Dick Armey is a man of the people

This editorial by Dick Armey is hilarious in its inauthenticity. It trumpets the beauty of a non-hierarchical grassroots movement in language clearly written by a PR firm. It is the velvet glove of populism. I feel like I’m still hearing the echoes of Spiro Agnew saying “nattering nabobs of negativity.”

The editorial describes the tea party as “decentralized,” as not a “top-down hierarchy.” I just wonder if the writers would apply the logic of the analysis to corporate governance. Would they apply their same populist message to the people at the bottom of corporate hierarchies having tea parties to improve their working conditions or increase their wages or to decry the growing gap between the pay of the people at the top and the people at the bottom?

Would Dick Armey celebrate a labor movement that, instead of looking to government for regulation of working conditions, self-organized in a decentralized leaderless movement that forced an oil company to improve the safety conditions on a drilling rig? Would he celebrate in the same glowing terms a decentralized labor union that applied the same logic to corporate governance as the tea party does to national governance, bottom-up rather than top-down; a labor movement that would work for higher wages, shorter hours, increased job security, and a raised standard of living for themselves and their families?

It seems to me that such a movement would decrease the need for government regulation because the labor movement would be able to advocate on its own behalf, making regulation unnecessary or less necessary. It would be labor taking a more assertive position in the free market that the libertarians love so much. So I would hope that people like Dick Armey would support such a movement wholeheartedly. I would like to think he would apply the same logic to such a movement in organized labor. But somehow I doubt it.

I remember reading Invisible Hands, describing the foundation of the movement we are seeing now, in the Goldwater years. There is a lot of talk from those people about the labor movement and the questioning of authority (i.e. capital) as somehow a moral shortcoming on the part of the general populace. This is why I’m skeptical of the tea party organizers (i.e. Freedom Works, not the people attending the rallies).

There are two moments in here that make me see this top-down attitude hiding behind what I think is faux-populism on Armey’s part. First is the fact that he says the tea party “rebellion's name derives from the glorious rant of CNBC commentator Rick Santelli, who in February 2009 called for a new "tea party" from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.” I can’t imagine a greater symbol of being “of the people” than standing on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

There is also a sort of linguistic slip in his call for letting “the leaders be the activists.” I know in this sentence he means that the activists should lead, but it’s funny that this can easily be read as meaning the opposite; let the leaders become like activists, as Patricia Clough (2004) says, “there is something more than intimacy between power and resistance in the ever-growing dependency of power on the usurpation of resistance” (p. 18).

This final point draws me into the problem of the analysis of a movement like the tea party, especially for someone who is outside of the movement. Who am I to say that, even if I disagree with their conclusions, the people attending tea party rallies are inauthentic in their feelings about government? How does one manage an analysis with the politics of it lurking in the background? How do we locate what constitutes a political “movement” like the tea party. Is it possible to separate the people or the movement from the PR company Freedom Works or do we have to call the people at the rallies a “front for” or “dupes to” a corporate organization that is using a bottom-up populist message to push what is really a top-down corporate agenda?

Health care crowds

Talk of the crowd is all the rage these days. The word rage here is convenient for me, given that the word describes much of the imagery of the crowd currently being discussed. There are crowds at tea parties, with their subtle and sometimes overt racism; there are crowds at congressional town hall meetings, with their vague and seemingly, amazingly, misinformed anger over health care reform; the crowds that talk to pollsters that are harder to define and thus slowly eroding the credibility of those pollsters (more on that in a later post); shouting; throwing punches; and in all of the talk about these crowds we find a movement toward making the act of gathering problematic in itself.

One image keeps recurring in my mind, that of Kathleen Sebelius attempting to address an audience with Arlen Specter in Philadelphia recently. The key moment comes at about one minute into this video:



She doesn’t seem to understand the nature of the crowd she’s dealing with. As she throws her hands up in frustration, as if to say, “why won’t you listen to reason” she misses the point that the crowd is not there to have a reasonable discussion. It is there to yell. And herein lies the problem for me; the ideological challenge with which I am faced. Can I continue to hold on to the assumption that crowds/audiences, not to mention individuals, can be reasoned with?

I use the term crowd rather than audience because it is a better description. The people who are shouting at members of congress about health care appear to be “barking mad” for lack of a better phrase. I say this not because they have an opinion counter to my own, but because they literally, at points, look like they’re barking rather than speaking; and look mad, crazy-mad not angry-mad.

And here I reach the depressing point. Is the act of gathering in and of itself now damaged? Will pro-health care reform gatherings now be presented in a similar light by media? These “barking-mad crowds” are coming under scrutiny for the organizations behind them, calling into question the act of organization vis-à-vis astroturfing. Will all organization now be tarred as astroturfing?

All of this misses an important point; if the crowd is “inauthentic,” they are not necessarily there to debate the issue of health care, but rather to act as a communication jam; to stop the flow of communication between representatives and constituents who want to interact. Thus, what is presented by actants (the crowd) as authentic outrage and anger as a political act of participation is instead a political act of interruption, at least as it is described here: “If the event were a shouting match, the mob won. [Rep.] Kagen tried talking about the health-care bill, but the roaring chants deafened his attempts.” This textual description is reinforced by video shown on Rachel Maddow.

The word “mob” is becoming more common these days. I’m afraid it might be an accurate description. I don’t recall protests of the left ever substance-less anger. Maybe that’s because I am of the left and I am blinded by my own beliefs here; I think I’m more fair-minded than that, but who knows. We’ll see how today’s forum with Arlen Specter goes.