Frank Rich's column on Sunday, and Glenn Greenwald's post today about the wildly incoherent Glenn Beck are clarifying regarding the middle ground between left and right in this country. After quoting Rich's column pointing out that Beck's view that "Wall Street owns our government," and that "Our government and these gigantic corporations have merged" is indistinguishable from what Matt Taibbi might write in Rolling Stone. Greenwald asks whether such views are liberal or conservative, and anwers:
They're neither. Instead, they're the by-product of a completely different dichotomy that is growing in importance: between system insiders and their admirers (those who believe our national political establishment and its elites are basically sound and good) and system outsiders (those whose anger is confined not to one of the two political parties but who instead believe that the political culture itself is fundamentally corrupted and destructive). There are people typically identified as members of either the conventional Right or Left who are, in fact, more accurately described as being in this latter group: those disenchanted with the political culture itself. Anger over the Wall Street bailout and corporate excesses was one example where that trans-partisan disenchantment was evident. The railing by Beck quoted in Rich's paragraph reflects the same thing. And that trans-partisan rage is clearly playing an important role in driving these protest movements.
So why has the Republican Party become so identified with this protest against the establishment? Greenwald answers:
Currently, opposition to "the government" is easily translated into "opposition to Democrats," and these protests are thus exploited and distorted as partisan Republican tools even though many of the individual protesters are as anti-GOP as they are anti-Democrat. Add to that the Democratic Party's general distaste for citizen activism (especially street protests) as well as its servitude to Wall Street and corporate interests, and Democrats are straitjacketed into ceding this protest movement to GOP operatives, who are cynically exploiting it to promote goals that have nothing to do with — are even at odds with — the goals of many of the protesters themselves.
This points to the great paradox of our political life that I've written so frequently about here–how cultural/tribal identification prevents effective political action. Entrenched elite power–the system insiders–remains secure so long as cultural lefties and cultural righties feel such a deep aversion for one another that they could never unite around a economic and power distributions causes from which they would mutually benefit. It's the same strategy southern oligarchs used to divide poor whites from poor blacks. As long as at least one cultural group loathes the other, they are divided, distracted, and therefore conquered, and the system elites have nothing to worry about.
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