Massing to Shout "Leave Us Alone!" Welcome to the Politics of the Libertarian Mob.

[BurtWorm]

Very interesting essay in the New York Review of Books on teabag-heads etc. by Mark Lilla:


http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/may/27/tea-party-jacobins/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+nybooks+%28The+New+York+Review+of+Books%29

...

We know that the country is divided today, because people say it is divided. In politics, thinking makes it so. Just as obviously, though, the angry demonstrations and organizing campaigns have nothing to do with the archaic right–left battles that dragged on from the Sixties to the Nineties. The populist insurgency is being choreographed as an upsurge from below against just about anyone thought to be above, Democrats and Republicans alike. It was galvanized by three things: a financial collapse that robbed millions of their homes, jobs, and savings; the Obama administration’s decision to pursue health care reform despite the crisis; and personal animosity toward the President himself (racially tinged in some regions) stoked by the right-wing media.1 But the populist mood has been brewing for decades for reasons unrelated to all this.

Many Americans, a vocal and varied segment of the public at large, have now convinced themselves that educated elites—politicians, bureaucrats, reporters, but also doctors, scientists, even schoolteachers—are controlling our lives. And they want them to stop. They say they are tired of being told what counts as news or what they should think about global warming; tired of being told what their children should be taught, how much of their paychecks they get to keep, whether to insure themselves, which medicines they can have, where they can build their homes, which guns they can buy, when they have to wear seatbelts and helmets, whether they can talk on the phone while driving, which foods they can eat, how much soda they can drink…the list is long. But it is not a list of political grievances in the conventional sense.

Historically, populist movements use the rhetoric of class solidarity to seize political power so that “the people” can exercise it for their common benefit. American populist rhetoric does something altogether different today. It fires up emotions by appealing to individual opinion, individual autonomy, and individual choice, all in the service of neutralizing, not using, political power. It gives voice to those who feel they are being bullied, but this voice has only one, Garbo-like thing to say: I want to be left alone.

A new strain of populism is metastasizing before our eyes, nourished by the same libertarian impulses that have unsettled American society for half a century now. Anarchistic like the Sixties, selfish like the Eighties, contradicting neither, it is estranged, aimless, and as juvenile as our new century. It appeals to petulant individuals convinced that they can do everything themselves if they are only left alone, and that others are conspiring to keep them from doing just that. This is the one threat that will bring Americans into the streets.

Welcome to the politics of the libertarian mob.

...

[baldguy]

1. Teabaggers are, at best faux-populists and faux-libertarians.

They don't want freedom & liberty for all - just for wealthy, white "conservatives".

[Posteritatis]

3. To be fair, most libertarians only want freedom and liberty for wealthy, white conservatives. (nt)

[BurtWorm]

2. The anti=political Jacobin: an authority-loathing narcissist

Lilla continues:

<<Quite apart from the movement’s effect on the balance of party power, which should be short-lived, it has given us a new political type: the antipolitical Jacobin. The new Jacobins have two classic American traits that have grown much more pronounced in recent decades: blanket distrust of institutions and an astonishing—and unwarranted—confidence in the self. They are apocalyptic pessimists about public life and childlike optimists swaddled in self-esteem when it comes to their own powers.>>

[malaise]

5. Freaking perfect

and an astonishing—and unwarranted—confidence in the self.

[LoZoccolo]

4. There are also a lot of people here who see soda as a civil liberty. n/t

[gratuitous]

6. Oh dear, where to begin?

Some of this is right on target, but so much more is just . . . well, wrong. The Tea Baggers are hardly "an upsurge from below." When you have a major broadcast network and shadowy corporate funding driving the agenda, organizing the rallies, and renting the buses, you're not looking at a "populist" movement. And as for what this disparate group wants? Well, that's a pretty mixed bag. There are the sounds bites that make it seem that the Tea Baggers want educated elites to stop "controlling" their lives. But when you ask the next logical question or probe behind the rhetoric, you find that these rugged individualists aren't really prepared for the individual consequences of the policies they're advocating, and indeed, they really do want to be insulated from the repercussions of bad choices.

If you ask for examples of the oppression these mostly white, mostly older Americans are suffering, you don't get a coherent answer. Who's trying to take away your guns? Well . . . somebody! Tell them they're operating in a system with the lowest tax burden in over half a century. But it's too much! Keep government out of Medicare and Social Security, they rave, the palpable irony being lost on their pointy little heads. And when the noise machine at Fox stops to take a breath, or the Big Money Boys quit sponsoring rallies? The mobs vanish like a fart in a frying pan.

The essay seems to have a good list of characteristics, but falls well short of finding the common threads that animate this alleged movement.