The revolution has begun, but we aren’t the revolutionaries. That was the disturbing thought that occurred to me this morning as I listened to Fresh Air on KALW and its interview with Robert Draper, the New York Times Magazine journalist who is writing a book about the House of Representatives, where Tea Party backed members almost just succeeded in bringing down government as we know it.
That wasn’t how Draper cast the situation, although he did paint a vivid picture of the right-wing true believers who manufactured this debt ceiling “crisis” and their monomaniacal goals of slashing government to the bone, no matter what the consequences to the U.S. economy and way of life. Instead, the discussion triggered a memory of the powerful and prescient premise from economist Paul Krugman’s 2003 book The Great Unraveling.
In its opening pages, under the heading of “A Revolutionary Power,” Krugman cites an unlikely source for how to identify and oppose those bent on destroying a country’s institutions: Henry Kissinger. In 1957, as he was completing his doctorate at Harvard University, Kissinger wrote his dissertation, “A World Restored,” on Napoleon and the French reconstruction period after Waterloo, with some obvious parallels to the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930s.
Kissinger argued for the importance of understanding the nature of a revolutionary force, and Krugman saw the inflexible right-wing movement in the U.S. as another example of that. “That is, it is a movement whose leaders do not accept the legitimacy of our current political system,” Krugman wrote, citing the oft-stated belief of modern Republicans that “long-established American political and social institutions should not, in principle, exist – and [they] do not accept the rules that the rest of us have taken for granted.”
At the time, Krugman cited the efforts of right-wing politicians and institutions to undo such New Deal era programs as Social Security, unemployment insurance, and Medicare, as well as their rejection of international treaties and cooperation in favor of empire and unilateralism. But since then, the right-wing has gone even further, willing to force the government into default in order to accomplish its ideological goal of destroying the federal government’s ability to ask anything of capital.
Kissinger made clear that such forces can’t be reasoned or compromised with, all you can do it try to defeat them before they destroy the country. The longer everyone delays arriving at that conclusion, the more difficult that task becomes, and that’s an important lesson for President Obama and the Democrats to learn right now.
“Lulled by a period of stability, which had seemed permanent, they find it nearly impossible to take at face value the assertion of the revolutionary power that it means to smash the existing framework. The defenders of the status quo therefore tend to begin by treating the revolutionary power as if protestation were merely tactical; as if it really accepted the existing legitimacy but overstated the case for bargaining purposes; as if it were motivated by specific grievances to be assuaged by limited concession. Those who warn against the danger in time are considered alarmists; those who counsel adaptation to circumstances are considered balanced and sane…But it is the essence of a revolutionary power that it possesses the courage of its convictions, that it is willing, indeed eager, to push its principles to their ultimate conclusion,” Kissinger wrote.
The Tea Party may have a fundamental misunderstanding of the principles and events surrounding the American Revolution, but make no mistakes that they do see themselves as revolutionaries, people who want to turn back the clock on the gains made in workers’ rights, environmental protection, tax equity, the creation of social safety net, and all the other hallmarks of civil society.
They’ve already taken over one of our two political parties, and succeeding in forcing the other one to do their bidding. Call me an “alarmist,” but if we don’t challenge the notion that Obama is “balanced and sane” and convince them that the American way of life is at stake, then we just might end up with another revolutionary war on our soil.