Martin DyckmanRevolutions have a way of turning against their founders and friends. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor is the latest victim.
Cantor didn’t launch the Tea Party revolution but he did coddle and exploit it.
Unlike the leaders of the French Revolution, Cantor still has his head, as well as–until January–the congressional seat he lost in last week’s Virginia primary.
But if there were a Richter scale for politics, there has been nothing so earth-shaking since 1994, when Democratic Speaker Tom Foley lost his own seat in Newt Gingrich’s Republican landslide.
The instant punditry took Cantor’s defeat by a hugely outspent and previously obscure college professor to mean that immigration reform, with which challenger David Brat belabored Cantor tirelessly, is dead. So too, it’s supposed, is any other necessary compromise.
Another government shutdown and even a debt default are more likely. The people with the hay rakes and pitchforks, who don’t care about consequences, blamed Cantor for caving.
On the same night, Sen. Lindsey Graham easily won renomination in South Carolina after being attacked as soft on immigration. But it’s Cantor’s loss rather than Graham’s victory that will set the agenda.
The consensus among those analysts who took the time to think things through is that Cantor projected overconfidence and arrogance.
There was a corrosive belief that his true constituency didn’t consist of the voters of his district but rather of the Chamber of Commerce, corporations, and Wall Street–his largest funding source.
On primary day, it was us versus them.
That was the thrust of Brat’s campaign. A New Yorker article describes him as “the Elizabeth Warren of the right.”
The Tea Party came into being, it bears remembering, because of massive irresponsibility–and worse–in the financial services industry. The righteous resentment focused, unfortunately, on the wrong target: what was necessary to save the economy.
And so Cantor was swept away by the angry current of populism that he, the Koch Brothers and Karl Rove encouraged so long as they thought they could control it.
Something good about Cantor’s loss is that massive campaign money didn’t matter. If anything, it backfired.
A report on the OpenSecrets Blog noted that Cantor spent more on steakhouse fundraisers–$168,000–than Brat had for his entire campaign. Of Cantor’s $5.4-million, nearly half came from PACs. Brat got zero from PACs; what money he did get came mostly from Virginians.
Populism arose as a farmer-labor revolt against entrenched, ruthless economic power. It inspired some of America’s greatest reforms, including the graduated income tax, direct election of senators, and the dismantling of the vast oil and steel trusts.
But within populism, including today’s Tea Party, there have also been menacing strains of nativism, racism, and know-nothingism. The resentment toward immigrants is typical.
People who are angry are more likely to vote than those who are satisfied. Many, if not most, of Brat’s voters probably expect him to hang tough against raising the debt ceiling or resolving the immigration issue.
And yet a Pew Research Center poll in February found majority public support even among the Tea Party for a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who would meet certain conditions.
However, answering that question in a scientific survey isn’t the same as hearing it demagogued in an election campaign.
Paul Krugman, the New York Times columnist, had I think, the best take on the meaning of Cantor’s defeat: “Movement conservatism….is unraveling before our eyes.”
He means not conservatism in general, but the part of it that “won elections by stoking cultural and racial anxiety but used these victories mainly to push an elitist economic agenda…
“By rejecting Mr. Cantor, the Republican base showed that it has gotten wise to the electoral bait and switch…lip service to extremism isn’t enough; the base needs to believe that you really mean it.”
So the Republican Party will be pushed even further to the right, Krugman argues. That’s bad news for the GOP “at a time when the country at large is moving left.” The party will be “even more extreme, even less interested in participating in normal governance… An ugly political scene is about to get even uglier.”
If the nation is to be redeemed from that, it can only be by uniting the populism of the right and the left to serve the people rather than corporate power. True tax reform would be one example.
That’s a tall order, which will take exceptional leadership to fill.
Martin Dyckman is a retired associate editor of the St. Petersburg Times. He lives near Waynesville, North Carolina. Column courtesy of Context Florida.
