HELPING
A LIBERAL PROFESSOR UNDERSTAND WHY THE WORKING POOR JOINED THE TEA PARTY, by Ralph J. Benko 12/5/16
Berkeley Professor Emerita Arlie Russell Hochschild’s newly published Strangers In Their Own Land: Anger
And Mourning On The American Right is an important book and a delight. It’s a sociological –
almost anthropological – foray into the minds, hearts, and lives of the Tea
Party — my own Tribe. Prof. Hochschild’s jacket biography describes her as “one
of the most influential sociologists of her generation.” I’m probably the first
right winger to review it.
A long time ago – 2010, a past epoch – the Washington Post invited me to represent the Tea Party in
an online Q&A. I had been the co-emcee of the July 4, 2009 Boston Tea
Party rally in Boston Common. The Tea Party was, then, a rising force – about
to wrest control of the Congress from the progressive Democrats. The online
Q&A made me feel like an alien who had just landed in a flying saucer on
the national mall to be confronted by curious, hostile Earthlings.
At the start of the Q&A I revealed how the City of Boston
had slow walked the 2009 permits. I told the Washington
Post‘s Q&A how I reached out to Sen. Ted Kennedy’s office for help.
The permits appeared, miraculously, within hours. Sen. Kennedy was a true
liberal, cherishing freedom of assembly and speech even by those with whom he
disagreed. My praise for Sen. Kennedy notwithstanding most of the Washington Post‘s readers still
treated me as an alien belligerent.
The Tea Party, now, is but a shadow of its former self. Perhaps
it has in part morphed, as suggested by Prof. Hochschild, into the Trump
Campaign. I give Prof.
Hochschild, a progressive Berkeley academic, enormous credit for
going over what she aptly calls the “empathy wall” to investigate what she
calls “The Great Paradox.” The Great Paradox has been fairly paraphrased by at
least two prominent reviewers as “Why is hatred of government most intense
among people who need government services most?”
Spoiler alert: most Tea Partiers feel that we need good jobs,
not government services, most. And it is our view that the federal government
has spent 16 years ineptly stifling job growth and betraying our trust in many
other ways. More on this later.
Berkeley Professor Emerita Arlie Russell Hochschild’s newly published Strangers In Their Own Land: Anger
And Mourning On The American Right is an important book and a delight. It’s a sociological –
almost anthropological – foray into the minds, hearts, and lives of the Tea
Party — my own Tribe. Prof. Hochschild’s jacket biography describes her as “one
of the most influential sociologists of her generation.” I’m probably the first
right winger to review it.
A long time ago – 2010, a past epoch – the Washington Post invited me to represent the Tea Party in
an online Q&A. I had been the co-emcee of the July 4, 2009 Boston Tea
Party rally in Boston Common. The Tea Party was, then, a rising force – about
to wrest control of the Congress from the progressive Democrats. The online
Q&A made me feel like an alien who had just landed in a flying saucer on
the national mall to be confronted by curious, hostile Earthlings.
At the start of the Q&A I revealed how the City of Boston
had slow walked the 2009 permits. I told the Washington
Post‘s Q&A how I reached out to Sen. Ted Kennedy’s office for help.
The permits appeared, miraculously, within hours. Sen. Kennedy was a true
liberal, cherishing freedom of assembly and speech even by those with whom he
disagreed.
My praise for Sen. Kennedy notwithstanding most of the Washington Post‘s readers still treated me as an alien belligerent.
My praise for Sen. Kennedy notwithstanding most of the Washington Post‘s readers still treated me as an alien belligerent.
The Tea Party, now, is but a shadow of its former self. Perhaps
it has in part morphed, as suggested by Prof. Hochschild, into the Trump
Campaign. I give Prof. Hochschild, a progressive Berkeley academic, enormous
credit for going over what she aptly calls the “empathy wall” to investigate
what she calls “The Great Paradox.” The Great Paradox has been fairly
paraphrased by at least two prominent reviewers as “Why is hatred of government
most intense among people who need government services most?”
Spoiler alert: most Tea Partiers feel that we need good jobs,
not government services, most. And it is our view that the federal government
has spent 16 years ineptly stifling job growth and betraying our trust in many
other ways. More on this later.
Prof. Hochschild lit out for Louisiana to encounter some of us
up close and personal. What she calls her “keyhole issue” into the paradox is
that the people of Louisiana, very devoted to the land, are hostile to federal
intervention against pollution and industrial practices destroying their land
and water and way of life. I am as appalled as she at the record of the former
government’s big tax giveaways to Big Petro, throttling of essential government
services, and ignoring the environmental degradation.
Thanks, in part, to the environmental degradation caused by the
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers — a federal agency — Louisiana reportedly has lost
an area of its landmass the size of Delaware. That’s yet another source of our
sometimes inchoate mistrust of government.
There are no paradoxes in nature. A paradox always means that
there is some deficiency in our perspective. As Niels Bohr once said “How
wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making
progress.” So I give Professor Hochschild enormous credit for tackling her
paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.
Prof. Hochschild yields many fascinating insights. I especially
enjoyed her deep dive into what she calls our “Deep Story.” That said, one
senses that she herself is not quite satisfied that she has resolved the
paradox even to her own satisfaction. It is my pleasure here to point out
the several keys which she inventoried but did not turn in the lock. Time to
resolve the Great Paradox.
It’s really difficult, even undertaking meticulous field and
abundant scholarly research, to appreciate someone else’s narrative. It’s even
difficult for insiders to see and convey it. I have spent many years pondering
our Deep Story from the inside.
Three keys to resolving the Great Paradox:
1.
The Great Paradox is
slightly misstated. We don’t need government assistance. We need jobs. Good
jobs provide both prosperity and dignity. For technical reasons good jobs
cannot be provided in mass by the government civil service. Poor economic
growth over the past 16 years has caused a sense of near desperation among the
rank-and-file. It is the dwindling of such job growth, and with it the
possibility of playing by the rules and getting a piece of the American Dream,that
fuels resentment of others such as immigrants. Such resentment is inevitable in
a zero sum game. Tea Partiers sense, as supply-siders like me have repeatedly
declaimed, that a bad government policy mix is the perp behind job stagnation.
No wonder we are somewhere between skeptical of and hostile to our pretentious
government.
2.
Poor, sometimes
catastrophic, performance by the government, especially regulators at all
levels, municipal, state, and federal, has forfeited our trust in the government’s
competence and even good faith. The plenary extent of the failure signals that
while the diagnosis is right the remedy is defective. The vast regulatory state
has failed. The prescription of More Regulatory State leaves us, at best,
incredulous. There are legitimate other ways to make business — the only
possible source of great jobs — keep the environment pristine.
3.
The first line of
Edgar Allen Poe’s Cask of Amontillodo states
our mood to perfection: “THE thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I
best could, but when he ventured upon insult I vowed revenge.” We have been
remarkably patient with the injuries Big Government in Cahoots with Big
Business inflicted on us. Insult, however, is intolerable. Prof. Hochschild
picks up and displays each key but she does not turn them in the lock.
As to the first key, as she observes, skilled workers employed
in the oil industry and chemical plants can make $80,000/year. That is, as she
points out, more than twice or three times as much as can be made in the
agricultural, fishing, and tourist economy. That’s a huge differential.
I recall a column I once wrote some time ago for Global Times, the English
language edition of the Beijing’s People’s
Daily. One of the commentators, commenting on another comment,
crisply observed, “Sounds like this was written by someone with a full belly.”
If a person’s only real chance at economic security, and even modest affluence,
derives from working for a petrochemical company it is unrealistic not to
recognize that workers will develop a strong partisanship, even to the point of
turning a blind eye to corporate misdeeds. It’s human nature.
As to the second key, Prof. Hochschild shares the left’s Deep
Story as to the benevolence of government regulation. That belief remains
unshaken notwithstanding her dramatic reports of repeated regulatory
negligence, failure, and capture by the regulated industry. She reports,
credibly, heartrending devastation of the environment and of health of workers
and neighbors and of corporate abuse of the legal system to avoid paying
meaningful damages for the damage from their emission of toxic chemicals into
the environment. She documents repeated government failure at every level –
local, state and federal – repeated government betrayal of innocent citizens.
Such betrayals are by no means limited to Louisiana. Her response? More
regulation. As Hemingway concludes The
Sun Also Rises, “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”
Government benevolence is a dubious proposition. Environmental
degradation was even worse in the Soviet Union. It is even worse in the
People’s Republic of China. Having worked inside and close to the federal
government for 30 years I know up close and personal that while policy
sometimes correlates with good outcomes more often it represents symbolic
gestures or represents good intentions that build a road to Hell. As Prof.
Harold James, of Princeton, concluded in an important recent article in The American Interest, “Before offering up yet more
technocratic fixes for what at base is not a technical problem, these folks
need to get out more.”
This observation does not represent a counsel of despair. Nor
does it countenance shilling for Big Business. Just, let’s get real. A
corporation making a million dollars a day can afford lobbyists and lawyers and
PR agencies with which to subvert the government. The rank-and-file have no
such resources. It was ever thus.
Government officials, whether elected, appointed, or career
civil service, are people just like us. Government is neither staffed nor
inhabited by angelic creatures. Concentrating more power in the hands of
officials and civil servants by no means promises benevolence. Benevolent
dictatorships are only slightly less rare than unicorns.
What, then, to do? Robert Townsend, then president of Avis
Rent-a-Car, wrote an iconic best seller, Up
The Organization. In it he addressed the problem of runaway corporate
policy and human resources manuals. These are cognate to government
regulations, now running to the millions of words. Townsend: “If you have to
have a policy manual, publish the Ten
Commandments.”
Poisoning the habitat and imperiling the health of people is
criminal and actionable to lawsuits. The rage of Tea Partiers may be inchoate
but it is justified. My libertarian friends would be horrified by the failure
to prosecute, both criminally and civilly, acts of force, fraud and coercion.
Conservatives believe that more affluence will bring about political dynamics
that will bring about cleaner air and cleaner water. This is part of our Deep
Story and has a lot of historical evidence grounding it.
Regulations are almost inevitably spottily enforced due to the
attendant expense and political blowback. Rather than imposing stifling
regulations, better to impose prison time and stiff damages on
malefactors. The law, rather than regulation, has a marvelous deterrent
effect.
Corporate executives do not like to wear orange jumpsuits.
Shareholders detest billion dollar damage judgments. The free market, you see,
actually works if applied. That’s my Deep Story and I’m sticking to it.
There is another benefit of ending crimes against humanity and
habitat by “publishing the Ten Commandments” – and enforcing by law, not
regulation, those prohibiting murder, theft, and dishonesty. Doing it that way
would speak directly into the Deep Story of most Tea Partiers whether religious
or secular. These Commandments are deep-seated norms of social justice
cherished by conservatives as well as progressives.
As for the third key, it is not easy for progressives, who trend
sanctimonious, to grasp how insulting we find what Prof. Harold James, in
the same article above referenced, calls “massive condescension from the elite.”
In this the elites are out of integrity with their own principles. One of the
signature claims of progressives is to celebrate diversity, to oppose invidious
discrimination of “out groups.”
President John F. Kennedy pioneered the federal government’s
entry into championing equality with an Executive
Order, signed on March 6,
1961, establishing The President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity.
He declared it to be the “plain and positive obligation of the United States
Government to promote and ensure equal opportunity for all qualified persons,
without regard to race, creed, color, or national origin….”
Bravo! But hold on a moment! Somewhere respect for “creed” seems
to have dropped out of progressives’ Deep Story pantheon. Creed, according to
the New Oxford American Dictionary,
is defined as: “a set of beliefs or aims that guide someone’s actions….” That
is its third definition.
The first two are: “a system of Christian or other religious
belief; a faith: people of many creeds and
cultures, and … a formal statement of Christian beliefs, especially the
Apostles’ Creed or the Nicene Creed.”
I know for a fact – I’ve done it – that a red meat Tea Partier
like me can get along beautifully with members of the progressive elite no
matter how puzzling they find me. My own creed holds “Capitalize with the
capitalists but socialize with the socialists. They throw much better parties.”
But now it has become an article of faith in the Progressive Creed that it is a
virtue to discriminate against those with whose creeds they disagree. That’s
really very ugly.
We Tea Partiers do not actually represent a threat. We want
great jobs. We want effective rather than oppressive enforcement of
environmental and worker safety laws. And we demand respect.
Strangers In Their Own Land: Anger
And Mourning On The American Right is by far the best book by an outsider to the Tea Party I
have ever encountered. It lays out in plain sight, although does not quite turn
in the lock, the three keys to resolve the Great Paradox. Still, it makes a
wonderful contribution to the national discourse. We Tea Partiers really are
(mostly) as delightful as Prof. Hochschild reports. That said, our Deep Story —
that of restoring America as the “Land of Opportunity” — is deeper than the one
Prof. Hochschild has reported.
Do not fear us. And if there comes a day where the Earth stands
still know that we come in peace. Back to my Washington
Post 2010 online Q&A as a member of the Tea Party to
Washington, DC. It made me feel like Klaatu, the Michael Rennie character,
emerging, surrounded by the U.S. Army, from his flying saucer on the national
mall between the Washington monument and the Lincoln Memorial in the 1951
movie The Day The Earth Stood Still.
The Washington Post’s
readers treated me as an alien. A stranger in my own land America is a land
that used to be called The Land of Opportunity.
Comments
The Tea
Party movement was launched with the taxpayer protest in Washington DC in
September 2009. This was followed by the Tea Party takeover of the US House in
2010. Tea Parties formed on a “bottom-up” basis. There were 130 Tea Parties in
Georgia alone concerned with UN Agenda 21 implementation in the US. We are distinctly
American populist groups, private sector oriented, “free market”, small
government, Constitutional conservatives and we’ve been very active since 2010.
I estimate that there are 5000 independent Tea Parties still active in the US.
The Trump
win is a big win for the Tea Party.
Norb
Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader
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