:49pm #

    dan e,

    if you actually believe that Mickey is “always original” then all that proves to me is that you aren’t very well read beyond internet columsn and blogs.

    Then again I guess that kind of evident from the fact that you just referred to a single person as “yall.”

  14. Deadbeat said on May 4th, 2010 at 10:58pm #

    Actually I think JE has something to say here I just wish he was a bit clearer in his critique. His first comment that “predatory capitalism” is redundant is absolutely correct and quite astute. This misuse of describing capitalism with some adjective has been long a technique of reactionaries in order to convince the public that there is some benign form of Capitalism.

    In fact Chomsky has done this in his commentary when he reference Adam Smith. He attempts to compare Adam Smith’s depiction to today free marketers and it would appear that Smih’s version is more benign. The problem with this rhetoric however is that it obscures (a Chomskyian trait) the TENDENCIES of the system and obscures how these tendencies operate to create social, political, economic and environmental PATHOLOGIES.

    The tendency on the Left has been to shy away from Marxian analysis and thus has opened the door to such rhetorical arguments like “corporatism” or “fascism” coming from the LEFT. For example the Chomsky interview with Christopher Hedges whereby Chomksy views the Tea Party as akin to Weimar Germany. This is totally ridiculous (especially coming from the world’s most renowned intellectual) as Jews do not fact any anti-Semitic backlash. As we are now seeing in Arizona, the War on Drugs and War on Terror — that is being reserved for people of color.

    JE can you be a little more specific and clearly with your critique with this article?