by Thomas Frank
It can be a little embarrassing to watch the newest Right’s rank and file arguing over who was the very first Tea Partier, exhorting their comrades to adopt some flag that they have designed, trying to impress one another with patriotic arcana like the forgotten fourth verse of the “Star Spangled Banner,” or strategizing to parlay a single moment of YouTube notoriety into a lifelong career. But these stabs at personal branding, these efforts people make to transform themselves into walking advertisements—they are all of a piece, I believe, with the conservative establishment’s efforts to capitalize on the grassroots awakening. Both are specimens of a kind of entrepreneurial self-assertion that distinguishes the American Right.
That’s why the movement’s gatherings are filled with freelance James Madisons, each one working on some patented political contraption out in the garage. Go to enough rallies, and you will learn about a group called GOOOH, which developed a plan to “evict the 435 career politicians in the U.S. House of Representatives and replace them with everyday Americans just like you.” You will meet the folks from iCaucus, who promise to apply a metaphorical “Big Stick” to members of Congress in retaliation for the bank bailouts. You will discover that “the answer we’ve all been waiting for has arrived” in the form of another group’s “Redeclaration of Independence,” which all are exhorted to sign. Someone else launched a movement called We Read the Constitution, which aims to have people all over America hold parties where they will declaim that document aloud. It may sound boring, but in truth it’s a “profoundly moving exercise,” so sign up.9
Everyone is a philosopher. This is a movement of manifestoes, blogs, and small-press books in which thousands of self-taught Montesquieus spin theories of government villainy they dreamed up using only the information provided by the Bible, the Constitution, and The Glenn Beck Program. Read through these brave declarations of political faith, however, and what astonishes is not their idiosyncrasy but their sameness. Using the same ingenious reasoning, each self-published philosophe comes to the same conclusions: The divinity of markets. The elitism of the liberals. And the extreme danger hanging over the head of the Republic.
Going Viral
All of these themes came together over the course of a story that began at a public meeting in a depressed part of Washington State in August of 2009. This was “Town Hall Summer,” when protesters took their complaints from the streets and into the traditional Q-and-A sessions held by their elected representatives. It followed the same trajectory from contrived to genuine as did the Tea Party movement itself. At first, memos appeared from leadership groups instructing conservatives how to make themselves heard at town hall gatherings or even how to disrupt same.10 Then, after a few town hall meetings were duly disrupted in spectacular fashion—with the disruptions captured for eternity on handheld video cameras—the fad caught on. The chance to inflict spectacular humiliation on some politician before the eyes of the nation was apparently the opportunity for which thousands had been waiting.
At the town hall meeting that concerns us here, the subject was the Democrats’ various health-care proposals; the politician on stage was Brian Baird, a bland, affable Democratic congressman in khaki pants and a light-colored shirt; the local unemployment rate was well above 10 percent; and all across the country, public meetings of this kind were giving way to explosions of rage. Representative Baird had made the mistake of labeling such protests “brownshirt tactics,” thus painting a big bull’s-eye on himself.
Thanks to those ubiquitous video cameras, the man who would emerge from the meeting with the spotlight fixed on his burly frame was David W. Hedrick, a management consultant and former marine. At some point in the Baird gathering, participants had talked over a federal proposal to encourage the teaching of parenting skills, and now, as the cameras hummed, this man Hedrick stepped up to the microphone on the floor of the auditorium to tangle with Representative Baird. “I heard you say tonight about educating our children, indoctrinating our children, whatever you want to call it,” Hedrick began, after introducing himself. On the soon-to-be-famous videotape, the congressman can be heard mumbling a reply, but before he finishes Hedrick erupts: “Stay away from my kids!”
The audience explodes with approval at the unprovoked assault. But the man on the floor is just beginning; thirty seconds later he is imparting “a little history lesson” to the hapless Dem: “The Nazis were the National Socialist Party. They were leftist.” These Nazis, according to Hedrick and countless leaders of the revived Right who have seen fit to educate the nation on the subject of World War II, seized the very industries that the Democrats were now also ominously accused of coveting: banks, automakers, health care. Therefore, if liberals such as Nancy Pelosi wanted to search the country for people wearing swastikas, the angry man on the floor insisted, in a voice growing husky with righteousness, “maybe the first place she should look is the sleeve of her own arm.”
The audience was on its feet now, shouting; a standing O for a guy who thinks we fought World War II to free mankind from universal health care. Or, more likely, because it’s always fun to see a politician get a good verbal thrashing, regardless of the delusions involved. Hedrick, for his part, was not quite done yet; there was one more insult yet to come. He had earlier mentioned the oath to “support and defend” the Constitution that soldiers and public servants take—a matter of grave significance where Tea Partiers gather—and now he flung it in the Democrat’s face. “As a marine,” Hedrick insisted, “I’ve kept my oath. Do you ever intend to keep yours?” As the congressman mumbled again, the former marine turned his back and marched to the rear, as if from an overwhelming disgust.
The video of the confrontation “went viral,” as the expression had it. Its image of a passionate everyman speaking up (literally, upward) at uncaring power was an awesome, inspiring sight, a populist moment of the most moving sort—that is, if you put aside the asinine things Hedrick actually said. In the days that followed, the clip appeared on countless conservative websites. It was played endlessly on Fox News. Someone set it to music. The former marine himself appeared on Sean Hannity’s TV program several days after the showdown, informing the host that the Democratic administration’s policies were the same “almost line for line” as those of the Nazis.
The world briefly seemed to be at the former marine’s feet, thanks to YouTube, the revitalized Right, and an understanding of German history that bordered on complete fantasy. Hedrick was the political star of the moment, the Santelli of the summer. But the summer did not last.
Shortly after his appearance on Hannity’s show, David Hedrick showed up at another town hall meeting for Congressman Baird, clearly trying to duplicate his original stunt. This time things didn’t go as well. Hedrick burned up his allotted time pouting about all the abuse he had received since his last go-round on the public stage and then made the rookie mistake of asking Baird to read from the Constitution; the long, boring disquisition that followed took the wind out of the proceedings.
Still, as we media-age citizens know, it’s hard to return to anonymity after a moment of stardom. Hedrick decided to run for Baird’s seat in Congress; of the several Republicans vying for the post, the former marine distinguished himself by the extremist purity of his stance. It won him an intense grassroots following, Hedrick claimed.11
Even though he was now a congressional candidate, articles about Hedrick still usually began by noting his long-ago moment of YouTube glory, and in July of 2010 he showed up at a public budget hearing, clearly aiming to rekindle the populist magic, this time by throwing accusations at Washington governor Christine Gregoire while the cameras rolled. She ignored him. In August he lost the Republican primary to a state legislator.
Still, Hedrick could not seem to let go. Toward the end of the year he made one more attempt to capitalize on his fame: a Tea Party book for kids—the very kids that he was remembered for having warned that congressman to stay away from. As far as I can tell, the only notices the bo
ok drew were written in the key of can-you-believe-this-shit. But let us give Hedrick his due. He produced here one of the movement’s most memorable documents: blunt, forthright, compact, insulting—and, most typically, written at an elementary-school level.*
The book was, of course, a Christmas story—which is to say, a contribution to the vast literature of complaint about how Christmas has been debased and uprooted from its rightful origins. The Liberal Claus, Hedrick called it, and it was a simple fable for the Tea Party era. It seems that evil liberal elves had stolen an election and installed a usurper on Santa’s throne: the “Liberal Claus,” a.k.a. Barack Obama. This impostor Claus (“‘Are you even from the North Pole?’ an elf questioned”) buys off the children of David Hedrick’s town, Camas, Washington, with free candy. He flouts the “Christmastution,” claiming that “very smart” people can find authorization for his misdeeds in that document even though ordinary people can’t. He even requires Santa’s elves to join unions, using as his enforcer an elf who uses German words and wears “jackboots,” a clever nod, apparently, to Hitler’s alliance with organized labor, something I had never heard of before but which I guess history-minded Tea Partiers know all about.
Spoiler alert: the kids of Camas, Washington, get their hands on a snake flag and rise up against the pretender Claus. Critical verdict: the metaphors are tortured, the prose is lousy, the caricatures are heavy-handed, and in a sort of demented homage to Where’s Waldo? the illustrations include images of a Stalin elf, a Castro elf, and a Hugo Chávez elf, all of them lending a hand to their liberal North Pole pals. Of course, Hedrick and his singular accomplishment had to be mentioned in the story, too: at the bottom of a page of the Christmas Times, the reader can see the following headline: “Camas man’s rant goes viral,” over a caricature of Hedrick himself.
David Hedrick was not elected to Congress, but his story tells us something valuable nevertheless. The relentless grabbing of opportunities, the blending of politics with profit, the ceaseless striving to build a career on a single moment of media glory—these are the elements from which the conservative resurgence has grown. In this particular episode, the entrepreneur failed. But thanks to the many others in which entrepreneurs succeeded, the resurgent Right was able to conquer Congress and put its crippling agenda into effect.
CHAPTER 6
A Mask for Privilege
Another revealing artifact: an enormous flag, waved by a man at the Code Red rally on the west lawn of the Capitol in March of 2010. This remarkable banner featured the stripes of the traditional Old Glory but replaced the stars with the Tea Party movement’s coiled-rattlesnake emblem, over the words “GET BACK!” The red and white stripes, meanwhile, were filled with carefully lettered political demands, eighteen of them in all, plus the name of the website where you could buy a flag just like it for forty dollars, plus shipping. Talk about political entrepreneurship: here was a flag with a built-in advertisement.
When I was young, I used to wonder what the elements of the American flag were supposed to represent; this particular ensign seemed to have been designed as an answer to that question, with each stripe carefully labeled so no misinterpretation was possible. It was difficult to read while flapping in the March breeze, of course, but now, after having visited the flagmaker’s website, I can tell you that, among other things, the stripes call upon our elected officials to: “Balance the Budget,” “Protect Free Markets,” “Respect Property Rights,” and to make “No Regulation Without Representation,” which sounds a lot like a call to let corporations vote.
I didn’t buy a “Get Back” flag. Instead, I picked up a book of political theory, Spread This Wealth (And Pass This Ammunition), in which the flag designer, the aforementioned C. Jesse Duke, can be found declaring that America was “settled, built, and defended by ordinary people, just like me—laborers, lumberjacks, farmers, soldiers, share-croppers, and others who make their living by the sweat of their brow.” These are also, I guess, the people who want government to keep its hands off “free markets” and to stop its infernal regulating—laborers and sharecroppers, acting through their intermediary, the Tea Party movement. “I take pride in the fact,” Duke continues, “that I’m one of them and not an intellectual.”1
But C. Jesse Duke isn’t exactly “one of them.” The About the Author page in his book describes him not as a lumberjack or a sharecropper but as “a self-employed small business owner for thirty-eight years.” And with that mix-up about social class, I submit, we encounter the movement’s most essential obfuscation.
Duke’s idea of society’s structure is actually something you come across all the time in the rhetoric of the resurgent Right: America is made up of two classes, roughly speaking, “ordinary people” and “intellectuals.” According to this way of thinking, as we see again and again, either you’re a productive citizen, or you’re some kind of snob, a university professor or an EPA bureaucrat. Compared to the vivid line separating intellectuals and productive members of society, all other distinctions fade to nothingness. Between small-business owners and sharecroppers, for example, there is no difference at all, just as other Tea Party authors saw no real difference between Rick Santelli’s bond traders and “working people.”*
Erasing class distinctions in this self-serving way is one of the conservative revival’s great recurring techniques. There is no better instance of this erasure than the enormous rally held in West Virginia on Labor Day 2009 for the express purpose of announcing the solidarity between coal miners and the coal mine operators who employ them. The get-together featured the protest favorites Sean Hannity and Ted Nugent and was presided over by Don Blankenship, the CEO of Massey Energy, a pollution-spewing, strikebreaking mogul of the old school.2 Dressed in American flag clothing and boasting that the gathering had cost him “a million dollars or so,” Blankenship took the stage and declared that he was there to “defend American labor because no one else will.” Specifically, the CEO was standing tall against “our government leaders,” who are, with their safety and environmental meddling, “American workers’ worst nightmare.”
Eight months after that rally, twenty-nine workers in Massey’s Upper Big Branch mine were dead from a huge underground explosion that almost certainly would have been minimized if Massey had followed standard safety and ventilation practices—or if U.S. mine inspectors had backed up their many citations of the operation with proper enforcement.3
Now, when we find a mine operator claiming that his own struggles against regulation are actually the struggles of mine workers—workers who are then killed because mine regulations are not properly observed by said operator—we have stumbled upon a nearly perfect example of what the sociologists call “complete horseshit.” The man’s ideas about class are so contrary to reality, so absurdly false, that they serve to bring into sharp focus precisely the difference they are meant to conceal.
In this new populist set piece, the intellectuals are once again the villains, but for reasons that have shifted with the times. In the Bush years, the crime of the intellectuals was always supposed to be their contempt for the values of the red-state heartland—their disrespect for the sanctity of the fetus as well as the fine points of NASCAR. In the present situation, though, the intellectuals’ sin is different: they doubt the hand of the almighty Market.
The common people, by contrast, supposedly understand their place in the Market’s order, whether they trade bonds or dig ditches. Indeed, these humble souls are indistinguishable from the Market Itself since It is an expression of their wants and aspirations. And the embodiment of this populist spirit of humility before the Market is the small-business person. Unlike the bureaucrat or the college professor—or that unholy cross of the two, President Obama—the small-business person is a purely Market-made creature, an individual who gets by on his initiative alone, an entrepreneur who works hard, who reaps what he sows, who receives no assistance from government, who even accepts failure uncomplainingly if that’s the way the Market
wants it.
Dictatorship of the Entrepreneur
We know, anecdotally at least, that the people who show up for Tea Party rallies tend to describe themselves as victims of the recession. But this is not to say that Tea Party protestors have been pauperized by the downturn or even that they are unemployed, in the manner of 1932’s Bonus Army, although individuals here and there certainly are. In fact, Tea Partiers tend to be better off than the public generally; read their accounts of hard-times suffering closely, and you will often find that the form it takes is a downturn in their business.
This is no poor people’s movement. Just look around you at a Tea Party event: the protestors’ clothes look new; their hair was recently barbered; and male protestors sometimes wear neckties even when not in Washington, DC. One man I met at a rally in Denver showed up in an ascot. Nor are they a desperate mob. The favored rhetorical style of the movement is vituperation with overtones of righteous bloodthirst, but when addressing one another the protesters tend to be polite—at least, in my experience.* They say “excuse me” as they make their way through the crowd, and according to right-wing legend they always put their litter in the trash can when they leave.
