Elites And Grassroots
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Jon Henke recently called for a boycott of WorldNetDaily on account of its encouragement of Birther nonsense. This has prompted a predictably furious reaction from the WND audience and some more interesting responses concerning the relationship of conservative elites and their grassroots supporters. Here at TAC, Dan McCarthy has argued that it is the Republican welfarism of ‘moderates’ and ‘reformists’ that requires and inevitably leads to the stoking of extreme emotions and the fostering of wild ‘fringe’ movements to compensate for the bloodlessness and lack of appeal of their own agenda. Dan writes:
They would all complain that the grassroots aren’t on board with their “moderate” military welfarism — the grassroots are too brusque, too bumptious, too worked up about Obama’s birth certificate and illegal immigration. But the grassroots Right is in the state it’s in thanks in no small part to the likes of Ponnuru, Frum, Douthat, and Brooks. Since their program of welfare for families doesn’t inspire anyone, their political allies wind up having to whip up enthusiasm for the military side of the program, and have to throw in some red meat about gays, immigrants, and abortion. But the NY-DC axis have no cause to complain, since that’s the only way to sell the public on their insipid welfare-warfare program. He who wills the end must will the means. The only means toward getting the Right to embrace the welfare state is to get the Right hopped up about real wars or culture wars. But that’s precisely what has cost the Right political power over the last four years.
In short, the moderates created the extremists.
There is something to Dan’s claim, inasmuch as the ‘moderates’ and ‘reformists’ desperately need their more ‘conservative’ counterparts to appear to be in league with maniacs and fanatics in order to play their role as the ‘reasonable’ members of the right with whom respectable liberals can do business. Even when this is not the case, they try to give people the impression that it is. They also need to find something with which they can motivate the grassroots, and so they turn to those issues where they can maximize grassroots anger at cultural change and the political status quo (both of which make the grassroots feel as if they are relatively powerless) without embracing any substantive agenda that would satisfy grassroots concerns. When some part of the grassroots becomes preoccupied with plainly ridiculous distractions, such as Birtherism, this makes things much easier for the ‘moderates’ and frees them to set themselves up as the only credible alternative on the right. To the extent that non-conspiratorial conservatives tolerate their wackier counterparts, these conservatives are playing into the hands of the people whose policy agenda they loathe.
In turn, the frequently substance-free, occasionally conspiratorial nature of some grassroots activism, which is epitomized by the Clinton obsessions of the ‘90s or Birtherism today, helps to reinforce the idea that the elites and ‘moderates’ are holding dangerous political forces within their own movement at bay. Having marginalized, stifled and ignored the grassroots for decades, conservative elites use the angry expressions of grassroots discontent, which is a function of grassroots impotence, to quarantine them even more and keep them away from real centers of influence. My guess is that conservative elites were extremely happy with the Tea Party and town hall protests, but not primarily because they represented conservative resistance to Obama’s agenda or because they helped to delay or even stall health care legislation. What would have satisfied them was the almost entirely negative quality of these protests, which leaves the door open to them to provide their policy solutions for lack of any proposals from the rest of the right.
Because the elites and especially the ‘moderates’ would be nowhere politically without being able to exploit culture war sentiments and nationalist enthusiasm for real warfare, the ‘moderates’ need to keep rank-and-file conservatives in a state of constant agitation. This directs grassroots fury away from the ‘moderates’ and towards the left, where it dissipates harmlessly because it is usually incoherent and presents no serious alternative policy proposals. This helps keep grassroots conservatives so preoccupied and so obsessed with feeling outrage rather than thinking or crafting policy that it leaves the field of a lot of actual policymaking open to the ‘moderates’.
Because it is the loudest and most widespread expression of popular conservatism, usually channeled through talk radio, the furious grassroots becomes the public face of conservatism even as the grassroots have next to no influence on policymaking regardless of which party is in power. Thus conservatives win a reputation for being unduly fixated on, say, immigration, while actual elected conservatives either take up much softer positions on the issue or actively work in support of continued mass immigration, or conservatives are portrayed as obsessed with social issues when social issues have next to nothing with the agenda of their elected representatives. As a result, the issues where the grassroots are ignored with the greatest regularity somehow come to be identified as the defining features of their party. ‘Reformists’ are more than happy to encourage this identification, because without a negative public image for conservatism there would scarcely be anything for them to change and improve. The more the public loathes the grassroots, the thinking seems to be, the more it will welcome the arrival of people who will reorient the party away from the things the grassroots care about.
The grassroots are permitted to feel as if they are the beating heart of the GOP during campaign season while they are carefully excluded from real power, which simply deepens their discontent and ironically makes them even more willing to leap at the chance to support any phony populist who comes along and says the right things to them. This process builds on itself as the grassroots conservatives mistake their feelings of agitation for populism, the elites encourage the idea that populism is nothing but aimless discontent and phony populist politicians prey on the emotions of the agitated crowd to propel themselves into office, where they quickly surround themselves with conservative elites who either loathe or merely laugh at the people who put their boss into office. The elites have increasing contempt for the grassroots as the latter demonstrate time and again that they can be easily duped into endorsing candidates who do not represent them or their interests, and the grassroots respond to elite contempt, which the elites no longer even attempt to hide, by denouncing anyone who does not pander to their feelings of agitation and stroke their collective ego as an ‘elitist’.
This is all very persuasive, except for the notion that the current GOP elites have actual policy prescriptions. I see nothing…..absolutely nothing…..in terms of foreign, monetary, fiscal or health policy. I suppose there are still a few hardy, unreconstructed souls that would, in their heart of hearts, prefer to wind down Medicare or Social Security. But, in terms of a credible, politically saleable proposal, that ship has sailed has it not?
I won’t even bother picking on the GOP’s barren health care position….it’s too easy to tear into…..but how about at least asking them to define our goal in Afghanistan? It’s not enough to point out that the Democrats don’t know what they are doing either. They need to articulate a goal and, if they cannot, explain how we are going to gracefully withdraw.
One doesn’t necessarily expect the grassroots to do this kind of heavy policy lifting but the so-called moderate elites a la Douthat and Frum are not exactly covering themselves with glory either.
Actually, you and your fellow travelers here at TAC could probably be invaluable in contriving counter-positions on some of this stuff. In fact. it will have to be someone like you guys because with every passing day it becomes clearer that the titular policy figureheads at National Review, Heritage Foundation, or Weekly Standard have absolutely nothing to say.
Henke and Ruffini at least deserve some credit for being willing to put their face out there to be punched. The Republican Party made this deal with the grassroots a long time ago and assumed that they could always keep the unwashed under control. It’s turning out to be a bad bet. Today’s “conservative” grassroots are masters of old school, 1971, Yippie-style street theatre. And we know how that urned out for the Democratic Party. The conservative policy positions do have to be concocted, but first someone has to take the public face of the party back or the policies will just be drowned out by the noise.
Great analysis, as only an outsider can give. It prompts this outsider question from me: does your political philosophy, or something near it, have any grassroots at all? Does that matter to you at all?
Even the libertarians can get a crowd together. Although not from outside reasonable driving distance: did you see any FreedomFest 09 on CSPAN 2? You could shoot a gun off in the room and not hit anybody – but you’d still kill a couple of heart-attacks-waiting-to-happen. I think they did a casting call for Grumpy Old White Men.
“I won’t even bother picking on the GOP’s barren health care position….it’s too easy to tear into…..but how about at least asking them to define our goal in Afghanistan? It’s not enough to point out that the Democrats don’t know what they are doing either. They need to articulate a goal and, if they cannot, explain how we are going to gracefully withdraw.”
jetan.
They are just the opposition party at the moment, that too, completely powerless and without teeth. They do have alternative proposals in health care (which the senators were waving around furiously during Obama’s big speech) but Obama has not been in any mood to listen nor has the progressive left. As you very well know.
A better question would be why has the Democratic Party been so incompetent that it is botching up the healthcare debate so badly? Not just healthcare, but the deficit, even Iran? The GOP has to do nothing at this point. They can be as wild and crazy and insane but I still expect them to win in 2010.
I know the Republicans have some proposals (Henke listed a couple which would be as difficult to pass as the nuttiest Democratic idea) but none of them really accomplish either one of the alleged goals of the effort, i.e, something resembling universal coverage coupled with a sharp reduction in cost. Actually I think Obama has listened to them too much as part of his general worship of High-Broderism.
I have always thought the Democratic effort to pass Health Care reform was doomed from the start…..too many in the party are just scared spitless of being tarred with the socialist brush. They will refuse to act until the country is actually faced with a real disaster.
That last applies with equal or greater force to the deficit/debt. The world will quietly go off of the dollar as a reserve currency and the Times and the WSJ will produce articles saying that reserve currencies don’t matter as much these days. Count on it. They will sound like the manager in Spinal Tap saying that “Boston’s not a big college town.” Our creditors will start calling more and more of the shots as we did to Britain when we held their leash in the Suez Crisis.
As to Iran, I don’t think there is anything left to botch. We have been botching it for decades and our failure there has truly been a bipartisan effort. They are going to go nuclear. There will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth. Then maybe, just maybe, we will stop trying to play that region like we have an inside straight in our hand.
I agree that, though the GOP is currently barking mad, they can hardly fail to pick up a significant number of seats in 2010. Unfortunately this will only confirm for them that they are on the right track.
“I have always thought the Democratic effort to pass Health Care reform was doomed from the start…..too many in the party are just scared spitless of being tarred with the socialist brush. They will refuse to act until the country is actually faced with a real disaster.”
I think its mistaken to say that Democrats are afraid to be socialists but it is fair to say that a lot of the democrats who are elected represent conservative/middle of the road districts that don’t want too much “change”. This is true especially in recently blue states and now liable to going red like Virginia.
“That last applies with equal or greater force to the deficit/debt…Our creditors will start calling more and more of the shots as we did to Britain when we held their leash in the Suez Crisis.”
I am afraid what you are saying here is quite liable to be true. The true problem with the Healthcare bill introduced is that it is going to require insane amount of money and we are unfortunately quite broke. I think a lot of the opposition is based on the “What are we spending on when we are so broke” principle. And Summers and Geithner on Obama’s team hardly inspire confidence.
@nyx, I honestly don’t see how you get to the idea that the healthcare bill will require an insane amount of money. Even the most generous estimates go no higher than $120 billion a year — about what we spend on the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns. And here’s the big difference: no one ever promised to fund Iraq and Afghanistan with cuts from elsewhere, or new taxation. They were all funded with borrowing from foreign sources, and until Obama took office, they were not even in the budget. Putting Iraq and Afghanistan in the budget this year is one of the big reasons, along with the stimulus and reduced revenues from unemployment and property devaluation, that our deficits climbed so high.
The administration has given a full-throated pledge not to fund healthcare with deficit spending. You’re free to not believe this, and you’re welcome to your misgivings about the capabilities of Summers and Geithner (I have my own, too). But clearly Obama has taken responsibility, with no weasel-words or qualifying terms, for delivering a healthcare bill that is revenue neutral. If he fails at that, he won’t be able to dodge the consequences.