Tea Party Patriots against Neoliberalism?
Ideas spread in all sorts of directions. I’ve heard Christian right “intellectuals” haphazardly invoke Gramsci and counter-hegemony and I myself have spent more of my youth than I’m willing to admit reading back issues of National Review. It’s probably less of a stretch that some Tea Partiers have favorably nodded toward the ideas on their movement that our friend Walter Benn Michaels expresses in his interview in the inaugural Jacobin.
Here’s my summary of Michaels’s argument on the Tea Party and immigration, which brings up the question, a question that shouldn’t really be a question at all, about the left and open borders. (My thoughts on the over-hyped and over-exposed Tea Party can be found over at New Politics.)
Michaels identifies the Tea Party as a reaction against neoliberalism. He doesn’t view the challenge as a serious one, but also stresses that the movement, “is not simply a reaction against neoliberalism from the old racist right.” Michaels contests the American left’s desire to summarily reduce the Tea Party to racists: “They’re thrilled when some Nazis come out and say ‘Yeah, we support the Tea Party’ or some member of the Tea Party says something racist, which is frequently enough.” Michaels finds the subversive content of their political program in an opposition to illegal immigration. The Tea Party recognizes that “one of the primary sort of marks of the triumph of neoliberalism in the US is a very high tolerance of illegal immigration, and that illegal immigration is the kind of one plus ultra of the labor mobility that neoliberalism requires.” The rise of illegal immigration represents a new form of capitalism, as opposed to the old “meritorious” capitalism of the post-war period. When right-wing ideologues attack “communism,” the argument goes, they are actually conceptualizing neoliberalism.
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