Lessig, polarization, and possibilities

My thesis advisor is a distinguished intellectual historian and he frequently makes the point that the most interesting thing to write about in that subject is where political allies disagree. It is a little trickier to interpret a debate in progress, but in this case it may be very important to get ahead of. A colleague posted a piece of it yesterday, the ultimate question seems to be whether or not liberal intellectuals should work to find common ground between OWS and the tea party. Lawrence Lessig seems to be the source of the exploration for cooperation. He is a law professor at Harvard and has been passionately advocating for both a reexamination of intellectual property laws in favor of a freer culture with fewer fences and reforming elections to get money out of the process. I have a lot of respect for him, but on first and second examination this idea of trying to bring the tea party into a larger movement to fight the power of big banks and their control over our government seems to be a monumentally bad idea, more on that later.

This event seems to be the first response to Lessig's conference on working with the tp groups. Then Lessig wrote a short essay on the results in Huffpo. If you are interested it seems videos of speeches from this conference can be found here. In response Dave Zirin wrote an essay arguing that trying to join hands with people who hate you and hold views abhorrent to so many on the left might not be a good idea. Lessig then comes back that "we" have no right to call ourselves "The 99%" if we alienate the 30% of the country that considers itself conservative.

Drawing the net even wider is Gene Lyons who pops up on Salon from time to time. While Lyons mostly talks about why "intellectuals" on the right are freaking out about OWS, he also cites Matt Taibbi as siding with Lessig. Though the opinions seem unconnected and Lyons did not link to his quote. I have not found it yet, but maybe there is some reality to the whole question. If rush and the right-wing noise machine that instigated, organized, funded, marketed, etc. the "tea party" lost even a bit of control over their monsterous creation and it started thinking for itself, they might realize that big business is just as capable of messing up their lives as "big government." Here is the quote: “The reality is that Occupy Wall Street and the millions of Middle Americans who make up the Tea Party are natural allies and should be on the same page about most of the key issues.” Furthermore Wall Street greed is: “an issue for the traditional ‘left’ because it’s a classic instance of overweening corporate power—but it’s an issue for the traditional ‘right’ because these same institutions are also the biggest welfare bums of all time, de facto wards of the state.” The closest blog link for Taibbi's analysis can be found here, but a lot of his entries are on the subject.

I think this is an exhaustive list so far, the debate is exciting and a far cry from teabags all the time. If nothing else, OWS has given the left something to argue about that is on their side, even if not "under their control." I worry about what would happen, Lessig seems to treat polarization as the core problem and that "we" could find common ground if only Lyons "tribalism" is suppressed. The real issue seems to me to be despair versus fanaticism. The protesters in OWS, regardless of their ideological or partisan affiliation, share one feature that drives them and this is the near-hopeless belief that the system is broken and stacked so far against them that they have nothing to lose by acting up. Contrast this to what motivates the teabaggers. Fear. It should be noted too that surveys of tea party supporters have revealed that they are the republican base, nothing more, nothing new really. According to Taibbi, the spark that set off the tp movement was not TARP or anything smacking of institutionalized greed, but a rather insignificant initiative by the Obama administration proposing to help people stay in their homes.

Hatred of people not like them and the heretical thought that government might do something to help them, when "everybody knows" that the crash was precipitated by poor blacks buying too much house. Then the equally heretical idea that a black president was going to force them to pay for all those illegitimate black babies and their undeserving of life parents healthcare. I dislike putting too fine a point on it, but this was a primary motivation. Birtherism has the same underlying features, if you have already "othered" someone there is no depth you can't stoop to in pursuit of destroying them. Maybe I've just encountered and dealt with more of these people than Lessig has. But they are a lot like the terminator, they can't be bargained with, they can't be reasoned with, they do not feel remorse, or pity, or empathy, they never, ever, admit a mistake much less apologize for hurting others. Ever argue with someone in the tea party or sympathetic to them? Facts just bounce off their established frame, they always troll the conversation onto "their" side.

This isn't me saying this. You can read all about framing in George Lakoff, about the long process of establishing a political storyline in Drew Westen. The authoritarian personality in Bob Altemeyer, fanaticism and the true believer in Eric Hoffer and Hannah Arendt. Eliminationism and parafascism in David Neiwert. Ur-facsism in Chris Hedges. These are specialists with a lot of experience in combatting the anti-American tendencies of the far right. Just ask yourself a question, why were teabaggers able to get away with carrying loaded firearms to political events, spit on and insult in the worst ways members of congress? Why are the unarmed protesters of OWS getting beaten, shot with rubber bullets, and subjected to all the latest in "non-lethal" police armament?

In principle, it would be interesting if teabaggers could be deprogrammed and join occupy events. But, whether individually or as an organization, fanatics would poison any meaningful movement for reform and justice. Even if their social conservative views could somehow "be checked at the door" they would always seek to capture the movement. When Lessig forwards the idea that the left needs to go after tea party members and groups to grow and approach the 99% they claim, he is either out-of-touch or really holds the liberal dream of the perfectibility of man, that no brownshirt is beyond redemption.

Here is a wildly optimistic graph someone made in support of the idea.