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My friend the left-wing columnist is stumped, he admits, by the recent US midterm elections. He attributes them to “unfocussed anger” from older people in the US upset over America's supposedly declining power in the world.
No kidding.
This is pretty dramatic evidence that there are two distinct cultures in contemporary North America, and at least one of them is completely ignoring the other.
In fact, my friend's reaction in and by itself seems to dramatically prove the validity of the concerns of the Tea Party.
Unfocussed anger? These elections had a laser focus like nothing I had seen in my lifetime. Not only were the issues laser-clear since early summer, but this election was almost perfectly predicted in the polls. In two sentences, here's the message:
- Stop spending money, and
- You're not listening and you don't care.
This is so obvious it is in the name of the “Tea Party” movement. Moreover, a nearly spontaneous mass movement like the TP appears to be has to coalesce around something that is pretty obvious to a vast mass of people, or else it is not going to happen. How is it then that, even if left-wingers do not agree with this perception, they cannot even be aware of other people having it? Obviously, they are not in fact listening, and they don't care. That is, they are not listening to anyone outside their own little clique, and they don't care what anyone else thinks if they are outside this clique. They are, in other words, a self-interested ruling class.
Some time last year, MSNBC featured a panel of economic experts loudly disagreeing online; as one often also sees on Fox News.
This, indeed, is the Fox News trademark; it is why they can call themselves “fair and balanced” and why the average person agrees with them. Yes, their commentators are all or almost all conservative-leaning; but that is not relevant. What matters is that they consistently have spokespeople on for both sides of any issue; so that people can feel pretty confident they are hearing all sides of the issue, from the horse's mouth, and any commentary is clearly labelled as such.
Besides getting both sides, and being respected for thinking for themselves [“We report; you decide.”], people love the excitement of hearing such arguments. MSNBC, more recently, has carved a niche for themselves by imitating the Fox format, but featuring star commentators resolutely on the left.
It is striking, and pathological, that the “legacy media,” print or broadcast, rarely does this. If and when they host what they purport to be two sides of an issue, it is usually faked, and this is visible from the plain fact that the two commentators usually agree on most things in their discussion. The permitted grounds for debate have been severely limited before the debate itself can begin. This is a visible attempt to limit public discourse, and it speaks directly to what the Tea Party and the midterm elections were all about.
To get back to MSNBC: one of the speakers, Rick Santelli, during a heated exchange when everyone was offering different opinions on the best economic path to follow, just threw up his hands and started repeating loudly and clearly, “STOP SPENDING! STOP SPENDING! STOP SPENDING!” Then he walked off camera.
Here's the link:
It was a marvellously clarifying moment; it was the Tea Party in one simple sound bite; and so dramatic it was rerun many times, and garnered close to 200,000 hits on YouTube. I've heard the slogan repeated as a catch phrase a lot of times since, in what I think it a deliberate allusion: “Just stop spending.”
Few political messages in history have ever been clearer. Yet, even though it was on MCNBC, their own house channel, the left, and my friend, missed it altogether.
We are in a worldwide recession.
It is the worst since the Great Depression.
The average person is hurting.
A lot of people have lost a lot of money through over-borrowing; that's what happened in the housing bubble.
What do we all do when times get tough? What _must_ we all do? Basic, kitchen-table economics: we cut back our spending.
Yet everyone has recently been watching the US government increase spending and borrowing to unprecedented levels.
Americans know they or their children will be left with the bill.
What about this is hard to understand?
Here's another good video on the issue, as it affects Britain—where the new government has been behaving far more responsibly than the Democrats in Washington.
Granted that the left or Obama or the Democrats may subscribe to Keynesian economics. Keynes may even be right, or partly right—though most economists these days seem to believe he was wrong. Even so, why on earth would the left or Obama or the legacy media think they could go extravagantly against common sense without bothering to present their argument clearly and humbly to the general public every step of the way? This speaks to being out of touch. This speaks to a sense of privilege, of a right to rule.
The second, broader, issue of being out of touch was crystallized recently by an essayist in the American Spectator:
It was picked up and pushed hard by Rush Limbaugh on talk radio; it was rushed into book form over the summer.
I think Codevilla's argument is actually a bit less than coherent; but it picked up on and laid out a growing sentiment in the US public, the same sentiment that generated the Tea Party movement.
The idea is strong and growing, in the US and across the developed world, thanks to the Internet busting what had been an information cartel, that the world is being run by a ruling class that looks out for its own interests, not the interests of the world or the general public, and deliberately limits access to information in order to sustain its power. One important result is that government is not truly representative. Hence the “Tea Party” reference: it's about taxation without representation.
This ruling class, however, seems to me to have sealed their own doom, through a spectacular complacency. The newspapering business is classic: it is not really that traditional newspapers are doomed by the technology. The technology ought to expand the market and boost the business, because it makes the product cheaper. The problem, rather, is that no one wants the product; and they now have alternatives. By contrast, new technology has done nothing to slow down talk radio—a positively antique medium--or Fox News. Instead, news organization after news organization is sinking into insolvency because of complacency and a sense of privilege which prevents them from stooping to see or react to the world as it really is; or indeed stooping to interest themselves in the wishes or needs of their audience.
In systematically choking the flow of information for their class benefit, they have, inevitably, as ruling classes usually end up doing, starved their own members of the very information needed for their survival.
As a result, instead of trying in any way to counter the obvious popular concerns that appeared over the past year or two, the Democrats and the “legacy press” seemed to do, and still seem to do, their darndest to reinforce the impression that they are out of touch and do not care. It was all amazing to watch: like someone standing on a track with a milk train bearing down on him, and no sign of awareness visible on his face at all. It seemed the dramatic final proof that the elite were not in synch with the rest of us, and indeed that they were not competent. Everybody else saw it coming a mile off down the prairie.
Now, even after the election, we are all seeing columns from the left still wondering what happened and positing arcane theories. Frankly, most of them boil down more or less to stating publicly that the average voter is stupid and not competent to govern his own affairs. This is the tone of a ruling class, not used to communicating with the public, and not interested in doing so.
It is all like the apocryphal comment attributed to Marie Antoinette--”Let them eat cake.”
This is an over-generalization, but, on the whole, the Republicans in the US have tended to be the party of the individual, and to have appealed to voters as individuals. The Democrats have tended to be the party of groups and group rights, and to have appealed to voters as members of some special interest group—blacks, women, Catholics, Southerners, the elderly, Hispanics, teachers, unions, auto workers, gays, and so forth.
With the growth of the Internet and the information explosion it has made possible, it is no longer nearly as viable to appeal to voters as members of special interest groups. It is no longer nearly as possible to speak only to their supposed “leaders,” themselves members of your own ruling class, and expect the average member of the group to tug his forelock and vote the party line. People are more able now to look into each issue for themselves and form their own opinion.
And, having the clear impression now from what new information they have seen on the Web that they have been systematically lied to by their leaders in the past, they are very much inclined to do so.
As a result, overall, the Republican Party's approach begins to work better than the Democratic Party's approach. I expect this advantage to grow. The Democrats will have to reinvent themselves as something else to survive. The Republicans, on the other hand, may be supplanted by the Tea Party.
The same dynamic seems to be at work in Canada and Europe. There are exceptions, of course, but traditional voting blocs and deference to traditional authorities are fading.
I see it as a new chapter in human freedom and a further advancement in the democratic ideal, at least on a par with the Renaissance.
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