The Tea Party is hardly Nazi. It's as American as Meet John Doe

John Doe, (was) released seven months before Pearl Harbor into a frightened and isolationist America still mired in recession. The movie features Gary Cooper as a hobo who takes on the identity of an anonymous letter-writer, "John Doe" – who threatens public suicide to protest the callousness of society – entirely conjured up by reporter Barbara Stanwyck. As John Doe, Cooper begins to believe the things he's supposed to have written, and goes along with the pretence. Grassroots John Doe clubs spring up nationwide – like Glenn Beck's "9/12" clubs – as cynical politicians seek to harness this political energy for their own ends...

Here, Capra's People are deluded saps, suckers, cannon-fodder for causes not their own. All of which puts me in mind of the Tea Party, an incoherent typhoon of xenophobic lusts and recriminatory pathologies, already co-opted by political manipulators like the Norton-esque Koch brothers, and a Republican establishment desperate to annex itself some political vigour.

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The best part of the article is the contribution by Thomas Frank, the author of What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. Here’s a highlight:

….Right-wing politics has become a vehicle for channelling this popular anger against intellectual snobs. The result is that many of America’s poorest citizens have a deep emotional attachment to a party that serves the interests of its richest.

Thomas Frank says that whatever disadvantaged Americans think they are voting for, they get something quite different:

“You vote to strike a blow against elitism and you receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our life times, workers have been stripped of power, and CEOs are rewarded in a manner that is beyond imagining… It’s like a French Revolution in reverse in which the workers come pouring down the street screaming more power to the aristocracy.”

As Mr Frank sees it, authenticity has replaced economics as the driving force of modern politics. The authentic politicians are the ones who sound like they are speaking from the gut, not the cerebral cortex. Of course, they might be faking it, but it is no joke to say that in contemporary politics, if you can fake sincerity, you have got it made.

And here, according to the author of the article, is the big takeaway message from all of this… “If people vote against their own interests, it is not because they do not understand what is in their interest or have not yet had it properly explained to them. They do it because they resent having their interests decided for them by politicians who think they know best. There is nothing voters hate more than having things explained to them as though they were idiots. As the saying goes, in politics, when you are explaining, you are losing. And that makes anything as complex or as messy as healthcare reform a very hard sell.”


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