Clockwork Perfection
By, Josh Fredman
“What we create, we do not often intend, yet it be uniquely ours.”
You should listen to me. I predicted the Tea Party, if not by name, as the inevitable consequence of radicalization that comes with the demise of a major political movement—in this case the conservative movement which began in the 1970s. After the Tea Party itself arose as a major political force, I warned that if it did not implode it had the chance of becoming a modern Nazi party. I took flack for that because people thought I was exaggerating, and I backpedaled by pointing out that it was much likelier that they would implode. Nevertheless I insisted that the fascist threat was plausible—a remarkable point given that our nation has only seriously faced the threat of fascism once before, during the Great Depression when conditions were so bad that a coup or a revolution were distinct possibilities. FDR doesn’t get the same credit that Lincoln does for saving the country, but save it he did.
I’m often wrong in my political prognostications. Most folks are. It’s like professional baseball. The best hitters still miss the ball twice as often as not. But, this time, I was right about the Tea Party. While its implosion is still a likelihood, this hasn’t happened yet nor is it on the immediate horizon. Meanwhile, Tea Party leaders have effectively become the dominant legislative force in Washington, DC. They forced the Republican Party leadership to do their bidding. They faced down President Obama, and won. They will have free rein to shape all crucial legislation to their liking through 2012. Non-crucial legislation of any significance will not pass Congress at all, because the Senate will ignore whatever comes out of the House and the House will ignore whatever comes out of the Senate. The 112th Congress will be known as one whose only accomplishments were Tea Party priorities: massive cuts to the social welfare net in exchange for short-term fiscal viability and the continued operation of the government.
As the Tea Party gains power, mainstream politicians lend further credibility to the Tea Party’s ideological positions by acknowledging it as a legitimate player in our democratic system. The media treat the Tea Party the same way, as a legitimate player. No one in power is admitting what most observers have already concluded: The Tea Party is not a democratic movement. Tea Partiers are extremely dangerous to anyone who is not like them.
I have often talked about the Tea Party’s threat as “pseudo-fascism,” implying that the party is not presently fascist but leans strongly in that direction while maintaining its good standing in our present democratic system. In other words, I have presumed that it won’t go fascist unless it has the power to do so legally. That much is still true: The Tea Party won’t stage a coup because there isn’t an institution capable of providing it with an opening, and won’t launch a revolution because it is very unpopular with the national electorate. The Tea Party will continue its lawful efforts to gain power legitimately.
What makes the Tea Party illegitimate, then, is its intention to subvert our democratic system as it achieves the power to do so. That much is clear to me now in a way it had not previously been. The Tea Party is not “pseudo”-fascist. It is fascist. The Tea Party advocates the systematic dismantling of the social welfare system which underpins our way of life, and indoctrinates its base by portraying whole classes of citizens as threats to the country.
The Tea Party controls the Republican Party. The Republican Party no longer exists as an independent political force. The Republican Civil War that I have written about in recent years was resolved in favor of the Tea Party during the debt ceiling battle—the same decisive battle which ensured the Tea Party’s viability at least until the 2010 elections. The GOP is now the Tea Party’s to lose. All that stands between the Tea Party and formal rule of the nation is—brace yourself—the Democratic Party.
Everything depends on the Democrats being able to galvanize the nation into spurning the Tea Party. But the Democrats aren’t heroes. They are an incompetent, weak-willed, disorganized rabble. The Democratic Party apparatus is a shambles. That’s why the Tea Party got its opening in the first place. No, we cannot expect the Democrats to save us. We have to save ourselves, and we have to use the Democratic Party to do it.
We, meaning those of us who do not want to see the Tea Party come to power, have two factors working in our favor with regard to the Tea Party’s continued viability. First, the American public currently dislikes the Tea Party more than ever. This is a positive trend, and we can build upon it. The American public will be amenable to the message that the Tea Party is a selfish and dangerous movement. Second, the Tea Party’s support base is heavily geriatric. The younger demographics still skew solidly liberal and the majority of young voters will not support the Tea Party unless they are given no alternative.
That’s what we need to do. We need to present the country with a strong alternative to the Tea Party. We need to clean up the Democratic Party and put some people into office who will actually support Democratic policy positions. We need to clear out many if not most of our elected Democrats and replace them with workable politicians who will passionately oppose what the Tea Party is trying to accomplish: developed-world Nazism in the 21st century.
I want to avoid oversimplifying this. The Tea Party is not responsible for the country’s present dire straits, excepting the legislative record of the 112th Congress. Plutocrats, the people I have usually called corporatists, are responsible for that. “Plutocrat” is a less descriptive but more inclusive term for the segment of upper-class citizens who have enriched themselves dramatically by legally (and sometimes illegally) stealing most of the new wealth created by low- and middle-income citizens since the 1980s. The plutocrats have no party loyalty. They play both sides, corrupting Democrats and Republicans alike in hopes of ensuring that, whomever wins the elections, the plutocrats win too. But the Republican Party has long been a better fit. Republicans favor deregulation, lower taxation, and other forms of corporate welfare, whereas Democrats generally favor social welfare and don’t think very highly of corporate abuses against consumers and the environment. Although Democrats are just people like anyone else—meaning most of them are corruptible and some already belonged to the plutocratic ranks, either as members or as minions—the plutocrats generally worked to advance the Republican Party, in varying degrees of collusion with each other and independent acts of self-interest.
The plutocrats originally won electoral victories and popular approval for their policies by presenting a future-oriented vision of a more prosperous, free-market America. Most Republicans of the day were amenable to the dream, and in the 1980s the Democrats, already reeling from the decline of that era’s liberal movement, lost their edge for good. They have been ideologically disorganized ever since.
The plutocrats slowly consolidated control over the media and eroded the voices of those who opposed them. However, the promise of the unfettered free market slowly revealed itself to be a sham, and, following recessions in the 1980s and early 1990s, plutocrats found themselves facing the dawn of the Clinton era.
Meanwhile, even as the old liberalism was losing its grip, conservative fundamentalist Christians had been enjoying a resurgence. The cultural changes of Vietnam-era liberalism had brought about huge gains in the civil liberties of persecuted classes of Americans, scaring those who had previously enjoyed the privileges denied to others. America’s growing cultural diversity, and the people working to promote it, presented the perfect enemy against whom a religious resurgence could rally. Because of the Democratic Party’s firm institutional commitment to civil rights, the Christian extremists increasingly defected to the Republican Party. And the plutocrats decided to encourage this.
The Culture War, a term primarily used by conservatives but one which has some accuracy as a description of what motivates the modern religious fundamentalist voter as well as many other Americans who are opposed to religious radicalism in politics, is a fabricated conflict which taps into genuine conservative unrest at the decline of religion and the growing civil liberties of Americans—particularly the aforementioned persecuted classes—and harnesses that anxiety into electoral discipline. The result is a large segment of ideologically extreme right-wing citizens who will reliably vote Republican. The early engineers of this conflict were nearly always from the ranks of the fundamentalist movement. They were religious leaders who had long been whipping their flocks of sheep into a frenzy of hatred. Some of these leaders actually believed all this stuff for themselves. Others didn’t give a damn, and saw religion as the avenue to power and profit. Either way, the Culture War was their means to fulfilling their ambitions.
Plutocrats saw this as a reliable engine to advance their own goals. Republican policy already favored the upper class. If Republican politicians played up the Culture War, then fundamentalists would consistently elect plutocrat-friendly politicians. Something I didn’t realize firmly until recently, but which the plutocrats always understood, was that the two movements—the plutocrats and the Jesus freaks—could coexist in peace under the Republican banner, because the plutocrats themselves had the means to sidestep the inconveniences of conservative social policies, and the Jesus freaks would neither realize nor care that the rich bastards were exploiting them, because with plutocratic patronage would come real political power. I don’t know how much of a conspiracy there was, or whether it was just a few trendsetters who set an example for others to follow, but, one way or another, Republican politicians increasingly catered to two constituencies: the upper class, and religious conservatives. It worked. The 1990s saw mass conversions of fundamentalist Democrats who decided to become Republican.
Along the way, neoconservatism rose and fell. That branch of the GOP, exemplified by Dick Cheney and the second Bush administration, consisted of plutocrat-allied foreign interventionists who supported the old model of war as a means of consolidating political support at home. Under George W. Bush, they got more wars than they could handle and lost power within the Republican Party.
Also under the second Bush administration, the conservative movement ran out of gas. It had achieved the power it set out to achieve. But with that power came only bitter disillusionment. The whole thing had been a sham. The economic stuff hadn’t worked. The wars hadn’t worked. And with the Jesus freaks calling more and more of the shots, the movement had lost its intellectual legitimacy and popular support. Hurricane Katrina was the proverbial last straw. America overwhelmingly voted for Democrats in 2006 and 2008.
Bush kept the conservative movement relevant once the Democrats took Congress in 2007, but after President Obama took office in 2009, there was nothing left. From this decay arose the Tea Party, originally reputed to be a spontaneous organization of small-government libertarians opposed to the expense of the financial absurdities the United States was facing after eight years of Bush rule. But they were never small-government libertarians. They were disaffected Republicans, always economically conservative, usually religiously fundamentalist, who were too embarrassed or too angry to call themselves Republicans any longer. Right-wing media stoked the coals, but the energy was already there. All these people had arrived in the promised land only to discover a barren waste. They were mad. And since they didn’t have the maturity to blame themselves, they blamed the same enemy they had always railed against: “the left.”
Democrats only made things worse by actually getting shit done during the 111th Congress, including some of the most progressive legislation in a generation. The country was ready to move to the left, and Democrats, despite internal intransigence and uniform Republican opposition, were fulfilling the public’s will.
You remember the rest, and here we are today. What’s different now is that the Tea Party has become autonomous. The plutocrats have finally lost control of their Frankenstein monster. The Tea Party isn’t responsible for where we are now, but it will be responsible for all the damage it wreaks moving forward. And they are a very dangerous enemy. Plutocrats, at least, don’t really care about what we do with our lives so long as it profits them. Tea Partiers care. Tea Partiers want very much to say what we can and cannot do with our lives. Their first target is the social welfare net—the modern essence of our government. Entitlements, education, regulation. The Jesus stuff is close behind. Every group of Americans who came out ahead in the 20th century had better watch out—even the plutocrats!
To repeat myself from a much earlier journal entry, Democratic voters were genuine fools for not showing up to vote for the Democrats in 2010. But their foolishness is understandable. We still don’t have a coherent modern liberal movement. We still don’t have an alternative to the Tea Party.
We will soon, though. It has been forming for years. It’s the “geek” culture—the people who have built their lives on and around the Internet. But before I talk about that, I need to talk about the word “liberal.”
It isn’t popular to point out, but what we call economic liberalism in the United States is actually a variation on socialism—strong worker protections and guarantees, wealth redistribution away from the upper class rather than toward it, and extensive government involvement in the activities of commerce, finance, and industry. Liberalism in its original sense actually refers to the policies supporting a free-market economy—quite the opposite from how we use it—and this is the sense of the word that many people still use outside the United States. The pairing of the word “liberal” with the word “social” came later, and refers to the policies supporting the growth of civil liberties.
So it’s all a bit confusing. Mainstream American liberals are economically socialist, not liberal, but socially liberal, not conservative. Moreover, the United States has been moving steadily away from socialist economics ever since the early 1980s. The move has been so thorough that, in conjunction with the right-wing assault on “socialists,” socialists no longer exist as a political force and the economy no longer takes socialist priorities into consideration, except for grandfathered relics like Social Security and the Fair Labor Standards Act. Conservatives have spent most of their energy in the 20th century undermining these populist economic policies, and have largely succeeded. The Tea Party will move to destroy even the relics if they can. If they succeed, there will be no Social Security, no Medicare, no Medicaid, and, in a worst-case scenario, we may even lose things like the 40-hour workweek and the minimum wage. (Although, if things get that far, we will have much more dire concerns to focus on.)
The reason I point this out is that the geek culture is not socialist. As it coalesces into a political movement, it isn’t likely to be the champion of worker’s rights and government regulation that the previous liberal movement was. The culture of the Internet is strongly opposed to top-down controls on anything, the complement of which is strong social liberalism. We can expect the new liberal movement to be solidly on the left or center-left with regard to civil liberties, but a unified economic stance will be much slower to manifest itself. Internet culture does generally recognize the importance of government intervention in the economy, mainly thanks to the example of the second Bush administration. And Internet culture generally supports workers’ rights. But the minority is quite substantial, and firmly liberal in the free-market sense of the word. They would take us right back to the boom dream of 1980.
This is an urgent problem because, in order to create a strong alternative to the Tea Party, we need to do something about the economic disparities and plutocratic power which made the Tea Party such a strong force in the first place. The national economic system in place today is unsustainable. Our national infrastructure is crumbling. We aren’t paying for our government agencies and programs. Incomes are not growing for the lower and middle classes. The plutocrats are driving us into the ground, and things are only going to get worse under the current model. Consider, if you will, that the Democrats’ main accomplishments in the 111th Congress have been hamstrung by economic shortfalls. The healthcare reform lacked new entitlements, instead bolstering the current for-profit insurance model. The financial reform law isn’t even operational.
If the new liberal movement does not promote socialistic economic policies, no one else will, and America’s economic decline will accelerate. The Tea Party may fall in the meantime, but the people who support it so fanatically will be there to seize their next opportunity—especially since social liberalism is likely to continue under the new liberal movement.
Our imperative is to influence the views of the new liberal movement. We have to be the early leaders, setting the terms of the debate, framing the issues, and so forth. Geek culture is smarter than the aggregate national culture, but not smart enough to figure this stuff out for itself. Even geeks are primarily composed of followers. Human beings have a remarkable proclivity for conforming to the provisions of the most appealing memes of the day, and precious seldom use their powers of critical reasoning to choose their views wisely. That responsibility, therefore, falls primarily upon the would-be leaders of society...and most aspiring leaders could care less about respecting that burden.
Don’t mistake me, by the way. Gabe and Tycho are not going to become Co-Presidents of the United States. When I talk about the “geek” culture, or the “Internet” culture, I’m insinuating that the rise of the Internet has outmoded old lifestyles and business realities, leaving new ones to take over. The true geeks are mostly as rare as we ever were. Nobody—no person or organization—controls the Internet culture yet. (Probably no one will, and the outgrowth of a political movement will only be partially representative of Internet culture.) Google presently comes the closest, but it won’t gain critical mass and in any event the tenuousness of its users’ loyalty has been established by the amount of waste heat generated in their embarrassingly impatient backlash against Google’s decision to role out anonymous user accounts and business accounts on Google+ a few months from now rather than this minute. I don’t think we have yet read the name of the organization that will engender the new liberal movement. Such open-endedness gives us an opportunity: That as-yet unrevealed organization could be us.
It’s worth pointing out that plenty of people on the Internet are conservative. There are entire wastelands of conservatism out there in cyberspace. Conservatives tend to dominate news website comments, and their crass malice and ignorance continually poisons social media like Reddit. Nevertheless, for all the noise they make, they are in the minority. Most people our age or younger are on the left if they have any political persuasion at all. They are sick of the clownishness and disingenuousness of our politicians. As they take positions of political power, and cultivate the support to do so, they will promise an honesty which has long been absent from liberal politics, in lieu of theatrical rhetoric not backed by policy action. And, unlike today’s Democrats, they will probably try to deliver on that promise.
But first, the Tea Party. The Tea Party’s greatest weakness is that there has to be a movement at all for this stuff, which was once firmly ingrained into the American way of life. Taken in combination with the Tea Party’s geriatric demographics, you can almost pity them. A lot of them are scared old people deluded by visions of a lost Eden that never existed, an Eden they have sworn to rediscover by throwing their neighbors to the lions. That’s the entrepreneurial legacy of people like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. That’s the lasting morality of charlatans like James Dobson and Pat Robertson.
It’s ironic. I talk about protecting “our way of life,” and the people I want to protect it from are the people who want to restore the way of life that used to exist. In a sick and twisted way, the Tea Partiers have a point. There used to be a time when privileged folks could be as insensitive as they wanted and everybody else had to conform to the way of things and bear any suffering in obscurity. Alas for the Tea Party: I like today’s way of life better.
The Tea Party is a cult. Its leaders will take this country the way of Hitler if they can, and its followers have few wits left to realize what is happening or extricate themselves from its progression. The older Tea Partiers are dying off, but the leaders are not so venerable, and there are enough younger Tea Partiers—and gullible Americans in general—to feed the party into a state of high vigor. Most Americans do not understand that a vote for the GOP is a vote for the Nazis. Most Germans didn’t understand it either. I am sadly convinced that most people never do understand what they’re getting themselves into when they choose a leader.
Incidentally, as you would notice this essay marks a decision on my part to acknowledge the fascist intentions of the Tea Party, thus compelling me to violate Godwin’s Law (or, rather, substantiate it)—and I must prepare to respond to the people for whom obeying tradition—and tradition frowns upon comparing anyone to the Nazis. There are people who will dismiss all that I have written here, out of hand, solely because of my blasphemy. For them, this essay is not intended. But for those of you who generally appreciate the substance of this essay, and perceive the gravity of our situation, yet are uncomfortable with the Nazi language, you should listen to me again:
The memories of history are a treasure. They are orbs of burning light, painful to the touch, imbued with their dazzling glow by the lives whose potential they consumed. Our history is wretched, and our treasure trove of memories cursed. Humanity has practiced upon itself every kind of savagery yet conceived. Even our golden ages glow with a brutal brilliance. Every orb has a word to describe the spirit of the day and age which created it. One of these orbs, so fantastically bright, is known in calm black ink by the word, “Nazi.”
People do wonder what we are supposed to do with a treasure that has no resale value and hurts to keep. They actually do wonder. Well, here is why the memories of history are a treasure: We stand amid the clockwork perfection of a cosmos without rhyme or reason. In our world, sunlight shines only on the outside of things. It shines down on the fields. It lights up our skin, warms us in our lives. It sustains all life. Yet, for all that majesty, it does not flick so much as one incandescent watt inside the minds of human beings. In such bottomless pits there be dragons, but for the inner radiance we kindle ourselves. And here is where the pearls of history live. In memory.
The orbs are meant to light our way. “We have been here before,” they say. “We know what lies thataway.” This is their entire value.
The luster of human thought does not often travel in a straight line like the orderly rays of sunlight do, and there is so much fog that the frail light of our awareness cannot yet illumine. Those little annoying specks of history, should you undertake to pluck them from the ether and deposit them into your vaults, offer you the wisdom of the ages.
The Nazi orb has a peculiar appeal to it. In a society where devils and demons have been proved figments of the imagination, the tale of the Nazis offers the most tangible “supreme evil” most people can comprehend. This most dearly earned treasure is squandered by fools, to shock others, and it becomes a mockery to speak the word at all. But no matter how often its name is misused, the orb shows anyone who cares to look what soon befell the dispirited people of an economically devastated industrial power, and their millions of neighbors.
Intelligent people must judge the course of events without obedience to conformity or comfort. The evidence is overwhelming. The Tea Party has declared its hatred of outsiders. It has declared its intention to eliminate the economic foundations on which many people’s very lives depend. It energizes its supporters by stoking their hatred. The Tea Party is not storybook evil. The Tea Party is comprised of actual human beings who believe strongly in their party’s goals. Few inside the party understand the consequences of those goals. But as the Tea Party gains power, if it gains power, its virulence will grow, for that is the crop it has planted. At best—at best—we will see modest privatization of longstanding public institutions and new restrictions on people’s rights. Of course, if you just got pregnant and suddenly find that you no longer have the option not to bring an unwanted child into the world, the best-case scenario may still ruin your life—and the kid’s life. And if you’re a senior citizen who can’t afford to live under a roof and buy food at the same time, well, the best-case scenario may very well kill you. But the nation itself will continue on, and most people’s lives will be minimally hindered. That’s not so bad, right? It’s certainly not another Holocaust.
That’s why it’s the best-case scenario.
Now, perhaps you don’t need to realize that the Tea Party would revive fascism in the developed world. Perhaps you would stand against it for lesser cause. But...I wish to make a distinction. We are not just facing some two-bit villain. We are facing a coherent manifestation of the impulse to destroy life as we know it. That the Tea Party shall very likely fail does not change the fact that we stand at a precarious and pivotal moment in the continuing saga of history. For now, they only control one house of Congress and their popularity is dismal. Next year they may well be washed away with the tide. But, let’s be honest: They control an entire house of Congress! All the credible Republican presidential candidates have decided to appeal to the Tea Party for support. The Senate is four votes away from a Tea Party takeover, and Democrats have double the seats up for election next year that Republicans do. Over at the White House, President Obama’s capitulation in the debt ceiling battle has, for the first time, brought his reelection prospects into doubt. The House will be hard to retake. The next election will potentially hand two branches of government to the Tea Party. The last time an extremist movement gained so much power, we had the Civil War.
We still have the opportunity to thwart the Tea Party peacefully, from inside the system, with no significant disruption to our political process. Although a more dramatic solution may seem more attractive inasmuch as it could have a more lasting impact on our political process, I would well and truly rather that it not come to that. I don’t want to have to start worrying about my personal safety, or begin contemplating insurrection.
Only judgment can beget justice. Listen to me a third time: Don’t take my word for any of this. Take my word as a call to vigilance. Explore this for yourself. Decide for yourself the very thing I would have you decide, and then we will share a common and worthy cause.
Do not be afraid of committing a faux pas against today’s fashion of docile agreeableness by acknowledging the threat of evil in our lifetimes. And do not be distracted by the blathering of people who abuse words. Hitler stands out in our imaginations because his weapons were so powerful, his villainy so exquisite, and his atrocities so recent in our ancestral memory, but he was not alone. His kind of evil is not uncommon in human history. The Tea Party looms. They are fascists. Pitiable, or not. Sincere, or not. Aware of the consequences of success, or not. They are a bomb and let’s defuse it right away.
I have one more thing to add. My opposition to the Tea Party is not reactive. I oppose the Tea Party not just because of its despicable intentions, but because I already have my own plans for the future. The Tea Party is a threat not only to what I have, but to what I want. In this day and age, in this time and place, we are building the future. Out there, along the hazy horizon beyond this anachronistic assault against our way of life, future history stands on the cusp of becoming much less painful for our descendents to behold than anything which came before us.
