Steve Benen
highlights the following exchange between Matt Taibbi, David Gergen and Gary Hart, and argues that "the Gergen/Hart argument is that their numbers lend them credibility. But isn't that a pretty clear example of
argumentum ad populum?" This is the sort of shit that makes me despair for the Democratic coalition.
Taibbi: To me, the main thing about the Tea Party is that they're just crazy. If somebody is able to bridge the gap with those voters, it seems to me they will have to be a little bit crazy too. That's part of the Tea Party's litmus test: "How far will you go?"
Gergen: I flatly reject the idea that Tea Partiers are crazy. They had some eccentric candidates, there's no question about that. But I think they represent a broad swath of the American electorate that elites dismiss to their peril.
Hart: I agree with David. When two out of five people who voted last night say they consider themselves supporters of the Tea Party, we make a huge mistake to suggest that they are some sort of small fringe group and do not represent anybody else.
Taibbi: I'm not saying that they're small or a fringe group.
Gergen: You just think they're all crazy.
Taibbi: I do.
Gergen: So you're arguing, Matt, that 40 percent of those who voted last night are crazy?
Taibbi: I interview these people. They're not basing their positions on the facts — they're completely uninterested in the facts. They're voting completely on what they see and hear on Fox News and afternoon talk radio, and that's enough for them.
Gergen: The great unwashed are uneducated, so therefore their views are really beneath serious conversation?
Taibbi: I'm not saying they're beneath serious conversation. I'm saying that these people vote without acting on the evidence.
Gergen: I find it stunning that the conversation has taken this turn. I disagree with the Tea Party on a number of issues, but it misreads who they are to dismiss them as some kind of uneducated know-nothings who have somehow seized power in the American electorate. It is elitist to its core. We would all be better off if we spent more time listening to each other rather than simply writing them off.
Taibbi is arguing that the Tea Party supporters are crazy. Why? Because "They're not basing their positions on the facts — they're completely uninterested in the facts"; because they "vote without acting on the evidence." Benen defends Taibbi here, arguing that his criticism is "fair" and asking "what do we when we're done listening, and we realize that a contingent is saying things that don't make sense?"
This is nonsense. I disagree with so so much that the Tea Party supports, and I recognize that lacking a coherent and centralized organizational structure [1] identifying what "they support" is itself an amorphous category, the unstable aggregation of protest signs, TV interviews, and the position-taking of elites trying to capture a leadership position (what does it mean to be a leader of the Tea Party? It is unclear. It is almost like a valence leadership, in that if you can be identified as a leader, regardless of whether you have been chosen through any institutional mechanism, you will receive substantial support and opportunity to gain political power and leverage). And I think that Benen is right to point out that the Tea Party is in some sense just the conservative base of the Republican Party. The early organizational apparatus of the Tea Party seems to have been one that drew heavily on existing apparatuses of the conservative movement.
But what is the standard that we are comparing it against? I could definitely find you a large number of Democrats--liberal, conservative, whatever--that hold contradictory positions, that reject certain established 'facts' as being reflective of some form of institutionalized bias. Certainly a lot of us rejected the 'facts' of the Great Moderation, and many of us still reject at least some of the 'facts' of free trade. So one question, which I think the Tea Party has been right to ask, is "whose facts?" Now certainly some of the facts that have been rejected by different voices in the movement are probably actual facts, well-established by any reasonable metric. But even here I guarantee that you could find the same for any sizable portion of the Democratic coalition. And we would in all probably also find a comparable portion of Democrats treating the presentation of evidence contrary to our beliefs by doubling down on our positions.
What about contradictory positions? Those Social Security getting, Medicare loving, farm-subsidy dependents hate government programs, hate government health care, and hate dependency. Maybe these are contradictory, maybe not. Certainly previous generations of Democrats believed that there was value in basing Social Security (and by extension, Medicare) on contributions, precisely to undercut the opposition to redistribution (taking from Peter to pay Paul) that the Tea Party seems to be articulating. They believed that while Social Security was redistributive, that straight out redistribution was not sufficiently defensible or desirable and instead decided to base it on contributions, to make it into an insurance scheme instead. And most of us think that certain industries should be getting various forms of governmental support, either through favorable regulations, subsidies, or tax breaks. And we usually think that the ones that should get the most support are those that are either concordant with our values or that we believe are likely to further our values in some way. So renewable energy, public broadcasting, higher education. There have been a lot of complaints that the Tea Party is hypocritical because various self-proclaimed Tea Parties attack welfare but love farm subsidies. But maybe these Tea Partiers don't see these as hypocritical at all: the first (they might believe) encourages dependency and not working, while the second (they might believe) encourages national food self-sufficiency and working. And even still, how many of us--regardless of how well-educated, how well-informed, how self-criticising--have managed, or even sought, to make sure that our various beliefs are all in alignment with particular expressions of all the different first principles we might hold.
Furthermore, when Taibbi says he "interview[s] these people", does he mean the sympathizers, the identifiers, the active members, the rally-attenders, the rally-organizers, or the various levels of people trying to place themselves in the leadership positions? Like I said above, if you interviewed the Democratic sympathizers, the Democratic identifiers, the active members of the Democratic party (those who have volunteered for campaigns, attended rallies, worn buttons), or the ward leaders, you would almost certainly find a comparable degree of inattention to inconsistencies, to contrary evidence, to contradictory positions. They, like the rest of us, are regular people with some core values, some enduring identifications, some personal experiences, and some informed positions; all these interact in complex ways, and there is always a lot of noise going on around us while we try and sort these things out. That the end result is often an inconsistent, unstable mess is hardly a surprise. You'll even find these amongst members of Congress and the President. After all, their job really is to put together and keep together a coalition of different and often contradictory interests all the while appealing to a broader population whose positions are themselves often unstable. And if he is interviewing higher-ups, those who 'ought to know better,' well like I said, their job is coalition building and maintenance. That will necessarily lead to some issue incoherence.
But more importantly, who the hell are these higher-ups and why should we take them as representative? They haven't been elected as representative of the Tea Party. They are in all likelihood competing with each other for positions of influence within the movement. Some of these positions will be democratically chosen, while others will be valence representation--Sarah Palin representation, where identification with her, in a whole hell of a lot of ways, and appreciation for her, in a whole other set of ways, is sufficient to give her a following and leverage. All movements have this quality to them; all movements have these tensions; all movements try to motivate people by appealing to almost anything that they think will both resonate and further their own specific agendas.
The end result of all of this is that there will be a lack of coherence, a mess, one that relies on appeals that many believe, and many know to be false, and that even the listener and the audience might believe to be false. But they often serve larger movement purposes. The civil rights movement, the Populists, the Progressives, the environmentalists, and pretty much any other popular social movement has done the same. And when, like Taibbi, you disagree with the agendas, you are especially likely to see the worst, to see crazy, to see a deeply regressive and anti-rationalist band that is out to destroy everything you hold dear.
But democracy doesn't require intellectuals; it doesn't require a highly informed citizenry; I don't even think, Machiavelli to the contrary, that it requires a virtuous citizenry. It just requires one that is able in the aggregate to recognize when times are bad, and to vote out whoever is in government at that time. That's all we've ever had; that's what we have now; and that's part of what we had in the midterms, mediated through the specific institutional arrangements of American government (namely, that we voted on 1/3 of Senators, all the House and not on the Presidency).
And I despair for the Democratic coalition, because it's exactly Taibbi's brand of Jane Addams elitism, albeit with his own particular anti-corporate aggression (which I wholeheartedly support), that feeds the impression that liberals are fundamentally looking down their noses at the mass of the population. It is an impression rooted in the fact that the Democratic party, with the exception of the union movement and much of the civil rights movement [2], has become intellectually and electorally un-moored from the working classes of this country.
[1] It is not unorganized; nor is it disorganized. And saying it is over-organized is also inaccurate. Rather, it is a valence label, one that a resonates with a significant number of people and which a number of different groups and individuals are trying to organize into something more coherent. But its temporary strength has to be in some part its lack of coherence, something like the old Democratic-Republican societies, those "self-created" societies that claimed to speak for the people directly and that sought to bypass existing institutional structures.
[2] These are obviously influential components of the Democratic coalition, but I would also suggest that they are the components that are least influential in the progressive-managerial consensus that has dominated, in one form or another, the Democratic party since Clinton.
