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  So when my friend Sarah, a cartoonist/journalist, asked me to accompany her to interview attendees at a Tea Party rally in front of the main post office in New York City on Tax Day, 2010, I saw it as an opportunity to venture back into the arena of politics and test out my tentative new policy of empathy and intellectual honesty. Even during my self-imposed information blackout I hadn’t been able to avoid hearing about the Tea Party, a recrudescence of the far right sooner than I would’ve hoped. Depending on whom you ask, the Tea Party formed either as a spontaneous grassroots protest against the government’s massive interventions in the economy after the financial collapse of 2008, an hysterical backlash against our first black president, or just a hasty rebranding of the Republican Party now that the name Republican had taken on the same stigma as the Pinto, DC-10, and other products that reliably self-destruct. Their platform was the usual Republican wish list—cut taxes, gut the government, repeal the last century and revoke the social contract—and happened to coincide with the financial interests of their billionaire backers. They were widely regarded, on the left,* as dingbats. But today I was going to resist the impulse to sneer and feel superior and instead try, for once, to listen.

  What dooms our best efforts to cultivate empathy and compassion is always, of course, other people. At first glance, the crowd at the Tax Day rally unhelpfully confirmed all my snottiest liberal stereotypes about conservatives: beer bellies and mullets, cop mustaches and wraparound shades, baseball caps and star-span-gled bandanas, Old Glory jackets and screaming eagle T-shirts, bad skin, fat asses, immobile helmets of hair. Most of the signs there were preprinted, for which I, a veteran of many a street protest, had the same low regard as I do for store-bought Halloween costumes. The printed signs were strictly on message—taxes, the budget, deficit spending—but, as at the antiwar rallies I attended back in 2002–2003, a lot of the hand-lettered slogans were ad hominem sentiments directed against the current president, many insinuating communist sympathies or even more sinister loyalties: the O in Obama rendered as a hammer and sickle, Maobama, “Obama bin Lyin,” etc. The MC proudly disclaimed the presence of any racists in the crowd, an assertion that seemed to be less for the benefit of the eavesdropping mainstream media (MSM) than for the crowd itself, which responded with defiant, self-congratulatory applause. (Should I mention that the only nonwhites I saw present were among a small contingent of NYU Young Republicans? I’m not interested in playing Who’s the Racist here; what struck me as suspect was the complacent certainty that one is not a racist. Most of us liberals are so worried that we might secretly be racists that we’re convinced this means we cannot really be racists.) A band played generic patriotic shitkicker rock. Someone nearly poked my eye out with the pointy gold finial on a miniature American flag (see illustration). I interceded in a rapidly escalating shoving match between a protester and a counterprotester, and got to say the words “I’m sorry, ma’am, but your mom started it.”

  Inevitably, the crowd began chanting “U!S!A!” which has always seemed to me both scary and pathetic—scary because it feels as if it’s pumping up some violent tension that can only be discharged by a book-burning or the ritual sacrifice of a foreigner—but pathetic because America is, after all, the most powerful military empire in the history of the planet; we spend the equivalent of most countries’ GNP each year maintaining an armada of battleships the size of cities, a fleet of radar-invisible supersonic bombers, and enough nuclear weapons to denude the entire biosphere of the earth, and still we need to root for ourselves? It reminds me of the kinds of feeble egos who need to invest themselves in boringly infallible sports franchises like the Yankees, who can afford to buy the championship year after year. I’ve always felt that the guys in America chanting U!S!A! and the guys in the Middle East chanting Death to America! had way more in common with each other than either of them did with me. At one antiwar protest, I remember, a counterprotester challenged us all, from across a police barricade, to chant “U!S!A!” along with him. We kinda tried, but it sounded stiff and timid and trailed off pretty quickly. “See, you can’t do it!” he exulted, as if he’d outed us all as vampires by waggling a Bible at us. I think we were less embarrassed by our halfhearted chanting than by the fact that we’d let ourselves be bullied into trying in the first place.

  My friend Lauren and I used to carry a casket-sized American flag at antiwar marches, and I wore a flag lapel pin at my cartoon readings during the War on Terror, but it was like when porn models dress as “nerdy girls” by putting on a pair of glasses and holding a prop book; you can appropriate the accessories, but the gestalt is all wrong. Somehow I felt like an impostor at the Tea Party rally when it came time to sing the national anthem; even though I’ve been known to play a swelling rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” on my own foot-pedal pump organ, in this context I felt inhibited singing along, like an uptight Mennonite nervously mouthing the words to a familiar hymn in a church full of charismatic Baptists all sobbing and ululating and toppling white-eyed all around him. In this crowd, it felt like the anthem of a different country, one in which I was an alien.

  I was uncomfortably aware of a subtle checking of identity papers here. People kept giving Sarah and me wary looks and asking us who were “with.” Partly this was because Sarah was interviewing people with a digital recorder, and they suspected us of being stooges of the MSM, but it also had to do with our dress and demeanor. It was the same look I used to get every time I ever walked into a rural Maryland dive bar: all heads would turn my way and give me a dubious once-over, as if to say: “The fuck you doin’ here?” For the Tea Party rally I had costumed myself in a double-breasted suit with a pocket square and gold-rimmed glasses. This was a miscalculation. I had dressed as a Wall Street Republican; these were the Wal-Mart Republicans.

  “He looks like a Moby to me,” said the lady I’d prevented from beating someone up, well within earshot and staring right at me.

  I cupped an ear at her. “A what?” I said.

  “A Moby,” said her daughter.

  “I don’t know what that is,” I said.

  “Well ’at’s yer problem, idn’n it?” she snapped.

  “That woman said I looked like a Moby,” I told Sarah.

  “A ‘Moby’?” she said. “Like the musician?” She looked at me, puzzled. “You have much more hair.”*

  I was starting to remember the whole problem now: I hate these fucking people. It’s never been just political; it’s personal. I’m not convinced anyone in this country except the kinds of weenies who thought student council was important really cares about large versus small government or strict constructionalism versus judicial activism. The ostensible issues are just code words in an ugly snarl of class resentment, anti-intellectualism, old-school snobbery, racism, and who knows what all else—grudges left over from the Civil War, the sixties, gym class. The Tea Party likes to cite a poll showing that their members are wealthier and better educated than the general populace,1 but to me they mostly looked like the same people I’d had to listen to in countless dive bars railing against “edjumicated idiots” and explaining exactly how Nostradamus predicted 9/11, the very people I and everyone I know fled our hometowns to get away from. So far all my interactions at the rally were only reinforcing my private theory—I suppose you might call it a prejudice—that liberals are the ones who went to college, moved to the nearest city where no one would call them a fag, and now only go back for holidays; conservatives are the ones who married their high school girlfriends, bought houses in their hometowns, and kept going to church and giving a shit who won the homecoming game. It’s the divide between the Got Out and the Stayed Put. This theory also accounts for the different reactions of these two camps when the opposition party takes power, raising the specter of either fascist or socialist tyranny: the Got Outs always fantasize about fleeing the country for someplace more civilized—Canada, France, New Zealand; the Stayed Put just dig further in, hunkering down in compounds, buying up canned goo
ds and ammo.

  But, see, I’m doing it again. This is the craft I practiced during the Bush years: polemic, invective, and caricature. It’s just so easy and fun. It’s also automatic—a defense against people who all seem to hate you for no reason. Yes, I know how it makes me sound. And I can imagine what the people at the Tea Party rally must’ve seen when they looked at me: some overdressed, arrogant, East Coast ivory-tower Pellegrino-sipping liberal elitist who probably regards them as too ignorant, misinformed, or just plain stupid to have the right to an opinion, much less a vote, and who’d come here just to judge and make fun of them—all of which is, to be fair, completely accurate.

  Actually one lady did compliment my tie. I’d almost forgotten her. See, to make all these fun unfair generalizations I’m conveniently airbrushing out the exceptions in the crowd, like Delia, a member of the NYU College Republicans who shyly asked me about the book I was carrying. I showed her David Lipsky’s interview with David Foster Wallace, a writer she hadn’t heard of, and got to feel politely patronizing until I asked her what she was reading—which proved, to my unfeigned astonishment, to be Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy. Delia was an econ major, and she was here, she explained, because she was opposed in principle to Keynesian economics. I made a mental note to look up Keynes later on and asked her, in the most tactful and roundabout way, so as to avoid the potential implication that she was a warmonger or a racist or anything: so, um, but then why protest now and not over the previous eight years, when Bush was bankrupting the country by starting two wars while cutting taxes? Hadn’t that been the fiscal equivalent of buying a vacation house and a powerboat at the same time you quit your day job? She informed me that the annual budget deficit had increased by nine times in the year that Obama had been in office, and that under his new budget the national debt would triple by 2019.* I said, “I did not know that.” This datum basically passed through my brain as a neutrino does through the earth, interacting with nothing. If I tried to account for these horrific expenditures at all, I figured they were probably necessary to salvage the economy from the shambles in which the Bush administration had left it. This is called “the confirmation bias”—retaining information that supports your preconceptions and forgetting anything that contradicts them. It was like seeing an instant replay showing that your team’s hit was out.

  Still, I had to wonder whether Delia felt at ease in this crowd, most of whom probably had less vehement opinions about Keynes versus Hayek than about Ford versus Chevy. But then anytime you join in a mass movement you’re going to find yourself standing alongside idiots. One reason people go to mass rallies is to become stupider and surer of themselves than they are when they’re alone. I saw plenty of people at antiwar protests I wouldn’t have wanted to talk to at a party: the well-meaning Wiccan who told my friend Lauren and me it was good to see some “normals” there, the guy who sneered, “Why are you carrying that?” at the American flag we were holding, or the Eminem wannabe atop a flatbed truck draped with Palestinian flags who kept bellowing hoarsely over a loudspeaker, “WHAT DO WE WANT?” to which we were supposed to respond, in bellicose unison, “PEACE!” Not to mention the inevitable contingent of hippies urging us to LEGALIZE HEMP or at the very least to SMOKE WEED, who seemed to believe that their giant puppets and drum circles would cause karmic tremors in the corridors of power.

  One of the things I felt at the Tea Party rally was envy, the complicated kind a divorcée might feel at a wedding, or an atheist at a baptism. I remembered how romantic and fun it was to stand up against a monolithic power, side by side with people you loved, for something you believed in. You got to feel courageous, besieged, and undeniably in the right. And even though I don’t endorse their agenda, I’m not wholly unsympathetic to the Tea Party’s grievances. I, too, increasingly feel as if paying my taxes is like giving money to a junkie—I know it’s all going straight into the arm of investment banks and Afghanistan. I might’ve liked to see executives at Goldman Sachs paraded down Wall Street in pickup truck tumbrels rather than lavishly rewarded with more of my money. And most of the people who’ve joined the Tea Party feel these injustices much more personally than I do. They understand that nobody in power gives a shit about them anymore. They watched Bush and then Obama bail out the authors of the financial crisis instead of its casualties. They see economic recovery measured by the Dow Jones and Nasdaq instead of the minimum wage or the price of milk. Also, even though many of them would punch you in the face if you were to suggest that America is any # other than 1, I’m sure they feel as clearly as I do that sick, vertiginous lift in their guts when you’re in something very large that’s starting to fall. All their apocalyptic rhetoric about a socialist takeover isn’t just panic at the imminent prospect of an America that’s no longer majority white; it’s a distorted recognition that ours is a nation in decline. And they probably see more clearly than I do that the fates of Red and Blue America are not intertwined, but increasingly divergent. The so-called “creative class” is manning vital industries like social marketing, graphic design, and creative nonfiction, while those peons back in flyover country who used to make quaint passé trinkets like steel are SOL.* It seems likely that in the future the coastal cities will resemble post-imperial nations like France—pleasant places to live with world-class museums and restaurants as souvenirs of their brief time at the top—while the heartland is already starting to look more like post-Soviet Russia, with crystal meth instead of vodka. They know that we’ve cut them loose. That they’re expendable.

  At this point the Tea Party and progressives have more in common with each other than either of us does with moderates: at least we’re passionately engaged citizens instead of dull-eyed consumers, and we’re both ideological purists who aren’t pushing for reforms so much as a razing of the status quo. The main difference between us is in our preferred villains: the left blames Corporate America for the ruinous state of the union, while the right blames the Government. Not many people on either side seem to have noticed that these alleged antagonists are literally the same people. They move from regulatory agencies to lobbying firms, Congress to corporate boards and back like Afghani warlords switching sides between Coalition and Insurgency depending on who’s paying better that week.

  Watching middle-class conservatives vote for politicians who’ve proudly pledged to screw them and their children over fills me with the same exasperated contempt I feel for rabbits who zigzag wildly back and forth in front of my tires instead of just getting off the goddamn road. You’d think that given our shared loathing for the Wall/K Street oligarchy that’s running this country like a Ponzi scheme we’d be able to put aside our brand loyalties, achieve what Hungarian Marxist György Lukács called “class consciousness,” and finally form that formidable coalition the American political philosopher Charles Daniels called “the cowboys and the hippies, the rebels and the yanks.”2 But even if you could convince the people at the Tax Day rally that our common interest lay in publicly funded elections or revoking corporations’ legal status as individuals, you’d still never get them to work alongside progressives, because when they look at us they see a bunch of electively unemployed anarchists with blond dreadlocks, fashionable disfigurements, and tribal tattoos appropriated from peoples their own ancestors exterminated. And good luck persuading me to repeal the income tax or eliminate the Federal Reserve or that this crowd has the answer to anything at all. We are just not each other’s kinds of people.

  What exactly these two kinds of people are is a question that’s been the subject of a lot of dubious ideation over the last decade or so. One study at the University of California at Berkeley collated the results of fifty years’ worth of psychological research literature and correlated conservatism to a constellation of personality traits like authoritarianism, dogmatism, intolerance of ambiguity, the need for cognitive closure, and something called “terror management.” It concluded: “the core ideology of conservatism stresses resistance to change and justifica
tion of inequality,”3 which even I can’t help but notice is a pretty judgmentally loaded way of putting it. (You could also say “ensuring social stability and rewarding merit.”) These findings seem to be corroborated by neuroscience: a recent study of brain scans4 reveals that in conservatives the amygdala, a structure associated with fear, is enlarged, while in liberals, the anterior cingulate cortex, which is concerned with detecting errors, monitoring conflict and uncertainty, and empathy, is more highly developed—all of which is presumably why Republicans like electrocuting criminals and bombing foreigners and we lefties are such dithery, ineffectual do-gooders.

  I find these studies really appealing for reasons that make me uncomfortable. Regardless of their scientific merits, which I’m not qualified to judge, they’re just as reassuring and self-congratulatory as my own theory about the Got Out versus the Stayed Put. They remind me faintly of all that nineteenth-century phrenological research that purported to prove that Negroes were an evolutionary stage between Europeans and apes. Psychologists, sociologists, philosophers, and other eggheaded academics tend to be overwhelmingly liberal, so it is perhaps suspect that they’d try to pathologize—or at least reduce to psychological symptoms—a perfectly legitimate and widely shared political ideology. What interests me more than any of these theories is the need to formulate such theories—to establish some basic, empirical distinction between these two groups, like the evolutionary split between the Eloi and the Morlocks, a difference not of opinion but of kind.