The Tribal Party
David Roberts writes:
Tonight was a full-throated reversion back to what has become the default posture for the right: resentment, tribalism, nationalism, and fear. After Carly Fiorina’s bland and widely ignored remarks, the rest of the night was pure red meat. I was somewhat surprised — I thought they’d use Palin as a hook to bring in mild-mannered soccer moms, but her speech was just as hyperpartisan as the rest. Instead of taking her appeal to the center, they are using her to elevate the culture wars.
First,
I thought they’d use Palin as a hook to bring in mild-mannered soccer moms
One assumes that was the initial hope, but of course the news cycle complicated matters. I’m struck by this notion that there is only one side in the culture wars — or rather that only one side ever makes any transgressions, while the other side is saintly and invincibly innocent.
After Carly Fiorina’s bland and widely ignored remarks, the rest of the night was pure red meat.
Surely this is an enduring feature of American politics, richly on display during the DNC as well. But of course the politics of moral superiority plays a different, complicated role in both political parties. There certainly is a kind of social conservatives who embraces a stance of moral superiority — one rooted in rigorous adherence to traditional values, old-time religion, and that opens one up to a charge of hypocrisy. That’s a difficult stance for, say, Rudy Giuliani to embrace, and for the most part he doesn’t — his red meat comes from a different place.
The left has its own politics of moral superiority — of superior virtue, of a more broad-minded, more tolerant view of the world. Roberts invoked tribalism. And of course the opposite of tribalism is cosmopolitanism: the politics of no-place. This cosmopolitanism is a source of moral superiority. However, this cosmopolitanism can never be referred to by name — that is an ugly nationalist smear, yet another sign of the tribal right’s self-evident moral inferiority.
The politics of fear is real and it is potent. Sometimes fear is deployed against agents of economic change as well as low-wage workers struggling to get a foothold on the ladder of prosperity — people in places like my parents’ home country, Bangladesh. Sometimes the politics of fear involves invoking the threat posed by Al Qaeda terrorists. I think it is possible to exaggerate the danger posed by Al Qaeda, but surely it is also possible to exaggerate the danger posed by flourishing economies in Asia.
In fairness, Republicans are often invoking the danger posed by a liberal foreign policy — one based on a model of a world defined not by competition, but by cooperation, in which terrorist threats are more likely to recede in a more just, equitable world. There are aspects of this vision that are attractive. But you’ll be shocked to learn that conservatives also find this worldview a little naive, particularly as it regards a handful of states that don’t share our normative commitments. This seems like a pretty fair, reasonable argument to have, and it makes sense that it would be heated — the stakes are high.
Fear is also invoked on the subject of the climate emergency. But ah, you object: the climate emergency is real! Fear is appropriate. And I think that’s right. Surely, though, you can acknowledge that some believe that there are also urgent threats to our national security?
Moreover, given the threat posed by methane emissions buried in the Siberian permafrost, and given that the Kyoto Protocol was essentially devised by Gore and Chernomyrdin to serve as a massive transfer of wealth to the Russian state, it is at least plausible to argue that conventional solutions offered for the climate crisis are likely to be of limited utility, and extremely costly nonetheless.
As for resentment, well, I’m an extremely fortunate person: I have two parents, I have two sisters, I have modest expenses, and while I have professional responsibilities, I don’t have many personal ones. But yes, I resent the contempt that has been directed against Sarah Palin, I resent the deliberate misrepresentation of John McCain’s record, and I think I’m not alone in either regard. I imagine many people inclined to like Barack Obama feel a little resentful as well about what they see as misrepresentations of his past association with Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, Tony Rezko, and other figures. And I think Democrats are fully capable of deploying that resentment to great political effect — Chris Hayes wrote a wonderful essay on the subject, referring to MoveOn’s appeal to today’s silent majority of the left — a group that, incidentally, I take to be a metaphorical majority in the manner of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority:
Though its politics are in many ways the opposite of the Nixon silent majority’s, they share a disposition. They are people not inclined to protest but whose rising unease with the direction of the country has led to a new political consciousness. For citizens angered, upset and disappointed with their government but unsure how to channel those sentiments, MoveOn provides simple, discrete actions: sign this petition, donate money to run this ad, show up at this vigil.
Anger is a powerful force in political life. A unifying grievance, as Jon Henke calls it, has motored the spectacular rise of the Democrats — the war in Iraq — and unifying grievances have also mobilized the political right. “But grievances mobilize the right more!” I’m not so sure. Really, though: isn’t it a silly conversation?
My politics of moral superiority is right. You are a rootless cosmopolitan who doesn’t put country first, and your moral fecklessness will send us all to hell. What do you expect us to do — defend out country with spitbaaaaaaaaaaalls?
No, mine is. You are a mean, nasty nationalist-tribalist, while I am an enlightened citizen of the world. How dare you call me a cosmopolitan! I am also a pork-rind-chewing populist. Except I hate pork-rinds, as evidenced by my visible distaste.
The Democrats have more esprit de corps this year. They are the happy warriors. The pendulum will swing. But let’s lay off on the “You’re resentful! I hate you with a virulent passion and will now stab you in the heart!” “No, you’re resentful! I will tear you limb from limb with my bare hands.” It’s unedifying.
I just want to stop by and say what a wonderful place TAS is and what great conversations are born here. This post is a rant but it’s also an incredibly thoughtful exhortation to listen to our better instincts.
Look. I’m concerned, because when I look at left wing takes on Sarah Palin I roll my eyes and stop reading and when I see right wing takes on her I am pumping my fist and going “Yeah, yeah!” I’m concerned because this makes me question my own objectivity. I really wonder.
But at the same time I can’t help but believe that there is a double standard at play here. I do believe largely the attacks on Palin are vicious, unjustified, and beyond the pale of decency and certainly anything that the authors of the same attacks would have tolerated against, say, Barack Obama. And what worries me most is that these commentators are not cynical Rovian figures out to destroy Sarah Palin — that’s their natural reaction, and they feel that they’re being, to coin a phrase, fair and balanced! (Which in turn makes me wonder how I can think these people are so off track when they think they’re being so objective.) If “swiftboating” has become a shorthand for political smears on a person’s character and record then I guess we need a new word to describe the gutter behavior of the bobo riot that has suddenly erupted around us.
And yet I’m as guilty as anyone of tribal politics. I almost act as if I know Sarah Palin and think she’s going to be the next Reagan when, really, I can’t tell. But I do believe she represents something important.
I don’t want TAS to become yet another right-wing echo chamber. But at the same time I’m happy when TAS bloggers provide snarky takedowns of ridiculous takes on her. Sigh. I’m not sure what my point is. But I certainly understand why Ross won’t blog more about her.
— PEG · Sep 4, 06:09 PM · #
It’s not obvious to me that Palin isn’t still a hook to soccer moms — Chrystia Freeland wrote a column in yesterday’s FT [*] arguing that she is, essentially on the, if you attack her she damn well will be, line that you and Ross Douthat have implied. Granted Freeland can get a little — breathless? — but still.
You’re getting indirectly at one of the weirdest things in the contemporary Democratic party (not the same as “liberals”), this weird well-traveled cosmopolitanism with a nasty dislike of the globalization that, well, is bringing life and hope to a lot of the world. But I don’t think it’s endemic or deep in the hearts of those “elites.” There was a time before people like Kos and Howrd Dean made the DLC into villains, when Bill Clinton embraced globalization and figured out how to couch its virtues in ways their constituencies would buy, when Al Gore went and smacked down Ross Perot in defence of globalization. People like me grew up politically in the late ’80’s and early ’90’s when magazines like TNR were bursting with new policy ideas and Clinton, McCurdy (whatever happened to that dude?), Vilsack and Babbitt (him, too) were opening new possibilities for liberalism. So I tend to feel in the end like the American left can shed some of its backwardness yet, whereas the American right is, well, trapped from birth.
[*] We get a little over two dozen magazines — not that I’m such an omnivore, I’m married, plus I sometimes do long business travel so it’s nice being able to reroute subsciptions — and a couple newspapers, but where I live I can only get the newspaper in the mail. That means, I get today’s paper at best when I go home from work, and sometimes not for a couple days. You’d think that that sucks in the Internet age. Au contraire, it rocks. I’m thinking in the future if the situation changes I’ll put the papers under the dorrmat for a day or two — let ‘em age — and read the FT and the Post a couple days late.
— Sanjay · Sep 4, 06:22 PM · #
The pendulum will swing. But let’s lay off on the “You’re resentful! I hate you with a virulent passion and will now stab you in the heart!” “No, you’re resentful! I will tear you limb from limb with my bare hands.” It’s unedifying.
This is true! The only little problem is, in order for you to talk about it, you’re sort of playing at it yourself… as we all are. You can’t stand outside of partisanship to talk about unhelpful or fraudulent discussions of partisanship. That’s partly the problem with this kind of discourse; it becomes this all-eating, all-assimilating amoeba that draws even discussions about right notions of process into it’s maw. It’s kind of like the Borg. The only way to play fairly becomes to not play at all, and well, we care about this stuff. It’s important. The stakes are high.
I think I’ve hit on the major problem with all this mess, which fundamentally is two questions, one broad and one narrow: to what degree is it legitimate and edifying to talk about the excesses of liberal/conservative bloggers as a generalization; and to what degree are the individual candidates responsible for the arguments made by the bloggers who support them. I’m of the mind that Obama is being unfairly taken to task for some of the nasty things that liberal bloggers say, in a way that McCain is not for the nasty things that conservative bloggers say. But then again, I support Obama, and good lord, I’m biased! Down to my liberal core. That’s a caveat I want attached to every comment I make; never let it be said that I’m some neutral monk meditating on a mountain somewhere….
— Freddie · Sep 4, 06:25 PM · #
You’ve conflated two very different things in your discussion of resentment. In the Chris Hayes quote, he appears to be talking about anger over the Iraq war. This isn’t properly resentment: they really think the war was a bad thing. Resentment would be anger at the way Republicans treat war-opponents.
Resentment over the perceived unfairness of attacks on Obama is an absolutely terrible reason to vote for him, and I doubt that it’s much of a motivator for many. Resentment from people who identify with Palin over the contempt directed at her (presumably by elements outside the Obama campaign, no?) is just not a good reason to vote for her ticket.
I can respect anger at cosmopolitanism, especially if that anger is based on an account of why cosmopolitanism is a bad idea. But this is not the same thing as resentment of cosmopolitans because they might think they’re better than me.
— matt · Sep 4, 06:34 PM · #
Reihan,
I want to defend nastiness and resentment a bit – on both sides. The extremes here are so far apart at this point that I’d argue that nastiness and resentment are entirely appropriate reactions. Me? I don’t want reconciliation and understanding with the hard right social conservatives. I want them marginalized, politically and culturally.
Now, I realize that you find this position appalling (and I think you genuinely do, with regard to people on both sides who feel this way). But Freddie’s comment, perhaps unintentionally, raises an uncomfortable dilemma for you. There are many, many people on the cultural right who want to marginalize me & people like me as much as I want to marginalize them. You aren’t one of those people, but you make common cause with them on a daily basis. Do you worry about that sometimes? If not, why not?
— LarryM · Sep 4, 06:35 PM · #
Sure, throw some resentment in your speech, whatever. But put some substance too! These are the only things she said about the issues (besides a few drive-by one-sentence swipes at Obama on foreign policy):
1.) Drill, drill, drill
2.) A series of lies about Obama’s tax plan
3.) Cut wasteful spending (with a bonus lie about how she told Congress she didn’t want the bridge to nowhere)
Is this all the substance one needs to get conservatives loving you? I was absolutely astonished that she said nothing else substantive about the economy. The speeches at the Dem Convention were very carefully designed to appeal to swing voters, and these GOP speeches seem to say nothing to them except that Obama is bad. Like Mike Murphy said, “it’s not going to work.” But even as a speech designed to appeal to conservatives — what, exactly, was there of substance that made everyone love it so much?
— JimmyM · Sep 4, 06:52 PM · #
Larry, I’ll steal your question to Reihan for myself, and say that there are plenty on the left who would love to marginalize the likes of me, tolerant rightist that I am. I don’t worry about making common cause with right-wing marginalizers for the same reason I expect you don’t mind making common cause with their left-wing analogues: Because we care about the issues, dammit. Who cares if the people who agree with us are distasteful, if we are still in the right?
Of course, if people are being jerks, we should call them on it. But jerks know no ideology.
— Blar · Sep 4, 07:06 PM · #
Blar,
Fair enough, but I have a tough time squaring this comment to your full throated defense of the Palin speech a couple threads below. I think we can agree that Palin went well beyond “calling” out the people who were being jerks, and well into the more intolerant type of cultural warfare.
— LarryM · Sep 4, 07:45 PM · #
I for one do take issue when people on the left are assholes, even when they agree with my position and their assholeness brings light to important issues.
Primarily this is because offensive comments when paired with legitimate issues completely drown out the legitimacy of the issues. For example, if people talk about Palin’s support of the BTN but also mention that there are unanswered questions about her youngest child (I personally think this is offensive and stupid) nobody is going to think twice about the BTN. The McCain camp, and assorted bloggers, can justifiably scream about how unfair everyone is being towards Palin and how the questions being asked of her are ludicrous. The McCain camp especially in the past few days has seized on a few offensive questions to delegitimize all attacks against Palin.
Im sure this happens on the left too, people on the right claiming that the left was saying all attacks against Obama were racially motivated comes to mind, but I have a much harder time seeing it. Mostly because the “you’re all racist” stuff was mostly coming from the blogs and not from the Obama campaign, and this I think is a key difference.
I think the lack of intellectual honesty is one of, if not the, great flaw of the blog-o-sphere. Because there will always be people who will read you if you spout venom and psudo-vindicate their personal (often ignorant) view there is little incentive to hold yourself to a higher standard. That the good folks here at TAS seem to do this is one of the main reasons I read this blog.
— Leigh Hartman · Sep 4, 08:14 PM · #
You resent the atacks on Palin? Why? She’s a Protestant working class white woman. You are a Muslim New Yorker upper class brown man. You’re natural enemies. Stop rebelling against your people, Reihan. Who should run the country — one of us or one of them? I pick us. Why do you pick them?
USA: Like Lebanon, but bigger.
(Conservative or liberal is not the issue here. See David Frum.)
— Ikram · Sep 4, 08:23 PM · #
Larry, that’s because I don’t think Palin is a jerk. I still don’t know what it is about Palin that upset you, but I’ll repeat what I said in the thread you alluded to. You mentioned “bittergate,” which to my mind touched off the culture wars in this race long before the Palin selection. Perhaps Palin was responding to that and similar affairs.
Leigh, it’s a bit off-topic, but since you brought it up." There is not much difference in my mind between accusations of “being racist” and “using race cynically.”
— Blar · Sep 4, 11:05 PM · #
It’s not a wash, the transgressions in Guiliani and Palin’s speeches are not at all defensible or comparable to anything the Obama campaign has done. The line in Plain’s speech about community organizing in particular had a really ugly subtext. Even if you agree with the policies and platform of the Republican party and Palin’s views it’s unequivocally wrong to defend or justify this type of rhetoric.
— Ted · Sep 6, 05:01 PM · #
I can’t figure out how tongue-in-cheek Ikram’s being. Hopefully at least a bit. But here’s the thing: I can think of about a half dozen conservative commentators, of whom Reihan and Ross Douthat are two, who seem to be tribally liberal but politically conservative. I don’t believe either of them act in bad faith—no doubt they come by their beliefs honestly, as they’re two of the most insightful commentators of any political affiliation—but I do think that they sometimes fetishize small-town WASP values in the same way that hipsters fetishize blue collar factory workers: with a mixture of admiration (for sincerity, integrity, and ever-elusive authenticity) and ironic exploitation. Which is interesting.
— haighterade · Sep 9, 04:27 AM · #