For want of better: "Know thy enemy"?
Electric Fetus said:
So if we had just sit back and learned more about the Nazis, our fear would have diminished? I'm not saying the Tea party are Nazis, but it possible it will grow stronger over the years and consume the nation driving whats left of it into the ground.
I wouldn't go that far.
Part of the difference is between rational and irrational fears.
One of the great mistakes of the twentieth century is often attributed to how the British handled the Nazis.
Appeasement is very nearly a profane word in politics these days. But appeasement also arose in fragile circumstances. Parts of Europe threw entire generations into the Great War, and weren't anxious to do it again. Any rational examination of the Nazi apparatus over those years should have telegraphed without any room for doubt what was coming. And perhaps from that knowledge, some sort of plan could have evolved to better contain the threat. In truth, though, the best outcome would have been a mild to moderate reduction in the scale of the war.
Rational fear: The Nazis were rising tyrants with great capacity for harm.
Irrational fear: The Jews were taking over the world and ruining the German economy.
In the present situation, the Tea Party only has the potential to present a Nazi-like spectre if we presume that the American people have become so apathetic about their politics that they will not only hand thos candidates the office, but then stand back and say nothing while this bawling, reactionary movement dismantles the Constitution.
We've already seen what apathy can do;
centrism in the United States includes warmongering and advocacy of torture. But in those cases, it's far easier to demonize Muslims or other perceived and announced enemies. Certainly, there is some concern among liberals about, say, abortion law. There are several candidates for federal offices, and many for state, who oppose abortion under any circumstances. But can something like five extreme right-wing senators and representatives
really destroy a woman's right to self-determination? It is doubtful.
The Tea Party mobilized around emotion. One cannot say they rallied in support of the corporations that fund them, as the Tea Party opposes bailouts. But if you ask the Tea Partiers what they stand
for—instead of
against—in terms of the effects of their policies, the implications shift dramatically. No bailouts? Sounds great, sure. But how about that unemployment that everyone is so concerned about, and the Tea Party is so angry about? If you add up the Tea Party arguments about business and finance, the result would be even greater unemployment. Original constitutionalists? I would think the extreme suggestions of amending the Constitution should put that rhetoric to rest. Transparency? Well, that certainly doesn't mean the Tea Party thinks the people should know who's backing them with money.
One perspective that arises from trying to add up the Tea Party's contradictions is that they really don't have any clue what they're trying to do. Certainly, they are venting anger, but what is the rational structure of that expression? It's a neurotic outburst that includes some built-in devices to perpetuate anger. We already have one TP candidate in the Senate, and he's already danced the Beltway Shuffle. If the O'Donnell, Miller, and Angle win the office, what will they actually
do? If they ride into town with their emotional six-guns blazing, they won't get anything done; this will anger their supporters because the establishment is against them. If the TP candidates win office and play the game in order to get things done, their supporters will feel betrayed.
The Tea Party isn't scary for its ferocity or extremity; rather, it's unsettling for its idiocy. Do we fear it like some sort of political Freddy Kreuger, or is it more like that one kid in the class who was prone to wild and destructive tantrums? One of my favorite examples of the Tea Party's disorganization is that you could go to a rally and find one guy denouncing Obama as Hitler, turn around, and ten feet away find another accusing Democrats of being Jews. Yet they share a common identity, the Tea Party.
What we've found is that as the Tea Party has stoked its steam for the elections, its candidates are just flat
nuts. Miller admires East Germany. Angle proposed bartering chickens for health care. O'Donnell ... well, she's just Christine O'Donnell, as much a living laugh track now as she was over a decade ago when trying to force her entry into teenagers' sex lives.
There's the recreational Nazi in Ohio. Conservative humorist P. J. O'Rourke said he's always been annoyed at Dayton's tendency to go with the Democrats, but witnessing Rich Iott's candidacy, that frustration abates somewhat, as the reason why seems a bit obvious.
I encountered last week a guy who was trying to remind people that "sieg heil" means "hail victory", in order to present it as an innocuous phrase that everyone gets unnecessarily worked up about. Of course, the old Communist standard of "from each/to each" is a Biblical concept (Acts 4), but people don't care. That some of these Tea Partiers don't understand that aspect of perception and human behavior is telling. They're naîve cynics, which is not so oxymoronic as it seems. I mean, come on, being cynical is a national pastime at least on par with baseball in the United States, but that doesn't mean people know how to do it. "Question authority" doesn't mean you need to argue against the Theory of Gravity.
Cynicism is like anything else; it takes a certain amount of practice.
Naîve cynicism: It's not actually that Christine O'Donnell might have dabbled in witchcraft, and thus might annoy the evangelical right; rather, it's just the incredible stupidity she showed in that clip, compounded with the fact that many people like me just don't believe it. Or Joe Miller's admiration for East Germany; it's not so much that he admires a tyrannical outcome, but that he doesn't seem to understand how that border worked. Sharron Angle? Whether it's chickens, or Hispanics as Asians, it's not so much that she's some sort of sinister racist or industry shill, but rather that she's as stupid as they come.
One Christine O'Donnell in the Senate isn't going to overturn the First Amendment. The irrational fear there is that she might somehow screw up free speech so badly. The rational concern, of course, is that she's a moron. Her best hope as a senator right now seems to be that she will get there and do absolutely
nothing of value to anyone. That's not a whole lot to bank on.
If we take the time to understand the dialectic of neurosis represented by the Tea Party movement, we find that we don't really need to freak out. At their most effective, the Tea Party is just a throwback to Reagan. Most days, though, they seem to be a bunch of pissed off people who aren't thinking their arguments through.
The strongest weapons against this kind of movement is calm, rational, and, ultimately,
intelligent consideration not only of their vaguely polished political rhetoric, but also the behavioral phenomenon we're witnessing.
Many people disdain psychology because it's not a science like chemistry. To the other, though, many of those cynics of psychology are adherents to various theories of economics, which is likewise a flexible scientific proposition. Nearly everyone, though, tries to psychoanalyze. This weekend I listened to an episode of
Backstory about spiritualism in American history. The guests included a women's studies professor, an historian turned reporter, and a spirit medium; the hosts are history professors. Yet
all of them were trying to psychoanalyze the movement in relation to abolition, the rise of feminism, and the emotional needs of the people at large.
Every armchair cynic is also an armchair psychologist. And in the end, it might do us some good if people studied the fundamentals of this discipline. Even the armchair quarterbacks need to know a few things about football, right? The box score critics questioning the relief pitching need to know a bit about baseball.
Whether it's a grand evil like the German National Socialists, or a petit-mal seizure like the Tea Party, there is great value in understanding the thought processes. And it is easier to address the perceived threat if one has some idea how that menace is going to behave. It is doubtful that the Tea Party will ever ascend to such stellar evil like the Nazis. But if it somehow happens, it will come about because We, the People, allowed it to. That is, we sat back and tried to respond according to our own version of common sense without taking the time to consider whether or not it's possible to argue reality on someone else's nearly delusional terms. You cannot bring the psychologically dysfunctional back to reality through forceful repetition of reality. That reality must be rendered in such a manner as to be accessible to the dysfunctional. Otherwise, yes, you can condition certain outcomes, but you seed a hundred new neuroses for every one you suppress.
And I don't mean
political suppression here. I refer to something more fundamentally psychological; you can condition people into ego defense—e.g., repression, suppression, or even sublimation—but such an outcome does nothing to reconcile the underlying neurotic conflict.
In this context the Tea Party is an expression of how low American culture has fallen before its asserted principles. We cannot, literally or figuratively, beat the dysfunction out of these people. Why would we want to? That's a cruel result that never worked for paranoia or identity confusion. Ego defenses like displacement and projection are mere
symptoms. In order to address the underlying disorder, we must spend some considerable effort understanding.
Where does it hurt? The head? Well, is that dehydration? Nervous inflammation? A nail in the skull? Similarly, what has them so scared and angry? For the most part, the answers come in the form of mythopoeic constructions. We need the Tea Party to start understanding the flow chart in American politics. Yes, it's a bothersome, messy, even reckless construction, but that's also why I don't do my own automotive repair. Or surgery.
But in order for us to understand the Tea Party, so that we might communicate with them, we do need to understand the nature of those mythopoeic elements, and whence they come.
One might be correct that this or that individual in the movement is just an exasperated racist, but that does nothing toward alleviating the underlying insecurity, or reconciling the neurotic conflict, that moves them to that racism.
Without that foundation, we cannot rationally address the movement as a whole, but merely stand in the street and punch it out with them. And even if we beat them down that way, we only drive them further into that insecurity, deeper into that conflict.
Some might suggest that we owe them no such effort, but at some point that idea fails. Something—some
one—somewhere has to give. It is not ours to presume the provenance of salvation; nor is it ours to decide who deserves it. In the end, these malcontents need to reconcile with society, else they will carry it to the grave. And, frankly, I don't look forward to the next fifty years of enduring these dysfunctional people.
I don't want to wait and find out if they become Nazis or American jihadis.
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Notes:
Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. Backstory with the American History Guys. KUOW, Seattle. October 31, 2010. BackStoryRadio.org. November 1, 2010. http://backstoryradio.org/2010/10/american-spirit-a-history-of-the-supernatural/
