Theda Skocpol and some colleagues have an interesting article out exploring the Tea Party’s unique brand of conservatism. This point jumped out at me:
The distinction between “workers” and “people who don’t work” is fundamental to Tea Party ideology on the ground. First and foremost, Tea Party activists identify themselves as productive citizens. We began our Massachusetts interviews with an open- ended question about what brought interviewees to the Tea Party. A striking percentage of Tea Party activists responded by talking about themselves as workers. Emmy says, “I’m almost 66 years old and I’m still working.” Krislyn calls herself and her husband “blue-collar working-class people” who have “had to work very hard.” This self-definition is posed in opposition to nonworkers seen as profiting from government support for whom Tea Party adherents see themselves as footing the bill. As Charles put it, “people no longer have to work for what they earn.” Robert says, “we shouldn’t be paying for other people that don’t work.” A typical sign at the April 14th rally on the Boston Common read, “Redistribute My Work Ethic,” and similar signs have appeared at rallies across the country. Tea Party anger is stoked by perceived redistributions – and the threat of future redistributions – from the deserving to the undeserving. Government programs are not intrinsically objectionable in the minds of Tea Party activists, and certainly not when they go to help them. Rather, government spending is seen as corrupted by creating benefits for people who do not contribute, who take handouts at the expense of hard-working Americans.
Now see Michael Kazin’s discussion of the “producerism ethic” in his book on American populism, The Populist Persuasion:
Producerism was indeed an ethic, a moral conviction: it held that only those who created wealth in tangible, material ways (on and under the land, in workshops, on the sea) could be trusted to guard the nation’s piety and liberties. The Lord had told Adam, “In the sweat of they face shalt thou eat bread,” and the oft-quoted line buttressed the sentiment that manual labor was the only honest, authentic and natural kind….
From its earliest formulations, the producer ethic was roughly synonymous with male citizens who belonged to what the Philadelphian known as Publius called “the middling sort.” They paid America’s taxes, fought its wars, and upheld the ideal of economic independence ever if, temporarily, conditions might force some to toil for wages. The middle was a broad category, but not an all-inclusive one. Above it sat a tiny elite that lived off the labor of others. Below it was a larger group whose poverty seemed perpetual and whose behavior appeared servile, undisciplined, and childlike. Some antebellum Protestant champions of the producing classes shoved the mounting numbers of Irish-Catholic immigrants into this lowest stratum…But African-Americans provided a far more durable and emotionally charged subject for collective scorn…
The problem with “producerism” (and, by extension, the problem with the Tea Party) is that its sense of social justice — that decent, hardworking folks ought to be treated with respect and fairness — is inextricably bound up with its message of exclusion and fear.
The populists want a better, less corrupt, more egalitarian world — I think that’s clearly true — but they want that world only for themselves. They want it only for the white, male, native-born, “working class,” those denizens of “real America,” that fantastical place where people always wear periwigs and slavery never happened.
Populism is not a principle — it’s not the principle of the “the more inclusive whole,” as William James once said — it is, rather, a cultural ideal, a set of images, a way of talking about America. Habermas once remarked that “all traditions are ambivalent,” and I think that’s true of few traditions more than populism. William Jennings Bryant, a hero of the left, leads seamlessly to Father Charles Coughlin. There’s clearly a bit of both in the Tea Party today.
Photo credit: Simon & Schuster