The Tea Party Moron Complex
By rallying behind dingbats and morons like Palin and Michele Bachmann, the
Tea Party has made anti-intellectualism its rallying cry.
By Matt Taibbi
Random House Publishing Group: November 14, 2010
The following is an excerpt from Matt Taibbi's new book, "Griftopia: Bubble
Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America."
published by Random House, 2010.
If American politics made any sense at all, we wouldn't have two giant
political parties of roughly equal size perpetually fighting over the same
5-10 percent swatch of undecided voters, blues versus reds. Instead, the
parties should be broken down into haves and have-nots -- a couple of
obnoxious bankers on the Upper East Side running for office against 280
million pissed-off credit card and mortgage customers. That's the more
accurate demographic picture of a country in which the top 1 percent has
seen its share of the nation's overall wealth jump from 34.6 percent before
the crisis, in 2007, to over 37.1 percent in 2009. Moreover, the standard
of living for the average American has plummeted during the crisis -- the
median American household net worth was $102,500 in 2007, and went down to
$65,400 in 2009 -- while the top 1 percent saw its net worth hold relatively
steady, dropping from $19.5 million to $16.5 million.
But we'll never see our political parties sensibly aligned according to
these obvious economic divisions, mainly because it's so pathetically easy
in the TV age to set big groups of voters off angrily chasing their own
tails in response to media-manufactured nonsense, with the Tea Party being a
classic example of the phenomenon. If you want to understand why America is
such a paradise for high-class thieves, just look at the way a manufactured
movement like the Tea Party corrals and neutralizes public anger that
otherwise should be sending pitchforks in the direction of downtown
Manhattan.
There are two reasons why Tea Party voters will probably never get wise to
the Ponzi-scheme reality of bubble economics. One has to do with the basic
sales pitch of Tea Party rhetoric, which cleverly exploits Main Street
frustrations over genuinely intrusive state and local governments that are
constantly in the pockets of small businesses for fees and fines and
permits.
The other reason is obvious: the bubble economy is hard as hell to
understand. To even have a chance at grasping how it works, you need to
commit large chunks of time to learning about things like securitization,
credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligations, etc., stuff that's
fiendishly complicated and that if ingested too quickly can feature a truly
toxic boredom factor.
So long as this stuff is not widely understood by the public, the Grifter
class is going to skate on almost anything it does -- because the tendency
of most voters, in particular conservative voters, is to assume that Wall
Street makes its money engaging in normal capitalist business and that any
attempt to restrain that sector of the economy is thinly disguised
socialism.
That's why it's so brilliant for the Tea Party to put forward as its leaders
some of the most egregiously stupid morons on our great green earth. By
rallying behind dingbats like Palin and Michele Bachmann -- the Minnesota
congresswoman who thought the movie Aladdin promoted witchcraft and insisted
global warming wasn't a threat because "carbon dioxide is natural" -- the
Tea Party has made anti-intellectualism itself a rallying cry. The Tea Party
is arguing against the very idea that it's even necessary to ask the kinds
of questions you need to ask to grasp bubble economics.
Bachmann is the perfect symbol of the Dumb and Dumber approach to high
finance. She makes a great show of saying things that would get a
kindergartner busted to the special ed bus -- shrieking, for instance, that
AmeriCorps was a plot to force children into liberal "reeducation camps"
(Bachmann's own son, incidentally, was a teacher in an AmeriCorps program),
or claiming that the U.S. economy was "100 percent private" before Barack
Obama's election (she would later say Obama in his first year and a half
managed to seize control of "51 percent of the American economy").
When the Chinese proposed replacing the dollar as the international reserve
currency, Bachmann apparently thought this meant that the dollar itself was
going to be replaced, that Americans would be shelling out yuan to buy
six-packs of Sprite in the local 7-Eleven.
So to combat this dire threat she sponsored a bill that would "bar the
dollar from being replaced by any foreign currency." When reporters like me
besieged Bachmann's office with calls to ask if the congresswoman, a former
tax attorney, understood the difference between currency and reserve
currency, and to ask generally what the hell she was talking about, her
spokeswoman, Debbee Keller, was forced to issue a statement clarifying that
"she's talking about the United States . . . The legislation would ensure
that the dollar would remain the currency of the United States."
A Democratic staffer I know in the House called me up after he caught wind
of Bachmann's currency bill. "We get a lot of yokels in here, small-town
lawyers who've never been east of Indiana and so on, but Michele Bachmann .
. . We've just never seen anything quite like her before."
Bachmann has a lot of critics, but they miss the genius of her political
act. Even as she spends every day publicly flubbing political SAT questions,
she's always dead-on when it comes to her basic message, which is that
government is always the problem and there are no issues the country has
that can't be worked out with basic common sense (there's a reason why many
Tea Party groups are called "Common Sense Patriots" and rally behind "common
sense campaigns").
Common sense sounds great, but if you're too freaking lazy to penetrate the
mysteries of carbon dioxide -- if you haven't mastered the whole concept of
breathing by the time you're old enough to serve in the U.S. Congress --
you're
not going to get the credit default swap, the synthetic collateralized debt
obligation, the interest rate swap, etc. And understanding these instruments
and how they were used (or misused) is the difference between perceiving how
Wall Street made its money in the last decades as normal capitalist business
and seeing the truth of what it often was instead, which was simple fraud
and crime. It's not an accident that Bachmann emerged in the summer of 2010
(right as she was forming the House of Tea Party Caucus) as one of the
fiercest opponents of financial regulatory reform; her primary complaint
with the deeply flawed reform bill sponsored by Senator Chris Dodd and
Congressman Barney Frank was that it would "end free checking accounts."
Our world isn't about ideology anymore. It's about complexity. We live in a
complex bureaucratic state with complex laws and complex business practices,
and the few organizations with the corporate will power to master these
complexities will inevitably own the political power. On the other hand,
movements like the Tea Party more than anything else reflect a widespread
longing for simpler times and simple solutions -- just throw the U.S.
Constitution at the whole mess and everything will be jake. For immigration,
build a big fence. Abolish the Federal Reserve, the Department of Commerce,
the Department of Education. At times the overt longing for simple answers
that you get from Tea Party leaders is so earnest and touching, it almost
makes you forget how insane most of them are.
This excerpt first appeared on DailyKos. Click here for a copy of
"Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is
Breaking America."
Matt Taibbi is a writer for Rolling Stone.
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