The Berkeley Blog » Lawrence Rosenthal

Vulgar Borkians: The Tea Party and the Judge

Lawrence Rosenthal — Mon, 24 Dec 2012 22:22:03 +0000

One of the great riddles of the 2009 and 2010 Tea Party heyday was contained in the famous sign that appeared in many of their anti-Obamacare demonstrations: “Government hands off my Medicare.”

How could they think that? It’s a plain contradiction since, obviously, Medicare is a government program in the first place.

The key to understanding this conundrum is to be found in zero-sum thinking. Tea Partiers are typically older, white, quite conservative, and often happy recipients of Social Security and Medicare benefits. In their view, proposing to grant health insurance to those tens of millions without coverage (who are seen as ... More >

It’s the Tea Party, stupid

Lawrence Rosenthal — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 04:03:17 +0000

Apart from certain quarters on the Right predicting a Romney victory on Election Day, the final weeks of the campaign witnessed a gathering sentiment, almost a last-minute conventional wisdom, about the election’s outcome. It went something like this: Obama had a significant and reliable lead until the first debate. Pre-debate, Republicans lamented a lackluster Romney campaign. The candidate’s enthusiasm gap among Republican voters seemed insurmountable. His financial supporters appeared ready to pull the plug. The campaign’s Paul-Ryan shot in the arm had flat-lined. Halting speculation began on 2016 nominations, as though an Obama reelection was inescapable.

And then came the first ... More >

Neoncons and the foreign-policy presidential debate: The ism that dare not speak its name

Lawrence Rosenthal — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 00:59:52 +0000

In Monday’s final presidential debate, President Barack Obama came full circle and more from his conflict-averse showing in the first debate. Obama not only attacked his opponent, but, in the absence of much challenge from Mitt Romney, took it upon himself to raise the very points required to mount his attacks.

For the most part, when the debate was not sidelined back to the domestic economy, Romney tended to endorse Obama’s specific policies, while offering weak and generic bromides about being strong and increasing defense spending. On critical matters, like Afghanistan, Romney’s earlier campaign-trail objections seemed to turn ethereal. As Obama ... More >

Tea Party Tuesday in Tampa

Lawrence Rosenthal — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 17:28:46 +0000

At one level it was obvious that the first full day of the Republican Convention was Tea Party Day in Tampa. It was the day the Republican Party adopted a platform that–well, here’s how the headline from Tuesday’s Freedom Works website puts it: “Republican Party Adopts Majority of Tea Party’s ‘Freedom Platform.’”

And when they say “majority” they really mean it: by their calculation, “95 percent of the Freedom Platform” made it into the Republican document.

Let’s be clear on what Freedom Works is. This is former U.S. House Majority Leader Dick Armey’s national organization of “free-market” absolutists that, in its own ... More >

Mapping Paul Ryan

Lawrence Rosenthal — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 18:28:32 +0000

Paul Ryan represents one of two branches of the Tea Party. Let’s call it the libertarian branch. These are people who are single-minded and absolutist about “free-market economics.” Theirs is a passion that leads to across-the-board opposition to taxes and government regulation of economic life, to bemoaning public debt, and to the aim of whittling down the American welfare state to extinction. It is a strain of extreme American conservatism that has been with us since its fierce opposition, generally among highly placed corporate leaders, to the New Deal. It fought for decades for dominance in the Republican Party. Once ... More >

Republican Agonistes: After Michigan

Lawrence Rosenthal — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 18:38:11 +0000

The narrowness of Mitt Romney’s victory over Rick Santorum in Romney’s home state of Michigan ensures that the ever more scathing struggle for the Republican nomination is far from resolved.

In 2010 the Tea Party established that it owned a chokehold on the Republican nominating process by way of its outsized representation as participants in the party’s primaries. In this it has followed the game plan of the religious right of the early nineties, which developed litmus tests for candidates around such issues as gay rights and abortion, making sure candidates who ran afoul of their views would not survive Republican ... More >

What the Occupy movement can learn from the Tea Party

Lawrence Rosenthal — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 22:09:27 +0000

It’s important to look at the Occupy Movement in the context of the Tea Party movement.

Both were utterly unexpected and both were game-changers. The Tea Party emerged in the wake of the election of Barack Obama, when the left was dreaming of a second New Deal and the right was lamenting the death of conservatism. Both of those discourses are now faint memories, and the Tea Party has largely been the agent of those short shelf lives.

Occupy Wall Street emerged at the end of a convulsion over the national debt. As the national conversation pivoted from the “debt crisis” of ... More >

Is Obama trying to anoint Trump?

Lawrence Rosenthal — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 18:46:50 +0000

It’s hard not to wonder about the political considerations behind President Obama’s decision to request and then release his “long-form” birth certificate from the State of Hawaii. Images flash through the mind: political advisors huddled around a table, thinking about 2012, strategy, tactics, the opposition….

Who do we want to run against? Surely a first question for Obama’s electoral strategists. The ideal seems to be someone with a foot or two stuck in the right-wing radicalism that has been expressed most prominently in the Tea Party Movement. The calculation among Obama’s people would be that a majority in America could never ... More >

Tucson: Is this an Oklahoma City moment?

Lawrence Rosenthal — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 01:21:34 +0000

There is a striking parallel between the years 2009 and 1993. In both, a Democrat becoming president of the United States coincided with a startling rise of radicalism on the political right.

In 1993 the face of right radicalism was the militia movement. With Bill Clinton in office paramilitary insurrectionists found their numbers expanding and their presence in the national political debate accorded novel legitimacy. Militia leaders appeared as talking heads on cable news networks and commanded “understanding” from right-wing Republican office holders.

In April 1995, militia members, hoping to set off a general ... More >