Harold Meyerson: “When Tea Party Wants to Go Back, Where Is It To?” The Washington Post, October 27, 2010.
Only a few days before the elections, after what—one might have thought—saturation levels of news and of opinion centering on the ‘Tea Party Movement,’ a weekly columnist for the nation’s leading newspaper for political coverage, a man named one of the 50 “most influential commentators” in America by The Atlantic Monthly, still doesn’t get it.
Harold Meyerson serves as vice-chair of the National Committee of Democratic Socialists of America; he edits The American Prospect; he gets booked frequently on radio and TV talk shows; he publishes in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Nation. Everyone who thinks he’s anyone thinks he’s an expert on politics—very much including himself.
But when it comes to the Tea Party, Mr. Meyerson has yet to find a clue. As a socialist, he may be waiting for a subvention. Although not currently employed by a government agency, I can still help—if not materially then at least spiritually.
He likes the Tea Party slogan, “Take our country back.” But he doesn’t know what it means. Here’s what he wants to mean….
The Harold Hypothesis. Mr. Meyerson supposes that the Tea Partyers want to take America back in time. Writing in the WaPo, he tells us: “When the Tea Partyers say they want to take the country back, they mean back to the period between 1950 and 1980, when the vast majority of Americans encountered more opportunity and security in their economic lives than they had before or since.” They blame Franklin Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson before him, for “the New Deal order” that has (they imagine) ruined the American economy in the long run.
Poor, deluded TP’ers. They don’t know that the New Deal Order “produced the only three decades in American history—the aforementioned 1950-1980—”when economic security and opportunity were widely shared”; when labor unions really protected the workers and the G. I. Bill surged a generation of Americans into the universities; when Americans’ average income soared 75%. Alas, what FDR built Ronald Reagan tore down; thanks to him, “America’s claim to being a land of opportunity has become a sick joke” as “the average income of Americans in the bottom 90 percent of the population flatlined” for the subsequent thirty years and counting.
I resist the temptation to dwell upon Mr. Meyerson’s economic history, other than to remark that anyone who remembers the 1970s as a time of economic vitality in doesn’t remember the 1970s. And it might just be that America’s economic dynanism in the Fifties and Sixties had rather more to do with the collapse of all market-exclusionary empires (except for that pesky socialist one centered in Moscow) and the consequent expansion of trade in goods produced by the one major country whose manufacturing base survived and indeed thrived during the Second World War. It’s a bit unfair to expect a social democrat to offer a sensible account of production and distribution, so I pass on quickly to….
The Meyerson Mistake. Rather, Mr. Meyerson’s more serious error is (of all kinds, given his reputation) political. When Tea Partyers say they want to “take our country back” they’re not talking about leaving it to Beaver in a fit of back-to-the-future nostalgia. They’re talking about self-government.
It helps to take the trouble to listen to Tea Partyers. They’re talking about taking the country back from the kind of folks who’ve followed the career arc of so many of the country’s top politicians, bureaucrats, educators, and pundits—the arc traced by the New Dealers and, yes, Wilsonian Progressives before them. Groomed in the leading universities, taught there that the American Constitution ought to ‘evolve’ or ‘develop’ along a path toward ever-increasing social and economic egalitarianism, the leaders of the new republic, the seers of the American prospect, have long congratulated themselves for knowing where historical progress shall take us, with them guiding us along.
You demur? But then you must be a “reactionary,” no? A dupe of sick jokesters?
The Tea Partyers propose to take the country back from those who know best —including those who say they know that New Dealers led Americans to prosperity. The professional elites have wanted to run the country for more than a century, and have to some extent succeeded in running its schools and many of its other ruling bureaucracies. Theirs is the ox the Tea Partyers aims to gore.
Were they not so inexcusably retrograde, Tea Partyers might be forgiven by the leaders of public opinion for suspecting that those leaders do not so much misunderstand “Take our back,” as deliberately misconstrue it. It may be that the inheritors of the New Deal and of Progressivism know very well that the Tea Partyers would indeed take the country back from the decent people, the forward-looking people who prefer to write Constitutional law as they go along, without inconvenient reference to all those wig-powdering, slave-driving Founding Fathers and their obsolete intentions about limited government.
But we need not be so uncharitable. It may be that today’s Progressives really don’t get it, that their cluelessness about the Tea Partyers and their intentions is entirely sincere. After all, if one assumes that something called ‘History’ is taking us all somewhere that’s very, very good then one might also consistently interpret one’s critics as desperate losers engaged in a futile but damaging attempt to hold all of that back.
We have here a dilemma for progressives. Either they don’t ‘get’ popular self-government or they ‘get’ it all too clearly but prefer to patronize its defenders, hoping they will soon fade back into the obscurity whence they came. One way or the other, a reckoning comes this Tuesday, and this time the real political issue will likely stay with us for a while longer than the Progressives would like it to.
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