Here’s a question for the voters of the nation. Why has the great state of Delaware sent forward one like Christine O’Donnel, the Palin-endorsed tea-partier, as the republican candidate for the Senate? As I write this, I will assume she couldn’t possibly be elected, but I wonder, seriously wonder, if there isn’t an element of wishful thinking in my assumption. I think of myself as an intellectual, if one can identify oneself in that way, and I do believe, as Lee Harris suggested, writing for Policy Review, that “a political movement ought be motived by ideas and that a new political movement should provide new ideas.” The tea-party provides very little in the way of ideas – at least the sorts of ideas that could be seriously considered – but Harris is correct, I think, in observing that the tea-party is not about ideas, but attitude. It is not “the deliberate articulation of a well-thought-out political ideology, but rather the expression of an attitude – the attitude of pugnacious and even truculent defiance” captured , evocatively, by the slogan “don’t tread on me!” While it may cause us pause, and “perhaps we should consider the possibility that American’s intellectual elite has become radically out of touch with the visceral sensibility of a large chunk of their nation’s population,” nevertheless, it is extraordinarily difficult for one like me to take it all seriously, and without doubt most of what actually comes from the mouth of one like Christine O’Donnel is thoroughly repugnant to me, except – and it is a big exception – viscerally, I feel some of the same pugnacious defiance.
Everything about Christine O’Donnell is questionable. She has lied repeatedly about her education, misappropriated campaign funds, and failed to pay taxes, the last not in the principled way of “civil disobedience,” but in the more mundane way of incompetence, evasion, or perhaps most likely incompetent evasion. The list will no doubt grow as the campaign heats up. Having said this, however, her misrepresentations and evasions may well be her strongest qualifications among those who put the check next to her name on the ballot. For those about to lose their grip on the lower rungs of the middle class, it’s not difficult to see one’s self in Christine O’Donnel l. Although it may indicate some lingering desire to be among the “intellectual elite” and some simmering resentment at being excluded, even among the “intellectual elite” of the republican party, why not lie about one’s education? In the end, an elite education is all smoke and mirrors, empty arguments on empty subjects, or worse cynical subversion of the truth, is it not? That she misappropriated campaign funds to cover her living expenses, to cover her rent and other personal expenses, may be more endearing than alarming to those who attended her rally at the local Elks club. Ditto the debts and back taxes. For a growing number of Americans, the assertion that “she’s just like us,” is less a recognition of studied noblesse oblige, as would be the case for most Senate candidates, more a simple recognition of facts – the facts of many people’s lives.
In the end, though, she is a poster child for the lowest common denominator – or more charitably, the next to lowest common denominator – among those who generally subscribe to the republican social agenda. She has checked all the boxes. She is against science, suggesting that evolution is “soft science,” but leaving open the question of what might consititute “hard science.” She is against illegal immigration, even favoring “tough penalties for business that hire illegal immigrants,” though I strongly suspect the immigrants themselves would bear the brunt of even tougher penalties were she appointed mama rabbit of the country. She is against gun control, and, perhaps most strikingly, she is against sex, or at least adulterous sex, and all that is tainted by sexuality. She is against abortion and stem cell research, while favoring chastity, to the point of taking on a role in an abstinance organization that denounced masterbation as a form of adultery.
In short, O’Donnell typifies what Hayek observed to be “almost a law of human nature, that it is easier for people to agree on a negative program … than any positive task.” Although there is little or no intellectual consistency behind this amalgam of “positions,” there is a good deal of emotional consistency – little logos, but a good deal of pathos – the vituperation of fear, anger, and resentment. It is almost shamefully easy to point out the xenophobia and the deep suspicion of science that is, on the one hand barely comprehensible to the lay public, and on the other a clear challenge to human, much less racial superiority. As Harris points out, however, doing so accomplishes little. Not too long ago, while visiting my home town in Nebraska, a denizen of the VFW club suggested that the country would be much better off if someone put a bullet in “that nigger’s head,” meaning President Obama. He raised his middle finger in a traditional gesture, then bumped it against his forehead to show precisely where the bullet should enter. The fear, anger, and resentment bubble up from a place that the “intellectual elite” have long since left behind, just as I have long since left rural Nebraska behind. At the very very least, we have eliminated overt racisim and other forms of bigotry from polite public discourse, but it is naïve to think that we have eliminated them from the hearts and minds of heartland America. It is equally naïve to think that the pugnacious and truculent defiance of those being left behind is somehow benign.
In this regard, Ms. O’Donnell has some natural rhetorical advantages. Not unlike her mentor Ms. Palin, she is conventionally attractive with a white cherubic face that we want to credit with goodwill, even intelligence. To give her credit, she is for “a private sector, free market approach to economic recovery.” It is, of course, just this that plays into the hands of the republian minority who are precisely what she is not – well educated, corporate technocrats with the sorts of disposable income that would make her campaign debt of $20,000 pocket change for a night out with the wife. She is clearly an embarrassment to the republican elite, and she clearly sounds an alarm or two because it is not entirely clear that the sentiments she represents can be controlled, but I suspect that the arrogance of the existing elites will out. So long as she and the other tea-party candidates can be controlled – so long as Ms. O’Donnell’s aversion to the deadly sin of avarice is not quite so deeply seated as her aversion to lust – it wouldn’t, from a republican perspective, be the worst thing if she were elected. So long as her support of a free market approach is simply a repetition of received opinion, and so long as she goes with the flow of wealth from other people just like her to those global elites who, I suspect, have little in common with her, either in values or in tastes, it might not be the worst thing, from a republican perspective, if she were elected. Nevertheless, by building their base around an incoherent amalgam of social issues, the visceral appeal of which serves as a distraction from their core agenda of corporatization and the continuing concentration of wealth, it seems the republican party has let a rattlesnake loose in the room.
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