The United States of Fear

breathless handicapping of the midterms that went on nonstop for weeks on the TV news.

Still, the most dispiriting? After all, I’m the guy who penned a piece eight days after the 2008 election entitled “Don’t Let Barack Obama Break Your Heart.” In what was, for most people I knew, a decidedly upbeat moment, I then wrote, for instance: “So, after January 20th, expect Obama to take possession of George Bush’s disastrous Afghan War; and unless he is far more skilled than Alexander the Great, British Empire builders, and the Russians, his war, too, will continue to rage without ever becoming a raging success.”

And take my word for it, when I say dispiriting I’m not even referring to just how dismal my actual voting experience was for the 2010 election in New York City. I mean, two senators and a governor I don’t give a whit about and not a breath of fresh air anywhere—not unless you count the Republican gubernatorial and “Tea Party” candidate, a beyond-mad-as-hell businessman who made a fortune partially thanks to state government favors and breaks of every sort and then couldn’t wait to take out that government. (And when Carl Paladino talks about taking something out, you instinctively know that he’s not a man of metaphor.) Okay, that is dispiriting, just not in a lifetime award kind of way.

No, it’s the whole airless shebang we call elections that’s gotten to me, the bizarrely hermetic, self- financing, self-praising, self-promoting system we still manage to think of as “democratic.” That includes, of course, the media echo chamber that ginned up a nationally nondescript political season into an epochal life-changer via a powerfully mad—as in mad elephant—populace ready to run amok.

What Goes Up…

I’m no expert on elections, but sometimes all you need is a little common sense. So let’s start with a simple principle: what goes up must come down.

For at least thirty years now, what’s gone up is income disparity in this country. Paul Krugman called this period “the Great Divergence.” After all, between 1980 and 2005, “more than 80 percent of total increase in Americans’ income went to the top 1 percent” of Americans in terms of wealth, and today that 1 percent controls 24 percent of the nation’s income. Or put another way, after three decades of “trickle-down” economics, what’s gone up are the bank accounts of the rich. In 2009, for instance, as Americans generally scrambled and suffered, lost jobs, watched pensions, IRAs, or savings shrink and houses go into foreclosure, the number of millionaires actually increased. The combined wealth of the four hundred richest Americans (all billionaires) rose by 8 percent in 2010, even as, in the second quarter of the year, the net worth of American households fell by 2.8 percent.

Up at the top, individually and corporately, ever more money is on hand to “invest” in protecting what one already possesses or might still acquire. Hence, the 2010 elections had a price tag that obliterates all previous midterm records, estimated at $4 billion to $4.2 billion, mostly from what is politely called “fundraising” or from “outside interest groups”—from that 1 percent and some of the wealthiest corporations, mainly for media and influence campaigns. In other words, the already superrich and the giant corporations that sucked up so much dough over the last thirty years now have tons of it to “invest” in our system in order to reap yet more favors—to invest, that is, in Sharron Angle and Harry Reid. If that isn’t dispiriting, what is?

The right-wing version of this story is that a thunderstorm of money is being invested in a newly aroused, mad-as-hell collection of Americans ready to storm to power in the name of small government, radically reduced federal deficits, and, of course, lower taxes. This is a fantasy concoction, though, even if you hear it on the news 24-7. First of all, those right-wing billionaires and corporate types are not for small government. They regularly and happily back, and sometimes profit from, the ever-increasing power of the national security state to pry, peep, suppress, and oppress, abridge liberties and make war endlessly abroad. They are Pentagon lovers. They adore the locked-down “homeland.”

In addition, they are for the government giving them every sort of break, any sort of hand—just not for that government laying its hands on them. They are, in this sense, America’s real welfare queens. They want a powerful, protective state, but one that benefits them, not us. All of those dollars that scaled the heights in these last decades are now helping to fund their program. For what they need, they only have to throw repeated monkey wrenches into the works and the Tea Party, which really isn’t a party at all, is just the latest of those wrenches.

Faced with all our national woes, are we really a mad-as-hell nation? On that, the jury is out, despite the fact that you’ve heard how “angry” we are a trillion times in the news. Maybe we’re a depressed-as-hell nation. What we do know, however, is that the rich-as-hell crew are making good use of the mad-as-hell one.

In October 2010, Amy Gardner of the Washington Post offered a revealing report on the Tea Party landscape. Of the 1,400 Tea Party groups nationwide that the Post tried to contact, it reached 647. Many of the rest may have ceased to exist or may never have existed at all. (“The findings suggest that the breadth of the tea party may be inflated.”) What the Post researchers found bore little relationship to the angry, Obama-as-Hitler-sign-carrying bunch supposedly ready to storm the gates of power. They discovered instead a generally quiescent movement in which “70 percent of the grass-roots groups said they have not participated in any political campaigning this year.” Most of them were small, not directly involved in electoral politics, and meant to offer places to talk and exchange ideas. Not exactly the stuff of rebellion in the streets.

On the other hand, the funding machines like Tea Party Express (run by Sal Russo, longtime Republican operative, aide to Ronald Reagan, and fundraiser/media strategist for former New York governor George Pataki), FreedomWorks (run by Dick Armey, former Republican House majority leader), and Americans for Prosperity (started by oil billionaire David Koch) had appropriated the Tea Party name nationally and were pouring money into “Tea Party candidates.” And don’t forget the Tea-Partyish funding groups set up by Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s bosom buddy and close adviser. That these influential “tea partiers” turn out to be familiar right-wing insiders —“longtime political players,” as the Post put it, who since the 1980s “have used their resources and know-how to help elect a number of candidates”—shouldn’t be much of a shock. Nor can it be so surprising that familiar right-wing political operatives are intent on creating a kind of political mayhem under the Tea Party label.

As for the TV set that filled your living room with the sound and fury of an “epochal” election, isn’t it curious how little attention all the commentators, pundits, and talking heads on that screen paid to where so much of that money was actually landing? I mean, of course, in the hands of their bosses. Vast amounts of it have come down on the media itself, particularly television. I’m talking about all those screaming “attack ads,” including the ones sponsored by the unnamed outside interest groups that the talking heads just love to analyze, rebroadcast, and discuss endlessly? These are the very ads enriching the media outfits that employ them in a moment when the news world is in financial turmoil. It was estimated that, for election 2010, the TV ad bill would reach $3 billion (up from $2.7 billion in the 2008 presidential campaign year, and $2.4 billion in the 2006 midterms that brought the Democrats back to power in Congress). For the companies behind the screen, in other words, those ads are manna from heaven.

If, in another context, someone was selling you on the importance of a phenomenon and was at the same time directly benefiting from that phenomenon, it would be considered a self-evident conflict of interest. In this particular case, all those ad dollars are visibly to the benefit of the very media promoting the world-shaking importance of each new election season. But remind me, when was the last time you saw anyone on television, or really just about anywhere, even suggest that this might represent a conflict of interest?

The media aren’t just reporting on a particular election season, they’re also filling every space they can imagine with boosterism for just the kinds of elections we now experience. They are, in a sense, modern-day carnies, offering endless election spiels to usher you inside the tent. Whatever they themselves may individually think about it, they are working to boost the profitability of their companies just as surely as any of those right-wing funders are boosting their corporate (or personal) profits. They are not outsiders looking in, but a basic part of the hermetic, noisy, profitable system we think of as an election campaign.

As for the election itself, none of us really had to wait for the results of midterm 2010, the Anger Extravaganza, to know that it wouldn’t be transformative. This isn’t rocket science. We already knew what the Democrats were capable of (or, more exactly, not capable of) with sixty votes in the Senate and a humongous advantage in the House of Representatives, as well as the presidency. So you should have a perfectly realistic