Elections

The Late Christopher Lasch on the Tea Parties

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Team Sarah

This post, entitled Tea Party Has Elites on the Run, by Tony Blankley writing in Rasmussen Reports, is very much worth reading. It analyzes the Tea Party in light of the “remarkably prescient book, Christopher Lasch’s The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy.

Lasch described the emergence of elites who “…control the international flow of money and information, preside over philanthropic foundations and institutions of higher learning, manage the instruments of cultural production and thus set the terms of public debate.” These elites would undermine American democracy in order to fulfill their insatiable desire for wealth and power and to perpetuate their social and political advantages. Middle-class values, Lasch warned, would be hollowed out by a value-neutral educational system preaching multiculturalism. Their replacement would be narcissistic values based on self-gratification and worshipful of fame and celebrity as the ultimate values in a world devoid of deeper meaning.

This very similar to the argument of Angelo Codevilla, both book form and article form.

Blankley goes on:

The tea party movement will assert middle-class values, economic nationalism, patriotism and other concepts derided by post-modern elitists. The movement’s central tenets — small government, decentralization of power and end to profligate spending — are precisely what Lasch prescribed to restore American democracy.

RTWT.

BTW: This article about the Tea Party, by Jonathan Raban, from the usually Lefty New York Review of Books, from last February, is remarkable fair. Worth reading.

(I should mention that the NYRB’s review essays on historical subjects, including military history, are often very good. For example, this article about the French Foreign Legion by Max Hastings is very good. He warns “… only the foolish seek to romanticize this bleak, cruel fighting machine, loyal only to its own. ” But the foolish, myself included, continue to do so. And while we are at it here is Max Hastings’ list of the Ten Best Books About War. I’ve read five of them.)

[Photo credit: The picture above is from the Raban article in the NYRB.]

This Guy Never Dabbled in Witchcraft

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This is the kind of bloodless, antiseptic, dead-eyed smiling, Mr. Perfect Senate candidate that we want to represent us.

We can be sure that this man will not let us down by using the wrong fork at the very expensive luncheons where the lobbyists will giving out their instructions about what is good for America. There is no danger that he will suddenly wax enthusiastic about Battlestar Galatica, or the Lord of the Rings. He did not grope the girl at the frat party, that one time, even though he really thought she wanted him to, because his career might have been jeopardized if she had, you know, not wanted him to. He goes to a church, sure, but it is a nice normal one with a Rainbow flag out front and not too much Jesus-talk or hand-clapping. He does not have a Metallica tattoo on his left pectoral.

He is not OUR Witch, and he never will be.

You betcha.

D’oh! Do you write-in Murkowski, or Murkwski?

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That Queen of sound, sane, sensible, boring government by well-connected heiresses, Sen. Lisa Murkowski employs staff who cannot spell her name.

D’oh!

I screeched and hooted in mean-spirited derision when this egregious faux pas was brought to my attention. Some enterprising and right-thinking fellow seized upon this error: comedic hijinks ensued.

The Force is strong in Murkwski’s implacable nemesis Gov. Sarah Palin. Inexplicable forces come to her aid. Her foes are confounded at every turn. Sand smites their eyes, stones stub their toes.

Gov. Palin will make her enemies her footstool. Cross her at your peril.

Or maybe Christine O’Donnell put a magical curse on Sen Murkwski, as a way of thanking Gov. Palin for her support?

Witchcraft as a Class Signifier

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shes-our-witch.gif

The people in the media who are trying to disqualify Christine O’Donnell for her witchcraft comments show as usual the insularity of their lives. They don’t know anything about millions of their fellow citizens except their own class-based bigotries.

Lots of people from a more blue collar or lower middle class persuasion are fans of heavy metal and various sub-genres which have all kinds of witchcraft and Satanic symbolism and lyrics. There has been black magic and witchcraft on the edge of the stoner scene and various parts of the music scene since the 1960s, and probably a lot farther back. A trippy girl with black fingernails and black lacy gloves at a party might tell you she was a witch. Wow. Cool.

Yeah, it’s weird. But it is not unheard of.

The smug people who run the mainstream media have lived their lives in a cocoon. I imagine them all spending their squeaky clean, college-focused, uptight, upper-middle-class teenage lives worrying about their SAT scores and living in terror of hurting their chances of getting into an Ivy.

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Murkowski’s OK, but O’Donnell is a Villainess?

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Let’s get this straight. Christine O’Donnell actually won her primary. But Karl Rove began actively campaigning for the Democrat in Delaware the day after O’Donnell won, when there was no other GOP candidate to back, when the voters had already decided, and blaming her for supposedly squandering a GOP Senate majority.

Lisa Murkowski lost her primary. Yet she is running as a write-in candidate, for no reason she can publicly justify. She is a spoiler who is likely to cause the loss of a GOP Senate seat.

Yet where is the full-throated assault on Lisa Murkowski by the GOP leadership?

You will never hear it. She has since then been reaching out to lobbyists and telling Alaskans that she will keep her committee positions, which means she is colluding with the GOP Senate leadership. They would prefer Murkowski, but they would rather have a Democrat than have Joe Miller.

The Combine wants to stop anyone who threatens the game.

UPDATE: A very knowledgeable friend admonished me, saying I was unfair to Karl Rove, and that he had not yet spoken about Murkowski, and would probably oppose her write-in campaign. This turned out to be correct. Even more, Rove has indeed spoken on it, and has called the Murkowski effort “sad and sorry,” and opposed it forcefully. OK. Credit where it is due on this one. Subotai, whose comment I previously quoted, and I both got it wrong about Rove re: Murkowski.

Let’s see how the GOP leadership handles the next few weeks. They do not have the trust of many people who should be their base. George Bush lost me with his second inaugural speech, in January 2005, which was totally detached from reality. But I did not project that onto the entire GOP. For all its (serious) defects, it was my party, if push came to shove. But in the last few months I have lost 47 years of thinking of the GOP as “us” and started thinking of it as “them.”

I hope that changes.

UPDATE II: Karl Rove should have said, “well, the voters have spoken, and the Republicans have a candidate and I support that candidate. This is an unusual election year, and people are very energized, and they decided to bet on a long shot, and do things the hard way. We’ll see how it works out. Ms. O’Donnell has a steep hill to climb, but I wish her well. I have worked on a few campaigns myself, and I would be happy to chat with her.”

How the Hell hard would that have been?