Aneurin Bevan On The Tea Party

By Steve Hynd

The great man would have recognised the Tea Party for what it is.

Conservatives, Aneurin Bevan wrote, "every election, must have a bogy man. If you haven't got a programme, a bogy man will do.� 

Or if you want a fuller form:

 "What we need, apparently, is not statesman but hypnotists, not scientists, but witchdoctors, not confidence born of scientific prediction of the future, but confidence created by a political Confidence Trick. There is nothing surprising i...n this. It is the kind of mystic Mumbo-Jumbo to which capitalism is driven when austere reason pronounces sentence of death upon it. It is the primitive recoil from reality and the burdens of reality which lies at the root of Fascist psychology."

This confidence trick is indeed at the heart of the Tea Party, as it has been hijacked by the Republican Party elite for their own purposes. If the words "democratic socialism" were not taboo, freighted with McCarthyite connotations that don't actually apply, then many Tea partiers would realise that democratic socialism - in the form of "socialism from below", with power flowing from the workers themselves in a distributed democratic structure rather than from the oligarchic elite who control the current structure - is actually what they want and need.

The first part of the hijacking is a sleight of hand about "freedom". The Republican elite want only to talk about negative freedoms:

On the personal level, this means a lack of coercion or intrusion from government in the lives of citizens. At the national level, it means a lack of intervention from outsiders in the life of the country. In both cases, the key idea is that the individual and the nation are both entities which alone have the absolute right to determine their own destinies for themselves.

What they don't want to talk about are positive freedoms. You can't pull yourself up by your bootstraps if you can't even afford bootstraps.

Negative freedom is vitally important. But the left has always recognised another from of liberty: positive freedom. This is the practical ability to actually make choices and live your life in the way you want. The problem is that negative freedom alone doesn't guarantee this. If you have no opportunities in life, the fact that the government isn't interfering with your business is small consolation...Freedom only becomes real if people are empowered to make choices for themselves, and they may need the help of others to do so.

In the US "positive freedom" is automatically "more government and more taxes" and this knee-jerk reaction is even made by those at the bottom of the heap who, without the benefits of "positive freedom", will always be working-to-be-poor simply because the fight to live any kind of decent life takes all their energy and resources. They have bought the right's vision of "negative freedom" and swallowed it whole.

Thomas Frank identified the primary Republican theme back in 2004:

Instead of it being blue collar against white collar, or workers against the Fortune 500, it is average Americans � or "authentic" Americans � versus an affected liberal elite. They use this language of class all the time and it is there in every single one of these issues. It�s just below the surface � usually not even below the surface. It�s right there.

This [class issue] was not a problem for Democrats fifty years ago. Calling Democrats an elite group back then would have been laughable. The idea of liberals being elite was ridiculous because liberals were autoworkers in Detroit, sharecroppers in Alabama. And that�s who they still are, to some degree. But they have to rediscover that identity.

...As for equality, if you look back to the founding of this party and Andrew Jackson, this is what it�s all about: equal rights for all, special privileges for none.

Unfortunately, the ruling set in the Democratic Party has indeed become an elite - but so has that of the Republican Party. The Republicans conceal that truth by a constant stream of "guns, God and gays", by subliminally xenophobic rhetoric dressed up as 'national security", by fearmongering about taxes while the elite themselves dodge taxation by legal and illegal means at every turn.

But the Democrats? Well, it's true that "every election, must have a bogy man. If you haven't got a programme, a bogy man will do.� The Democrats bogey man - the one used to keep the great unwashed voting for their elite - is the spectre of a Republican victory. "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the possible" is the most pernicious of lies. It translates directly to: "We're not (quite) as bad as those Republicans" and deliberately plays on the Republican elites use of misdirections about race, God and taxes to create a false binary choice. It justifies health legislation that's a giveaway to elite vested interests, immense efforts to placate the financial industry and wars of occupation that "we Dems didn't start", even though the Dem elite respect the people who did. .

I tell you, it isn't the "latte-sipping liberals" that are the problem in this country - its the latte-sippers FULL STOP - on both left and right. The latte-sipping conservatives are just as bad. All of them divorced from the reality of a tough life at or below minimum wage and all thinking they can look down upon and pontificate to people (of any race, color or religion) who do real work.

Right now, the AFL- CIO are working for the wrong people by working to elect the Democrat elite.

"When our canvassers call on our members on their doorsteps, they hear Glenn Beck or Bill O'Reilly in the background," says Dan Heck, who heads a massive union-sponsored program in Ohio devoted to persuading its members to vote this November for candidates who would mightily displease Beck and O'Reilly.

Heck's organization, Working America, was created by the national AFL-CIO in 2004 to reach out to white, working-class voters in key swing states such as Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania. "Right now, we talk to 25,000 people every week," says Karen Nussbaum, the program's national director, "and we'll knock on a million doors in the next two months. The people we talk to are the volatile 40 percent in the middle of the electorate. They're angry, and they're not sure who to blame or what to do about it."

"A number of these folks are evangelicals, some are conservatives," says AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka. "We still manage to find common ground with them, talking about ending tax breaks for the rich and penalizing companies that offshore jobs." Poll after poll makes clear that it is working-class whites who have most decisively turned away from President Obama. With only 7 percent of the private sector unionized, the AFL-CIO now reaches out beyond its members to preach the gospel of economic progressivism -- public investment in infrastructure, reviving manufacturing, clipping Wall Street's wings -- to swing voters who, 30 or 40 years ago, would have been card-carrying union members.

The Change To Win Coalition has a better idea - they split from the AFL-CIO back in 2005 because they didn't wish to simply be vote-getters for the DC Democrats without reward, time after time.

E.J Dionne, back in 2005, noted the electoral math for the Democratic Party's ruling elite and it's over-riding need - relection.

the party's problems are structural and can be explained by three numbers: 21, 34 and 45. According to the network exit polls, 21 percent of the voters who cast ballots in 2004 called themselves liberal, 34 percent said they were conservative and 45 percent called themselves moderate.

But as I wrote at the time, that only means that if the Democrats want to be elected by the current electorate, then they must move towards a centrist-right politics. They also must themselves in the position of needing corporate funds to swell campaign coffers, because enough money will never come from the Left's grassroots.

However, and its a big however, the current electorate is not the same as the potential electorate. By American standards the turnout for the 2004 Presidential election was high - yet by the standards of other Western democracies it was woefully low. Chris Bowers at MyDD researched who didn't turn out to vote and came up with some interesting findings. In 2004, for example, the national median income was $35,100 p.a. yet the median income of the electorate was $55,300 - a difference of 57.5%.

In other words, it is mostly the poorest segment of society who don't vote. Consider that although Bush gained 52% of the electorate, he only got 34% of all the possible votes. That means there is a huge potential constituency out there, between 25% and 30% of the potential electorate, who simply don't vote - and they don't vote simply because neither party conducts politics on behalf of the vast majority of Americans who work for a bare, paycheck-to-paycheck, living.

The concerns of those Americans who are just getting by are, I'd hazard to say, the core concerns of the rank-and-file Tea Partiers who haven't been seduced by the Republican siren song of social divisiveness and bigotry against "the other": education as a right for as far as the kid is capable of going (not just till High School), some help to find work that isnt minimum wage (travel, education, childcare) or some help with the bills if the work is minimum wage (or below - which is still legal if you are waitstaff for instance), a livable income if you really, truly cannot work, medical care where the first question is "what's wrong?" not "how will you pay?", a break on crippling interest and bankruptcy cycles because you worry about how to pay after the kid is cured, that kind of thing.

They don't care about keeping down gays or brown folk or about Christian fundamentalist power because the gays and brown folk and Christians are all poor together and see the common theme first.

The Tea Party has managed to mobilize a part of that un-voting electorate, along with a part that is listening to the Beckistan siren song. But that siren song is simply the established elite's method of control, it should be ignored. The original and true Tea Partiers should instead be making common cause with the Left to challenge the rich and entrenched elite of both ruling parties. Tea Partiers should be embracing democratic socialism - call it something else if it will help, but that's what it will be.

As Aneurin Bevan also said:

"Not even the apparently enlightened principle of the �greatest good for the greatest number� can excuse indifference to individual suffering. There is no test for progress other than its impact on the individual."

Unfortunately, I feel the likelihood of the Tea Party returning to its true roots in American Labor and becoming a true Labor Party are slim. The elite - via Gingritch, Palin and Beck, as well as elite sources of funding -already have their claws in too deep.

But maybe there's still a demographic and political opening here for a true third party that isn't in hock to that elite both financially and ideologically. Maybe there's "hope for change" after all.