The X-Men were big when I was a kid. The kids in my neighborhood would all get together, each assume a character, and roam around searching for evil and tyranny to confront. Of course we had to invent the evil and tyranny, but that was part of the fun. Last week’s South Park episode reminded me of how much fun it can be saving the world from an imaginary tyranny, but if I’d been watching Glenn Beck, I’d have recognized that fourth-grader’s self-indulgent thrill twenty months ago.
I credit Slate editor David Plotz with the most convincing explanation for the ascendance of the Tea Party and the successful hitching of the GOP cart to their frothing, wild-eyed horse. In last week’s politics podcast he argued that midterms are won and lost on turnout and that the best way to gauge which party is going to muster the greater turnout is to determine which party’s base is having more fun. This theory resonates for me because I remember having a lot of fun on November 4th, 2008, in a Obamaphile-packed bar in Keene, New Hampshire, but also because the Tea-Baggers look like they’ve been having a lot of fun this past year too.
First, let’s examine the premise. Are midterms a turnout game? The polling suggests that they are. Congressional Democrats actually have a higher approval than their Republican counterparts, though neither party enjoys a lot of support. For months in advance of election day pundits have been crowing about the “enthusiasm gap” that Democrats faced, and indeed the base failed to show up. The electorate last week was old, white, and angry. But I think they weren’t just old, white, and angry; I think they were on a mission to save America from a muslim, Kenyan, dark-skinned, socialist/facist/whatever-ist armageddon.
Liberals and progressives haven’t been having much fun lately, so we’ve been retreating to our familiar Bush-era habits of sneering, cynical ironic detachment. Mine has been Dana Milbank’s new book about Beck, as you might have guessed from the theme of this post. Events like John Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity resonated because it struck the right balance between collective therapy and biting satire (as Stewart always does), but it was still a party for the kids who didn’t get invited to Beck’s. There were some kids in my neighborhood we didn’t let play X-Men with us. (I’m not sure why; kids are just mean.) And I don’t think those kids were having nearly as much fun.
Which brings me to the potentially frightening corollary to the fun theory. Our current media landscape makes it easier for the right to whip up this kind of fervor than it could ever be on the left. Beck invents a new impending apocalypse or rapture or fanciful America-imperiling cataclysm traceable to the sinister machinations of Woodrow Wilson at least once a week, and the other four nights he’s checkin in on calamities already in progress. He gets to use his imagination. And his fans get to feel like they’re confronting Magneto (whose outfit kinda suggests he’s behind the whole terrifying gay agenda) every time they go to the ballot box.
On the left, all we’ve got to rally the troops are real threats to the world as we know it. We’re gonna need some superpowers.
