How the Tea Party Won the Deal
By Peter Beinart
The Daily Beast – 8 hrs ago

While the details of the debt ceiling deal remain fuzzy, this much is clear: Barack Obama may be president, but the Tea Party is now running Washington. How did this happen? Simple; this is what American politics looks like when there’s no left-wing movement and no war.

Let’s start with the first point. Liberals are furious that President Obama agreed to massive spending cuts, and the promise of more, without any increase in revenues. They should be: Given how much the Bush tax cuts have contributed to the deficit (and how little they’ve spurred economic growth), it’s mind-boggling that they’ve apparently escaped this deficit-reduction deal unscathed.

But there’s a reason for that: since the economy collapsed in 2008, only one grassroots movement has emerged in response, and it’s been a movement of the right. Compare that with what happened during the Depression. In 1933, Franklin Roosevelt assumed the presidency and launched the hodgepodge of domestic programs that historians call the first New Deal. By 1935, however, he was looking warily over his left shoulder at Huey Long, whose “Share our Wealth” movement demanded that incomes be capped at $1 million and every family be guaranteed an income no less than one-third the national average.

At the same time, the Townsend plan to guarantee generous pensions to every elderly American had organizers in every state in the union. To be sure, FDR had vehement opponents on his right, but he was at least as concerned about the populist left, which helps explain why he enacted the more ambitious “second new deal,” which included Social Security, the massive public jobs program called the Works Progress Administration and the Wagner Act, which for the first time in American history put Washington on the side of labor unions.

Obama, like FDR, had a reasonably successful first two years: a stimulus package that while too small for the circumstances was still large by historical standards and a health care bill that while subpar in myriad ways still far exceeded the efforts of other recent Democratic presidents.

And then, unlike FDR, he ran into a grassroots movement of the right. Historians will long debate why the financial collapse of 2008 produced a right-wing populist movement and not a left-wing one. Perhaps it’s because Obama didn’t take on Wall Street, perhaps it’s because with labor unions so weak there’s just not the organizational muscle to create such a movement, perhaps it’s because trust in government is so low that pro-government populism is almost impossible.

Whatever the reason, it was the emergence of the Tea Party as the most powerful grassroots pressure group in America that laid the groundwork for Sunday night’s deal. The fact that polling showed Obama getting the better of the debt ceiling debate barely mattered. The 2010 elections brought to Congress a group of Republicans theologically committed to cutting government. And they have proved more committed, or perhaps just more reckless, than anyone else in Washington.

But it’s not just the absence of a mass left-wing movement that explains last night’s deal. It’s the end of the war on terror. From 9/11 until George W. Bush left office, the “war on terror” defined the Republican Party. That meant massive increases in defense and homeland security spending, but it also meant increases in domestic spending—such as the 2004 prescription drug bill—aimed at ensuring that Bush got reelected, so he could perpetuate the war on terror. In that way, “war on terror” politics resembled cold war politics, in which the right’s desire for guns and the left’s desire for butter usually combined to ensure that all forms of government spending went up.

The Tea Party, by contrast, is a post-war on terror phenomenon. Many of the newly-elected Republicans are indifferent, if not hostile, to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. They’re happy to cut the defense budget, especially since cutting the defense budget makes it easier to persuade Democrats to swallow larger cuts in domestic spending. It’s the reverse of the cold war dynamic. During the cold war—especially in the Nixon and Reagan years–conservatives accepted that overall spending would go up in order to ensure that some that increase went to defense. Today, conservatives accept defense cuts in order to ensure that overall spending goes down.

The good news is that the Tea Party, more than Barack Obama, has now ended the neoconservative dream of an ever-expanding American empire. The bad news is that it has also ended whatever hopes liberals once entertained that roughly 100 years after Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, roughly 75 years after the New Deal and roughly 50 years after the Great Society, we were living in another great age of progressive reform.

Given the era of fiscal scarcity we’re now entering, those neocon and progressive dreams are now likely dead for many years to come. Meanwhile, the Tea Party’s dream of a government reduced to its pre-welfare state size becomes ever real.

Key quotes are a-plenty, but here’s my favorite:

For the most part, the governor has surrounded himself with people who, like him, are novices to state government. He has filled his administration with people he is comfortable with, politically and personally, and excluded those who could augment his get-tough philosophy with experience, expertise and an occasional dash of common sense.

LePage doesn’t seem to take advice from anyone, much less from newspaper editorials, but we’ll offer some anyway.

The governor should recruit at least one adviser who can point him in the right direction, warn him when he’s about to make a mistake, counsel him when he’s in trouble. Maybe he could solicit advice from some former governors or other public officials – and act on it.

Wow.

Apparently the judge, who coincidentally was appointed by GW Bush in 2003, looks likely to support LePage’s position that the removal was a political statement. This rankled Edgar Allen Beem, opinion columnist for the Forecaster, and one of the protest’s organizers:

“If the governor can legally remove any work of art he doesn’t like from public view, does he also have the power to remove any book from the state library?” Beem asked while addressing the demonstrators. “Based on the state’s argument, we have to assume he does.”

Bam.

Looks like they just ran another one, I fired up their iPhone app this morning and look at the mug I see:

Yep, our fair governor, Paul LePage.

Here’s the story “G.O.P. Pushes to Deregulate Environment at State Level” nyti.ms/gmRgz0 (Sorry link is wonky, I’m on my phone).

In fact, LePage leads off the story, and also contributes more than a few juicy quotes:

Governor LePage summed up the animus while defending his program in a radio address. “Maine’s working families and small businesses are endangered,” he said. “It is time we start defending the interests of those who want to work and invest in Maine with the same vigor that we defend tree frogs and Canadian lynx.”

I’m so sick of all of the Canadian lynxes coming down here and taking all the good jobs. I’m glad someone is finally standing up for the straight, white males …

But in all seriousness, it’s not like when people think of Maine they think of nature …

See, I don’t watch Jersey Shore and wouldn’t know “The Situation” if I fell over him, but this Paul LePage mural malarkey is almost as bad as reality television.

First there was a free speech claim made last week: “Federal lawsuit seeks return of mural to Labor Department“.

Then Republican state senators took a swipe at him in the press: “LePage rhetoric interferes with goals, say GOP senators“.

AND now the federal Department of Labor is getting in on the action: “US Labor Department demands refund in Maine mural dispute“.

See? Reality TV at it’s worst.

I’m glued!

What’s next?!?

Mount Holyoke College President Lynn Pasquerella wrote a letter to the New York Times about Governor LePage’s removal of the Department of Labor murals: “Honoring Frances Perkins“.

Additionally, here’s the letter that Dr. Pasquerella faxed to his office yesterday.

Key quote:

I was particularly surprised to read that you were influenced by an anonymous fax comparing the 11-panel mural to North Korean political propaganda, because the act of removing images commemorating Maine’s history itself conjures thoughts of the rewriting of history prevalent in totalitarian regimes. If the U.S. Department of Labor in Washington, D.C. is housed in the Frances Perkins Building, why can’t she be honored with a conference room in Augusta?

Boom.

Let’s add the New York Times to the list: http://nyti.ms/fWiWA5

They get bonus points for mentioning the thing with employing his daughter in a $41,000 entry level job …

“Gov. LePage Orders Little Girl’s Sandcastle Kicked In”

“LePage Orders Cancellation of Labor Day”

Key quote:

If Americans do, indeed, have a different and larger conception of the self than they did a few decades ago, I wonder if this is connected to some of the social and political problems we have observed over the past few years.

I wonder if the rise of consumption and debt is in part influenced by people’s desire to adorn their lives with the things they feel befit their station. I wonder if the rise in partisanship is influenced in part by a narcissistic sense that, “I know how the country should be run and anybody who disagrees with me is just in the way.”

Most pervasively, I wonder if there is a link between a possible magnification of self and a declining saliency of the virtues associated with citizenship.

Citizenship, after all, is built on an awareness that we are not all that special but are, instead, enmeshed in a common enterprise. Our lives are given meaning by the service we supply to the nation. I wonder if Americans are unwilling to support the sacrifices that will be required to avert fiscal catastrophe in part because they are less conscious of themselves as components of a national project.

No way this passes, but I have to mention it because yesterday I received my “Maine’s Majority” stickers in the mail:

Order yours today!