Just as the financial crisis has created toxic assets and "zombie" financial institutions, so has it transformed conservatism into a movement of the living dead. Its partisans cling to a now-toxic portfolio of discredited notions, rhetoric, gestures and strategies. They lumber comically on, their only goal being to obstruct efforts to save the economy from catastrophe.
These days the zombie right is rallying around CNBC commentator Rick Santelli, who won fame last month when he railed against a rescue of the economy's "losers."
Mr. Santelli claimed he was backed in his outrage by "the silent majority" -- meaning a floor full of traders at the Chicago Board of Trade -- and he called for a "Chicago tea party" to protest the administration's mortgage plan.
Next thing you knew, there were "tea parties" all over the land. When I showed up for one last Friday in Washington's Lafayette Park, however, my suspicions were immediately raised. A fellow in an expensive-looking pinstriped suit came hustling into the gathering knot of the discontented, handing out pink pig balloons. This had to be a put-on, I thought, one of the "Billionaires for Bush" pranksters in his capitalist costume, preparing to lead us in a chant of "Four More Wars."
But no, this was for real: the pigs symbolized "pork," the stuff of which President Barack Obama's stimulus package was supposedly made. Suits were common among the protesters. And the slogans on the signs made their undead politics impossible to misinterpret: "Liberalism Socialism Communism," read a typical one, "What's the Difference?"
Lending proletarian authenticity to the proceedings was the famous Joe the Plumber, who took up the bullhorn to deliver a dose of working-class cynicism that would have been convincing in, say, 1978. "Our politicians up on the hill, Republicans or Democrats, don't give a rip about you, and that's the bottom line right there," Joe Wurzelbacher declared.
Banks are insolvent, asset prices are falling, GDP has taken a nose dive, but what exercised this bunch was the possibility that government -- understood as a force of pure evil -- might get too big.
"America wants people who are gonna come to D.C. and say no," exhorted Andrew Langer of the Institute for Liberty. "No more taxes! No more spending! No more expansion of government!" Another speaker insisted that deregulation was not at fault for our troubles, and that the free market had never really been tried.
As the event wore on, the speakers began to repeat, zombie-like, some version of the famous line from "Network," the 1976 movie, "I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore."
I got out of there quick. This was no place to find the changed, chastened conservatism that all the pundits are looking for.
But at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), which was going on in the swank Omni Shoreham hotel on that same day, what I found was merely a smoother version of the same grumbling.
Capitalist self-pity was much in vogue. Former presidential candidate Mitt Romney, looking tanned and groomed and yet strangely mechanical, joked that he needed to get through his speech "before federal officials come here to arrest me for practicing capitalism."
Jim Gilmore, a former governor of Virginia, moaned that the "philosophy" one encountered in the land these days was that "people who succeed and have wealth are bad people, and they're entitled to be discriminated against in the tax code."
Perhaps this was because the current economic crisis was being "overblown," as claimed Lew Uhler, who heads the National Tax Limitation Committee. The administration was trying "to create as much trouble for all of us as possible, and we're here to create trouble back, back, back!"
A little while later, Mr. Uhler lapsed into the same confused zombie cry as the tea partiers across town: "We're not going to stand around and take it anymore! We're mad as hell and we're not taking it!"
They're not going to take it anymore? I guess it's supposed to be obvious that conservatives are history's real victims -- that their imagined suffering at the hands of that Big Deficit to Come trumps the global systemic economic crisis and all the upheaval it may unleash.
Or is it that the mind of the right is running on some spooky kind of autopilot? "Silent majority," "Mad as hell": These are the sayings of the 1970s. Remembering them brings back all the false populisms to flicker across the screen since then, all the stale illusions that brought us to our present disaster -- all the fake cowboys, the folksy radio talkers, the regular-guy billionaires, the middle American tax rebels, the salt-of-the-earth bankers.
There is much to dislike about President Obama's approach to the financial crisis. But opposition, it seems, will have to come from somewhere other than conservatism. The party out of power is also a party out of touch.
Thomas Frank's column, The Tilting Yard, appears every Wednesday at OpinionJournal.com
Also in Opinion Journal:
Evan Bayh: Deficits and Fiscal Credibility
Robert J. Barro: What Are the Odds of a Depression?
By chance did you write a similar piece in 1980 about the Democrats? I am just curious if this same sort of review is given to the other party when they lose the majority? The Republicans are trying to find their way right now, didn’t the Democrats do the same or is that a bit of history we don’t want to discuss?
The Presidents’ agenda should include REAL tax reform. Something that is easy to understand and therefore easy to execute. No need to question why Mr. Geithner or Sen Daschle didn’t pay interest and penalties, we’ll leave that alone and continue to discuss class warfare as only being between rich Republicans and poor Democrats, but when tax problems are the first issue you have to deal with a in young presidency perhaps that identifies a larger issue that should be addressed.
The only obstacle to making real change in either the Tax Code or Renewable Energy (problems we have had for decades!) are the 535 members of Congress.
Best. Line. Ever.
If I can only afford to take 2 cruises next year instead of 3 that will bother me. If someone is looking at the choice of heating their house or putting food on the table, that would bother me worse.
Keeping 250,000 people at the cost of over $1 trillion and 3,500 lives under the guise of fighting terrorism bothered me as well. The lives lost were more of a tax on the poor and middle class than the rich, just an observation.
Will Obama make a difference? Will Obama have the gift to be able to change the direction of our economy? Some appear ready to judge him now after less than two months on the job. I think Ill give him a year or two to see if he can set the course right.
Right now, neutral observers, economists and others, while not one hundred percent in favor of him, appear to be leaning towards giving him the benefit of the doubt with some believing he hasnt gone far enough and some believing he has gone too far. Most however agree on one thing. The cure for our economy will not be done in weeks and months no matter what the remedy might be. So, those who are ready to condemn Obama might want to wait a bit before they roll out the coffin.
http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRelease/idUS135259+07-Jan-2008+BW20080107
They and their GOP Predator Pals not only want President Obama to fail, but like Jefferson Davis 150 years ago, they want the Union to fail as well.
Check out my HP article on some of the other culprits:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ronald-b-robinson/fox-and-murdoch-use-i24i_b_171304.html
Dont they realize that George is out so up is no longer down and down is no longer up.
Case in point: witness the endless procession of the cream of capitalism, ascending the steps of Congress to ask, no beg, for public money.
Those CEO's and their legions of hard core capitalist executives, show no hesitation about seeking big government assistance, public tax dollars, in absolutely astronomic, deficit exploding amounts, to permit them to continue practicing....
...capitalism.
But to hear the so-called conservatives tell it, the present Administration is engaging in socialistic communism by....
....feeding these capitalists public money, to go on being capitalists.
By their reasoning, we should conclude that the barons of Wall Street, AIG and the Banks, Industrialists galore, are actually closet Marxists leading America to it's doom?
So the yokels protest at tea parties before heading back to their tax subsidized bank jobs.
That's the new Republican ideology, plain and simple.
Who cares about your neighbor - get yours for you while the gettin' is good. Not that taxing the rich helps stimulate the economy or anything...
These people make baby Jesus cry.
Take away half of the income of someone earning $200 a week tough, and the crisis becomes very real.
The credence Republicans give the 'successful' to me is akin to saying that Al Capone was 'successful'.
Of course mister Plumber's fortunes are built entirely on lies and brainwashed ideas - he has no reason in the world to begin looking at and talking about actual, reality based, researched facts. That would ruin him.
"Let's all go down to the Trans Lux and hiss Roosevelt.: