Jonathan Todd

Anthony Painter has recently written about movement politics for Progress. He recounts how “equal voting rights and civil rights”, the fruits of the civil rights movement, ”changed America. But it was the movement that followed it and, in part, was a reaction to it, that was America’s most successful ‘movement for change.’ That was the audacious and many headed conservative movement. If the civil rights movement was driven by a sense of moral injustice, the conservative movement was motivated by a sense of moral outrage.”

Painter doesn’t, however, draw the more contemporary parallel: the movement that powered Barack Obama into the White House was driven by a sense of moral injustice, while the Tea Party movement, the most visceral counter reaction to this victory, is motivated by a sense of moral outrage. They are outraged with the ‘socialism’ of Obama-care, outraged with the free market perversion that is the bank bailouts, outraged with the extension of the big government leviathan that has been the fiscal stimulus, outraged by illegal immigration, outraged with plans to build a Mosque near Ground Zero and outraged by the indifference of Washington DC to all of this. They want their country back.

But who took their country from them?

Some fusion between socialists and al-Qaeda, which may very well be personified by Obama. His middle name is Hussein, after all. Sarah Palin trades on the same suspicions that the name Hussein arouses when she describes the proposed Cordoba Centre in NYC as the ’9/11 Mosque’. “Of course”, as Alex Massie sarcastically points out, ”it’s planned as a tribute to al-Qaeda and of course it’s perfectly reasonable to suppose that all muslims are really just the same and we know what that means don’t we?”

The main contribution of Newt Gingrich, the former Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, to the debate on the Cordoba Centre has been to declare, ”there should be no mosque near ground zero so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia”. As the Economist points out, “to Mr Gingrich, it seems, an American Muslim is a Muslim first and an American second. Al-Qaeda would doubtless concur.”

Sarah Palin’s contribution to this debate has been more illiterate, just as offensive and has passed the bumper sticker test: her argument can be condensed into the space available on a bumper sticker. And, as certain as night follows day, the bumper stickers have arrived. And the t-shirts. They are a celebration of a misspelling in that they build on Palin’s infamous ‘refudiate’ tweet to attack Obama and socialism.

It is striking both how easily they conflate a dispute about a Mosque with Obama and socialism and how willing they are to proclaim, literally as a badge of honour, Palin’s spelling error. This proclamation speaks to the anti-intellectual fire in the bellies of many of Palin’s followers; many of whom make up the Tea Party movement. What they want, as Palin puts it, “is a commander-in-chief, not a constitutional law professor lecturing us from a lectern”.

Palin has an ability to tap into a raw nerve that many middle and working class Americans seem to have about being ‘talked down to’ by a liberal, east-coast elite. This raw nerve makes her straight-talking the stuff of authenticity and empathy. Her misspelling, and the condescending response to it, has deepened this emotional connection between her and her followers. “She validates me and she validates my life”, as I recall one of her followers once telling a TV camera. No constitutional law professor could ever provide such validation.

Now, it’s all too easy to look at this and sneer about people clinging to their guns and their bibles. Obama once seemed to do exactly this. However, reading this fantastic reportage from the FT makes me wonder whether something else is going on.

“Mention middle-class America and most foreigners envision something timeless and manicured, from The Brady Bunch, say, or Desperate Housewives in which teenagers drive to school in sports cars and the girls are always cheerleading. This might approximate how some in the top 10 per cent live. The rest live like the Freemans. Or worse.”

The Freemans are a family in Minneapolis that the article very movingly describes.

“Last year the bank tried to repossess the Freemans’ home even though they were only three months in arrears. Their son, Andy, was recently knocked off his mother’s health insurance and only painfully reinstated for a large fee. And, much like the boarded-up houses that signal America’s epidemic of foreclosures, the drug dealings and shootings that were once remote from their neighbourhood are edging ever closer, a block at a time.”

There are some harsh economic realities underlying the position that the Freemans’ find themselves in.

“The slow economic strangulation of the Freemans and millions of other middle-class Americans started long before the Great Recession, which merely exacerbated the “personal recession” that ordinary Americans had been suffering for years. Dubbed “median wage stagnation” by economists, the annual incomes of the bottom 90 per cent of US families have been essentially flat since 1973 – having risen by only 10 per cent in real terms over the past 37 years. That means most Americans have been treading water for more than a generation. Over the same period the incomes of the top 1 per cent have tripled. In 1973, chief executives were on average paid 26 times the median income. Now the ­multiple is above 300.”

Michael Spence, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, reflected upon the consequences of this economic position by telling the FT:

“I have this gnawing feeling about the future of America. When people lose the sense of optimism, things tend to get more volatile. The future I most fear for America is Latin American: a grossly unequal society that is prone to wild swings from populism to ­orthodoxy, which makes sensible government increasingly hard to imagine. Look at the Tea Party. People think it came from nowhere. While I don’t agree with their remedies, most Tea Party members are middle-class Americans who have been suffering silently for years … To be pessimistic about the future is so new for Americans and so strikingly un-American.”

As the swings from the civil rights to the conservative movements and from the Obama to the Tea Party movements attest, movements are both part of and create the weather of American politics. However, perhaps, one doesn’t have to be a fully signed up Marxist to see these movements as being in some senses superstructures determined by the economic base. The Tea Party seems as much about the economic exasperation of the anxious middle as about guns and bibles. Still, it is testimony to the enduring power of movements and conservatism in America. As the likes of Palin fire fear of the other – be that ‘socialists’, Muslims, illegal immigrants or anything or anyone who isn’t carrying a gun and a bible – and China’s rise heralds an era of contested modernity, it’s hard not to share Spence’s concerns that the Tea Party are a harbinger of more angry and troubled times in America.

Let’s hope that enlightened government from Obama can avert this. But no matter how intelligent Obama’s policies may be, they are unlikely to resonate unless the arguments for them can be summarised on a bumper sticker.