Elections 2010: Turning right

By Max J. Castro
majcastro@gmail.com

It is Halloween night as I write this. Could there be a better time to reflect on the horrors that await this country should the widespread expectation of a Republican wave in the November 2 Congressional election prove accurate?

One man’s horror is another man’s utopia. The elation of young voters, blacks, Latinos, and white progressives upon the election of Barack Obama in 2008 masked the shock and dismay felt by another sector of the electorate: conservative white voters. John McCain won more white votes than Barack Obama. Had black and Latino voters been disenfranchised as in the past, McCain would be president today. A subset of this white electorate that voted for John McCain — a relatively older, overwhelmingly Republican, reactionary, racist subsector — was particularly enraged by the victory of a man they considered to be hardly American by heritage, political credo, or world view.

For them, Obama could do nothing right. This cauldron of anger was fertile ground for the rise of the Tea Party movement. The official story is that the Tea Party, a motley collection of loosely organized groups, was formed as a reaction to the government overreach and excessive spending of the Obama administration. Yet curiously nothing akin to the Tea Party arose during the eight years in which George W. Bush managed to turn the substantial budget surplus he inherited from Bill Clinton into the largest budget deficit in American history.

Of course, Bush was overspending taxpayer money on worthwhile things like a colossal tax cut for the very rich, two unnecessary and extremely expensive wars which provided huge profits and graft to contractors and arms purveyors, and a drug subsidy for seniors that had the virtue of ingratiating the administration with a large bloc of voters while providing an economic bonanza for the pharmaceutical industry, a major source of campaign money for the GOP.

In contrast, Obama was spending the nation’s money on such trivial items as providing health insurance for millions of children, preventing a global financial meltdown, averting a second Great Depression, funding an honorable end to Bush’s Iraqi adventure, and avoiding a sure debacle in Afghanistan after seven years of neglect by the previous administration. As for overreach, no Tea Party was around to protest the Bush government’s deceiving the American people in order to wage an illegal war against a country that represented no threat to this nation. Nor were the Tea Partiers, stalwart defenders of the Constitution all, around to express outrage about government sanctioned torture, warrantless wiretapping, indefinite detention of American citizens, and the trampling of the venerable right of habeas corpus.

In contrast, the Obama administration’s governmental overreaches have consisted of a modest reform of health care to provide access to 30 million previously uninsured Americans and curtail the worst abuses of the insurance industry as well as new rules for the financial sector to prevent the gouging of taxpayers and the public and to forestall another systemic near-death experience.

The real reasons behind the Tea Party — a furious white backlash against a black president, a racially tinged rage enabled by millions of dollars provided by reactionary billionaires hell-bent on squashing Obama and his mildly progressive agenda — have little to do with the deficit or the extension of government power.

Yet, while according to surveys only 2 percent of Americans consider themselves Tea Party members, the movement has a much broader reach and has managed to serve as a catalyst for a witch’s brew of pseudo-populist enthusiasm, resentment, and top-down class warfare that has propelled the Republican Party, near rock-bottom less than two years ago, to the brink of control of one or both houses of Congress.

With a real unemployment rate of nearly 17 percent and millions of people driven from their homes by foreclosure, this election was fated to be a punishing one for the Democrats even in the absence of the Tea Party and the flood of right-wing money into the campaign. But the Tea Party provides an outlet for raw resentments — against an uppity black president who graduated from two Ivey League schools, against immigrants who are portrayed in campaign ads as thugs invading the country — as well as a faux populist imprimatur for policies that benefit only the super-rich. Ironically, this election will reward those most responsible for the economic crisis and promote policies, such as continuing tax cuts for the rich and cutting government spending, which can only make economic recovery for the majority of the American people a longer and more difficult slog.