Re: “The Tea Partiers vs. ‘progressive’ leftists and statists,” Feb. 18 Mike Rosen column.
The peculiar rise of the tea party movement and its intense distrust of America’s major political and economic institutions have gotten a great deal of ink in the nation’s leading newspapers and magazines.
Recently, Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne wrote a column where he observed that progressives have a hard time understanding the ferocity for which the tea party movement has come to oppose President Obama, especially considering the fact that Obama’s governance hasn’t been particularly liberal. He certainly isn’t the radical socialist tea partiers seem to assume as almost an article of faith.
In response, talk radio’s Mike Rosen wrote a surprisingly vitriolic column in the Denver Post attacking Dionne for being afflicted with “Tea Party Derangement Syndrome.” According to Rosen, Dionne belongs to the “delusional left” and accuses him of reducing the rise of the tea parties to inveterate “racism and anti-statism.”
He contends that Dionne assigns “seditious and mean-spirited” motives to tea partiers rather than believing they may actually be motivated by principle. Rosen then argues that Dionne dismisses anti-statism by “narrowly associating it to the anti-federalists who opposed the Constitution.”
Further, Rosen uses his critique of Dionne to launch a broader indictment of other “delusional liberals” in the mainstream media, namely Jon Meacham of Newsweek magazine. He chides Meacham for making the same observation about Obama’s centrist governing style during his first year in office because in his mind Obama is the most radical – he uses the term liberal but I am not sure he sees a distinction-president in American history. He cites Meacham as saying “we are all socialists now” and that Obama’s political philosophy is “right of center,” adding sarcastically that someone “has to be pretty far left to place Obama on the right.”
The problem is that Meacham never made these statements, at least not in the context that Rosen suggests. What Meacham said in the February 1 issue of Newsweek was that Obama campaigned on essentially “a center-right cultural platform,” which is not a judgment on Meacham’s part, but empirically beyond dispute.
Obama opposed gay-marriage, favored gun-rights, supported federal funding for religious charities, was critical of race-based affirmative action, and conceded that the welfare state had contributed to the erosion of the black family. Although he may not win the endorsement of groups like Focus on the Family or the Mike Rosen fan club, this platform was anything but liberal.
Moreover, in his article, “We Are All Socialists Now,” Meacham’s analysis is again beyond reproach – just ask conservative columnist George Will, who made the very same point in his November 2008 column titled, “‘Socialism’? It’s already here.” Both men argue that the U.S. political-economic system already looks a lot like European social democracies, and its transformation preceded the Obama presidency.
It was George W. Bush, a self-proclaimed conservative Republican, who essentially nationalized the mortgage industry and pushed through the $700 billion Wall Street bailout. It was also under the Bush administration that the auto industry got its first government bailouts and the too-big-to-fail rationale for increased government intervention in the private sector became part of the new Washington consensus.
Since coming into office, Obama’s governance has been surprisingly moderate. He escalated the war in Afghanistan based on an Iraq style surge/counter-insurgency plan; he continued Bush’s federal funding of religious charities, and expanded the rights of gun owners; and he has kept intact the bulk of his predecessor’s domestic surveillance program. Almost one-third of his stimulus package was made up of tax-cuts while another third comprised infrastructure projects, both of which are essentially Republican ideas.
Even on health care, his plan falls far short of what most liberals wanted – i.e. single-payer or, barring that, a public option. In fact, Obama’s plan is based on principles that are shockingly similar to principles outlined by President Richard Nixon in February of 1974. Finally, the method by which Obama has continued with the bailout of Wall Street suggests that he is not trying to subvert capitalism so much as save it.
As for Dionne, a close reading of his article reveals that he even attempts to minimize the role of both racism and nativism within the movement. No doubt, nativism and racism do exist at the fringes of the tea party movement, a point made not only by Dionne in his article when he noted Tom Tancredo’s inflammatory speech at the Tea Party Convention, but it is also made by Fox News” Bill O’Reilly, also in reference to Tancredo’s speech, in his interview with Sarah Palin last week. Yet, according to Dionne, these things are secondary to – and not as widespread as – the deeply rooted anti-statist impulse that ties the tea party movement together.
Dionne does not dismiss anti-statism; in judging the legitimacy of anti-statism as an ideology, he is decidedly silent. Instead, he identifies it as a powerful and reoccurring impulse in American political discourse reaching back to the anti-federalists of the 18th century.
In making this connection, Dionne isn’t arguing that the tea party movement lacks principle or is seditious and mean-spirited. To the contrary, Dionne’s contention is that distrust of Obama – and by extension Washington – is a matter of principle. That’s why, Dionne writes, “understanding the principled anti-government radicalism that animates this movement explains why its partisans see the conservative Bush as a sellout and the cautiously liberal Obama as a socialist.” It also suggests that even though fears of Obama have tethered the tea party movement to the GOP, Republicans will one day feel their wrath again.
By ignoring these realities, Rosen offers only a haphazard analysis that lacks nuance, truncates and cherry picks quotes, and fails to honestly engage with either Meacham or Dionne. All this leads me to question whether Rosen has fallen victim to his own derangement syndrome?
Ryan Dawkins of Fort Collins blogs at . EDITOR’S NOTE: This is an online-only column and has not been edited.
