Sean Wilentz has a fascinating article in the Oct. 18 New Yorker on “the Tea Party’s Cold War Roots“:
… For the fractious Tea Party movement, Beck—a former drive-time radio jockey, a recovering alcoholic, and a Mormon convert—has emerged as both a unifying figure and an intellectual guide. One opinion poll, released in July by Democracy Corps, showed that he is “the most highly regarded individual among Tea Party supporters,” seen not merely as an entertainer, like Rush Limbaugh, but as an “educator.”…
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Beck himself often acts as a professor, a slightly jocular one, on his Fox News program. Surrounded by charts and figures, he offers explanations of current politics and history lessons about the country’s long march to Obama-era totalitarianism. The decline, he says, began with the Progressive era of the early twentieth century, in particular with the Presidency of Woodrow Wilson, when both the Federal Reserve System and the graduated federal income tax came into existence. “Wilson,” Beck told his radio audience in August, “just despised what America was.”
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Beck’s claims have found an audience among Tea Party spokesmen and sympathizers. At the movement’s Freedom Summit in Washington last September, one activist told a reporter, “The election between Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson in 1912 was when it started going downhill.” And in April an angry member of the Tea Party Patriots group from Cape Fear, North Carolina, claimed on the group’s Web site that “the very things you see happening in this country today started with the Wilson Administration.”
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At a Tax Day rally this past spring, the veteran conservative organizer Richard Viguerie described the Tea Party as “an unfettered new force of the middle class.” And, indeed, calling Obama a socialist in the tradition of Woodrow Wilson is audacious enough to seem like the marker of a new movement—or, at least, a new twist in the nation’s long history of conspiracy-mongering. In fact, it marks a revival of ideas that circulated on the extremist right half a century ago, especially in the John Birch Society and among its admirers.
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Beck’s version of American history relies on lessons from his own acknowledged inspiration, the late right-wing writer W. Cleon Skousen, and also restates charges made by the Birch Society’s founder, Robert Welch. The political universe is, of course, very different today from what it was during the Cold War. Yet the Birchers’ politics and their view of American history—which focussed more on totalitarian threats at home than on those posed by the Soviet Union and Communist China—has proved remarkably persistent. The pressing historical question is how extremist ideas held at bay for decades inside the Republican Party have exploded anew—and why, this time, Party leaders have done virtually nothing to challenge those ideas, and a great deal to abet them…
The whole article is well worth reading, as a capsule history of Republican paranoia and paranoia-enabling since the early 1960s, but what struck me first is how much of the current Tea Party “history” comes off as nostalgia for a past that never quite existed. The people most prominent at Teabagger rallies — white people over 50, many of them suffering from degenerative afflictions common among geriatrics — were children and adolescents in the early 1960s, when a suspiciously non-Protestant young celebrity-Democrat “stole” the presidency from a certified anti-Communist and proud Paranoid-American Republican. Even the myth-tinged assassination of that elitist internationalist failed to return the Presidency to the Birchers’ favorite Goldwater (“In your heart you know he’s right”) who was cheated of his rightful position by an oversexed Negro-loving professional politician who didn’t have the guts to bomb some little gook nation into submission. “We”, the Americans who write the history textbooks, like to tell each other that the Civil Rights Era (as we insist on calling it) was a progressive triumph for the whole globe… but there are a lot of our fellow Americans who think of the last 50 years as the end of Real America(tm), a golden place where any white Protestant male could grow up to be President, or at least master of his own Levittown domain, complete with stay-at-home wife and 2.5 compliant offspring. It’s hard enough not to conflate a personal “rage against the dying of the light” as age and illness encroach, without the continual media messaging that dark forces are determined to steal, denigrate, destroy all that was once good and golden in one’s youth…
When I first came into science-fiction fandom, in the late 1960s, there was a considerable resentment among the fannish establishment (whose members would, and did, indignantly reject the very idea) against us untested, unworthy “media fans” polluting the purity of Trufandom with our faddish dystopias, destroying the golden comity of All-Smart-White-Men-Are-Brothers slan-dom with our mean-spirited chatter about ‘racism’ and ‘sexism’ and ‘homophobia’. Of course the influx of new people and new experiences into the SF ghetto is exactly what led to our modern pop-cult utopia, where science fiction, fantasy, and even graphic novels are a respectable part of even the most stolid American’s media diet… but what I remember as the end of the fannish “backlash” was the emergence of Star Wars as an antidote to “postmodern” SF and a return to the nostalgic space-opera tropes. Glenn Beck’s “Woodrow Wilson Was the Great Beast” pseudo-history reads, to me, like a civics-class version of Star Wars on a rather wider scale. The problem is, while the anti-Star-Trek fans affected nothing outside the social activities of maybe a few thousand nerd hobbyists, Beck’s enablers and supporters are playing fantasy games with a much wider real-world audience.
MikeJ
Check out Edroso discussing the Doughy Pantload’s recent dribblings on Wilson.
Brachiator
I can’t take Sean Wilentz seriously anymore. He sold his soul to attack Obama during the primaries, and fancied himself to be in the running to become a Wise Counsellor in a Hillary Clinton Administration.
Yutsano
The most glaring example, of course, being Uhura. Here was not only a black woman but an actual African being treated as an equal to all the other white faces on the Enterprise. In 1965. Not a lot of folks remember, but this did cause an uproar that NBC somehow managed to quell. Then Roddenberry rubbed the salt in the wound when he had a clone of Abraham Lincoln use an antiquated term for an African-American female and she chides him for it. It’s no wonder Glenn would much prefer Star Wars.
RRogers
Very perceptive summation. The singular good fortune of this country coming out of WW2 was taken by the conservative portion of the Boomers for granted–Am. Exceptionalism as just the way things SHOULD be. The Boomer Left understood how em, peculiar our ahistorical good fortune was. Not this crowd–SPOILED from the get-go and still whining.
wag
I disagree. The whole Star Wars thing, in my opinion, was a band of (multi-species) brothers fighting against the oppressive fascists. The saga is a screen upon which anyone can project themselves. Glenn Beck may see himself as a Jedi, fighting the oppressive Emperor Obama, but I can disagree, and instead project Beck in my universe as a propagandist of the Galactic Trade Federation.
True, the whole Star Wars franchise lacks the bitterness and crumbling beauty of, say, Blade Runner, but a diet of nothing but dystopian worlds clouds the mind every bit as much as a diet that consists of Star Wars cotton candy. One needs a balance of both the grit of dystopia and the fluff of Star Wars to maintain the balance in life.
Brachiator
@Yutsano:
Star Trek debuted in 1966 and always had to fight more against struggling ratings and attempts by NBC to kill it off than it had to deal with uproar over its characters. There was as much of an uproar over the “devilish” Mr. Spock as there was about an egalitarian Enterprise.
And the supposed opposition between Star Trek and Star Wars fans has always been nutty and overblown.
MTmofo
What you said. Thank you.
mclaren
So Ronald Reagan is Jabba the Hut, Karl Rove is Boba Fett, and Duyba is Sarlacc….?
The whole thing sounds like The New Chronology.
AKA The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, The Emerald Tablets of Thoth the Atlantean, The Third Eye by T. Lobsang Rampa (AKA a plumber from Hoboken who made up a bunch of shit), The Urantia Book, Dianetics: The Science of the Mind, and A Herald for the Space Brothers by George Adamski.
I liked this kind of wacko gibberish a lot more when it was straight-up nutso delusion without any pretence of having some connection with reality, as in the case of Other Tongues, Other Flesh – The startling sequel to “The Saucers Speak!” by George Hunt Williamson.
piratedan
well I always considered Star Wars to be an updated homage of the old Flash Gordon serials, with a bit more derring do and the evil being a bit more sinister. I agree with Wag that the original vision was multi species, working for a common good (the Old Republic) that was taken down by the manipulation of fear merchants (strange parallels eh?). SF has always had it’s Space Opera and military genre writers, but much like anything else, they’re all across the spectrum in regards to their politics so I’m loathe to try and pigeonhole them, many of them write from a POV that they don’t actually hold (a rare gift) because of how they tell the story through their characters.
As for Beck and his ilk about how they are going about “rewriting” history or reinterpreting it, that is the scariest part of all of this in my opinion. They are marching in lockstep with the charter school and home school crowd who very much wish to control the information flow, thereby raising a whole new generation of wingnuts for us to deal with. Having to deal with notions like the American Revolution was staged by Conservatives and that the Constitution is a static document and that creationism belongs in the same breath as evolution as a viable concept explaining our prescence on the plnet today.
Mark S.
@MikeJ:
I doubt anyone will believe me, but I remember when Jonah wasn’t so bone-crushingly stupid. He wasn’t really smart, but you could at least read him without pausing after every other sentence and saying “That’s really pretty stupid.” He really got a billion times dumber after writing that book. Has he ever written another one, or is he the wingnut version of Harper Lee?
And when did conservatives start hating the fricking Fed? If you’re a follower of Milton Friedman, don’t you need a fucking central bank to control the money supply? As much as I’m not a fan of the Chicago school, I’ll take it over Beckonomics.
NobodySpecial
@wag: Agreed. The bad guys were all-white, everyone dressing and acting the same, mindless authoritarians with the big war machine who didn’t care about little people – the very definition of Republicans in the era of Reagan.
Although I do have to give Anne Laurie props for ‘slan-ism’. I still own my copy of Slan, although it reads a lot different now than it did when I was 14.
geg6
Well, I’m not a big sci-fi fan, but the big exception for me has always been Star Trek. As a child, I got hooked when my oldest brother would secretly let me watch it by letting me keep my bedroom door open (with a clear view to the living room tv) when he was babysitting me and my younger sister while mom attended college night classes and dad worked second shift at the steel mill. Star Wars came out when I had just graduated high school and I eagerly went to the theater hoping for the same experience. To my disappointment, I found a special effects masterpiece with a rather pedestrian Western script and major daddy issues. I enjoyed the first three installments, but never made it through the first half of Episode I and skipped the last two completely. Star Trek is still the only sci-fi I truly love, in all its iterations. To me, it seemed that Gene Roddenberry was a story teller who explored the human condition and attempted to teach us about ourselves while George Lucas is a stone cold technician with little feeling for the humanity of his characters and no lessons to impart. Soulless versus compassion.
It makes sense to me that an old DFH like me whose formative years were the 60s and whose first true love for tv was shaped by the original Star Trek would still be an old school liberal who cannot abide the sad political turn our country has taken and sees both the right, with its insane and cruel goals, and the left, with its rigid ideologies and lack understanding of human behavior, as barriers to any achievements, however incremental, that would improve the lives if us all. If that seems a reach and to be giving too much import to a tv show, well, we all have our inspirations and I am not embarrassed by mine.
Xenos
I really miss Octavia Butler. She foresaw us heading down this road, and she was just starting to intuit a way out.
Shalimar
What struck me is that “The Decline” according to Beck corresponds very closely with the period when the US rose to become the dominant world power. So, the more powerful we got, the more these idiots perceived weakness. It’s like a mirror history to reality.
aimai
I agree with most of the other comments on this thread, and I want to compliment Annie Laurie for such a perceptive linking of things. Ignore Brachiator, he’s just incredibly cranky and determined to find fault.
To my mind there’s no doubt that Star Trek was a forward thinking, Kennedyesque (romanticization of Kennedyesque), post civil rights take on what the future could be–it was filled with warnings about what could have gone wrong and prevented the rise of the enlightened federation and spent a ton of time on the idea that race conflict was foolish and destructive, that passion and reason needed to be balanced, that jingoism was folly. The kiss between Uhura and the Captain was a huge scandal at the time. The show had its flaws but contrast it to then popular westerns (except The Big Valley and, for different reason, the Kwai Chan Caine thing) it was a utopian, liberal, forward looking version of the future after humanity has cleaned up its act.
Star Wars was an entirely different kettle of fish. The first three (which are the only ones I could stomach) are straight up fairy tales about the lost heir regaining power in a fragmented and uncontrollable empire. There’s no restoration of order, and the order (once restored) would be essentially genetic, hereditary, and monarchical. Its retro in every sense of the word except that its set in the future.
aimai
kommrade reproductive vigor
There always have been and there always will be, because there will always be WATBs amongst us.
Hell, I’m sure that 50 years after the American Revolution dudes sat around grumbling that things have gone to shit since we threw off British rule.
John S.
@brachiator:
I’m of a similar frame of mind. Wilentz completely humiliated himself in his genuflecting of Hillary Clinton, and for a while I thought he may be writing at Hillaryis44 under a pseudonym.
That said, this article is pretty good, although I still brace for the Peter Daou-like gratuitous swipe at Obama whenever I read his stuff.
WereBear
It’s a trick of our organic nature that the brain filters our experience in certain patterns.
Every single civilization hearkens back to a Golden Age that was not nearly so obvious to those living in it; and it seems people do it in microcosm, too.
I remember reading that during Abraham Lincoln’s growing up years, the country was in despair that the “fire of revolution” had burned out, people weren’t as involved in politics as they used to be, and the time for a man to stand up for what he believed in was long past and would never come again.
Same as it ever was.
GeorgeSalt
I’m a big Star Trek fan. I enjoyed all the television franchises expect for “Voyager.” The original series was a bit Utopian, but later franchises such as “Deep Space 9” and “Enterprise” attempted to correct that by delving into the darker side of the Federation.
I enjoyed “Enterprise” because it knocked the Vulcans off the pedestal that the original series elevated them to. The Vulcans of the “Enterprise” era are deliciously duplicitous and deceitful. I liked “Deep Space 9” although at times it veered away from sci-fi and into the realm of space opera and fantasy. For some reason I never connected with “Voyager.”
I never regarded Star Wars as sci-fi; I always saw it as space opera, albeit with great special effects (for its time).
WereBear
I adore Star Trek.
Perhaps one had to live through that time to realize just how unusual a show it was. When xenophobia, racism, and sexism was both decried and dismissed, it modeled a picture of what the world could be like if we all just got along.
This was brought home to me in a very particular way; I had to sneak my viewing of it during the times I lived with my grandparents, because its themes and presentation made them froth at the mouth with inchoate rage. I now know it was because it was bending their brains into new shapes; as I gladly let it bend my own.
As my grandmother put it, “That show isn’t real. You should watch something real, like Gunsmoke.”
Alwhite
Funny but I hate Wilson too. I hate that he issued the order that segregated the Army, that he ordered all Blacks removed from Federal jobs and in many ways encouraged the atmosphere that gave rise to the KKK and lynching. Then there was his meddling in Central America & the Caribbean. He sent the Marines to Haiti to over throw the elected government, return land to the wealthy, white, landowners which returned the poor to their status as quasi-slaves.
And yet I bet none of the teabaggers would see much of a problem with all that – if GB ever mentioned it.
Daniel X
I may have said this previously, but…..what the bulk of tea partiers want is to return to the good old days when white men ran everything and could expect decent paying jobs to fall into their laps, and in which women, children, blacks, and everyone else who wasn’t a white adult male knew their place and by god kept to it….or else. Oddly enough, the period included the highest marginal tax rates ever imposed, highest level of union membership, and highest percentage of manufacturing jobs the country has ever known.
When I say “the bulk”, I’m not including that smaller subset who would also like to return to the good old days…of say, 1400 AD.
schrodinger's cat
Another Star Trek fan here. TOS was before my time. I liked both the TNG and DS9 thought Voyager was so so and could never get into Enterprise. TNG seems a bit naive now but the themes explored in DS9, war, paranoia, terrorism seem so topical today. As for Star Wars I could never really get into it and I agree with the person that said it is more like a western but set in the future.
Steve
I was going to say, “Hey, nice to see Sean Wilentz is allowed to come out in public now,” but sure enough, I see comments that are still reliving the presidential primaries. Hey guys, make sure you oppose Andrew Cuomo for governor of New York too, never lay a primary grudge down!
El Cid
Scientology was also a return to space opera. Xenu lives!
Linda Featheringill
I have been amused by the TeaParty fascination with Wilson. After all, he has been dead and gone for a long time.
One could say that he ushered the 20th Century in. Maybe they don’t like the 20th Century. By and large, the 20th Century was a bitch. No doubt about it. There was plenty to disapprove of. I can see why folks would not like to go back to that.
So where do the TeaParty folks and their magic time machine want to go? The 19th Century? Cheez! Have these guys studied 19th Century US? Don’t want to go there. No thank you.
That brings us back to the 18th Century, shrouded in a romantic fog, populated with the Founding Fathers and other Noble Folk. Yeah, right. Self-serving jerks they were.
On the other hand, the time machine is not such a bad idea. We could ship these guys off to whatever time in the past they want. Away from us.
Good idea.
El Cid
Wilentz in his summary (it’s been made plenty of times before recently) of the direct heritage of the crazy TeaTards with the crazy Bircher paranoids doesn’t connect the tradition with the Liberty League created by the super-wealthy to hire anti-Commie nuts to scream hysterically about the New Deal, but I would.
Unfortunately, there will be no quick improvement in our economy as there could be no New Deal nor no huge upscaling of the New Deal type stimulus justified by WWII, so the TeaTards won’t be going away soon.
GeorgeSalt
Speaking of Xenu, I’ve been watching the SciFy channel series “Caprica” and it seems to be based on some of L. Ron Hubbard’s themes.
“Caprica” is strange story that occurs on another world that is approximately at the same level of development as our own, although the wardrobes seems retro, circa mid-1960s. This seems to gibe with some of Hubbard’s musings. From Wikipedia:
The world of Caprica seems very similar to this.
aimai
@GeorgeSalt:
I’d put the clothes at more mid fifties–especially the hats–I think by the mid sixties the hat had largely disappeared.
I like Caprica, not as much as I liked BSG but quite a bit.
aimai
El Cid
@GeorgeSalt: Battlestar Galactica was likely based on the space mythology of Mormonism, as its creator was a faithful Mormon.
different church-lady
Because a black guy is president.
Because they’re spineless Quislings who think they can rule the village after the beast had destroyed it.
Well, ain’t that the problem? You made their tree house non-exclusive.
kth
Kevin Drum has an article (a real article, not just a blog item) in Mother Jones that covers much of the same ground. Pithier title, though: Old Whine, New Bottles.
rm
@Linda Featheringill: On the other hand, the time machine is not such a bad idea. We could ship these guys off to whatever time in the past they want. Away from us.
Good idea.
Um, do you remember Back to the Future II? They’d go back there and change history, and we’d wake up tomorrow in a racist dystopia ruled by King John Birch VIII.
Or . . . has it already happened?!?! Can it be a coincidence that the same paranoid style keeps popping up again and again in American history? Maybe because it’s the same people!!!!
———————————-
In response to the comment on Octavia Butler, yes indeed. I feel like there’s just a little way to go before we’re living Parable of the Sower.
no_absolutes
Awesome.
Most notably, it’s really telling how easy it is to recognize that the Tea Party protesters are just a small minority living in a deeply flawed media-driven fantasy world. They love feeling like they’re persecuted and righteous, but when you expose their flights of fancy to the light of day it’s just a sad reminder that they’re playing out a narrative only slightly more interesting than the real world we live in. The country (especially the national media) is designed to suit every need of their privileged, insulated white supremacist egos. They’re just a bunch of utopians who fear change. So, every time you introduce a new element to the fantasy, you can hear them whining, “Make it back!”
Hawes
I got into a raging argument with a teatard at a farmer’s stand around Labor Day. He was haranguing the poor girl who worked there about how evolution was a crock. My wife jumped in, then I jumped in to keep her from slugging him.
He asked what I did finally – after boasting of his years working at Yale Medical School – and I said I taught US History.
His first question was whether I thought Woodrow Wilson was a Progressive. Knowing a fair amount about Wilson, I answered that Wilson was a reluctant Progressive. He erupted and his wife dragged him out of there before we could get anywhere substantively.
But I always wondered why he asked about Woodrow Wilson of all people. That was such a strange point of attack. The religion of the Founders would have made sense, or Lyndon Johnson or Jimmy Carter. But Wilson?
Now I finally know why. But because I labelled the temperamentally conservative Wilson a reluctant Progressive (especially compared to people like LaFollette or even Teddy Roosevelt in 1912) I never got to hear the Bircher perspective on Woodrow Wilson.
And yeah, he was an old white dude.
John S.
@Steve:
Apparently, you didn’t bother to read one of those two comments. Reading comprehension is your friend.
different church-lady
@Hawes: A few months ago I started assuming that when I was talking or listening to someone who, on the surface, seemed to be a conservative, but was making far less sense than usual, what I was actually witnessing was a Bircher.
GeorgeSalt
@different church-lady:
I’m amazed at how the Birchers seem to be crawling out of the woodwork these days. I’m beginning to believe that wingnuttery is endemic to these shores and always manages to infect 20-30% of the population at any given time.
phein
For a very enlightening, and nauseating, view of the birth of the current version of the reactionary right, circa 1944 – 1952, see David Halberstam’s last book, “The Coldest Winter.” It’s about the Korean War in full: Not just MacArthur’s grotesque insubordination and incompetence, but the political environment in the US that made it possible. You will see all the kinds of reactionary teatardism that we’ve experienced in the last few years in full blossom in the aftermath of WW II, including the fear-mongering and divisiveness that seemingly came from every Republican quarter.
In one way, it’s nice to get the perspective of time, but in another, it’s bone-wearying to realize that these bastards have been always with us.
Bill Murray
@Linda Featheringill: I don’t know why the Tea Partiers don’t like Wilson. Nobody cracked down on the sozhulists and commies like Wilson’s administration. Hating dark skinned people became OK in polite society again. Historians decided reconstruction was bad.
Oh wait I forgot, the only thing that matters is income tax
Steve
@John S.: Which one is the comment that is not still reliving the primaries? Was it the comment that said “I can’t take Sean Wilentz seriously anymore. He sold his soul to attack Obama during the primaries” or the one that said “I still brace for the Peter Daou-like gratuitous swipe at Obama whenever I read his stuff”?
sneezy
@Mark S.:
“[Goldberg] really got a billion times dumber after writing that book.”
I doubt that very much. He may well say dumber things than he once did, but that’s because the book sold pretty well and he figures he’ll stick with what pays.
Seriously, when I read people like him, or hear people like the fox “news” crew, I don’t assume that what they say bears any particular relationship to what they think. It’s all just bullshit, stuff they say because they’ve been successful with it. They couldn’t care less whether it’s true or whether it even makes sense.
bjacques
Teabaggers fixating on President Wilson is like Randroids hating Immanuel Kant. In both cases, their gurus told them to do it, so they do it, without really understanding why.