The Roots of American Anger

Yesterday I was pondering the anger of Americans who support the Tea Party, which seems to me deeply irrational. In the grand scheme of things the political difference between Barack Obama and George W. Bush is turning out to be thin; Obama's health care initiative does expand the government's reach, but it really smacks much less of socialism than Bush's expansion of Medicare, and they are turning out to have a similar fondness for foreign wars.

I don't believe the causes of right wing anger have much to do with the issues Tea Party politicians are taking up, especially government spending. Nobody likes paying taxes, but Obama only wants to raise them back to where they were in 2000, and the notion that he is some kind of revolutionary socialist is just absurd. In practice Tea Party voters support most of the spending the government does, not just defense, social security, and medicare but farm subsidies, roads, the war on drugs, and so on.

The real problem, I believe, is that it is spiritually corrosive to be a conservative in the modern age. The essence of conservatism is opposition to change, and despite the best efforts of conservative politicians the modern world is changing at a dizzying rate. If you are a fan of novelty, there has never been a better time. But if you want things to stay the way they were when you were a kid --like John Boehner, who recently accused Obama of "trying to snuff out the America I grew up in"-- you are fighting a doomed rear-guard action. That way of life is under attack from a thousand directions: technological changes that render the skills of your grandparents less and less valuable, economic changes that sweep away whole categories of work, social changes that undermine traditional roles and have even changed relationships in the most fundamental institution, the family. The neighborhood you grew up in is likely unrecognizable, especially if you grew up in the sort of outer suburb or populous rural area where many populist conservatives are based.

The people who thrive in this world are the ones who surf the wave of change -- who take pleasure in the new, who love to be the first, who learn to promote themselves as change agents. So to be a conservative in such a world is to be perpetually left behind, and to watch what you love fade away. It makes people sad and angry. They also know that the real stars of the contemporary world, the people who run banks, invent iPods, and write advertising, feel nothing but contempt for people they call rednecks.

Of course there are enough people who feel the same way that conservative spokesmen can thrive -- politicians, country music stars -- but ultimately you are still railing against unstoppable forces of change. What Tea Party conservatives want is not for the government to spend less money, but for the world to go back to being the way it was in 1957. This explains their support for a lot of dubious spending, such as farm subsidies (designed to keep rural America from changing), highways (because driving is very American), and the war on drugs (because there was no cocaine or meth in 1957). It also explains their fondness for restrictive neighborhood covenants and the like, despite their unending talk about liberty.

The confusion of conservative American politics is most clear in their attitude toward capitalism. American conservatives support the free market, because America has always been a capitalist society with less regulation of industry than in Europe or Japan. But unregulated capitalism, in alliance with science, may be the most effective engine of change ever devised. It is not the government that is killing off small towns in America, emptying people from whole districts, shutting down mines and factories, or driving family farmers out of business. On the contrary, the government is spending billions to keep those things from happening. Nor is the government trucking in immigrants from Mexico. It is capitalism that is remaking the country, and capitalists who hire immigrant workers. So by supporting capitalism, conservatives are helping to sweep away the world they want to defend.

Consider how much the world has changed in the past 50 years -- in the public role of women, the breakdown in barriers between men's and women's work, family structure, the acceptance of homosexuality, the creation of the internet, and on and on. No wonder people who want the world to stand still are confused and angry.

I don't know what to do about this, since we do not have the power to stop technological and economic change, and some big social changes -- women's rights, gay rights -- are at the core of the progressive agenda. But maybe if we could speak honestly about what we care about, instead of fulminating about side-issues like government spending, we could work together to make change less painful for its victims. And maybe we could convince some voters that the big capitalists don't care about preserving the world they love, and only want lower taxes and less regulation for themselves, so they can get on with the business of changing the world faster.