Classless Clinton

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19 April 2010

Those on the Left who are attempting to defuse and destroy the Tea Party movement are finally living the socialist dream: They truly have no class. Rather than engage with a movement that is more diverse than the New York Times’ Board of Directors, they have sought to smear those who worry about the size of government, ballooning deficits, and the dependence of future Americans on the state, flinging around loose charges of racism and terrorism.

Exhibit A is Bill Clinton’s risible op-ed in the aforementioned Grey Lady, the latest in a series of sly comparisons to be drawn by the former president between domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh and today’s Tea Party protestors.

This is of course old hat for Clinton: As Byron York explains, Clinton and his svengali Dick Morris worked hard to use the tragedy (provoked, for those who believe that any act of terrorism can be explained by root causes that redound to the US government, by his own administration’s bungled raid in Waco) to shore up what was then a sinking presidency.

Deciding it worked, he would go on to make it a hallmark of his career. Readers who lived in or visited the US in 1996 likely heard him using a phony “epidemic” of arson attacks directed at black churches to garner votes and thump Republicans with the racist card. Today, he is just the latest example of failed leadership on the American Left: Allegedly the home of the smart, the reflective, the tolerant, the people too busy to hate, it is falling to intellectual pieces now that it is confronted with a grass roots movement that has taken its old playbook and is using it, successfully, for very different ends.

To put it another way, they cannot understand that what is happening in the US is that after spending decades debunking the idea of homo economicus – i.e., the notion that humans are perfectly rational economic beings who always vote their pocketbook – while at the same time preaching the virtues of political protest, Democrats are suddenly confronted with a large number of people who can’t be bought and are taking it to the street to fight those who would buy them. These individuals do not believe that the government is necessarily the thin line that stands between order and chaos, nor do they think the state is the proper intermediary for civil society. They do not see dignity in dependence, which is what five decades of failed welfare theory have preached. And they resent terribly the idea that because they might get a tax break they ought to be grateful, rather than annoyed.

Be careful what you wish for, indeed.