America’s long-suffering normal people breathed a collective sigh of relief this past Wednesday when Tea Party Queen and Minnesota’s resident crazy woman, Rep. Michele Bachmann, announced she would not be running for reelection in 2014. While most of the progressive and center-left political establishment, not to mention many Republicans, are no doubt happy to see her go, her departure is in some respects unfortunate.
How, you may rightly ask, can that be? After all, this is a woman whose answers to questions are so factually challenged that PolitiFact, the online political fact checker, assess her as telling the truth only 10 percent of the time. Yes, you read right, nine times out of ten Representative Bachmann is spewing half-truths, fibs, and outright humdingers so out-there that PolitiFact rated them as ‘pants-on-fire’ lies.
That’s pretty bad, even for a politician – a jobs that requires, on a daily basis, lying to whomever one happens to be speaking with at a given moment. So she either had to be a sociopath so completely uncaring for what the truth happened to be on a given subject or she was so grossly ignorant and misinformed on the topics on which she spoke that, in an earlier, less politically-correct era, she would have been deemed feebleminded and locked away in an institution somewhere.
That she was not, and in fact had enough political star power to run for the U.S. presidency and be chosen by the Tea Party to give its official response to one of President Obama’s State of the Union addresses is ghastly. That she was reelected four times to represent Minnesota’s 6th Congressional District is an absurdist tragedy fit for a Werner Herzog film. Despite this, though, the existence and obscene persistence of Michele Bachmann highlights why, in fact, liberals should be wary of seeing her go.
No information voters
The reality is that Congresswoman Bachmann did not simply come out of nowhere. She did not appear, like Athena from the head of Zeus, magically and with no prior history on our TV screens. She lied and said terrible things about gays, Muslims, liberals, and everyone else she disagreed with because it worked with the people who sent her there to begin with – the men and women comprising Minnesota’s Sixth Congressional District.
It is they, not her, who created and sustained her grotesque political career. Money from outside groups helped, to be sure, but Bachmann consistently and handily beat every Democratic opponent sent against her because her people, in the end, voted for her in droves. So what applies to Michele Bachmann also applies to the people who sent her there. Either the voters of the Sixth Congressional District are so far gone in their ideological fervor that they do not care about what happens to be true, they are immensely stupid people, or, more likely, both.
In this information age of ours, Bachmann’s voters had to have known that, for instance, her statement about a broad “Islamist conspiracy” to infiltrate the highest reaches of the U.S. government was pure hokum. Or, likewise, that her belief that people won’t be allowed to purchase private health insurance under Obamacare – the President’s landmark health reform bill – was also knock-down, flat-out wrong.
Or what about the conspiracy-theorist nightmare about the IRS amassing a huge health-care database on all American citizens that turned out to be totally untrue? Her voters couldn’t have possibly have believed that that bit of pants-on-fire nonsense was actually the case, surely? Then there was the fantastic claim that scientists could cure Alzheimer’s in ten years if only federal bureaucrats would get out of the way. That’s so farcical a statement that not even the most gullible child could be taken in by that, right?
Unfortunately for the rest of us, it would appear that the voters in Congresswoman Bachmann’s district were, in fact, quite unable to discern truth and fact from all the lies and the egregious misinformation surrounding them. Perhaps they could be forgiven for thinking that maybe only half of what she said was probably a lie or otherwise incorrect, but after eight years of humiliatingly dumb statements and outright untruths uttered by Congresswoman Bachmann, you would think that the good people back home would have eventually caught on. It seems more likely, however, that by playing to their foolish prejudices and demonstrable ignorance, Bachmann was telling her votes exactly what they wanted to hear.
A strange — and useful — work of performance art
To be fair, her voters were apparently learning that Ms. Bachmann’s words were not exactly worth the air they were uttered with. Her poll numbers were well below her previous highs and every indication was that she would be up for a tough reelection fight in 2014, so Lincoln’s maxim that you can only fool some of the people some of the time was clearly at work.
Even so, that she decided not to run is more than likely due to creeping ethics scandals rather than fear of voter wrath – suggesting that Bachmann was still fairly confident that, sans scandal, she could probably rely on her voters to send her to serve another term in Congress if she so desired. She decided not to run, however, thus never giving the good people in her district the opportunity to vote her out of office and so prove to the rest of America that they are not, in fact, horrifyingly ignorant humans.
Which is exactly why Michele Bachmann was in the end such a useful enemy for Democrats and progressives to have. Her demagogic idiocy – manifest to anyone who really examined her statements – was so cartoonish that they repelled nearly everyone except the touched Neanderthals who kept voting her into office back home in Minnesota. As such, she was the political equivalent of both a Gaudi masterpiece and a mineshaft canary.
Democrats could, for instance, always showcase her like one of Gaudi’s twisted buildings as an example to the Democratic faithful of what could happen if Republicans were allowed to win elections. Vote for us, they could warn, or that crazy woman from Minnesota might actually be able to get things done. Indeed, the more successful her endeavors became, the more money and opposition organizing Bachmann tacitly provoked. As a hate-figure sure to bring out progressives gunning to run her out of office, she excelled.
America’s remote tribal region
Bachmann’s tenure also vividly demonstrated the extent to which there is a deep reservoir of right-wing paranoia out there in America that fears and loathes anything different or which tries to come to terms with America’s rapidly changing demographics, declining international position, or new economic circumstances. For them, like the neo-fascist movement in austerity Greece, politics aren’t actually about solving real problems – which would necessitate valuing the truth about things. Instead, it is about voicing of tribal grievances in a way that reinforces group identity and deflects responsibility for group problems onto outsiders.
As in today’s Greece, then, where a right-wing organization is gaining ground at the polls by blaming foreigners and ethnic minorities for their country’s problems, a vote for people like Michele Bachmann represents a particular tribe in America crying out in pain and lashing out at weak, defenseless targets that the tribe despises – Muslims, gays, smart people, you name it. It is mindless, sectarian and divisive – and the louder and angrier it becomes, the more Americans should be worried about it because, inevitably, unreasoning violence will follow.
So losing Bachmann deprives the left of both a useful bogeyman and an alarm bell, which is unfortunate. She will likely be replaced by some boring, blow-dried, spiffed-up and telegenic right-winger well adapted to looking good on TV and making reactionary policy go down sweetly one sound-bite at a time. The monster of right-wing, know-nothing populism will therefore fade into the background somewhat, replaced by a new, gentler face that will do his or her best to mask the terrible things the right wing actually wants to accomplish.
Michele Bachmann may be going, but we would be wise to remember that the movement she represents isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Her grotesque political career, at the very least, always helped remind us of that.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Mint Press News editorial policy.