Monday, October 25, 2010

Reading Sean Wilenz in New Yorker writing on Tea Party

Here just some random thoughts that occurred to me the other day after glancing over a paper by Dr. Wilenz in New Yorker were he laid on layers of his erudition and sophistication. So I thought, education and knowledge is supposed to enlighten people, illuminate dark areas of human mind, uncover the truth. But the same education and the same knowledge can also be used to hide the truth behind a smoke screen of facts, pieces of information, names dropped just for the sake of dropping the names. This screen is used to confuse people, to pull the wool over their eyes. And then I understood the obvious: why "tea party" folks have this annoying anti-intellectual bias. They instinctively feel that they are being taken for the ride by this guys concocting pseudo-intellectual meaningless "political discourse". This is just too bad as it gives bad name to anything more or less intellectual and complex.

8 comments:

  1. Lyova, I'm a little confused here. Is your problem with Sean Wilenz, the Princeton historian who wrote the article in the New Yorker, or is it the various extremist conspiracy theorists that he describes? What the article describes, it seems to me, is precisely how these "tea party folks" eat up this "pseudo-intellectual meaningless political discourse" like meat and potatoes. But I'm afraid you're finding fault with the messenger rather than heeding the message. Or have I misread?

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  2. My problem is with the method used to design the main thesis of the article. I did listen to Glen Beck on several occasions, and I did hear him talk about the need for small government, about the relation between increasing size and power of the government and decreasing "freedom" (whatever he means by this). He did talk about the role of Wilson in shifting US toward more "progressive" society away from classical liberal model, which I think does not deviate from historical truth. However, I never heard him talking this conspiratorial nonsense usually associated with the Birchers. What I really despised about this article was that instead of honest analysis of what tea partiers stand for, Wilenz throws in an "association" between them and the Birchers and uses this association to prove that tea partiers are crazy lunatics because everybody knows that Birchers were. Typical assignment of the guilt by association. The only thing common between the Tea Partiers and the Birchers, which I found was that both movement were proponent of free market and small government. This associates with them a lot of people, including me. Does it make such people as M. Friedman a conspiratorial lunatic too? In other words, instead of providing honest analysis of the true political sources of the Tea Party, Mr. Wilenz uses unwarranted historical analogies, which he as a historian can invent quite a few, to a particular political end. This is what I call misuse of a knowledge and education.

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  3. Your point would be well taken if it were just a matter of guilt by association -- i.e.tea partiers like small government, John Birchers also like small government, therefore tea partiers and John Birchers are one and the same, and all the ...nuttiness associated with the JBS can be pinned on the tea party. But Wilenz goes far beyond this, by showing a number of direct and specific connections between the two movements. Most notable is Glenn Beck's endorsement and promotion of the works of W. D. Skousen. As Wilenz point's out, Beck put Skousen's book "The 5000 year Leap" on the first place of his "required reading list, and immediately it shot up onto the Amazon best seller list. Beck frequently promotes Skousen's other books and Tea Partiers have often used the books for their study groups. In addition, Beck has invited representatives of the John Birch society on to his show and has openly endorse their arguments.

    I'm not saying we should have some McCarthy style purge to get right-wing nut jobs off the airwaves. But I think that Wilenz has provided more than enough evidence to support the inference that there is a direct ideological connection between the extreme right of the 1950s and 60s and the tea party movement of today (or at the very least, it's leading ideologist, Glenn Beck). And, contrary to what you suggest Wilenz does spend several pages discussing Beck's teachings and their influence on the tea party movement more broadly.

    So what's the problem here? Wilenz is suggesting that the problem is precisely with people like you (don't take it personally!): level-headed sober minded conservatives who seem unable or unwilling to do now what William F. Buckley did so well a generation ago--draw a clear line in the sand between themselves and the extremists to their right. I would even compare the behavior of mainstream conservatives these days to mainstream liberals in the 1970s who were all too willing overlook the excesses of their comrades on the left. It's understandable in a way. Back then it was the left that had the cultural momentum-the fire in the belly. Now the fire is one the right, and everyone wants a piece of the action. But how far can you go in endorsing extremism before you lose your principles completely?

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  4. I'll start with the end. Wouldn't you agree that you are using word "extremism" a little bit too freely? Of course this is one of those words, which everybody fills with their own meaning, but you compare the Tea Partiers with left-wing revolutionaries of the seventies, which makes your understanding of the word clearer. And here I want to tell you: "Come on!!!" Left radicals of the seventies actually robbed banks, bombed buildings, killed people and their rhetoric was that of revolution, i.e. violent overthrow of the government. How does this compare to even the most fringe of the tea-party groups? I never heard of any calls for violence from them or of any organized violent behavior of any groups affiliated with them. The claims by NAACP about calls for violence against minorities at Tea Party rallies were never confirmed, and no such acts of violence as far as I know were investigated. As far as I am concerned, the Tea Party, whatever their ideological origin is, are not political extremists even if (big if!) they are misguided in their beliefs. They are product of existing political reality, they act well within the established political framework, and even their rhetoric in it's demagoguery is no different then the demagogic nature of the political rhetoric of their liberal opponents. Would I like to see less religiosity and more intellectual rigor in their political candidates? Definitely, but this situation, in which conservative or better say old liberal thinking is present so little in any kind of higher level intellectual discourse, is to a great extend the creation of liberal academic establishment. It might be just my impression, but all academics in humanities whom I know are very left wing. Thus, Glen Beck just fills the vacuum left by people of your profession. To summarize: I do not see Tea Partiers as political extremists and do not think that they are dangerous either for political process in the country or for my principles. As far as their ideological origin I ask for the time out as I need to read more on this guy Skousen.

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  5. Just one more additional thought. It seems to me that Wilenz's attempt (warranted on not too much warranted, it is not important for this argument) to explain away the Tea Party movement by linking it to the JBS and Skousen, is a way for him to disconnect the rise of this movement from present political reality, i.e. the actions of current administration. I am no historian, but in my opinion this the worst mistake a historian can make. In a way he creates a conspiracy theory of its own kind as any conspiracy theory is based on replacing objectively existing historical, political, etc. circumstances with an evil will of some known or unknown individuals or groups.

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  6. "Disconnect the movement from the present..." perhaps there's some truth to what you say. But on the other hand, what do historians do if not deal with history--how the past developed and continues to shape the present? I'll grant you, of course, that the past as it is envisioned in the present day partisan context, often bears little resemblance to anything historians would recognize. The past, in a effect, becomes a tool in promoting a present day political agenda.

    So perhaps it really doesn't matter that Beck and the tea party are drawing ideas from the old John Birchers and their ilk, particularly since they are giving voice to legitimate concerns about the course of the present government?

    I would argue that in fact it does matter. It's all too easy to turn a blind eye to the ideas that drive a movement just because the movement fulfills a politically expedient goal. Forgive me for the threadbare comparisons, but there were all too many German conservatives in 1933 who were willing to overlook Nazi ideology in the hopes that they would reform an inept government and defend against communism; likewise, plenty of otherwise moderate socialists in 1917 were willing to throw in their lot with the Bolsheviks in the hope that they would end the war and stave off a military dictatorship.

    I'm not, incidentally, comparing Beck and the Tea Party with Nazis and Bolsheviks. My point is simply that ideas do matter. When a group attains prominence spouting ideas about returning America to the legal and political landscape of the 1890s it is relevant and important to understand what these ideas are and where they are coming from. Whether or not these ideas can be realized is irrelevant--more than enough harm can come from trying.

    Wilenz's point, as I understand it, is not so much to blacken the reputation of Beck and the Tea Party by pointing out the connection with John Birch, although that strain is certainly present in his piece. Far more importantly he is pointing to the failure of pragmatic conservatives to take seriously the implications of Beck's ideas and distance themselves accordingly, as William F. Buckley did back in the 1960s with the John Birchers. My own critique of Wilenz would actually be that he gives Buckley and Reagan too much credit for being politically principled, when in fact their calculations had more to do with electoral politics. Back in the day, especially after the Goldwater campaign in 1964 (in your guts, you know he's nuts!) John Birch and the like instantly evoked the image of far right extremism--far removed from the mainstream and thoroughly unelectable. Buckley and the like know that if they wanted to stand a chance in mainstream politics they had to carve out a more centrist position. Now, of course, its a very different picture.

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  7. A brief (hopefully) coda on the matter of extremism. We could have a long and interesting debate over the relative harm caused by left-wing vs right wing extremism. I would point out that violent revolutionary groups in America in the 1960s and 70s were numerically quite small--the Weathermen, the SLA, Black Panthers (whose violent tendencies were much exaggerated), Charles Manson, who else? Peace and nonviolence were in fact the watchwords of the "movement" and to the extent that there was violence, it tended to be targeted against property more than people. Certainly there was nothing comparable to the militia movement of the 1990s, the Oklahoma City bombing, bombings of abortion clinics and assassinations of doctors, the bombing at the Atlanta Olympics, etc. It's true that initial fears of a wave of right-wing tea infused violence have not really materialized, but there have been some chilling hints--the guy who flew a plane into an IRS building in Texas, the shooting of a guard at the holocaust museums, planned attacks on the Tides foundations--there's lots more, just google "right-wing violence" and you'll find plenty of examples.

    But my point is actually much simpler. Extremism comes in many varieties. Some extremism involves acts of violence, to be sure, but extremism can also involve ideas. I have in mind ideas so far removed from the fabric of modern institutions and social structures that their implementation would likely bring about massive disruption, transformation, dislocation and possibly violence. I believe that if you take Beck and the Tea Party activists at their word, you would find a whole slew of ideas that fit this criterion. Maybe some other time we can take a closer look. Or, perhaps its time to move on to something else.

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  8. Well, at least we did agree on something: Wilenz's paper did not aim at objective analysis of Tea Party movement, but pursued a political agenda. I also agree with you that ideas can be extremists and dangerous. I also agree that we have to move to the next topic. How about "How extremist Tea Party actually is?" You say that you can present a slew of extremists ideas supported by the Tea Partiers. Why do not you write them up, and we will discuss their extremism?

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