Reflections of a stormy petrel

This unpleasant abortionist creep, who can't hold back from connecting opposition to abortion with Fascism, nonetheless agrees with me that it is specifically opposition to abortion that has fuelled the rise of the conservative movement. (History disproves her pathetic claim in that area: Fascism, and Nazism even more, were into free love, sexual licence, the abortion of inferior children, and euthanasia - all the dear, sweet, progressive programmes that re-surfaced in American universities - where Hitler had been widely popular in the thirties, after being briefly bombed into silence by American bombers in the forties.)

Marcotte misses the point that the Tea Party is a deliberate attempt to do what "fiscal conservatives" have been itching to do for years, which is get the anti-abortion majority to forget about such "divisive" causes as abortion and concentrate instead on such "uniting" matters as tax cuts for the rich. There are two forces in the general area of the GOP whose long-term aim is to defang the anti-abortion movement and co-opt its membership for their own political purposes: old-style party hucksters such as Karl Rove, who despise Christians and anti-abortionists pretty much as much as Democrats do, and the Murdoch empire, which is built on pornography and based on a debased view of human nature that could not survive a moralized society. The Rove Republicans have been trying for decades to ride the anti-abortion tiger without conceding anything substantial to it. The Murdoch group is smarter. Part of Rupert Murdoch's animal cunning, base but clever in its own way, is not to try and create movements himself. The British newspaper owners, his predecessors, tried that in the 1930 election and were destroyed, shamed and ridiculed by the professional politician Stanley Baldwin. Murdoch and his people keep an eye on popular movements and, when the time is right, co-opt them. Then they use their formidable financial and organizational power to direct, penetrate and corrupt them so that, whatever happens, the real interests of the Murdoch group are never harmed and always promoted.

These interests amount to two things: weakening corporate taxation and taxation on rich individuals - the whole Murdoch group is one enormous, matchlessly brilliant tax evasion operation designed in order to evade as much British, American and Australian taxation as possible - and insuring that their pornographic populism is never put under serious scrutiny. In doing so, they are quite willing to make some quite remarkable alliances. In Britain, for instance, Rebekah Wade, when editor of the original Murdoch porn sheet, The News of the World, took up with great enthusiams the cause of an anti-paedophile campaigner. This from the press group that has done more than everyone else put together to sexualize every corner of British life, which has made parents so used to smut on every page that they left it around for their children to read (literally - I saw that with my own two eyes, in umpteen British homes, in the eighties and nineties), and from which pre-teen girls learned to idolize softcore models such as Samantha Fox. But it makes sense in two important ways: first, Sara Payne, the movement's leader, is quite frankly an ignorant woman whom Rebekah Wade found easy to manipulate (Payne was shocked, poor creature, to find that she too had been on the phone-tap list of her dear friend Rebekah); and second and more important, it gives any possible sense of revulsion at the sexualization of society a focus and a limit. Child rapists, of course, are the lowest of the low; to focus and concentrate on them the disgust that in other ages was felt for pimps and whores of every sort offers a cheap salve to the violated conscience of natural man - and, even more, woman - in sexual matters. This, of course, is nothing but good news to the biggest pimp the world has ever seen, the inventor of the Page Three Girls, the exploiter of "reality" shows. It also, as a side effect, offers journalists in general a steady source of monster stories. In a sense, it is the ideal Murdoch compromise: the Murdoch media get to carry on untroubled with their appeal to the crotch, at the same time as they get to posture as moralizing campaigners. Really, if homicidal child rapists did not exist, Murdoch would have had to invent them.

The alliance with the Tea Party is a broader matter, but there are some points in common. The heart of it is to deviate, twist and corrupt an existing popular movement so that it works to the advantage of the Murdoch media. The popular groundswell against paedophilia had been going on for a couple of decades when Rebekah Wade took it up, as a natural and humanly inevitable reaction to the stated desire of Sexual Revolution theorists and publicists to sexualize children. (In Denmark, the age of consent was abolished in 1968 and only restored - as a result of some such groundswells of public opinion - in 1978; for ten years, child sex and child pornography were legal in one of the most prosperous and respected countries in the world.) Likewise, the movement against abortion, a despised fringe factor in the seventies, has been slowly picking up strength decade after decade until at present a majority of Americans declare themselves pro-life at every poll. Marcotte, the doctrinaire abortionist, calls it a "moral panic", but anyone without her blinders ought to realize that moral panics don't last three decades and don't pick up strength over that period. Certainly it could no longer be treated, either by the GOP or by Murdoch, as a noisy minority.

The Tea Party certainly started as a grassroots movement; but the Murdoch media pimped it from the beginning, and it is really remarkable to what an extent not only basic views, but talking points and intellectual fads they originated (such as the demonization of the little-know eighty-year-old academic Frances Fox Piven) spread like oil slicks across the whole movement right; and how even such an utterly compromised Murdochista apparatchick as Bill O'Reilly, whose sexual shenanigans should have put him beyond the pale long ago, remains a guiding light of sorts. Forty years ago, Murdoch's animal cunning identified an enormous gap in the market - the conservative/populist area; and the feeling that Fox-TV pundits are the ones who "speak our language" has since then increasingly blinded conservatives to the debasing, manipulative and mafia-like characteristics of Murdoch and his empire. Mere gratitude that someone noticed them has co-opted them into the Murdoch camp, with the inevitable corrupting results. Remember, this is a guy who managed to find enough "friends" in the Vatican to get himself awarded a Papal medal, at the same time as he published some of the most Jack T.Chick-like Church-bashing in the mainstream media.

And the Tea Party has been amazingly effective in drawing attention away from the scandal of abortion and to the obsession with tax. Some of its leaders have openly said that conservatives ought to stop pressing on "divisive" issues such as abortion. Never mind whether this is a representative view or not; the mere fact that it has been said and publicized means that abortion is no longer the central issue - that it is in play, one of many things on which conservatives may agree or disagree. And this is only the beginning. In actual fact, however "divisive" anti-abortion views may be, no opponent of abortion has ever done has been so recklessly divisive and socially and politically irresponsible as the Tea Party's successful attempt to blackmail the Senate and the Administration into not raising taxes at a time when that is desperately necessary and any sane "conservative", including Margaret Thatcher, would have. I have a suspicion that one reason why we haven't heard a lot from Sarah Palin in the last few weeks is that she is quite happy to let Michelle Bachmann and the other idiots run after this hare and compromise themselves in the long term. Any serious presidential candidate cannot indulge in this of idiotic rhetoric, on pains of being found out one day after taking the oath of office. You can bet your life that the next Republican President will raise tax (remember Ronald Reagan and "read my lips"?) with the subdued approval (subdued because nobody will want to draw attention to their duplicity) of the Republican Party and of selected Tea Party leaders; and those tea-partiers who stick to the anti-tax hysteria out of misguided principle will suddenly find themselves isolated and reduced to fringe specimens. Thus do party politics, especially in the age of Rupert Murdoch, work against integrity, whether right or wrong.

The true believers have been told that the purpose of the borrowing limit blackmail was to hurt the hated Obama presidency. As a matter of fact, it has hurt the Tea Party, by isolating it from a considerable area of Republican moderates and from any Democrat. But the hysteria about tax is necessary for long-term reasons that have nothing to do with the economy and everything to do with the corrupting use of party politics. As while abortion is something that generates its own disgust and its own opposition, to try and move at least a large mass of conservatives away from thinking against abortion, the propagandists had to offer them something equally emotionally involving and more short-term. The budget battle, which was a disaster for the USA, served to blood the Tea Party in an actual political battle, which will from now on dominate their imagination. And as the anti-tax hysteria rages, abortion moves further and further from the centre. And if the stock markets of the world crash and America loses power to China, what does Murdoch care? His corporations, insulated from stock marked concerns by a very peculiar property structures, are not apt to suffer; and he has spent decades flattering and supporting the coming Chinese superpower in the hope of being allowed a place at the table. As I keep saying, Murdoch is cunning. It's his only quality. And Mademoiselle Marcotte ought to thank him on her knees: he has managed to set the anti-abortion cause back at least twenty years. Had there been a Murdoch around in nineteenth-century America, there would still be slaves today.