Michael Moore and the Tea Party Deserve Each Other

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This month, Michael Moore has unleashed his latest on left and right alike, a memoir of the early years that shaped him in his beloved Flint Michigan, along with his remarkable and colorful family, aptly titled Here Comes Trouble. Ironically, it's a book which explains more than Moore - it may explain the entire battle currently shaping American politics.

Despite his liberal unionist and progressive roots and his kindergarten-to-college activism, Moore wasn't a "red diapers" baby in the usual sense of the phrase. In fact, as he himself never fails to remind people in his books and films, Little Mikey Moore grew up in a world where $20,000 homes at 3%, lavish retirement-at-55 and health benefits, and easy-to-get, lifetime-secure jobs, seemed to be as much a part of America as voting, Mom, and apple pie.

And then, a "greed is good", financial service-based, globalized economy reared its ugly head, and foreclosed this workers paradise -- something that Moore has never stopped thinking was a very personal insult from Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and both Bushes. Now the working class is adrift, betrayed, screaming like a jilted lover on Mad Men or The Good Wife that they've been abandoned despite all they've done.

Ironically, despite their polar ideological orientation, this is the same attitude that underlies the Tea Party's seemingly-unquenchable fury and bitterness. Both are reacting to a world where the old certainties no longer exist, and where government increasingly appears to be on the side of the powerful, rather than the “little guy,” whether that be Moore’s union workers, or the Tea Party’s small businessmen.

Both strains of populism have been a long time forming. For the past few decades, the economy has moved ever more inexorably to a "creative destruction" based, high-tech, fast-changing job market, where choosy employers refused to hire untrained American workers anymore, feeding the economic anxiety for which Moore is a voice. While office and factory workers are outsourced and downsized in good times and bad for the last two decades, Big Government stays frustratingly silent. In fact, from these peoples’ perspective, the government not only does nothing – it make things worse. Just look at the laundry list of failures from the past two administrations.

In other words, Moore and the Tea Party are both furious at the government (in their very different ways). The only difference is that Moore still thinks that government can protect his people, while the Tea Party disagrees.

It's this understandable anger and cynicism that was behind the contempt that Sarah Palin quite correctly had for Campaign Obama's magical-thinking, "hopey changy" malarkey. And yet it's also the fear that Palin, Bachmann, and Rick Perry count on when reaching into their own tired bag of electoral tricks. "Vote for me, and I'll bring you back to that safe, predictable world you remember, where you can still 'save' and 'plan' for the future, where tomorrow looks just like today, where business decisions aren't made out of fear and panic., and most importantly, where things still made sense to you."

Does anything better sum up Michael Moore's wish list?

The fact is that Michael Moore and the Tea Party are the "Mr. and Mrs. Roper" of American politics. They may bicker and fight about everything on one level, but on another, they couldn't be more alike. Like any old married couple, they're both a lot better at reliving their memories of the good old days than at finding realistic solutions to the high-tech, post-meltdown Age of Uncertainty, where one worker can do the job 5 people used to do.

And the scariest part is, while Moore and the Tea Party have no answers, neither does anyone else.