Monday, October 28, 2013

Mike Lofgren — The Revolt of the Lower Middle Class and the Stupidity of the Elites

 Mike Lofgren takes on Michael LInd's thesis that the Tea Party revolt is characterized by the regional (chiefly Southern) "local notable who are locally successful and have accumulated modest wealth — millions, but not billions. Lofgren sees it differently and rather alarmingly so:
In periods of political crisis or threatening social change, the lower middle class[ii]often has been the demographic segment most susceptible to militant authoritarian movements - such as the Klan or the Coughlinites in earlier times in American history. In other countries as well, the lower middle class has been the basis of fascist movements. As Richard J. Evans documents in The Coming of the Third Reich, the original electoral backbone of the National Socialists was the lower middle class, exemplified by petty shopkeepers, the lower rungs of the white-collar professions and land-poor farmers. As the great economic calamity of 1929 intensified, these groups feared, above all, sinking into the despised proletariat. It was this emotion that caused them to identify the source of their problems less in the banks, corporations and cartels that were the proximate cause of the crash than in the contaminating presence of foreigners and the underclass. France has had periodic bouts of thisphenomenon, with movements like Action Francaise, the post-World War II Poujadists (the definitive small shopkeepers movement) and, more recently, the anti-immigrant party of Jean-Marie Le Pen, whose psychologically penetrating political catchphrase was "I say what you are thinking." Capitalists are of course more than willing to fund such parties if they are on the brink of success and can be useful to capital, just as the German cartels began to fund the Nazis after their breakthrough election in September 1930. Nothing succeeds like success: University professors and intellectuals flocked to the Nazi Party once it gained power. But the motivating energy of the movement sprang, above all, from the fear and resentment of those tenuously situated a couple of rungs above the actual poor....
Lofgren then looks at what is happening in the US. He sees a disturbing ascendence of authoritarianism in this iteration of the Tea Party, obscuring its Libertarian roots:
[In What's the Matter with Kansas Thomas] Frank identified the culture wars as trumping economics, but the fascinating question he never sufficiently answered is how this mechanism works at the granular level.
In 1933, psychologist Wilhelm Reich attempted to answer that question in The Mass Psychology of Fascism. His answer: The virus is all around us, because it is latent within ourselves. But it flourishes in rigid, punitive and authoritarian upbringings, whereby a person's early domestic circumstances foreshadow his future relationship with state and society. In a home life filled with punishments, taboos and guilt, Reich saw the kernel of the future fascist: repressed, conformist and outwardly submitting but filled with a rage over his humiliation whose source could never be admitted. This dilemma accounts for the curiously contradictory psychology of the adherents of authoritarian movements. They are highly suggestible followers of some strong leader whom they can masochistically adore, yet at intervals they become anarchic and rebellious. And as they cannot admit the roots of their rage, they displace it onto others: Hence the xenophobia, the militancy, the endless search for scapegoats. It is no coincidence that this kind of personality finds an outlet on the Tea Party - which overlaps so heavily with followers of the Religious Right, whose lives are often a catalogue of commandments, taboos and shibboleths.
All this unhealthy energy usually does not find a unified political objective unless coaxed along by money and organizational skill from outside....
...there are always not a few businessmen willing to finance an ostensibly populist movement so as better to manipulate it, and who then get an unpleasant surprise....
Definitely an analysis worth reading all of. This is a defining movement of our time and not only in the US.


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