The Tea Party

A lot has been written recently about the Tea Party and I certainly wouldn’t claim any expertise on the issue – my friend Ed for one knows a lot more and I would recommend you read his excellent recent piece here – but one thing that these bleating imbeciles keep reminding of is this, from Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier

“And what about that far larger class, running into millions this time--the office-workers and black-coated employees of all kinds--whose traditions are less definitely middle class but who would certainly not thank you if you called them proletarians? All of these people have the same interests and the same enemies as the working class. All are being robbed and bullied by the same system. Yet how many of them realize it? When the pinch came nearly all of them would side with their oppressors and against those who ought to be their allies. It is quite easy to imagine a middle class crushed down to the worst depths of poverty and still remaining bitterly anti-working-class in sentiment; this being, of course, a ready-made Fascist Party. “

The tea partiers seem to be exactly these sorts of people – they are people who thought they were middle class. They grew up in the Mad Men-esque suburban idyll of the 1950s and 1960s, when salaries as a proportion of GDP were at their height and when executives earned tens of times as much as their immediate inferiors, rather than hundreds of times as much. They learned to expect comfort and continual progress. Instead, forty years of growth and innovation have left them almost exactly where they were before. Better healthcare has meant higher insurance premiums, eating into stagnant salaries. Unprecedented increases in the cost of a university education mean that even getting one of those salaries means accumulating a hell of a lot of debt. And worst of all, the thing that fuelled two decades of expanding consumption turned out to be a giant government engineered bubble – that’s the property boom no-one thought would ever end.

I’m not saying that the Tea Party is fascist. However awful Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin are, I don't think that they are quite ready to send illegal immigrants to the gas chambers or to invade Canada just yet. What I am saying though is that the sort of middle class resentment that drives the Tea Party now also drove the Nazi party in the 1920s and early 1930s. In post-war Germany, the hyperinflation of 1923 wiped out the wealth and incomes of much of the German middle class. Afterwards, all they saw around them was immorality and the destruction of old values. They saw swinging Berlin and Marlin Dietrich and artists and musicians getting along whilst they lived in poverty. The country they thought they had built was gone. Was it any surprise that they bought so readily into the romantic myth of Nazism – to the idea of a ‘real Germany’ to which Jews, financiers, artists and so on didn’t belong? The Nazi Party didn't just offer prejudice. It offered a return to an idealized country of farmers and small businessmen and buxom blonde housewives. Now doesn't that sound familiar?

As I say, Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck are far from being Nazis. The myth they are selling though is still a very dangerous one. To counter them, people on the left need to stop just shouting ‘racist’ – they need to reach out to these people and actually offer an alternative version of America.