A major American political party, shorn of all moderating influence, has finally, unalterably, gone insane. The striking thing is how many of the estimated 15,000 journalists who were with me in Tampa for the 2012 convention were missing this story of a lifetime—one sixty years in the making.
To be fair, the dramaturgy confused a lot of observers. After all, when I arrived inside the Tampa Bay Times Forum, the fellow onstage singing “God Bless the USA” was such a big black teddy bear of a man—and “God Bless the USA” seems like such an ideologically neutral, innocuous, goose-pimply kind of tune—that it would be easy to miss the blindingly reactionary stanza with which this anthem, featured at every last Republican and Tea Party rally, begins:
If tomorrow all the things were gone I’d worked for all my life,
And I had to start again with just my children and my wife,
I’d thank my lucky stars to be living here today,
Because the flag still stands for freedom, and they can’t take that away.
And I’m proud to be an American, where at least I know I’m free…
Think about that lyric. A man’s security is wiped from the face of the earth. That passes without further comment: shit happens. In any other civilized nation, government protections—decent unemployment insurance, national healthcare, good public education, childcare—make such a thing unimaginable. But in America, Old Glory is the only consolation a patriarch needs. It’s almost a privilege to be wiped out here.
Mitt Romney’s father, whom Mitt claims to revere, called this cult of rugged individualism a “political banner to cover up greed.” President Obama made a mild feint toward a more robust vision of collective obligation in a speech in July, when he pointed out that “if you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help”: teachers taught you, infrastructure served you, firefighters protected you, government research gave you tools like the Internet. “Some things we do better together,” the president added, like building “the Golden Gate Bridge or the Hoover Dam.” Obama also uttered the fateful line “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that.” Republicans willfully misheard the “that” to refer to the businesses themselves—which meant Obama was crapping on every American entrepreneur who’d ever lived. And upon that rickety claim, the 2012 convention built its entire rhetorical appeal. God bless the USA.
Mia Love, a small-town mayor running for Congress from Utah, kicked it off: “This is the America we know,” she said, jabbing her finger, “because we built it.” It got a solid thirty seconds of applause, as delegates waved their party-provided “We Built It” signs. “Yes, we did,” she punctuated, Obama style, letting another eight seconds of rapturous applause ride. Country singer Lane Turner sang a brand-new song written for the convention, “I Built It.” The titanic job creator Janine Turner—a radio host who played Maggie on the TV show Northern Exposure, last on the air when today’s 18-year-old voters were in diapers (for connoisseurs of D-list celebrity, a Republican convention is the place to be)—cried, “And President Obama, I’m here to tell ya, government didn’t build it. God and the American people built it!” (That Palin-style “ya” is in the remarks-as-prepared-for-delivery press release.) She said this in front of one of the set’s recurring images, an inspiring earth-toned collage that included the government-built Gateway Arch.
Yes, the entire theme was a lie, and that shouldn’t pass unremarked. More extraordinary, however, is this: if you’re not among the small percentage of Americans who own a business, or don’t aspire to become one, you were invisible to the people on that podium in Tampa. That applies if you are a first responder, a social worker, a carpenter, an airline pilot, an artist, a lawyer—even a soldier (Mitt Romney’s acceptance speech never mentioned the word “Afghanistan”). But especially if you are a worker.
MORE: The GOP Throws a Tampa Tantrum | The Nation.