Election 2010: Of Tea Parties and Kings

Yet another story details the reasons that Barack Obama has had the most impressive first two years as President in modern times--this one in Rolling Stone, summarized here at Daily Kos. And so the question recurs: why is this news to people? Why isn't he getting the credit? Why do people even believe the contrary of what's true: for example, that he's raised their taxes, when in fact he's lowered them?

There are a lot of complaints about "messaging," and that's part of it. So is the dominant media narrative, which somehow always seems to track with GOPerness, which I take to be a combination of "what sells papers" emphasis on conflict and novelty, and their corporate interests.

But there's something else, something more fundamental, at least in terms of the national psyche. It has to do with Kings.

It may be, as someone said, that humanity's greatest invention is the sentence. But quite possibly its most harmful invention was the King. Human beings lived for thousands of years without kings--but I suppose as populations increased and small groups merged into big ones, and organized warfare became more organized and more deadly, the emergence of the King was a reasonable if fatal step.

Despite the rewriting of prehistory, I suspect that the concept of the King emerged at more or less the same time as the concept of the single god. Which came first may not matter, for they each seem to depend on--and reflect--the other.

In any case, the King became the single ruler, the absolute power, who was directly connected to both the god above and responsible for everything that happened in the kingdom. So when things went well, it was the King's glory. And when things went bad, it was the King's fault.

At first (the story goes) the King's subjects took this pretty literally, so if the King failed, the King was killed. But this got changed, so that the King was symbolically killed, at first through killing a substitute person--a mental and/or physical defective, a fool--and then through killing a substitute animal, like a goat. Like a goat that lets the King escape his fate. The scapegoat.

These days we have Presidents, and though they have a lot of limitations on their governing, they remain the symbol of power. Sometimes what happens is mostly or somewhat their fault, and sometimes it's not at all. But it doesn't matter. They are Presidents of projection. When things go wrong, they become the scapegoat.

This is a powerful tendency, though there are others associated with the King. The King is a symbol of the nation, especially when it is at war. So people do rally around the King, the President, when war is front and center. It probably underlies why G.W. Bush got a second term.

But today there's the sick economy. People feel helpless about it, and need to punish someone, and that's often enough the President. Probably some of those people are going to vote GOPer, though I think mostly they will be among those who don't vote. Frankly, I don't think this is as big a political problem for Obama as some--it's more to do with the party in power--but it is a problem for Dems.

More important though is President Obama as the scapegoat for change. There are a lot of people who are afraid of change. White people mostly. They're afraid of change that at this point is mostly a product of demographics, and in some respects is inevitable. But that doesn't matter. They see the first black President, and they want their country back. "Liberal" to them means "favors blacks and mostly brown foreigners over whites."

Now, Washington liberals, government bureaucrats, self-serving progressives--they (and we) all bear some responsibility for the suffering of others. But much of the truly awful change that is affecting their lives is the product of GOPer policies of the past decade, and the policies of American and multinational corporations and banks. But there's this convenient scapegoat, the black man in the White House.

This is the Tea Party in a nutshell. This is why, as Rachel Maddow pointed out this week, we have the largest number of extremist zealots ever to be running for high office, and in a midterm election, they have a better chance to get the relative fewer numbers of votes they need.

Right now the smart money is some of them making it to the Senate, and a lot of them making it to the House. But things are trending away from them, the polls are shaky, there are numbers that contradict the supposed trends (like the declining viewership for Fox News.)

I think what the Tea Party and the GOPer establishment fears the most is that black voters understand who is being scapegoated, and rise to the voting booths to protect him. To guard the change. The GOPers are already organizing their voter intimidation efforts, for which they are so justly infamous.

The move of so-called Independents away from extremist zealots is a good trend, but the conventional wisdom on that also is that House candidates aren't as exposed as Senate candidates to any kind of scrutiny, so they may get away with hiding their agenda--and lack of basic qualifications, like knowing anything--behind the usual rhetoric. But Dem prospects depend on mobilizing young voters, Latinos and other minorities, and black voters, as Obama did in 2008. The polls underestimated them, too, remember.

The President is inevitably a symbol, and people project their hopes as well as their fears, both irrationally to some degree. Irrational hopes not yet entirely fulfilled may lead to disappointment. Irrational fears are easy to have confirmed these days, with Fox running wild and other more temperate authorities eroded. But Obama is not the King, he is the President. As the evidence shows, by real world historical and political standards, he's been a very good one. His ability to make progress that benefits all Americans, that benefits the world and above all the future, will be hampered by a GOPer majority House of Representatives, even apart from the circus of investigations that will ensue.

Early voting has begun in several states. Guard the change.