The Long View 2009-04-17: Spengler at the Zombies' Tea Party
Fifteen years ago, I probably wouldn't have taken a bet that the Boston Globe would still be in business in 2024, but they are still chugging along. On the other hand, the loss the New York Times took to sell the paper was staggering. The Times bought the Globe for $2B and sold it for $70M.
I often wish that John Reilly were still with us. This post is fascinating in hindsight, as John opined here both that the Occupy Wall Street movement seemed astroturfed and that most public protests seemed to be less of an expression of public opinion and more of a political tool intended to manufacture public opinion.
In retrospect, it has come to seem to me that the Occupy movement was genuinely concerning to the powerful, but I don't have specific evidence of that. What has become abundantly clear in the last fifteen years is that aggressive protests in the United States are rarely spontaneous.
Spengler at the Zombies' Tea Party
What does Mark Steyn think about this week’s Tea Parties? Well, it’s all about the coverage:
“MS: Well, I thought it was really pitiful. The Boston Globe, for example, this after all, this tea party thing, is taking off on an event called the original Tea Party that took place in Boston Harbor, which I gather is, you know, in the general vicinity of Boston. And yet the Boston Globe did not have anything in the paper about the many, it claims to be the New England newspaper, yet had nothing in there not only about tea parties in Boston or in Massachusetts or in New Hampshire or Rhode Island or other parts of what it claims to be its coverage area. This is a newspaper that the New York Times, its owner, has threatened to close. The New York Times bought this newspaper in one of the worst deals in business history for, I think it was $2 billion dollars a decade ago. It’s now worth nothing. The Boston Globe, actually, the way things are going, the last edition will wind up being dumped in Boston Harbor, and everybody dancing on the pier as it sinks to the bottom unmourned. The coverage which was exemplified by the absence of it in the Boston Globe, and by the condescension of that ludicrous teleprompter reader on CNN hectoring members of the public, I think speaks, says more about the media than it does about the tea party movement.”
Regarding this week’s Tea Parties, I’m afraid that I incline more to the astroturfing interpretation of the events. They were not by any means as phony as the Usual Suspect demonstrations with which the Netroots have been regaling the evening news these many weeks, of course. The Obama Administration has provoked genuine uneasiness on several counts, uneasiness that substantially augmented the size of the Tea Parties. They would have been larger still, had the demonstrations not been organized by the tax zombies that have sucked out the brains of American conservatism over the past 15 years. On the federal level, tax issues have little popular traction; no more, really, than Texas Governor Rick Perry's suggestion that state secession is a legal option for states dissatisfied with Washington's centralizing ways. Both the tax talk and the secession talk are historical gestures. If there is to be a future conservatism, it won't sound like that.
John Lukacs has noted that the Rankean practice of historiography as the collection and analysis of official documents has become obsolete, because so many documents these days are produced for no other purpose than to produce mandated documents; the actual business of government is increasingly conducted in face-to-face conversations, so that nothing can be recorded or subpoenaed.
I am starting to think the same about public protests of all sorts: they have become too easy to generate to mean very much. Genuine violent mobs are still real political factors, but we should note that the inflationary flashmobs of the 21st century have been remarkably genteel, at least so far. As far as I know, these days violent mass menaces are routinely used to silence opposition only in the context of public discussion of immigration issues. (What’s the term, turba divina?)
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Readers were no doubt relieved to see that the Department of Homeland Security is now examining the possibility of a nexus of violent neonazi groups, proponents of immigration controls, opponents of abortion, and veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. At least in this connection, the DHS can be trusted not to coin more euphemisms, such as “man-made catastrophe” for “terrorist attack.” (I don’t want to wish Secretary Janet Napolitano or the country as a whole ill, but history is unlikely to forget that she did not use the word “terrorism” in confirmation hearings to head a department created to fight terrorism.) The suspicion of veterans is not new. For instance, Eleanor Roosevelt proposed interring returning veterans of World War II for a few weeks at least, until their homicidal rage subsided. Neither is there is any novelty in the monitoring by law-enforcement agencies to see whether a subversive popular front is developing. What is new this time is that, perhaps for the first time since 1917, the authorities are not looking for connections to hostile foreign states.
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Asia Times was kind enough to allow its Spengler, known in the real world as David P Goldman, to wax autobiographical on its website, even as Spengler prepares to devote most of his literary efforts to his new job at First Things.
Spengler is chiefly about music; look at the link and see how the appreciation for classical music explains much of his admiration for Benedict XVI. But there is also this political bit:
G K Chesterton said that if you don't believe in God, you'll believe in anything, and I was living proof of that as a young man, wandering in the fever-swamps of left-wing politics. I found my way thanks to the first Ronald Reagan administration. The righting of America after it nearly capsized during the dark years of Jimmy Carter was a defining experience for me. I owe much to several mentors, starting with Dr Norman A. Bailey, special assistant to President Reagan and director of plans at the National Security Council from 1981-1984. My political education began in his lair at the old Executive Office Building in 1981, when he explained to me that the US would destroy the Soviet Empire by the end of the 1980s. I thought him a dangerous lunatic, and immediately signed on.
Later, he went to Wall Street. That could get you barred from electoral politics these days, but opinion journalism is more tolerant.
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Meanwhile, Peggy Noonan wishes America, Goodbye, Bland Affluence, and looks benignly at a new trend to “authenticity chic”:
“A small sign of the times: USA Today this week ran an article about a Michigan family that, under financial pressure, decided to give up credit cards, satellite television, high-tech toys and restaurant dining, to live on a 40-acre farm and become more self-sufficient. The Wojtowicz family—36-year-old Patrick, his wife Melissa, 37, and their 15-year-old daughter Gabrielle—have become, in the words of reporter Judy Keen, "21st century homesteaders," raising pigs and chickens, planning a garden and installing a wood furnace.”
This is an extreme case, and Noonan does not recommend rustication for everyone, but it still seems to me that the most remarkable thing here is the notion that someone can take up farming in order to avoid stress. Farmers, from what I understand, work more hours than the most overworked junior associate in a major law firm. They also worry all the time. Even with various kinds of crop insurance and price supports, farming is a highwire act played without a net. There are such things as gentlemen farmers, of course, but they already have enough money to live wherever they like; that’s why they can afford to farm as a hobby.
The reality of what this column is talking about is not a return to arcadia; it’s moving to a region with good public transportation.
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