After hardly taking them seriously most of last year, and after more or less predicting the death of the American right wing politics the winter before, it seems now that the mainstream media is bending over backwards to take the Tea Party movement seriously. From the sublime to the ridiculous, as usual. A crop of journalists have packed themselves off for the middle states, embedded themselves with the enemy, and begun sending reports back from the frontline of American politics.
Just as they overestimated how fundamentally Obama’s victory had altered the basic balance of American politics, now they’re overestimating how powerful the populist right is. But at least they're bothering to actually look at what's going on. Rather than just taking pictures of loonies nursing heavy weaponry hanging from their necks, or waving placards that a seven year old with basic phonics skills should be able to improve on, the hunt is on now to find “normal” people joining the ranks of the movement and building something dramatically new and dangerous.
This, presumably, is the reason David Barstow opted to begin his great article in the New York Times about the Tea Party movement with the story of Pam Stout. Pam was a “happily retired” lady, a mild, former government employee who – “Worried about hyperinflation, social unrest or even martial law” – joined up with an Idaho branch of the Friends of Liberty and in so doing abandoned her lifelong political inactivity.
Thus we see the return of one of the most popular elements of American biographical history: the conversion narrative. In this case, the transformation is from politically unconcerned citizen to raging, fear-fuelled antiradical. But this is nothing new to the Tea Party activists. Throughout history all that's remained consistent is that Americans keep changing their minds. Whether one looks to the jeremiads of the Puritan colonies, the redemption myth in Frederick Douglass’ narrative of slavery and escape to freedom, or even the autobiography of Malcolm X, conversion narratives have been a staple of American life for centuries.
Of course, it suits Tea Party organizers to play up the role of new converts since this contributes to a sense of political inertia: a powerful tool in itself. Putting new recruits in the headlines gives the movement a sense that history is on their side, that people are wising up to the truth of their claims. But we can’t entirely explain the centrality of conversion narratives just by pointing out that they serve the interests of canny political propagandists. Clearly average joes must like to punctuate the stories they tell about their lives with moments of Pauline transformation, or they wouldn't spend their time saying so to journalists.
Such stories offer a way of personalising your life in a world that is otherwise made up of vast and overwhelming forces, markets and systems of power. For the religious convert being born again, God himself looks down from the heavens and selects you. For the secular activist, a moment of discovery – often attached to joining a group or reading a political tract – provides a similar, personal moment of contact with history, a sense of agency that might otherwise be robbed from an insignificant retiree living anonymously in Sandpoint, Idaho. Your life suddenly speaks to the major events of the time. Rather than just another forgotten soul, the conversion narrative makes you a centre-piece in the nation's history.
We all love to tell stories about ourselves, to explain our behaviour in this way in order to give meaning to the paths we choose through our lives. But it can sometimes be deceptive to take these stories at face value. In this case, the effect of reading too much into the conversion narrative is to downplay how much the Tea Party movement owes to its political predecessors. I’m not saying that Pam Stout didn’t undergo the change she described – I have no more reason to doubt her than I have to believe her. But you have to convert to something: if there isn’t a pre-existing movement to give you an explanation for your anger then no conversion is going to happen whether you’re looking for it or not.
It might seem counter-intuitive to talk about stability on the right when so many of its barmstormers are so manifestly unstable. Given that the ideology of the far right is so caught up in apocalyptic fantasies, it seems difficult to believe that it can have anything so moderate as a tradition. But when you look at the history, a different picture emerges. The John Birch Society, one of the many groups Barstow highlights in his piece, have been around for more than half a century, each year managing to get even more angry with government than they were the previous one, never at any point substantially disturbed that the system hasn't come crashing down as they expected it to. And frankly, in terms of apocalyptic traditions, half a century is the tip of the iceberg. Dispensationalist millenarian fundamentalists have been predicting the imminent end of the world for a century or more.
So when we, or our journalists, are told about the dramatic conversions that are taking place in the Tea Party movement, how people are waking up across the country and declaring they’re mad as hell and not going to take it anymore, perhaps we should wait a moment. More often than not, actually a lot less has changed than might appear to be the case on the surface. And the solution is a lot less complicated than it might otherwise appear. Get people some jobs, and things will suddenly start to look a lot less apocalyptic again ... until the next time arrives for people to suddenly realise that everything has changed and life can never be the same as before...
Think Of the Children
58 minutes ago
