American As Apple Pie

by digby

Turns out teabaggers have always been teabaggers:

“If something is not done shortly, this country is going the way of…Italy, Germany…or Russia, and it is high time we did something,” exclaimed Irénée du Pont, one of the more prominent conservatives of the 1930s. Many of his fellow Americans agreed there was good cause to be alarmed: a new Democratic president was proposing an unprecedented expansion of federal power that would increase taxes on the well-off and dole out benefits to the jobless and other unfortunates. Several spokesmen on the right made more ominous vows: “So help me God, I will be instrumental in taking a Communist from the chair once occupied by Washington,” declared Father Charles Coughlin, who commanded one of the largest radio audiences in the nation.

[…]

This tradition is, in fact, as old as the nation itself. During the 1760s colonists along the Eastern Seaboard were convinced that King George III and his ministers meant to abolish their liberties and yoke their economy to the venal desires of the imperial court in London. They made a revolution to thwart this wicked plot, one that historians now agree never existed. Even after the Constitution was ratified, Americans were more comfortable when state and local governments levied taxes and enforced moralistic laws like Prohibition than when the feds tried to do the same thing.

The article (subs only) goes on to discuss all the times the right has succeeded, with the notable exception of Roosevelt who had the dubious advantage of an economy so devastated that the people no longer trusted the private sector.

But there’s another layer to this besides the internalized colonial fear of despotism (which didn’t seem to bother the right when it came to George Bush the Second) and it has something to do with this rather ugly strain in the American character:

After many months of conservative claims that Barack Obama and the Democratic Party are determined to engineer a “government takeover” of the private sector in order to “redistribute” income, Steele is upping the ante to suggest that Obama wants to redistribute healthcare – and perhaps even the opportunity to take another breath – as well.

This should be familiar to any political observer over the age of 30 as a new version of the old “welfare wedge”: the emotionally powerful conservative argument that Democrats want to use Big Government to take away the good things of life from people who have earned them and give them to people who haven’t.

As Lee Atwater correctly predicted, they have had to give up their explicitly racist welfare wedge: it’s now just implied. But I think we all know what it means —- these fine Americans believe that lazy shiftless inferiors are going to benefit from these their hard work and they are having none of it, even if they themselves have to go without. The health care debate has actually brought this right out into the open: people are saying right up front that they refuse to pay taxes for something that might end up benefiting people they don’t like.

Those early Americans didn’t like the distant King confiscating their money for his own use, for sure. But they had a little problem with giving their money to the government to help those less fortunate as well. Our vaunted revolutionary spirit looks just a bit less valiant when you see the whole picture for what it is.

Michael Kazin summarizes in the piece I linked to first above:

If Obama and his progressive allies hope to defeat the latest assault on
federal power, they will need to go beyond the president’s artful ambivalence about the subject. Like FDR, they will have to talk about government as the property of all the people and push through programs that make its benefits palpable to the great majority…For all its flaws, the national state is the only common political ground we have. To make that case does not advocate socialism; it advances
democracy.

That’s true, but at this stage I think Obama would have to start by making a case for democracy as well. I’m not sure a whole lot of Americans know what it actually means.

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