Thanksgiving is a Time for American Things, Like Musing About Politics in an Upper Level History Seminar
I’m in a class called Social Movements in the United States Since 1945. We have previously covered Civil Rights, Women’s Rights and Gay Rights. We are now at the Conservative Movement, which, in the readings for our last class (meeting tomorrow), means the Tea Party.
It’s a fascinating exercise to read about this. It’s current, it’s topical, and it’s truly bizarre. I admit to being an ill-informed citizen on this stuff. I’m a pro-Obama college student living in her liberal bubble and hearing vague discussion about tea and Glenn Beck, but I never paid much attention to it. We were on the upswing, I thought. We had the rhetoric of hope and change and true social movements.
Of course, given the results of this past midterm election, it’s clear we’re not on the upswing. Obama had to defend himself against the relentless criticisms of Jon Stewart, of all people, a liberal demigod. And he didn’t do a very convincing job. People are dissatisfied, and that’s feeding this populist movement.
From the reading I’m doing (particularly this one from the Weekly Standard, written at the end of September), it’s fascinating what the Tea Party has done. It has taken traditional liberal, progressive rhetoric—fighting for the underdog and such—and co-opted it. Their ideas, when presented logically and in the dispassionate indifference of black and white text, seem fairly logical. But when you throw in a personality like Glenn Beck, or blind devotion to the least fit politician of the era, Ms. Sarah Palin, you get a “social movement” that seems only misguided and fanatical.
But I guess that’s how us Obama-ists looked to the right wing. Perhaps there was something salvageable, even commendable in the ideas we believed in, but we were blindly devoted to our own politician, who could even be painted as similarly unfit for the presidency just like Ms. Palin. He is certainly educated and informed, but practice and theory are two different things, and he might have been a little green for Washington’s highest office. That doesn’t mean he can’t learn—he’s having to, every day, and in particular with a now Republican majority in the legislative branch—but his learning curve proved a little steep. Obama and Palin might be two sides of, if not the same, then related coins.
Tough pill to swallow, but one to come to terms with. Obama needs to shape up, or the Tea Party wins. Then it’s a fight between the rational, the earnest, the measured—what the Weekly Standard paints as the Rick Santelli followers—and the impassioned, perhaps illogical Beck followers. Would the Santelli followers be so bad?
I’m a little young (and a little leftist radical) to be getting in touch with my Conservative side. But it is something to think more about. Maybe tomorrow’s class will shed a little light and be an open forum for honest debate and mind changing. Or else it will be more of the same, ignorant and blind liberal love that refuses to see anything beyond its own limited view. We’re equally capable of both as young college students.
We’ll see.
1 year ago • 1 note
