Berkeley leftists meet to disparage tea party. One of them asks:
Why can’t we just arrest the Tea Partiers? – exercises in ‘social citizenship’ [Darleen Click]
In reading this article in Slate about a Lefty academics conference in Berkerly — where they have the chutzpah to present themselves as “Tea Party Experts”, one comes away with the distinct impression that these “scholars” look at the individuals they are “studying” not as actual human beings, but noxious bugs. Certainly, they don’t ever give any credence to the actual words of Tea Partiers, but impute all manner of motives to them.
BERKELEY, Calif.—On the night before we are scheduled to address this conference, the Tea Party experts are treated to a meal at the Faculty Club. It sounds fancy, and it is, with the feel and décor of a Sundance ski lodge. Over craft beers, wine, and cheese, we discuss that favorite topic of liberal academics: What the hell happened to Barack Obama? Why does the right have all the energy that he and the left used to own? [...]
On Friday morning we file in for the conference. Just outside are giant tubs of coffee and tea, and abstracts for papers that are in progress or completed.
• Prospects for an American Neofascism.
• A Macro-Micro Model of Participation in Political Action:
The Tea Party and Cognitive Biases in Information Consumption and Processing.
The research and analysis from the panelists is along those same lines. Why are people joining the Tea Party? Perlstein kicks off the conference with an analysis of conservative anger, tracing its history and discussing the “sluicing” that conservatives do to keep people angry by giving them stories that reinforce their fears. The audience, mostly academics and activists but some students, respond to quotes from Newt Gingrich and other Republicans with nervous laughter and gasps, the air-rushing-through-teeth kind that you only hear from audiences reacting to speeches. The plaintive questions start in. [...]
“There is that U.S. DNA that goes all the way back and does provide the conceptual source for this lynch mob mentality,” says Steve Martinot, who teaches at San Francisco State University. “And that is white supremacy. Shouldn’t we be looking at the Tea Party through that?” [...]
“If you look across the board here, true skeptics of the Tea Party, 49 percent agreed with the proposition that blacks ought to work their way up without any special favors,” says [University of Washington's Christopher] Parker. “But if you look at the true believers, that goes to 92 percent. This is another indicator of racism.” [...l]
[P]olitical anthropologist Madeline Landau shares her own theory of how the right-wing populists took over.
“The second that the major financial institutions would not loan money was in my view the critical moment,” says Landau. “All Obama needed to do was say to Wall Street, if you do not do this I’m going to create some regional banks.” [...]
Was Obama’s downfall inevitable? Was the rise of the Tea Party? “We need social citizenship,” says Lisa Disch, a professor of political science and women’s studies at the University of Michigan. “We don’t need Democrats kowtowing to the language of the market—although I don’t think Obama is kowtowing. He believes in it.”
That puts the blame on Obama, but a moment later, Disch argues that the Senate and the Republican Party used the Tea Party’s anger to undercut any progressive agenda Obama might have had. “You’re not allowed to just say no to everything the president wants,” she says, venting.
Der Fuhrer must be obeyed!
“The Tea Party movement gives them the illusion they’re speaking for the majority when they aren’t.” [...]
“I wonder if we’re likely to see a Timothy McVeigh situation,” says Nicholas Robert, an attendee originally from Australia, who basically wonders if any Tea Partiers can be arrested. “It seems to be that we’re being very polite. I wonder if there are any legal mechanisms—one that comes to mind are the provisions used to crush the Wobblies.”
From a call for “social citizenship” to some musing about having the government crush the Tea Party movement by “legal” means (a suggestion writer Weigel reports did not find much favor … currently), it’s clear these academics believe in representative democracy as much as they do in the humanity of the people they are “studying”.
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