This is part 2 in an
ongoing series of blog posts analyzing key ideological and messaging documents
in American conservatism from 2009-present.
2010 was a heady time for American conservatism. Not only
had it seen the election of a Republican, Scott Brown, in a special election to
replace the recently departed Ted Kennedy, but conservatism had a certain
energy and momentum not seen since at least since the 1994 Congressional wave,
which saw a crowd of Republicans elected alongside the promise to produce a new
“Contract with America.” Of course, what distinguished the activity of 2010 was
that where Newt Gingrich and others used an implicit theory of American
populism tethered to slogans intelligible to an audience stuck in the midst of
what were then called the “culture wars,” fought primarily over topics like gays
in the military, affirmative action, and abortion, to name a few.
Amidst the rise of the TEA (Taxed Enough Already) Party and
small electoral victories that portended a very successful November for
Republicans, the Hudson Institute hosted a symposium bringing together key
conservative pundits and politicians to discuss the supposed paradox at the
heart of the Tea Party’s rise: if conservatism seeks to “conserve” institutions
and morals, how can one reconcile a populist movement with conservative ideology,
given that “the people” are often and unpredictable mass who threaten to
undermine established institutions and orders?
I have already examined some of this dialogue on the
blog in the past, but today I want to look at a different passage, one that
focuses most directly on the air of “authenticity” that surrounds emerging
social movements. After a lengthy discussion between Jonah Goldberg, Michael
Barone, Dick Armey, Mike Pence (R-IN) and Weekly
Standard editor Bill Kristol, the panelists get into audience questions,
and one member asks about the Tea Party’s relationship to a certain kind of
populist libertarianism represented by Ron Paul:
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Here was an
interesting political poll where they actually went and asked Tea Party people
who showed up to rally—that’s different than calling people on the phone and
asking whether they support the Tea Party. They asked them with which
politician they most identify. Half said Sarah Palin, which makes sense for the
point that you made, Bill Kristol, but the other half said Ron Paul. I was
actually interested to hear the panelists’ thoughts about how Ron Paul has been
kind of caught up in the Tea Party movement, and the extent to which
lower-case-l libertarians are part of the Tea Party movement.
RICHARD ARMEY: This point was
raised earlier. There is a word that you used that binds. There is a symbiotic
word between Ron Paul, the Tea Party activists, and Sarah Palin. The word is
“authentic.” And that’s why they’re feared. They’re real. They’re not plastic.
They’re not manufactured. They’re not staged. They’re not choreographed.
They’re who they are. Ron Paul is who he is, bless is heart. He’s unique;
there’s only one like him. There’s one who is similar Not quite the
same. You know? And Sarah Palin is authentic. This drives the left nuts. They
believe in a world where ceremony triumphs over substance. Scenario over
science. And authenticity? It’s like Jack Nicholson said; they just can’t
handle the truth. They’re all truth, whether you like them or not. They are
what they are. What you see is what you get. And it’s authentic. They have a
certain affinity for—why do we grassroots activists find Ron Paul and Sarah
Palin attractive? Well, they’re real. We just really don’t know how much we can
say that about most people holding or seeking office. Are they really real, or
are they staged? We don’t like staged; we’ve had enough of it. So I would say,
“authentic” is the (inaudible).
What really sticks out here in Armey’s comments is the
insistence that the Tea Party is a natural and organic movement. Indeed, this
sentiment is found throughout the document where appeals to “authenticity” or
“the grassroots” come up around every other page or so. Armey suggests that Tea
Partiers are animated by the same kind of energy that fuels Ron Paul supporters
and supporters of Sarah Palin: that is, some kind of gut feeling that something
is wrong, and that they are right to be fed up and frustrated with the way the
world is. Indeed, the audience member’s question directs a reader to this
interpretation, with the framing of how actual interviews produce a response
different from that which can be gleaned from phone polls.
As Armey says of the Tea Partiers “They are what they are.
What you see is what you get.” For Armey, liberal concern and anxiety about
what the Tea Party means indexes the importance of a visible and agitative
conservative presence: its existence cannot be denied. “Realness” and
“authenticity” as key criteria also explain why what sometimes seem idiosyncratic
or folksy characteristics of figures like Paul or Palin do not, as their
critics hold, undermine their fitness for national office. Instead, they
testify to the ease audiences have with identifying with these figures
precisely because they represent a kind of style or persona that is not typical
to “insider, D.C.” style politics. This
was an especially important argument in the 2010 political environment because
it was this disease of crony insiderism that many argued caused the government
to unfairly bail out the big financial institutions that had caused the 2008
financial crisis.
As I and others have argued, conservatism won a
number of victories through managing to not “appear” explicitly in public as an
interest based political formation but instead as a more or less disembodied
cultural formation that worked to conserve an existing body of traditional
practices and political beliefs.[i]
Reports framed the 2008 presidential election as a momentous moment in
nation-making, in which America finally broke through the color barrier at the
presidential level. At the same time, many headlines after the election
portended doom and gloom for a rapidly shrinking conservative demographic of
mostly older and white voters.
Armey’s insistence that one cannot deny the existence of the
Tea Party cannot be disarticulated from this political context. Nor is it for
nothing that the forum hosted by the Hudson Institute was about populism. Populism
is not so much an ideology as a political style according to works like those
of Michael Kazin and Michael Lee.[ii]
Populist argumentation is characterized by the central claim that the
population of a nation is better positioned to determine its policy direction
that a policy elite. “The people” tend to be summoned as a counter-hegemonic
force, emerging to speak with democratic legitimacy against outrages or
transgressions that the nation’s population can simply no longer tolerate.
This document represents one quite typical of conservative
thought from early 2009 to at least 2011. There is a focus throughout on the
resentment derived from bank bailouts, and the authenticity of the public’s
fury against them. There is a palpable sense that conservatism is a people’s
movement. (Elsewhere in the transcript, Jonah Goldberg is appropriately wary of
this claim). “The people” are mostly articulated to two values: limited
government and the Constitution.
When looking for guidance about the extensive policy
gridlock and partisanship that has accurately described the last four years in
Washington, D.C., a document like this tells a very clear story. The animating
principle of this particular version of populism is negativity: “the people”
are against bailouts, against government, against cronyism, and against
overreach. There are no real clear singular policies which can serve as the
means to concretize the demands of the movement. With the bar set through these
negative demands for an “authentic” movement that establishes its truth simply
by virtue of its opposition to the existing system, one begins to see at least
one cause of conservative policy decline: the expectation is not that they will
engage in particular modes of governance but simply that they will, as a matter
of principle, oppose governing.
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