The Party of Loss

In the December HARPER'S, Corey Robin has republished an article on a phenomenon common to conservative politics from its inception. The conservative movement has relied on Tea Party populism, with its immoderation and adventurism, going back to the days of Edmund Burke.

My family illustrates the difference between two kinds of populism. My working class Irish mother's populism was a populism of hope. She reached adulthood at the start of the first Great Depression, and she had, to start with, nothing, not even a high school diploma. With nothing to lose, she had no more sense of loss than FDR. Instead she had hope. She was no victim. Her goal was to live day to day and put her children through college. She had no negative feelings about Blacks, Latinos, Asians, Jews, Gays, hookers or men.

My father came from a border state "Scotch-Irish" family that had been in America since the Revolution without making its way out of the working class; and he was the other sort of populist, the angry man who had suffered, as Corey Robin points out, a terrible loss. He was a victim, a white man who had lost his birthright, lost his place in the world as a member of a master race.

I have resisted, as too simple, the idea that the Teabaggers are racists with a grievance, and of course that is too simple. There is a strong component of populists in the tea party who have either suffered small financial losses or fear that they will soon suffer small financial losses. The Teabaggers tend to be old. They fear the end of Social Security (so, in their unproductive way, they vote Republican and demand a balanced budget). But what seems to drive the Tea Party most goes back to before the Civil War, when the Southern elite managed to convince the Southern white populist to fight for slavery, more or less on the grounds that every white person belonged to a class that was superior to black slaves.

My father did not believe that Blacks, Asians or Latinos were inferior--he was afraid that they weren't. He fought in a losing turf war, as he saw it, and his sense of loss turned his politics on its head. He moved from being an early supporter of FDR to being a committed follower of the NRA. Of course, he did not endorse racism, any more than Glenn Beck openly endorses racism today. Instead we see men and women practicing racism-once-removed by talking about closing the southern border and cutting entitlement programs. Euphemistic racism has become as American as apple pie.

My father, an admirable man in many ways, did not live to see a dark-skinned family in the White House, but that would have been for him a kind of ultimate end of his own special status. He would have joined with other angry "victims" and supported the populist party of emotional loss.