Along with shag carpet, the thought that black people being able to vote is akin to a racial entitlement is something that should have died in the 70s. Alas the tacky flooring is still in basements around the country. And we still have Antonin Scalia in the Supreme Court.
At least the slaves powering frigates of yore weren’t under any illusions that they were rowing their way to wealth.
The Article: The Last White Election? by Mike Davis in The New Left Review.
The Text: Last September, while Bill Clinton was delighting the 2012 Democratic Convention in Charlotte with his folksy jibe at Mitt Romney for wanting to ‘double up on the trickle down’, a fanatical adherent of Ludwig von Mises, wearing a villainous black cowboy hat and accompanied by a gun-toting bodyguard, captured the national headquarters of the Tea Party movement in Washington, DC. The Jack Palance double in the Stetson was Dick Armey. As House Majority Leader in 1997 he had participated in a botched plot, instigated by Republican Whip Tom DeLay and an obscure Ohio Congressman named John Boehner, to topple House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Now Armey was attempting to wrest total control of FreedomWorks, the organization most responsible for repackaging rank-and-file Republican rage as the ‘Tea Party rebellion’ as well as training and coordinating its activists. Tea Party Patriots—a national network with several hundred affiliates—is one of its direct offshoots. As FreedomWorks’ chairperson, Armey symbolized an ideological continuity between the Republican congressional landslides of 1994 and 2010, the old ‘Contract with America’ and the new ‘Contract from America’. No one was better credentialed to inflict mortal damage on the myth of conservative solidarity.
Only in December did the lurid details of the coup leak to the press. According to the Washington Post, ‘the gun-wielding assistant escorted FreedomWorks’ top two employees off the premises, while Armey suspended several others who broke down in sobs at the news.’ The chief target was Matt Kibbe, the organization’s president and co-author with Armey of the best-selling Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto. Although Kibbe, originally a protégé of Lee Atwater, is an equally devout Misean (indeed, ‘distinguished senior fellow’ at the Austrian Economics Center in Vienna), he is a generation younger than 72-year-old Armey or, for that matter, most of the Tea Party base. On the FreedomWorks website Kibbe describes himself as living ‘with Terry, his sublimely awesome wife of 25 years’ and spending his leisure time ‘reading Hayek or Rand, watching The Big Lebowski or listening to a killer Grateful Dead show.’ Yet as Armey himself had put it, ‘sometimes you’re the windshield and sometimes you’re the bug.’
Unfortunately, “Oppa Dodd-Frank Act Style” doesn’t have the same ring as the brain cell-depleting “classic”.
The Vermont Independent is one of the last great New Deal-heralding statesmen we’ve got.
