by Matt Taibbi
Ohio’s economy had been cardinally affected by NAFTA. A onetime manufacturing powerhouse, Ohio now suffered through mass layoffs and crushing economic uncertainty. But when the election rolled around, and both John Kerry and George Bush flocked to the state in search of its up-for-grabs twenty electoral votes, neither candidate mentioned free trade at all. In the national political media, pundits wondered what the “liberal” Kerry (who had voted for NAFTA) would have to do to win votes in a tough Middle America state like Ohio. Chris Matthews suggested on MSNBC’s Hardball! that Kerry might need to save a baby from a burning building; his middlebrow cohort Howard Fineman agreed. “He’s got to do something like that,” he frowned. Unsurprisingly, General Electric, the parent company to MSNBC, had laid off thousands of workers in Ohio in the years prior to the election.
But with the grotesque failure of the Iraq war and with some of the other foibles of the Bush administration came a late change in Republican strategy. Rather than their usual tactic of redefining the center further rightward, by 2008 the Republicans, just like Democrats, were offering to their base a spate of “moderate” candidates whose chief virtue to the party was their potential for a general-election victory against a Democrat like Hillary Clinton. Candidates like Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, and even Romney fell short according to the usual social orthodoxies, with none of them being born-again Christians or staunchly anti-abortion. Just as the Democrats had done for years, the Republicans were now asking their voters to sacrifice their own interests in favor of a candidate who would be viable to “swing” voters.
As a result, the 2008 presidential race going into the primaries looks like a perfect storm of electoral cross-purposes. With the exception of Barack Obama, all of the major candidates the predominantly antiwar Democratic base will be asked to choose from were originally pro-war. On the other side, fundamentalist Christians may be forced to vote for a cross-dressing pro-choice New Yorker like Rudolph Giuliani. When once again asked to vote against the candidate they dislike, voters on both sides will now have real trouble figuring out which party’s offering they’re supposed to hate more.
But out there, on the campaign trail, you can already feel the vibe changing. Particularly on the Republican side, you can see that the paranoia conjured by all those years of right-wing oracles telling people that they’ve been lied to by the “liberal media” is blowing up in some prominent faces. This is the problem with training people to believe they’re being lied to; after seven years of Bush, some Republicans raised on that kind of education are beginning to wonder just who else exactly has been lying to them.
OUTSIDE THE ROMNEY EVENT in Florida there was a protest of about thirty people, all supporters of antiwar libertarian Ron Paul who came to shout at the cars on their way in and out of the civic center parking lot. When I went over to visit with them, I found that almost all of them told the same story. Excepting a few cases here and there, they were all former dyed-in-the-wool Rush Limbaugh Republicans who had experienced holy conversions. Many talked about being reunited with liberal family members with whom they had argued for years.
“I’m a conservative, I used to be a neocon even, I used to think Cindy Sheehan was…I mean, I ended up going out and buying a Dixie Chicks album, just because I feel bad, you know?” said J. C. Braithwaite, a thirty-something ex-Ohioan who was emerging from a Sleeping Beauty-esque sojourn in the Limbaugh woods. J.C. would later tell me that she once won the Daughters of the American Revolution’s Citizen Bee Award and had the Statue of Liberty on her class ring in school. “I get misty-eyed at the ‘Star-Spangled Banner,’” she told me. “I called Mike Eruzione’s answering machine when the U.S. beat Russia. I want to fall in love with my country again.”
J.C. is at this protest with her mother and her brother, Aaron. Her brother used to be the reviled family liberal, a “conspiracy theorist” who had a lot of ideas about 9/11 his family didn’t even want to listen to. Now Mom, Sis, and Brother are all together under one banner, campaigning for Ron Paul. And while all the protesters here seem genuinely smitten with their candidate, I get the feeling that it’s more what Paul represents that turns them on. The vibe here is very science fiction, very Invasion of the Body Snatchers; Romney, an insectoid big shot among the pod people, is to be protested, while the unpodded, still-human Paul crowd holds its banners and tries to stay awake.
“It kinda felt like in The Matrix, where it’s like, ‘Take the red pill,’ you know?” she said. “They make it sound like if you support Ron Paul you’re some crazy 9/11 conspiracy wacko. But we’ve just been lied to so many times, you feel like you’ve just been chumped, you know what I mean?”
“Well, yeah…” I said.
“And I’m ready to blow up my TV!” J.C.’s kindly bespectacled mom shouted. “Ready to blow it up and watch YouTube!”
“Yeah,” said J.C. “I used to watch all that stuff…O’Reilly…Fox…”
“I used to think everything on TV was true,” chimed in Mom.
“Now we know,” said J.C. “And the worst thing, we used to be so hard on Aaron,” she said, referring to her brother, who was holding a banner across the street.
“We thought he was paranoid,” agreed Mom.
“Now we all get along again,” said J.C.
I asked what family gatherings used to be like.
“We didn’t even talk at Thanksgiving,” said J.C. “About politics we couldn’t talk at all. I mean, he was the tree-hugging Democrat, while I was the conservative, married to a Republican doctor…”
“Didn’t talk much,” agreed Mom.
Just then, while I was talking to J.C. and her mother, a reporter for the local Orlando TV station, Channel 6, swooped in to shoot some protester footage. The reporter had a perfect helmet of wavy anchorman hair. One of the Paul supporters leaned over and whispered to me. “Check it out, it’s Mitt Romney,” he said.
“You mean the hair?” I asked.
“Not just the hair,” he quipped.
AMERICAN POLITICAL MOVEMENTS always seem to have an us and a them, and the them is often more important than the us. With plenty of justice the Ron Paul movement identifies the them as an incestuous oligarchy of insider assholes: congressmen and businessmen and TV reporters who show up once every four years dressed in nearly identical Halloween-like costumes—ties, sculpted hair, high-production values. Canny campaign strategists have always keenly understood the depth of popular distrust of those types, which is why you’ll seldom see a mainstream campaign event without a candidate taking a shot here and there at the superficial trappings of his own political class. Even Romney lately has been making haircut jokes—not at his own expense, of course, but at the expense of John Edwards, whose plan for a federal savings program that would save $250 a year for most Americans seemed ripe for ridicule to Romney’s handlers. “That wouldn’t buy John Edwards a haircut,” cracked Romney today, eliciting a half-fart of muted laughs from the crowd.
But not many people are buying this bullshit anymore, and that may mark the beginning of something genuinely new in the American political system. The Derangment that I describe in this book kicked off when Americans finally figured out that they’d been betrayed by their mainstream political system, but still failed to abandon that old paradigm completely. The 9/11 “Truth” and Christian End Timer phenomena are both basically crude parodies of the same old left/right canned media Holy War. Adherents abandoned their former champions in the Republican and Democratic parties not because they realized they’d been conned into hating each other, but because they felt those champions of theirs had failed to act on that hate aggressively enough. So instead of having a political awakening, they just went further down the rabbit hole of geeked-up patriotic paranoia, into a place where the other side isn’t merely wrong, but made up actually of conspirator-killers or terrorists or agents of Satan, not even really human beings. They reached out to or built movements whose object was not defeat of the Other Side, but its utter destruction (as in the case of
the End Timers) or its overthrow (the Truthers).
From that point of view the Derangement was a grotesque black comedy. It was Monty Python’s Crack Suicide Squad brought to life; screwed by a corrupt ruling class, the Population at Large rebelled by ramming itself into twin brick walls of pure idiocy. It was hard to say what was more absurd, the preposterous corruption of our politicians or the utterly irrational response of the people they betrayed. For most of the time that I worked on this book, it looked like an utterly hopeless situation, the kind of maelstrom of pointlessly destructive behavior and willful misunderstanding that could leave us all fucked for a generation, with nothing left to do but laugh.
But who knows, maybe things aren’t so bleak. At the extremities of the Derangement there are signs now that the mainstream attempt to freeze-dry the debate in a permanent predictable struggle over the same old symbolic issues, voiced by the same media-political complex, has failed. And maybe the Paul campaign, as marginal as it seems, offers a glimpse at the new fault line. It’s not blue and red so much anymore. It’s on the farm and off the farm. And the numbers off the farm are growing.
And sure, some of those people off the farm are Truthers and End Timers and other members of the Crack Suicide Squad rebellion. But increasingly some are people who have their eyes wide open, who are seeing the Big Con for what it really is.
“Yeah, I’ve never contributed to a campaign before, but that’s because I couldn’t afford it,” said Terence Reilly, one of the Paul protesters. Terence does geek-squad-type computer maintenance for a central Florida company; he’s got a wife and a newborn child, and he’s getting by. He came to the Ron Paul campaign via the usual route; disillusioned with mainstream politics and the Washington media, he surfed and he read and he decided that this little-known politician was the man who stood for his values.
“There are people out there who don’t have the time, or the energy, or the…the Internet to find things out for themselves,” he said. “They don’t take that time.”
And it isn’t just on the Republican side, in the Paul campaign, that I saw this kind of thing. On the Democratic side, the John Edwards campaign seemed, to me, to have been crafted specifically to appeal to those voters who felt they’d been left behind by their party. Edwards not only promised to eschew lobbyist donations and corporate bundlers but went out of his way to shed light on the kinds of manipulations that ran the Senate he served in. In fact, part of the Edwards stump speech in the fall of 2007 was an exposé of exactly the kind of behavior described in the congressional portions of this book—in particular, he talked about a slowdown of legislation that would have eased the way for more production of cheap generic pharmaceuticals, a slowdown effected by key members of his own Democratic Party who had accepted massive donations from the pharmaceutical industry. This was heretical behavior for a formerly “mainstream” Democrat, and Edwards’s admonition to audiences not to “replace corporate Republicans with corporate Democrats” led to standing ovations when I saw him in Iowa and New Hampshire that fall. Even longtime Democrats like Harold and Patricia White, an elderly couple from a small Iowan town called Monticello, nodded immediately when I asked if they agreed with Edwards’s statement that there was “no difference” between the two parties.
“He’s telling it like it is,” said Harold, who incidentally was also a devout Christian—as much as he liked Edwards’s views on Washington corruption, he disliked his use of the phrase “give ’em Hell.” The evangelical Christian who turned up at speeches of reformist Democrats like Edwards and Dennis Kucinich was another phenomenon I would see a lot that fall. This was something I certainly did not see in 2004, when the makeup of Republican and Democratic crowds was far more predictable.
Beyond Edwards, you found some off-the-farmers at the speeches of Barack Obama as well. While Obama almost certainly represented the same kind of obscenely funded insider Democrat who’d let down generations of party members over the years—he raised almost $100 million before the Iowa caucus alone, with heavy support from Wall Street and the other usual corporate villains—it was the tone of his campaign that was different. Maybe it was because Obama, with his natural charisma, felt he didn’t need it, or maybe that’s just the way he is, but the Buck Fush/unseat-the-Republican-devil stridency was completely absent from his whole approach. “I’m so tired of Democrats waving Bush in front of me and thinking I owe them my vote,” one woman in Nashua, New Hampshire, told me. “Just tell me who you are and let me think about it, okay? I don’t need to be hating someone else. I’m really tired of all that. It’s tiring, you know? Why do I need to hate some dolt in Alabama? I don’t even know those people.”
At the peak of its intensity, in 2004, the blue-state/red-state split represented, in a way, an enormous triumph for mainstream politics. It was a time when huge masses of the population could be organized into two rival groups, each trained to hate the other intensely. But what’s happening now is that many people are beginning to resent being lumped simplistically into shallow, media-created Crossfire-style categories of “left” and “right” on the one hand they distrust the very media that celebrates those simplistic distinctions, and on the other they see that the elected politicians who ostensibly represent those would-be opposing ideologies actually do no such thing.
So now they are not only seeking their own far more individualized identities, they’re actually demanding that those identities be recognized. And some of these new politicians are responding—by running against the economic betrayal, like Paul and Edwards, or by rejecting the left-right partisan hatred deal, à la Obama. It’s not much, but it’s at least providing a few more choices. And the more things move in that direction, the more the original problem of a monolithic, corrupt political orthodoxy withers away. Because a mass Balkanization of the political landscape in this country would, of course, be enormously dangerous to that kind of dug-in, corrupt elite. When the country is split not into two neat sides but in a million little pieces, how do you tie up the population with hatred for the “other half” while you burgle the national treasure and run Congress like a medieval Khannate? How do you get families hating each other at Thanksgiving over trifles while you cook up phony wars and pad the Pentagon budget with billions in political kickbacks? The answer is, you can’t. When the Crossfire paradigm loses its force, all that’s left is a bunch of people with different views all sitting together in a room, wondering why they’re all paying three bucks a gallon for gas, why they have no health insurance, why their tax rates are higher than Warren Buffett’s. If we’re all equally a bunch of suckers, how could any of us be worth hating? Only a madman wastes his time hating a sucker. And increasingly, the J.C.s and the Terences are realizing that we all of us have been suckers all these years.
MAYBE THAT SIMPLE OBSERVATION is our path back to reality, if it’s not too late.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THANKS TO S&G editor Chris Jackson for his superhuman patience throughout the embarrassingly long ordeal that was this book. Without his stoic bravery in the face of my general assholeness, this book would never have been published. Thanks also to his assistant, Mya Spalter, who spent countless hours trying to find me when I was hiding from Chris, and also to the many members of Spiegel & Grau’s publicity and marketing team—and also, of course, to Celina Spiegel and Julie Grau themselves, who showed tremendous confidence in the project throughout.
I would also like to thank my editors at Rolling Stone, Will Dana, Eric Bates, and Jann Wenner, for having patience with me while I wrote this book. Naturally, thanks should also be extended to my agent, Lydia Wills at Paradigm, who has frequently had to hold both of my hands during his process.
Thanks also to my friends and family for their continued encouragement and support, in particular my mother, Veronica Whelan, who nearly went off the road many times talking to me on the phone throughout this period.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Matt Taibbi is a contributing editor for Rolling Stone and
a columnist for RollingStone.com. He’s the author of two essay collections, Spanking the Donkey and Smells Like Dead Elephants. He lives in New York City.
ALSO BY MATT TAIBBI
Spanking the Donkey:
Dispatches from the Dumb Season
Smells Like Dead Elephants:
Dispatches from a Rotting Empire
WITH MARK AMES
The Exile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia
PUBLISHED BY SPIEGEL & GRAU
Copyright © 2008 by Matt Taibbi
All Rights Reserved
Published in the United States by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of The Doubleday Broadway Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.spiegelandgrau.com
SPIEGEL & GRAU is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
The names of certain individuals in The Great Derangement have been changed in order to protect their privacy.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Taibbi, Matt.
The great derangement : a terrifying true story of war, politics, and religion at the twilight of the American empire/Matt Taibbi.—1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-385-52570-1
1. United States—Politics and government—2001– 2. United States—Description and travel. 3. Political culture—United States. 4. Taibbi, Matt—Travel. 5. United States. Congress—Decision making. 6. Iraq war, 2003—Personal narratives, American. 7. Left-wing extremists—United States. 8. September 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001—Causes. 9. Big churches—Texas—San Antonio. 10. End of the world—Social aspects—Texas—San Antonio. I. Title.