Pinched (19 page)

Since then, America’s social and civic health have so far held up better than the economy. Crime rates have stayed low, and hate crimes have actually fallen somewhat. A variety of polls on social conflict since 2007 have shown mixed results, but for the most part they point to continuing, if slowly thinning, amity. Signs of looming class warfare or racial conflagration, as of this writing, are not much in evidence. This general pattern fits that of previous downturns, even steep ones. The worst effects of pervasive joblessness and economic weakness take time to incubate, and they show themselves only slowly. Brief downturns seldom change politics or culture dramatically—only over the course of many disappointing years does the national character change.

Still, it has been three years since the crash, and many more
since incomes were growing strongly for most Americans; those pre-recession days of increasing openness seem far off now.
Economic hardship clearly has weakened the social fabric, and has prompted a retreat into private concerns. The National Conference on Citizenship, a nonpartisan organization that has tracked civic engagement for more than fifty years, reported that in 2009, 72 percent of Americans said they’d cut back on time spent volunteering, participating in groups, and engaging in other civic activities. The organization last observed such a widespread “turning inward,” it noted, in the deep recession of the early 1980s.

The seeds of a deeper discontent may slowly be germinating, and with them a more reactionary set of ideas.
Public views toward society’s more marginal members have hardened since the crash; the percentage of Americans who support government aid to the needy fell from 54 percent in 2007 to 48 percent in 2009, even though poverty and unemployment rose sharply over that span.
Mistrust of all things foreign has risen, and support for free trade has declined. A 2010 poll by the
Wall Street Journal
and NBC News found that 53 percent of Americans believed free trade was harmful to the United States, versus 46 percent in 2007 and 32 percent in 1999.

In the spring of 2010,
the state of Arizona passed into law the strictest and most far-reaching immigration measure that any state has enacted in decades. Among its more controversial measures, the law requires immigrants to carry registration papers with them at all times or face criminal penalties. It also requires police to ascertain the immigration status of anyone they stop, detain, or arrest if they have a “reasonable suspicion” that the person may be an illegal alien.
According to a poll conducted by NBC and the
Wall Street Journal
in May 2010, 66 percent of Americans believed the Arizona law would lead to discrimination against legal Latino immigrants—and yet 64 percent supported it.

Deportations have risen dramatically since the recession began, and prominent senators, including John McCain and Lindsey Graham, have supported hearings to consider amending the Fourteenth
Amendment, which grants citizenship as a birthright, regardless of the immigration status of one’s parents.
The percentage of Hispanics saying that whites and Hispanics get along “not too well” or “not at all well,” according to Pew Research, rose from 24 percent in 2007 to 41 percent in 2009.

Anti-Muslim sentiment has seemed quick to surface since the downturn began (though violence against Muslims has not risen). The number of Americans with a favorable impression of Islam declined from 41 percent to 30 percent between 2005 and 2010. In the summer of 2010, anger erupted over the plan by a moderate Islamic cleric to build an unobtrusive mosque two blocks away from the site of the World Trade Center. Several mosques around the country were defaced or defiled, and a pastor in Florida threatened to burn the Koran.
Martin Peretz, then the editor in chief of the
New Republic
, publicly questioned whether American Muslims were “worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment.” So quickly did the flames of bigotry seem to rise in some quarters that
an “emergency summit” was convened in the nation’s capital by prominent Christian, Jewish, and Muslim leaders to try to quell them. A joint statement expressed alarm over the “anti-Muslim frenzy” and pled for tolerance. “This is not America,” said Cardinal Theodore McCarrick. “America was not built on hate.”

T
HESE PROLIFERATING SIGNS
of a turning inward and a narrowing of American minds should not be surprising: as hard times linger, they reliably produce resentment toward outsiders, suspicion of unfair treatment, and zero-sum thinking. And as is clear from history, frustration is typically strongest not among the
most
marginalized groups, but among the
newly
marginalized—that is to say, those whose status and self-image have collapsed most abruptly, or are in the greatest danger of doing so. In the United States today, that describes a large part of the nonprofessional middle class.

Middle-class discontent with the federal government has grown
markedly since 2007, finding its clearest expression in the Tea Party movement. Candidates affiliated with the Tea Party won forty seats in the House of Representatives in the 2010 midterm elections, and 41 percent of voters polled on Election Day said their attitude toward the movement was generally supportive; 73 percent said they were angry or dissatisfied with the federal government.

The Tea Party’s active supporters are overwhelmingly white and about 60 percent male; in a 2010
New York Times
poll, half described themselves as middle-class and another quarter as working-class (the rest were split among upper-middle-class, lower-class, and upper-class, in descending order of prevalence). A plurality had some college education but not a college degree.

At the core of the Tea Party, it is often asserted, stand older residents of rural regions. And indeed, 75 percent of Tea Party supporters are older than forty-five, and the movement is popular in many rural areas. Yet this characterization is overly narrow and ultimately misleading.
An analysis of Tea Party events in the run-up to the 2010 midterms, performed by the political scientist James Gimpel, showed the highest level of activity in former real-estate boomtowns and in newer exurbs around the country—the places where the housing market crashed the hardest.

It appears likely, then, that
many of the Tea Party’s supporters are people who used to feel prosperous, but whose stars are now falling and whose lifestyles have become insecure. Unemployment itself isn’t an overwhelming problem within the Tea Party; just 6 percent of its supporters responding to the
Times
poll said they were temporarily out of work, and 14 percent, less than the nationwide average, said the recession had caused them true “hardship.” (The relatively advanced age of many Tea Party members may be one reason why comparatively few are unemployed. Some are retired, and for older workers, the unemployment rate in this recession has been relatively low.) But more than half said the recession had in one way or another made life “difficult” for them and their family—whether due to falling home values, pay cuts, anxiety, or other problems.

At Rand Paul’s May 2010 Senate primary celebration in Kentucky, his father, Ron, an elder statesman of the Tea Party who was mobbed by supporters in the crowd, said his son’s insurgent victory sent a strong message: “Get rid of the power people, the people who run the show, the people who think they’re above everybody else.” At the Tea Party’s national convention earlier that year, Sarah Palin denounced “elitists” and said America was “ready for another revolution.”
At a Utah GOP convention, conservative senator Robert Bennett was jeered before his primary ouster for supporting the bank bailout—“TARP! TARP! TARP!” went the chant.

The Tea Party is powered partly by anger toward a financial elite that, abetted by government, seems to be prospering at the expense of regular people. But the movement seems equally suspicious that less favored groups are also unfairly getting a leg up.
According to a survey by the Public Religion Research Institute, 61 percent of people who identified with the Tea Party believed that discrimination against whites was as big a problem as discrimination against minorities, and 58 percent said discrimination against women was no longer a problem.
Tea Party supporters generally favor lower taxes and the slashing of government programs that do not benefit them directly, with exemption for those, like Medicare and Social Security, that do.
The ideal of market freedom is not deeply held within the movement: in October 2010, 63 percent of Tea Party supporters said free trade was “bad for the U.S.,” and just 24 percent believed it was good for the country.

If you squint hard enough, you can begin to see some resemblance between the Tea Party and the Populist movement of the late nineteenth century, a movement of downwardly mobile farmers who felt deeply exploited by the financiers of their time. The Populists formed the only grassroots political cause in American history that achieved widespread support and didn’t fade quickly away; the movement grew for two decades before reaching its apotheosis in 1896, and for a time, it looked possible that it might upend and remake the traditional two-party system in the United States. Like the Tea
Party, it was born in an environment of rapid economic change, rising inequality, and increasingly burdensome debt—an environment, in the words of the historian Lawrence Goodwyn, in which “a large number of people in the United States discovered that the economic premises of their society were working against them.” Like the Tea Party, the Populist movement attracted earnest and well-meaning people, previously uninvolved in politics, who felt that neither Democrats nor Republicans were serving “plain people” like themselves. And like the Tea Party, it developed worrisome characteristics: nationalism side by side with an aggressive provincialism; reflexive anti-elitism; a strong sense of moral superiority; little reverence for the present, and too much for a partly imagined past.

At its core, however, Populism was a class-based movement, with class-based goals. By contrast, as the conservative political analyst
David Frum has noted, American populist ire in recent generations has nearly always been focused on the best-educated rather than the wealthy. A key difference between the Populist movement and the Tea Party is that the latter, so far, has not taken on an anti-business or anti-rich cast. Despite its flirtations with protectionism and its loathing of the bank bailouts, the Tea Party still fits relatively easily within the GOP—favoring small government, light regulation, and low taxes at every income level.

Yet if class distinctions continue to grow sharper in the United States, and if educational differences keep looming larger as a filter between the classes, one wonders whether the populist distinction between wealth and education will last very far into the twenty-first century. One of many reasons that Sarah Palin is the natural leader of the Tea Party is that she has achieved power and material success outside of the usual meritocratic channels. But her path to wealth—celebrity—is of course not widely available, even in the age of reality TV.

In his 1951 book,
The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements
, the social writer Eric Hoffer argued that all mass movements, whether religious, social, or nationalist, share certain
essential characteristics, and are rooted in the failing self-esteem of large groups of people. Ruined middle classes, Hoffer noted, are highly susceptible to movements; they “throb with the ferment of frustration. The memory of better things is as fire in their veins.” Over time, feelings of helplessness and worthlessness foster paranoia, which shifts guilt and blame onto others. Boredom with a stagnant life inspires identification with radical causes. To one extent or another, wrote Hoffer, mass movements always breed “enthusiasm, fervent hope, hatred and intolerance.” Their stated goals are less important than the psychological and emotional void they fill, and in fact are easily mutable.

The American middle class, while under increasing pressure, is hardly ruined. And aggressive populism—whether embodied in the Tea Party movement or any other—does not look likely to gain dominance over U.S. politics anytime soon. Even the Populist movement, which developed deep institutional roots and had deeper grievances than those of the middle class today, was ultimately crushed by business and financial interests in 1896, once it had become a true threat to them. (The Populists had cast their lot with the Democrats by then, and the Republican Party, fueled by unprecedented campaign contributions, developed a new and more sophisticated campaign machine that would dominate politics for years thereafter.) It is very difficult for any outsider movement to succeed in American politics. That difficulty is all the greater today—and the odds that any genuinely anti-elite movement could succeed are all the longer—because of the nature of our meritocracy, which lifts natural leaders from the communities of their birth and absorbs them.

Yet that very fact also makes modern grassroots movements less apt to develop responsible and coherent positions, and more vulnerable to demagoguery. When discredited ideas and irresponsible proposals gain a wide following, they do eventually exert an influence on policy and on the culture, even if their main proponents never gain power. And of course, the “tail risk” of an inchoate populism should not be overlooked; however unlikely a populist government
might seem in any particular year, should economic pressures increase, the dam could someday break. The frustration felt today by many Tea Party supporters is not without basis. It is likely to increase as the cities of the “coastal elite” and other elite enclaves shrug off the recession.

I
N
J
ULY 2010
,
a Penn Schoen Berland poll of Washington, DC, elites—defined as college graduates involved in politics or policy who make more than $75,000 a year—revealed their views about the economy to be much more positive than those of most Americans; nationwide, about two out of three survey respondents said the U.S. economy was on the wrong track, but less than half of the Washington elites surveyed felt the same way. (Elites were also less concerned about immigration than most Americans, and more apt to think the Tea Party was a fad that would “go away soon.”) A large majority acknowledged that the current downturn had affected them less than it had most Americans.