one of the reasons i started this blog was not just to document the process of recording my own music; i also wanted it to be a place where i could periodically dump my thoughts on other matters, even if just to track the evolution of my worldview and thought processes.
so, if reading about a musician's political point of view is not your idea of illuminating blog material, this probably isn't the blog post for you. i promise i'll get back to music business with the next entry.
i've been thinking pretty hard about this recent bubble of self-described libertarians that's been rising in american politics over the past year or so. one might even trace it back to the 2008 campaign of ron paul (which happened mostly in 2007, of course), but since obama's election, and certainly since the debate on the health care bill began last summer, there has been a very loud minority (and for a laughably enormous percentage of them, it is literally the only sense in which they can be described as a minority) asserting that obama's economic policies represent nothing less than an end to capitalism and the free market system.
the "tea party" movement was launched by cnbc commentator rick santelli on february 19 of last year, and flogged on the fox news channel virtually every single day after that, particularly around the time when fox news organized nationwide "FNC Tax Day Tea Parties" (i'm not sure how it is that a news network can organize rallies on behalf of any one political party, but whatever).
everyone seems to have a theory on the tea party. it's been fascinating/embarrassing to witness the media "observe" the tea partiers, studying their strange codes and customs like anthropologists deep in the bush. the pundit/reporter/gossip class was convinced for a while that tea partiers were the children of the gingrich revolution, and we were about to see 1994 all over again. many seem less convinced of that as time passes, but that seems to still be the general view--the tea party voters are angry about deficits and long for smaller government, goes the logic, and in november, the democrats are in for a bloodbath, etc. i think both of these conclusions are understandable but lazy.
at first i dismissed the tea party phenomenon as a purely astroturf affair -- a fake grassroots movement ginned up by out-of-work, out-of-power republican operatives, inflated by breathless coverage in all the old familiar places (fox, rush, drudge, etc). the rallies seemed to be a short-term temper tantrum by folks who were used to their team running things (and not a small number of angry sarah palin supporters obsessed with darker conspiracy theories about obama). i still think it's mostly that, but short-term it's not. i now feel like it's the inevitable byproduct of the current historical moment, and it's somewhat connected to obama's election, but is actually a result of forces that have been building for some time.
i'm no political expert. but, i'm not uninitiated, either. i did some work in democratic politics for a while, and even landed a gig as a speechwriter on howard dean's '04 presidential campaign (and that's the last time i will namedrop that guy, i promise). i still keep in touch with many of the people i met during that period, and have never lost the passion for the political arena, even as an observer, though it's been years since i worked on an actual campaign. my strength has always been discerning the "big picture" -- the slow, generational swings that occur back and forth between our two political poles. political change doesn't happen in a vacuum, and it doesn't happen overnight, either; it tends to be more like a 30- or 40-year cycle. roughly, as i indicated above, the span of a generation.
every two years, the voters want something slightly different. this not because they're fickle or uninformed (though plenty are); it's because every two years, you're literally talking about a different set of voters. some people have died. others have just turned eighteen. some people have immigrated here. others have moved away. from one election to the next, it's sometimes hard to see the movement, but when you're talking about the long view, you're talking about a very different set of people voting today than the set of people voting 30 years ago, with a different set of shared cultural experiences, and most importantly, a very different set of conclusions drawn from those experiences about how the world works.
in my view, the presidency of george w. bush came at the tail end of a generational political cycle that began with nixon, peaked with reagan, and breathed its last gasp in 2004. there are similar figures in history, but we really only have two in the modern age -- herbert hoover presiding over the collapse of the republican coalition that ended with the great depression and the election of FDR (which admittedly stretches the definition of modern) and lyndon johnson trying to hold together the crumbling new deal political coalition amidst the shock waves of inner-city riots and the tragedy of vietnam. both analogies have their usefulness when it comes to bush, and the hoover analogy has certainly been made elsewhere, but i think it's worth examining the johnson presidency for clues as to what it looks like when a political coalition that has held for decades begins to self-destruct. it is a long, painful process for everyone involved, especially when it's not precipitated by one big event like the crash of 1929.
the New Deal coalition was, in its way, a historical anomaly, made possible by stubborn conservative southern voters with a reflexive hatred for the republican party (which was at that time still associated with lincoln and reconstruction). roosevelt and the new deal coalition basically built 20th century america, but the coalition couldn't hold together forever; politics is just people, and eventually, different groups of people who once had aligning interests will start to diverge. what held them together from 1932 to 1968 wasn't just the force of FDR's personality, though that helped; it was a shared sense of accomplishment and pride in the national effort to overcome the depression and prevail in world war two. government not only worked; it was capable of doing big things. government wasn't scary; it was a safety net. it certainly wasn't treated with the same mistrust reserved for unscrupulous businessmen who were accountable to no one and had driven the economy off a cliff; government, unlike business, was the "people's voice," and could be kept in check and held accountable by voters (again unlike business).
in the 1960s, though, huge cultural changes were afoot, and the biggest one was television (which unleashed all the others). suddenly, the public couldn't just ignore the civil rights workers being beaten on edmund pettus bridge; it was in their living room. so were the watts riots -- for four straight days of uninterrupted live coverage. so was vietnam. so was the kennedy assassination, and oswald's shooting. seen in the magnifying and distorting mirror of television, the unstoppable U.S.A. appeared to be falling apart. government couldn't control it. soon enough, life imitated television, with race riots occurring in over a hundred cities and the vietnam "conflict" hemorrhaging at breakneck speed. the economic base of the cities was collapsing as the televised images of black rioters drove millions of white people to the suburbs, where their televisions reassured them for the next 40 years that the world outside their door was a dangerous, dangerous place. the social safety net, one of the new deal's most proud and lasting accomplishments, began to be viewed as little more than handouts to undeserving minorities (a misconception that was only exacerbated when a series of impressive civil rights bills and a "War on Poverty" seemed only to inflame the inner city riots even further). so, when people talk about the 1960s as having shaped our country and our politics for many decades hence, this is what they mean -- the 1960s, far from ushering an era of liberal freedom and harmony, did the opposite: it set the stage for a 40-year period primarily dominated by reactionary racial and economic politics and a deep suspicion of not only government itself, but of the enemies within -- liberals, communists, atheist schoolteachers, welfare queens, city dwellers, black people in general -- who always had their hand in your pocket when they weren't pointing a gun in your face. we became a suburban nation with suburban values: high walls, locked doors, layer upon layer of insulation to protect each one of us from the reality of other people. the "american dream," in other words. in 1961, kennedy urged us to ask what we could do for our country. by 1981, we were back to asking what our country could do for us.
when a coalition falls apart like this, though, it's messy, especially for those people who had internalized the values of the previous coalition. in the 1960s, young people in particular became more and more hostile to the idea that american society wasn't what it had been promised to be -- namely fair, inclusive, moral, just. some of those young people became radicalized and acted out, often in ill-considered ways, especially in the case of groups like the weathermen and the black panthers. these extremists, far from achieving their goals, became a 30-year lodestone around the neck of any democratic politician trying to get elected. even bill clinton, in 1992, had a suspicious hippie past. (hell, even barack obama had to disassociate himself from former weatherman bill ayers, who apparently shook hands with obama a few times, and who many conspiracy theorists believe is the secret author of barack obama's memoir.) because the truth is, when an ideology is pushed into extremism, it is because that ideology is dying, at least for the foreseeable future. the 60s radicals raged against the american system when it became clear that the american system no longer shared their values. the less revolutionary-minded among them simply dropped out of society completely.
today we have another coalition that has collapsed -- the reagan coalition of evangelicals, businesspeople and national defense hawks. there are many reasons for this collapse, having in large part to do with the "people" factor (old people dying, young ones turning eighteen, minorities growing as a share of the population, etc.). but the precipitating crises were both foreign and domestic--the Iraq war and the housing market crash--and they both were a direct repudiation to the core philosophies of the reagan coalition itself. in reality, the demographics had been getting tighter and tighter for republicans since 2000, when a center-left majority appeared in the combined vote totals of gore and nader, which hadn't existed since, well, johnson. 9/11 artificially inflated the republican bubble for a bit, but the total dismantling of the regulatory state under the bush administration, along with an invasion of a huge country under false pretenses with no plan for stabilizing said country in the aftermath, led to a series of self-inflected wounds that caused a majority of voters to lose confidence in the republicans as a competent governing party. it wasn't just the housing crash (which was itself a cruel joke played on those who placed too much faith in the suburban american dream), and it wasn't just the wall street meltdown; it was enron creating an artificial energy crisis in the state of california, it was the outdated levees in new orleans, it was the bridge in minnesota collapsing; the philosophy of no government, no regulation, no investment in public works, no aid for newly homeless hurricane victims, no answers to the worlds problems other than military aggressiveness abroad and tax cuts for the wealthy at home that led to the end of the age of reagan.
but like the end of the age of roosevelt, the transition isn't a peaceful one. like the young hippies who felt burned by reality, the reagan-inspired radical individualists who are now being confronted with crises large enough to require collective action are very angry. this is understandable; believing for 30-odd years that the world operates in one way, and then being confronted with a wildly different reality, is incredibly unsettling. i'm fascinated by how closely the tea party movement resembles the hippie movement (minus the cultural and creative output, obviously). they are even self-consciously emulating it -- witness the planned "Tea Party Woodstock". (i have far less sympathy for their cause, of course -- a 50-year-old upper middle class man protesting a 3% tax increase doesn't really carry the same moral heft as an eighteen-year-old facing the vietnam draft -- but the similarities between the two groups are fascinating.)
one thing it's not, though, is the dawn of a new republican or libertarian era. demographics, recent events, technology, self-inflicted wounds, and finally the embrace of extremism will put the republican party out of power for a long, long time. sure, there may be an eisenhower down the road, just as there was a bill clinton during the republican era, but like eisenhower and clinton, they will govern by accepting the new political reality, not by trying to upend it. this november, the democrats will lose some seats, and they may even lose the house (though i doubt it), but the republicans who are fantasizing about 1994 are dreaming. it was literally a different set of voters that was voting at that time, and they had plenty of southern democratic holdovers from the new deal era just waiting to be picked off; in a way, 1994 was the completion of the reagan realignment. this year, though, republicans don't have a gingrich. they don't have a contract with america. they don't have a campaign. they don't have a leader. voters don't just vote for the other party by default (the democrats spent years learning this the hard way).
which is not to say that it will be a big victory for the democrats. we've just had two democratic "wave" elections in a row (2006 and 2008), and the democrats are very much due for a haircut. but in the 2012 republican primaries, the republican dilemma will become painfully clear. it was the dilemma faced by democrats throughout the 1970s and 1980s -- namely, that no one will be able to win their party nomination without taking unacceptably extreme positions, in order to satisfy the only base voters they have left. hell, this is already happening -- rand paul and sharron angle are the new face of the republican party. and therefore in 2012, the most likely nominee is sarah palin -- not only because she is by far the most popular figure among what's left of the republican party base, but because she can win big in early primary states like iowa and south carolina. there may be an "establishment" challenge to her in the person of mitt romney, but the republican "establishment" ain't what it once was. palin has fox, she has rush, and she has her facebook page; meanwhile mitch mcconnell, the most powerful republican in washington, can't even get his guy elected in a republican primary in his own state of kentucky. but even if somehow palin doesn't win, whoever the nominee is will be forced to pander as hard as possible to the base, and will be saddled with the baggage of a party that quite visibly lost their shit for the past four years or so.
no, we are at the end of one cycle and the beginning of another -- the republican base is shrinking, and in doing so, is being forced to take more and more extreme positions to satisfy the ideological purity of their base. this posture has already led them into another historic blunder--this one in arizona, where their mean-spirited immigration law has become a national symbol of racial divisiveness and has almost certainly driven hispanic voters into the arms of the democrats for a generation. it's almost pitiful to watch, this slow-motion train wreck that is today's republican party.
UPDATE: I rest my case.
