The subprime mortgage crisis that swept the United States in 2007 was the worst crisis since the 1929 economic crisis in the United States. The recession lasted for 18 months[1] and triggered a dramatic upheaval in American society. The society is fluctuating, and the people's minds are changing. The fresh-looking Obama successfully defeated the old-fashioned McCain and officially took office on January 20, 2009. For a time, whether the United States wants to return to the New Deal and intervene in the market by means to save the economy has become a topic of social concern. As soon as he took office, Obama proposed an ambitious economic stimulus package. It is expected to invest nearly $800 billion in the future to stimulate the economy. The matter sparked unanimous opposition from conservatives. On January 29, 2009, just a week after Obama** took office, the Cato Institute, a prominent right-wing research institute, cited the Washington Post's sharp criticism as a "Keynesian mistake"[2]. The right's anger is not unfounded, but it is ironic. Because, it is precisely the conservative American George W. Bush**. During George W. Bush's eight years in office, military spending increased from 2 percent of total GDPThe 9% of $306 billion soared to $612 billion, or 42%[3]。According to the statistics of the Office of the US Congressional Budget Committee, the United States had a budget surplus on the eve of George W. Bush's inauguration. If the fiscal surplus created by Clinton is accumulated, the total US surplus should reach $5.6 trillion in the period from 2002 to 2011. In fact, the U.S.** has accumulated a fiscal deficit of $6.1 trillion during this period[4]. On February 19, howeverLess than a month after Obama took office, the attack on Obama had already arrived。Financial analysts at CNBC TV in the United States angrily denounced Obama's stimulus plan in the connection. Not only did he call those who invested in high-risk loans "losers," but he also called on the people to engage in a "21st-century tea party movement"[5]. During the new crown pneumonia epidemic, this person, as the host of CNBC, also made an outrageous statement that "the new crown virus should be passed on to everyone". Of course, at the time, this inflammatory statement instantly ignited a massive Tea Party movement in the United States。On April 15, 2009, two months after the incident, more than 750 tea party organizations had been established spontaneously and coordinated in several large cities**[6]. A few months later, the Tea Party's "9.12" congress attracted 2.68 million people to participate in the march [7]. We can say that the Tea Party movement began to take shape.
While the Republican establishment looks like a suit and mild-mannered to the outside world, the Tea Party members look angry and rusticHowever, the relationship between the ideology of the Tea Party and the traditional ideology of the Republican Party is very close。As we will prove belowOn several key issues, the Tea Party is almost identical to the mainstream Republican establishment, but at a far more extreme pace。According to 201410.According to a Gallup poll on the 1st, 77 percent of Tea Party supporters consider themselves conservative, while only 52 percent of ordinary Republican supporters are conservative. Among Tea Party supporters, a whopping 28% consider themselves extremely conservative, compared to only 10% of ordinary Republican supporters[8].
Figure 1: The ideology of Tea Party supporters.
Figure |Gallup.
Recognizing,As a Republican Party of social conservatism, its ideology has strong moral attributes(We'll talk more about that later). As an ideology with moral attributes, it has a priori immunity from the test of reason for its followers. It is religiously sacred and inviolable. It simply has a kind of righteous and imposing temperament of truth. The consequence of such an ideology is its susceptibility to fundamentalism。Since an ideology is a priori, unquestionable, and untestable, any deviation from or change from it is under-emboldened. If reality does not correspond to it, it is also the "evil" and irrationality of reality, not the error of this ideology with the aura of truth. Under the influence of this ideology, the right-wing turn of the Republican Party will be more extreme and holistic than that of the Democratic Party. Just like the data.
For the above reasons,When Tea Party elements began to pour into the public office campaign, this powerful right-wing populist force instantly upset many entrenched Republican establishment and forced many Republican moderates to turn sharply to the right。First, in the mid-November 2009 gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey, two Tea Party-backed Republican candidates won gubernatorial seats by 18 percent and 4 percent, respectively. This was followed by the fact that on January 19, 2012, Scott Brown won the Senate seat in the deep blue state of Massachusetts, which had previously been held by the Kennedy family of the Democratic Party. Subsequently, in the 2010 midterm elections, Christine O'Donnell won the Delaware Republican primary, and Carl Palladino won the Republican primary for New York governor. With the support of the Tea Party movement, Republicans regained control of the House of Representatives in the 2010 midterm elections. Of the 83 newly elected Republican House members, more than 60 are supporters of the Tea Party movement. The biggest victory came on May 8, 2012, when Richard Murdoch, a political amateur backed by the Tea Party, defeated Indiana's veteran Republican Senator Dick Ruger, who had been re-elected for 36 years. In addition, many candidates who were supported by the Republican elite faction, and candidates who monopolized a lot of resources, lost to the amateurs of the emerging Tea Party. The Tea Party was like a whirlwind that crushed the Republicans. Republicans entered a conservative spiral that continues to this day.
2.1 Anti-political sentiment and the big chaebols
For supporters of the Tea Party, according to a July 2010 poll by Politico NewsThe Tea Party movement's primary concern was the issue of spending and debt。A whopping 61% of nearly 700 respondents believe that the debt problem is "an extremely serious threat" [11]. According to the New York Times in 2010According to a systematic poll of 1,580 adult voters in April, the results of the poll showed that:Almost all of the top six public issues that the Tea Party is most concerned about are related to the issue of fiscal conservatism。The downsizing of the Federation** has garnered a whopping 68% support[12]. Tea Party well-known activist Grover GNorquist even takes the issue to the extreme. In 2010, he declared in the newspaper of his alma mater, Harvard, that "I don't want to abolish the federation**, I just want to shrink it to the point where I can easily drown it in a bathroom bathhouse." ”[13]
Figure 2: Goals of the Tea Party Movement.
Figure | politico
This attitude of extreme, almost fanatical fear of federal spendingBehind it is an anti-political sentiment。Anti-Politics comes from James Fergerson's 1994 book, The Anti-Politics Machine. The term describes a deep distrust of traditional political processes and political actors. Consider the traditional political process to be unjust. Believe that the people need to somehow oppose and change this "unjust" political system.
This anti-political sentiment can be traced back to the foundation of American society, which is based on distrust of the old political system. The traditional ideology in American society is also the soil for anti-politics。For many years, American society has emphasized autonomy, independence, and self-reliance. ** and other public power is always seen as an unnecessary interference, and even worse, as an inefficient "necessary evil". And this "anti-politics" of distrust of the ** project and the ** intervention in detail is the product of the propaganda of large capital investment represented by General Motors President Alfred Sloan in the early days of the Cold War and the combination of the ** ideology that prevailed in the United States [14]. In the 21st century, it is still common for large corporations to use propaganda to create distrust of the country and then promote their political interests。For example, according to Dorie EDr. Apollonio with Lisa AAccording to Dr. Bero's research published in Public Health Weekly, the well-known anti-political civil society "Get Government Off Our Back" movement was heavily funded by the American Tobacco Group before the Tea Party movement. This organization uses large-scale and extremely inflammatory discourse to create an all-pervasive and extremely controlling image of the people, trying to persuade the public to resist the regulation in order to achieve the goal of deregulating large business. This **control is exactly what the American social conservatives *** think**[15]. In the era of the Tea Party movement, the characteristics of big business in funding right-wing movements and inciting anti-political ideas became more and more obvious。In his book "The Political Process of Social Movements in the United States", Yang Yue, a professor at the China Foreign Affairs University, specifically listed such things as "the cause of freedom" and "our country deserves to be better" (35 large demonstrations were organized across the country in just two weeks).In 2010, there were eight nationwide bus parades, more than 400 demonstrations, etc.), Americans Fighting for Prosperity (1.9 million members in 2012, and affiliates in 35 states. In the 2010 election, which spent a whopping $40 million on election funds, in 2011 it spent $8.4 million to attack Obama** for lending to battery panel companies. The group also planned to spend $125 million in 2012 and mobilize 9 million swing voters against Obama), the Tea Party Patriots (who in 2010 claimed to have 2,200 local affiliates with 115311 members — 63 percent men[16] [16] and the Tea Party State, which claimed to have more than 50,000 members and paid Republican conservative Sarah Palin, who paid six-figure speeches by Republican conservatives such as Sarah Palin, were either directly supported by the monopoly oligarchy Koch brothers or promoted by prominent conservative media elites such as Fox TV.
This anti-political propaganda is also very effective in Republican politics. Republican candidates have long campaigned for language attacking Congress and the current system. From the Tea Party to the Trumpist, we have seen a great deal of malice towards the Washington establishment. Trump and his supporters are extremely keen to attack the establishment of American politics. Back in the Tea Party movement, 85% of Tea Party supporters directly referred to Obama as a "socialist"[17], and Obama was in fact only an executor of Keynesian policies, a far cry from so-called socialism. Trump and his supporters have repeatedly described the Washington establishment as "swamp." Trump supporters are keen to concoct conspiracy theories about the establishment, represented by Hillary Clinton. Trump himself has also publicly identified Hillary Clinton as the "mother of ISIS." On several occasions in 2016 in the United States, Trump and his supporters vehemently called for Hillary Clinton to be "locked up (in jail)" [18]. Entering 2019, the far-right conspiracy theories represented by "Anonymous Q" have unexpectedly been echoed by Trump**. In the United States in 2020, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia 14, the Republican candidate who openly expressed his belief in the "Anonymous Q" conspiracy theory, was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, while her Democratic opponent had already withdrawn. In April 2020, a woman who publicly professed her belief in the "Anonymous Q" conspiracy theory was convicted of attempting to assassinate Biden [19]. It is precisely this extreme fear and disgust of the traditional political order that makes them regard ** as an enemy, and they will want to get rid of it as soon as possible。The strong fear and resistance of the people at the bottom to politics coincides with the Republican establishment's goal of reducing the size of the federal government and cutting the federal budget in order to finally achieve the goal of cutting taxes on the rich and abolishing welfare programs. In this way, it is precisely because of this shaped fear that the people at the bottom throw themselves into the group they should oppose the most.
2.2 Xenophobia, Racial Discrimination and Religion: Social Conservatism Born in a Closed and Backward Society
Tea Party supporters have incredibly conservative tendencies。According to a July 2010 poll by the Politico News Network, participants in the Tea Party movement are very concerned about immigration. A whopping 41 percent of nearly 700 respondents said that illegal immigration was "an extremely serious threat"[20] and a study from the University of Washington showed that most Tea Party supporters had little affection for people of other races and sexual orientations. About 45 percent of whites expressed "strong support" or "support" for the Tea Party movement. Of these, only 35 percent thought blacks were industrious, only 45 percent thought blacks were "intellectual," and only 41 percent thought blacks were "trustworthy." Only 54 percent of whites who support the Tea Party consider Latinos to be "hardworking," only 44 percent think they are "hardworking," and finally only 42 percent consider Latinos to be "trustworthy." Only 36 percent of Tea Party supporters believe that LGBT families should be given the right to adopt children, and only 17 percent support LGBT people's right to marriage. A whopping 73 percent of respondents believe that "black people (in bad circumstances) just don't work their own" and 56 percent believe that immigration "leads to fewer jobs for Americans"[21] (as shown below).
Figure 3: Tea Party supporters' attitudes toward race.
Figure | politico
This overt racial discrimination may be due to the very nature of the movement itself。According to the University of Washington's systematic survey (see Figure 4), 86 percent of Tea Party supporters who are also Republicans are Caucasian. Up to 59 percent are white, and up to 56 percent are over 50 years old. Obviously, the Tea Party movement is a typical "old white man" movement. Of these, only 30% have obtained a university diploma. Up to 70% of the population does not even have a university education [22]. This demographic structure can effectively explain the results of the February 2010 survey conducted by The Economist magazine. According to the survey, 74 percent of Tea Party members agree with the ultra-conservative judgment that "abortion equals **." A whopping 81% oppose same-sex marriage. A whopping 63 percent support Xi of creationism in public schools and oppose evolution. 62% believe that "the only way to heaven is through Jesus"[23]. This low level of knowledge and its own identity as a mainstream group is the root of the identity of the participants in the right-wing movement in the United States. From the above analysis, it is not difficult to conclude thatThe supporters of the right-wing movement in the United States, in addition to the conservative elite at the top, are the "red-necked" old white men with low education and living in remote rural areas
Figure 4: Group portrait of Tea Party supporters.
Figure |University of Washington.
Western democracies are based on pluralism. Pluralism believes that in social and political life, different interest groups are formed by collectives with different interests and demands, and different groups will compete in a unified social background, and finally achieve a balance that takes care of the interests of all parties. At the heart of this pluralistic politics is consensus politics。On this basis, political architects were able to construct a mechanism of competition. Through the artificial design of competition mechanism and confrontation mechanism, mutual checks and balances and constraints are achieved to achieve balance. A strong consensus is the basis for mutual consultation, and it is also the core of ensuring that "fighting without breaking" in competition and maintaining a unified and stable social existence. It's also easy to understand. We don't need to be premised on the existence of a common consensus all the time. When we interact with friends, teachers, and relatives, an implicit consensus is to respect each other's personality and bottom line. Without this consensus, people-to-people interactions are impossible. Two people who do not have a common understanding and lack basic respect for each other will never have friendship. The same is true in the handling of political relations and economic exchanges. If there is any need for collaboration, consensus is of course essential. This is why, on May 20, 2016, after Tsai Ing-wen refused to recognize the "92 Consensus", the mainland stopped exchanges with Taiwan. The mainland official pointed out: "If the foundation is not firm, the earth will shake the mountains." The "92 Consensus" embodies the "one-China principle" and embodies the fact that the two sides uphold the most basic bottom line of mutual respect in cross-strait exchanges and establish a consensus that dialogue can be conducted. In political and social life, different forces and groups that lack consensus and have conflicting interests with each other are bound to be on the same page. And unfortunately,The near-unconditional worship of freedom in American society, which has led to the proliferation of freedom, has in reality undermined the basis of the consensus on which society can be formed。Groups with different interests in American society have also entered into frequent conflicts. According to Rousseau, the different "public opinions" of American society tore apart the "public will" and challenged the foundation of American society as a community, and the result was the so-called "politics of veto" in academic circles. In this society of frequent conflicts and divisions, there is no place for any authority above the two. Whether it's moral, it's scientific. In order to win, both sides gradually abandoned the moral convention of means. Respect for objective facts and science is the fundamental core consensus of a society that guarantees rationality, and this consensus has been gradually abandoned in the conflict. When consensus politics is seriously challenged and all consensus disappears, authoritative science can no longer be the basis for the two parties to work together。When faced with the major personnel decision of nominating Kavanaugh, the Supreme Court's first officer, and the American society still condemns the other party as a "criminal" and condemns the other party's "personality" [24], it is almost impossible to rely on science to jointly calmly and objectively face this major public health event similar to the epidemic that needs to rely on scientific guidance, and work together.
The greater impact of consensus politics is greater than the cultural characteristics of American society itself. Zhan Mingxin, a world-renowned contemporary cultural critic, made a wonderful analysis of the culture of late capitalist society in his famous work "The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism". Zhan Mingxin pointed out that postmodern society is a society that abandons tradition. "The disappearance of the sense of history, which is such a state that our entire contemporary social system begins to gradually lose the ability to preserve its own past, begins to live in an eternal present and an eternal transformation, and this erases the traditions that need to be preserved by the various social constituents of the past"[25], which is the intrinsic need of post-industrial societies to critique the residual culture of industrialized societies. Zhan Mingxin said: "What should be the era of capitalism?According to logical reasoning, it is clearly a 'decoding', that is, the destruction of all sacred remnants, the liberation of the world from error and superstition, and the making of it an object that can be scientifically explained, measured, and free from all old-fashioned, mysterious, and sacred values" [26]. The rapid development of science and technology has promoted the emancipation of the mind, but it has led to people's challenge and rebellion against science, which is really an unexpected thing.
This challenging thinking has pulled down the sacredness of science. Westerners, who have dismantled the old authority, also lack sufficient respect for scientific facts. The most famous is the famous philosopher Feyerabend. In Against the Method and in his subsequent writings[27], Feyerabend dismantled the sacredness of science in an anon-a** manner. Science, he argued, was nothing more than an idea that was equal to other ideas, such as religion. Science is no better than religion, and it should compete on an equal footing with ideas such as religion. Such an idea, while staggering, has had a huge impact in the United States. Although Feyerabend was not strictly a standard anti-intellectual, his no-nonsense attitude towards intellect and his famous saying "anything goes" profoundly influenced American society. Today's right-wing in the United States has inherited such a kind of paranoia that is close to "opposing everything and listening only to itself" and rejecting the scientific method, but scientific ideas and methods are precisely necessary for the normal and healthy operation of a society. Whether it is for the most basic transportation and regional planning on a daily basis, cultural and industrial policies, education and medical layout, or for major issues such as global warming and the epidemic that has swept the worldScience is the only tried-and-true standard in the current world
In the late capitalist society of what Zhan Mingxin called the "disintegration of norms", society is changing with each passing day, constantly criticizing and challenging traditional culture. People in the metropolis are accepting the criticism, ridicule and ridicule of the traditional film and television culture of the late capitalist era, enjoying the rich dividends of modernization and globalization, and their ideas are becoming more and more diverse. However, the vast number of people in small villages and towns in the vast plains of the interior of the United States, where their cultural life is barren and who almost never communicate with the outside world, are still ideologically and even pre-modern, and their information is closed and their lives are difficult. Obviously, they have long been people of two worlds. Not only is it unlikely that there will be much concrete consensus, but even a common language is unlikely to exist. When one side conforms to the times, shouts progress, and slowly loses its sense of religion, while the other side shouts "stick to traditional values" and believes in religion without knowing anything about science, people in the two different worlds will only be filled with incomprehension and anger. In such a "folding America" forcibly stitched together by the world, it is unlikely that much consensus will exist anymore.
The right-wing people themselves are located in small villages and towns deep in the vast plains of the American interior, with poor cultural life and almost no communication with the outside world. Not only do they suffer from a severe lack of health care and educational infrastructure, but as the people at the bottom, their voices are not being reached by the ruling class through normal channels. Martin Gilens and Benjamin I., Princeton University, 2014Page two teachers published a research report [28] that proves that the influence of ordinary public opinion on the legislation of the US Congress is almost insignificant. However, interest groups and big chaebols have a disproportionately large influence on American politics, especially on the outcome of congressional law agendas and passages. In other words, the democratic system in the United States is in fact unable to effectively convey public opinion. It's more of a plutocracy。As for the right-wing people, they not only find themselves abandoned by modern society, their anger has nowhere to be expressed, and they even feel despised by modern society, almost losing the legitimacy of their existence. They then resorted to an almost mad anger to express their disappointment and helplessness. They actively spread conspiracy theories, oppose the authority of science, and attack everything they believe is causing their lives to be miserable. It was the ultimate rebellion against modern society. Right-wing opportunistic politicians who have seized the opportunity to take advantage of public opinion, such as Republicans who have been polarizing to the right since the Obama era, including Trump, who deliberately uses insulting terms such as "China virus" and "kung fu virus"[29], and Pompeo, who constantly creates conspiracy theories to gain political benefits, have taken advantage of this. Behind these extreme words and deeds is obviously the result of serious class contradictions after the people at the bottom of the United States have been systematically deprived of their right to education and development dividends.
Written by Lin Lingzheng.
Typesetting Yang Wenjie.
Pictured by Yang Wenjie.
Audit |Zuo Jiachen, Lin Zezheng, Weng Jiachen, Yang Zongrui, Tang Junya.
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