Socialite Populism
by digby
Yesterday I had the misfortune of watching distinguished Lyndon Johnson historian Robert Caro and prize-winning populist historian Charles Postel get lectured to by two smug, dishonest, wingnut welfare elites on Fareed Zakaria’s show on CNN. It was enough to make me turn off the computer and head out to the local drinking establishment.
With her usual smug church lady croon, Noonan insisted that the tea party is a populist movement that will appeal to centrists because everyone knows that the government is too big and failing everyone. Both Caro and Postel, being historians and all, pointed out that it wasn’t populist, but rather conservative and in many ways, contradictory to populism with its sympathy to big business and antipathy to social justice.
Noonan corrected the two historians on that in a New York socialite minute:
NOONAN: Bob, are we confusing populism and the populist tradition with progressivism and the progressivist tradition?
I don’t hear anybody in the Tea Party saying do away with social security.
POSTEL: (INAUDIBLE). Everywhere.
NOONAN: All right.
POSTEL: Everywhere.
NOONAN: In every movement there are some people. They —
POSTEL: No, no.
NOONAN: They are absolutely not saying social security should not exist.
POSTEL: They are (ph).
NOONAN: They are saying reform the entitlements. They are saying change the way it’s set up, and they are seeing —
POSTEL: This is what you would like them to say.
NOONAN: It is what they are saying, and saying to me.
Now, they may be saying something different to you, but it is a nation of 305 million people. You are describing something that I’m not seeing, and so it leaves me confused.
This is a broad — the Tea Party Movement is broad and evolving. Nobody’s in charge of it. Nobody’s telling it what to think.
POSTEL: The Tea Party Movement is a very well-organized, very disciplined movement, in my view. It has very important centers of power. The role of FOX News, Glenn Beck, is very important in this. It’s not — he’s not just a — a figure. He’s just not one of the figures. He is a very important mover and shaker in the Tea Party Movement.
And what I’m describing is the stuff about — about —
BROOKHISER: Free press. Terrible.
POSTEL: I’m all for the free press, but this —
BROOKHISER: [As long as] they’re not having an effect.
POSTEL: I’m all — I’m not saying you shouldn’t do it, but we should recognize that the — that the — that the FOX machine plays a fundamental role in the organization of the Tea Parties. And Glenn Beck is one of these people who’s saying that — that Obama is leading us — or is a socialist, and leading us to —
BROOKHISER: The National Review Institute —
NOONAN: Charles, I think it’s more interesting than that.
BROOKHISER: So the National Review Institute took a — a poll about the Tea Party and — and related phenomena, and of the respondents who said they had been to Tea Parties, one-fifth of them said they voted for Obama.
Postel is correct, of course. (And he didn’t even discuss the recent co-option by the religious right — and neither did Noonan, for whom this would be terribly inconvenient.)
Noonan sounds like she’s been listing to Beck rant about progressivism. (And you have to admire her intellectual confidence in challenging Charles Postel on his definition of populism.) But as you can see, both Noonan and Brookheiser were defensive and dishonest in that exchange, Noonan in saying that the tea party isn’t hostile to Social Security and Brookheiser in citing a poll that has no relationship to reality. All other polls have shown that the Tea Party is a right wing conservative movement a vast majority of whose members are Republican. If this National Review poll showed something different it was an outlier. And by the way Brookheiser said it, he knew it too.
Meanwhile Noonan tells Postel the tea party is “more interesting” than the fact that this so-called grassroots movement is being led by a multi-national media corporation, in the most condescending tone possible (and nobody can be more condescending than Noonan.) I honestly don’t think there’s anything more interesting about it than that although Brookheiser also scoffed at the notion that there was anything significant about it, interjecting a ridiculous non-sequitor about free speech as if anyone was questioning that.
And then it got worse:
Zakaria: Bob, let me ask you another element to all of this, because at some level the Tea Party does seem similar and in a very vague sense to movements that you see around the west and that they all seem to have a kind of populist, nativist, nationalistic feel to them.
CARO: Yes.
ZAKARIA: How much — and if you listen to Tea Party on issues like immigration or the Islamic center at Ground Zero, they are very, very passionate about that.
CARO: Yes.
ZAKARIA: How much of this is about nationalism/nativism/race? After all we do have the first black president in office.
CARO: It’s a very perceptive question. Because as you say, to me, that’s what’s at — that’s what at the bottom of a lot of this. I mean like I’m writing — in the book I’m writing about Lyndon Johnson, he is passing the Voting Rights Act of 1965. At that time, blacks could hardly vote in any significant numbers. In 11 states, they weren’t really a political force like they are today. That was 1965.
This is 2010, which even by my math is 45 years. You know, that’s in terms of history, Fareed, that’s a blink of history’s eye. Forty-five years ago, African-Americans were not as nearly as significant a force in American political life and today an African- American sits as president in the United States — in the Oval Office.
You say that has happened so fast. I think that in a way, it takes time for people to absorb that. I happen to believe that race does play a factor in everything in American life, even those of us who would like to pretend and hope that it doesn’t, and I think that what you ask is at the bottom of a lot of what’s happening today.
ZAKARIA: So if Obama were a middle aged white man do you think there’s many people would be saying he’s taken the country away from me, he’s — he’s not an American, things like that?
POSTEL: Well, I — I think that my own view is that if Hillary Clinton were president, we would have — we would have the same billionaires funding protest movements against her that we have against Obama. The Koch Brothers were just as passionate against Clinton as they are against Obama, and we would be, if she had pushed health insurance, we would be having the same cries of socialist dictatorship that we have today.
I don’t think there’s a difference. There’s no question that the Tea Party is tapping into racist — racist feelings.
ZAKARIA: I’m guessing you don’t totally agree.
BROOKHISER: Well, I just want to back up and, you know, yes, race is a dark and bloody ground throughout American history and we should acknowledge here that many of the populists were awful racist. So there was a lot of, you know, this bad baggage appears on the right, on the left. It appears from elitists, it’s appeared in populist movements, sticking up for the little guy, as long as he was the white little guy. So let’s not have any “Not me, lord.” It’s that public.
You cannot fully imagine the nasty, aggressive tone he used to deliver that statement. I frankly don’t see his point, unless he’s saying that since populists in the past were racists that this somehow means that Postel and Caro are racist too — or something. But it was some kind of accusation, that’s for sure.
And then he came back to this nonsense:
ZAKARIA: However, what about the Tea Party movement of 2010? Is it — is there an element of racism?
BROOKHISER: Look, I’ll just repeat the statistic I gave you. We found that one-fifth of people who had gone to Tea Parties had voted for Obama. So if they were, they’re very odd racists is that’s what they are. I’m not buying it.
Again, total bullshit. I’d be surprised if even 1% of tea partiers really voted for Obama. It’s irrational that they would have done that and then joined the tea party within the same two year period, so if they did they are idiots and their opinions must be discounted as meaning anything about the movement at large.
Then Noonan decided to take control,being the voice of the peeeeple and all, and took the opportunity to lecture these pointy headed academics about where they’ve gone wrong with all their book larnin’ and telling them they need to see what’s going on in Real America:
NOONAN: Guys, every time the left gets obsessed with FOX News, I know they’re starting to lose. Get your mind off that. Talk to the Tea Party. Get out there with the folks, not just the people who e- mail you and declare themselves to be John Birch Society members, but forget that stuff.
Everybody’s got a mike in America, everybody. What matters is the message that’s going into it. Don’t look at shiny, sparkling things. There are things below that that are more interesting. Glenn Beck is a shiny, sparkling thing.
He’s a bright shiny thing who, along with his comrades in the pulpits, on Fox and on talk radio, are writing the messages of this so-called movement. Legitimate polls have been done proving this. Noonan and Brookheiser obviously are embarrassed by the clown who are leading their little revolution, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t leading it and at some point they are going to be forced to publicly reconcile themselves to that fact.(Recall Noonan’s “real” opinion here.)
Robert Caro got the last word and I think he is right:
CARO: I would say it’s something that’s been — you know, I would say it’s a battle that’s been going on in western civilization for a long time, and this is a moment of a real clash. I would put the clash differently than you. I would put the clash about issues of social justice. You would put the thing about, you know, government, economic issues and the — and the crisis, but I don’t think we can ignore the fact that right now, during the Obama administration, is a very climatic moment for democracy in America.
I think so too. These people coming to the fore and taking over one of the two American political parties at a time of great stress and global transition is certainly a climactic moment for democracy in America. It might end up just being a blip and we will laugh about it ten years from now. Normally I’m fairly sanguine about these things and assume we’ll find some equilibrium. But this time, I’m not. As Caro says, this is a moment of real clash and I don’t know how it’s going to come out.
Noonan and Brookheiser were agitated, hostile and defensive. The conservative intelligentsia is nervous, and it shows, despite their efforts to be good soldiers and carry on. They are about to reap what they have sown over the past 30 years and I think it scares them too.
Update: Crooks and Liars caught some of this exchange.