Department of Bad Ideas: Polly Toynbee Writes About American Politics

Surprise! Polly Toynbee’s column on the Tea Party today is a mess. You wouldn’t expect La Doyenne to agree with the Tea Party’s thirst for deficit reduction, nor with its willingness to take the United States to the edge of a technical default. That’s fine. Equally, there’s certainly a strain of conservative thinking immune to logic or reason. But much the same could be said of certain classes of Guardian readers too.

This, however, is dreadful or, at best, simply lazy:

The founding fathers built a constitution of checks and balances believing reasonable men would agree; how could they foresee Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann or Glenn Beck? To the British eye, America was always dangerously prone to waves of populism and McCarthyite panics. The country has reached a deadlock that may set it on a faster road to decline as absolute intransigence creates a constitution that no longer functions. Why bother with the great show of presidential elections when presidents are denied the power to match their pomp? The politics of miasma, where words matter more than facts and actions, lets the Tea Party demand the impossible – debt reduction with tax cuts, spending cuts without touching the gargantuan defence budget. Obama believed against all the evidence that his opponents would see reason. That’s not who they are.

I worked in Washington during Watergate and the fall of Richard Nixon; even in that national trauma there was not this unbridgeable detestation between the red and the blue. What happened? The rise of the Tea Party owes a great deal to Rupert Murdoch’s Fox TV, the foghorn of extremism that changed the nature of political discourse. Trouncing the competition, its propagandising for Tea Party views misinforms the electorate on just about everything: it is rivetingly frightening viewing. It makes our own politics look civil, our commentating measured, our right wing moderate. But there is little doubt that had News International not fallen so spectacularly from grace, the Murdochs would have intimidated British politicians into changing our laws to allow unbridled political bias in broadcasting. Fox-style television would have battered its way into our living rooms, bringing us Tea Party politics too.

Oh dear. Those famous checks and balances were supposed to offer protection against swift agreement; similarly they were designed to prevent Presidents enjoying “the power to match their pomp”. Granted, Congress’s retreat from its own responsibility helped create the Imperial Presidency but if Toynbee thinks the Presidency is underpowered then perhaps she should simply say so. One suspects, however, that when George W Bush lived on Pennsylvania Avenue she did not consider the Presidency a dangerously diminished institution.

Meanwhile, she might have noticed that, contrary to her claims, the defence budget is a matter for discussion now. True, many Republicans and conservatives are wary of slashing security spending but a minority are quite prepared to countenance the idea and many of those so minded are on what might loosely be termed the Tea Party wing of the movement. Are some of Obama’s opponents “unreasonable”? Sure. Are all of them? Certainly not.

For that matter, this notion that the past was a happy, sunlit place where everyone drank lemonade, ate apple pie and agreed with everyone else is dreadful tommyrot. The United States faces a number of serious challenges – both fiscal and political – in the next couple of decades but the notion, much-loved by some, that the country is being torn apart by goons and neanderthals enthralled or corrupted by Fox News simply won’t wash.

Of course there’s disagreement and perhaps the headbangers are more visible these days but last time I checked American civil society was in large and important ways much healthier now than it was when Mrs Toynbee strolled through Georgetown. To pretend otherwise requires one to forget the violence of Jim Crow, the assassination of leading public figures, the shootings at Kent State, the horrors of Vietnam and much else besides. Does anything in contemporary America really compare with any of that? No, no and no again.

For that matter and whatever anyone may think of the detail of the debt-ceiling deal the fact remains there was a deal. It may have been a close-run thing and perhaps few people are happy with the outcome but, however fortunately or belatedly or partially, the system eventually gave birth to the kind of compromise it is supposed to produce. An “unbridgeable detestation” has, actually, been bridged. Messy and unsatisfying as it may have been, the system still (just about) worked. Deadlock, what deadlock? Not, by any measure, the kind of deadlock that let Jim Crow live for nearly a century after Reconstruction.

As for the Murdochs apparent desire to bring a Fox News-style of TV to this blessed isle, well, maybe but I have my doubts about that too. Apart from anything else it proved quite easy for politicians to persuade News Corp that their chances of purchasing the rest of BSkyB would be enhanced if they agreed to sell Sky News.

Fox News hasn’t created the modern American conservative movement. It has given it an outlet just as the greater diversity of British media (newspapers especially) caters to people of many different persuasions. (Perhaps, Polly, you could think of Fox News as the product of “market failure”?) Media organisations may sometimes lead but they also reflect. If you have a problem with that then your problem is really with the people, not the medium. It’s the message, not the messenger stupid.

UPDATE: Charles Crawford has more.