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What a Difference a Year Can Make!
I am just back from the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, which is held every year on the weekend immediately preceding Labor Day, and which I attend with some regularity. Last year, when this august gathering was held in Toronto, I showed up for a panel on Obama’s First Year. The participants were an intelligent lot, and they had a great deal of interest to say. But I was amazed at one omission: no one even mentioned the Tea-Party Movement.
I thought this decidedly strange. Early in August, 2009, I had posted a piece on Powerline entitled The Great Awakening, in which I compared the Tea-Party revolt with the emergence in and after 1828 of the movement of resistance to the so-called Tariff of Abominations. That event had greatly impressed Alexis de Tocqueville, and it inspired his ruminations concerning the Americans’ mastery of what he called “the art of association.” I suggested at that time that with the Tea-Party Movement we might be witnessing the beginning of a political realignment no less significant than the one that had produced the Jacksonian era — a movement which would permanently transform the character of American politics.
So, with this in mind, I put a question to the political scientists who had just spoken: “Why,” I asked, “did no one on the panel even mention the Tea-Party eruption?” No one seemed much interested in my question. One panelist responded that the movement’s appearance was indeed, odd. It had, he said, no institutional backing. Then, he and his colleagues moved on.
This year in Washington, D. C. I attended three different panels on the Obama administration and the upcoming midterm elections, and everyone was eager to discuss the Tea-Party Movement. As I listened to their prognostications, however, I could not help thinking of the collapse of the Soviet Union. During the Cold War, Soviet studies were in vogue, and a considerable community of scholars grew up that devoted its attention to developments within the Soviet bloc. There were those who foresaw the Soviet Union’s demise. Alexander Solzhenitsyn comes first to mind. But I cannot think of a single Sovietologist who foresaw the collapse and dissolution of communism within eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. It was as if all the time that they had spent studying developments was wasted. It was as if their studies made them sensitive to the trees and blind to the forest as a whole. Scholars — especially those who pretend to be social scientists — seem to be rendered by their focus on particulars blind to the possibility of systematic change. Even now, the political scientists to whom I listened over the last few days in Washington were struggling to assimilate recent developments to the general oscillation between parties that takes place in American electoral politics. They could not imagine that this time it might be different — that it might not be appropriate to attempt to assimilate what we were witnessing to the normal political patterns, that the liberal ascendancy might be over, and that the era of the New Deal might be coming to an end.
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Thank you for this, Professor Rahe. And welcome to Ricochet.
Your comment confirms my own experience. It’s striking how often and how quickly among my acquaintances lately conversations turn to politics. And, when they do, the tone is new and different. There is a sober sense that things have gone very far and become very serious, and that we are on the brink of the unprecedented. Everyone seems to agree that the Tea Party movement is just the beginning.
What makes me think that this movement might have legs is that it is not personality-centered; it’s idea-centered, unlike our last moment on the “brink of the unprecedented,” Nov. 2008.
And welcome Professor Rahe. Loved your book.
Perhaps their excuse last year was that they thought the Tea Party movement would fade quickly. Even if it was only a brief occurrence, a lack of curiosity does not compliment any kind of analyst.
This year, I wonder how many academics take interest because the participants of this movement are foreign to them. Is their interest to understand the movement or to explain it away? Let’s not forget how many people who formally studied the Soviet Union admired communism. I would expect an opposite reaction from similar thinkers in this case.
The straightforward results of the last primary election in Oklahoma were slightly disappointing for the Tea Partiers hoping for an immediate and large effect on elections; however, as one looked behind the curtain of simple win-lose election results and examined the percentages of votes captured, it is apparent that the “Tea” train is still accelerating down the tracks. Establishment Republicans are not terribly motivated to excite Tea Partiers to vote in the primary elections–after all, this is where the vector of conservatism is most effectively redirected. As Tea Partiers learn to devote more energy to the primaries while having an additional two years to educate the general public, those vector arrows will more frequently be hitting home in November elections as well. It must be a relief to the Tea Partiers not to be attracting the attention of political scientists–Baby, what a big surprise! Right before my very eyes!
This year, I wonder how many academics take interest because the participants of this movement are foreign to them. Is their interest to understand the movement or to explain it away?
Good points, Aaron and David.
Cas, I can think of two immediately. Abolition and the charismatic renewal and/or Pentecostalism within Christianity. There were leaders, just as there are in the Tea Party movement, but in all three cases the leaders seem incidental to the movement as such, which appeared spontaneously and in several places at once.
” . . . [C]onservatives can begin to express their creativity in a multitude of ways.”
Your list of “liberal” institutions, David, is rightly suggestive of cultural dominance, whereas the internet is analogous to a nervous system transfering impulses not to a central brain but between isolated nexuses that renders all points in the system equally important. In past conservatives have always been isolated or marginalized. On the internet conservatives represent as strong a group as any other group, which breads cultural confidence. It is the medium, the internet, that gives this movement life in my view. Don’t misunderstand me, I thnk this is a good thing.
The Tea Party movement leaves me with a question. As setup: All movements of whatever stripe throughout history had a defined leadership and direct lines of communication, if this is not so I’d gladly accept instruction as ‘all’ might be too broad of an adjective. That said, the Tea Party seemingly has neither national leadership nor defined lines of communication. So here is my question: Would the Tea Party movement have been possible without the internet? As a corollary, does the Tea Party movement represent the first internet rebellion against conventional establishment politics, a hyper-democratic movement if you will?
Welcome, Paul, to your week on Ricochet. This really is your moment. You’re the only conservative of who has been optimistic about the prospects for an American renewal since the very moment Obama took office.
If I may, a question I hope you’ll find a moment to address this week:
”They [your colleagues at the meeting of the APSA] could not imagine that this time it might be different,” you write, “that it might not be appropriate to attempt to assimilate what we were witnessing to the normal political patterns, that the liberal ascendancy might be over, and that the era of the New Deal might be coming to an end.”
What’s the evidence for this? To put it another way, what do you see that your colleagues at the conference were missing? We all have the general feeling that there’s been a reaction against Obama–and that the GOP is likely to do well this November. But if I understand you, you’re claiming that something much more profound is taking place. What are the data points? The concrete pieces of evidence?
Cas, I took it that way. Here’s another question, then. Across organismal groups, the pattern seems to be that nerve nets serve radial, simple organisms–like jellyfish–very well. For elongated organisms with complex tissues and specialized organs and well-directed movement, centralization towards a spinal cord, and subsequent cephalization towards a concentrated brain in the front, seems to be characteristic. So, do we need to float like a jellyfish with gentle pulsations sufficing for avoiding scarcity of food or predators, or do we need directed, targeted movement like a voracious lizard? On Richard Epstein’s post regarding the question of blogging lawyers having too much power, I suggest and foresee new Internet tools evolving that will serve various professions between specialists while also having a broad antenna for input from nonspecialists or across specialties. Tea Party activists effectively employed the internet at the outset, and still do, much like a nerve network. So perhaps the beauty is that, in each case, the internet can serve people and causes as needed in either an evolutionary equilibrium where networking is sufficient, or with a network progressing towards cephalization—at least in some aspects and perhaps retaining both properties.
Good, quick thinking Katie. In the case of Pentecostalism and the Charismatic Renewal, this leaderless spontaneity “everywhere at once” is frequently cited as evidence for the movement’s inception being beyond mere human design.
1. Who has “led” liberalism all of these many years? 2. I do think that we are seeing a phase change here. It is not just in politics: it is journalism, academia, commerce, entertainment, technical development, and so on. Perhaps, we can see the end of clumsily defined, top-down control in many areas. This is hyper-democracy, and it can be done without mob anarchy into which the old democracies devolved because of poor communication and pent up, inarticulate, inchoate energy. I think this new democracy in the realm of conversation, at the germinal level of ideas (the “stem cells” of ideas, if I may), can be channeled so as to fit very nicely into a stable Res Publica, the functional, mature phenotype. One can see here, and elsewhere, the bubble sorting of thoughts. And now, for goodness sakes, conservatives can begin to express their creativity in a multitude of ways. This will win.
Since communication seems to be the key to the new “revolution,” perhaps we can dump that stodgy old term, “conservatives,” and switch to (excuse the neologism), “conversatives.”
Mahatma Gandhi said it best: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” Right about now the Tea Party movement has moved from phase two to three but come November we will see phase four.