I'm reviving here a post I wrote in early 2012 - to suggest that the roots of the Trump phenomenon are deep, that liberals profoundly misunderstood them -- and that still misunderstand them. We're not going to fix this without dealing with these feelings.
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Liberals do themselves and the nation a grave disservice by dismissing the views of the Tea Party.
Speaking as a mostly-proud liberal myself – sympathetic to unions, redistribution, and other conservative bugbears – I am horrified by many aspects of the Tea Party ideology. They frequently seem, from my perspective, to avoid rational, evidence-based thought, as when denying that failure to lift the debt ceiling would be harmful, or (in many cases) denying the dangers of climate change. I am also convinced that some aspects of Tea Party activity are not genuine, that they sometimes supported and influenced by wealthy “special interests” who hide their activities or disingenuously cloak self-serving proposals in public-spirited rhetoric.
However: It is quite clear that there are a great many self-identified Tea Party supporters who are entirely genuine and public-spirited. Some of them may be uninformed, but many are clearly not: in fact an important characteristic of the Tea Party is that it is built on many local self-study groups that carefully read the Constitution and various difficult theoretical works by Hayek and others, and apply them to current events. Conservatism in general has arguably a more consistent intellectual framework than liberalism. Most polls indicate that Tea Party supporters are, if anything, somewhat better educated than average.
So when my liberal colleagues dismiss Tea Party conservatives as stupid and ignorant, it makes my blood boil. One of the very few core principles of progressive liberalism, in my view, is that one should always strive to understand those with whom one disagrees. That does not mean one must come to consensus with them, or to compromise, or even in all cases to tolerate them; but arrogant dismissal violates everything we stand for. Conservatism, as its name implies, seeks to protect existing goods, so it can afford to draw up defenses around its ideas; liberalism at its core seeks improvement and development, so must always make the effort to seek understanding. This is the act that opens the mind and makes possible new ideas and new relations.
When I consider individual ideas associated with the Tea Party (recognizing, of course, that it has no single dogma), I am often baffled – I can’t make sense of them. How can they blame Obama for a Federal debt that was created mostly by Bush, and where were they in the Bush years? How can they oppose closing tax loopholes for the rich, while simultaneously expressing strong antipathy for Wall Street and the banks? And so on.
But like an Impressionist painting, it makes better sense if one takes a few steps backward. The core animating feeling of the Tea Party, rather clearly, is that things have gone wrong and are getting worse. The reasonable conclusion is that the people in charge can no longer be trusted. That means first of all government: it has failed to spur economic growth or improve the lot of most people, while running up mind-boggling levels of debt. Even most liberals would agree with the basic sense that government has lost its grip on the situation.
It gets worse. The government has been for the last fifty years a hectoring moralist telling most people, especially most conservatives, that they are bad because they hold traditional views of relationships. Powerful leaders, mostly holding political offices, have told them that their “old” ways of doing things are not only impractical but unjust. It has told them that they must change deeply ingrained relations and ways of thinking, must accept all kinds of unfamiliar people into their daily lives, must accept an upset of traditional patterns of family and neighborhood in the interests of an abstract sense of justice.
There are few things that make human beings madder than being blamed. If I bump into someone on the sidewalk and they say “excuse me,” I am not angry; I reciprocate and move on, no matter whose fault it was. But if they say, “Why don’t you look where you’re going?”, I instantly become less reasonable – I get my back up, even if it was my fault; I nurse the grievance. On a big and long scale, this is what much of the country, indeed much of the world, has been feeling for at least a half century: they have been told they are to blame for long-standing injustices and that they must apologize and make amends. It’s enough to make anyone furious.
Most Americans are ambivalent. They accept the good that has come of the push for human rights and diversity – as a nation we are on the whole far more accepting of Blacks and of women’s rights than we were fifty years ago; but that doesn’t mean that they don’t resent being pushed into it. And many are not at all convinced that they want further broadening of the community to include Muslims or homosexuals or other “outside” groups. Liberals see such attitudes as stupid and racist. And that contributes mightily to our national polarization.
