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In a prematurely administered autopsy of the ‘death of conservatism’, Bill Moyers’ Friday interview with Sam Tanenhaus, (the Editor of the New York Times Book Review and the Week in Review section) dissected the motivations and ideology of the “revanchist” anti-Obama birther/teabaggers and the movement against health care reform.

It should come as little surprise that a protest movement attempting to paint Obama as “a basic pastiche of right-wing hobgoblins” is fraught with internal contradiction. Reports of anti-government, anti-tax protesters complaining about the ineffectiveness of public transit service aside,  anti-government protesters demanding that government not touch the effective government program they depend on, Medicare, tend to elicit the most laughter.

(via lookatthisfuckingteabagger)

In a interesting interpretation of the thought (or lack there of) behind these strange messages, Tanenhaus conjures up an articulation of the deep-seeded, nearly unconscious visceral distrust of the dependency created by the patron/client relationship  between the citizens and the state, unleashed by by the  Johnson Administration’s “Great Society” legislative agenda (where, it should be noted, Bill Moyers served in a variety of roles including LBJ’s White House Press Secretary):

BILL MOYERS: There’s a paradox there, right? I mean, they say they’re against government and yet the majority of Americans, according to all the polls, don’t want their government touched. You know, there were people at these town hall meetings this summer, saying “Don’t touch my Medicare.” You know, keep the government out of my Social Security.

SAM TANENHAUS: Yes. This is an interesting argument. Because it’s very easy to mock, and we see this a lot. “Oh, these fools. These old codgers say the government won’t take my Medicare away. Don’t know Medicare is a government program?” That’s not really what’s going on, I think. I think there’s something different. A sense about how both the left and the right grew skeptical of Great Society programs under Lyndon Johnson, and the argument was everyone was becoming a kind of client or ward of the state. That we’ve become a nation of patron/client relationships. And a colleague of yours, Richard Goodwin, very brilliant political thinker, in 1967 warned, “We all expect too much from government.” We expect it to create all the jobs. We expect it to rescue the economy. To fight the wars. To give us a good life”. So, when people say, “Don’t take my Medicare away,” what they really mean is, “We’re entirely dependent on this government and we’re afraid they’ll take one thing away that we’ve gotten used to and replace it with something that won’t be so good. And there’s nothing we can do about it. We’re powerless before the very guardian that protects us.“

Certainly this revelation does not explain the totality of the situation in the United States, but I think it does offer a nuance often missed in similar attempts to delineate conservative ideology.

Tenenhaus’ comments on the dominance of theater and show in American politics are also worth the look: download the podcast of Friday’s Bill Moyers Journal interview with Sam Tanenhaus.