A few takes.
1. To me, the real story is the low status of the Tea Party. As others have pointed out, if the NAACP or the Sierra Club had complained about harassment, politicians and the press would have investigated the story from day one. But I think that it is wrong to think of this as an ideological double standard. If Code Pink or Greenpeace had complained about IRS harassment, nobody would have risen to their defense. My point is that, in the eyes of the establishment, the Tea Party is closer to Code Pink or Greenpeace than to a respectable organization. The low status of the Tea Party was brought home to me reading Moises Naim’s The End of Power, in which Naim was much kinder to Occupy Wall Street than to the Tea Party. I think he reflects establishment opinion.
2. I am surprised at how long the story has remained in the news, because I think of news as dominated by cable TV, which is ADD, ready to shift to a celebrity’s hijinks, a gruesome murder, or some other political event. If Watergate had taken place in today’s media environment, I don’t think the scandal would have stayed in the news long enough to jeopardize Nixon’s Presidency.
3. I was also surprised to see Jonathan Turley’s WAPO op-ed.
Our carefully constructed system of checks and balances is being negated by the rise of a fourth branch, an administrative state of sprawling departments and agencies that govern with increasing autonomy and decreasing transparency.
Suppose that there are two groups of people. One group thinks that the Tea Party is the problem with America and technocrats are the potential solution, while another group thinks it’s the other way around. The research I cited in The Three Languages of Politics predicts that this scandal will reinforce both groups’ thinking. So I would not be optimistic that Turley will persuade anyone to change their mind.
I agree with you that status explains the variance, but I dont think that organization status (which you discuss) is as important as the status of the the groups that these organizations represent.
The variation in status between Greenpeace and Sierra is dwarfed by the variation between environmental groups and the evangelical set. Environmentalists >>> Christians in status.
The fact that OWS is about an order of magnitude less organized and coherent than the Tea Party, yet command as much if not more respect tells you a lot about the relative status of working class conservatives versus their children who get English degrees from Columbia.
I think the NAACP is the perfect example. There isnt anything even remotely comparable to them. There is no right wing conjugate. It is not imaginable (legal even?) that there could be an explicit racial advocacy group that fights for unequal treatment in favor of white people. The social status (according to the media, the government, academia etc.) of black people is a good 2 orders of magnitude higher than for non elite white people.
But anyway, yeah I agree, status (a certain kind, though) trumps ideology (of course they are not independent)
Arnold, you seem to regard this as just another passing news story, instead of a shocking abuse of government power. Turley gets to the larger structural issue, of large non-transparent and irresponsible bureaucracies throwing their weight around. Let’s hope that this doesn’t just “blow over,” but that such abuse incurs consequences that reduces its likelihood in the future.
I am not saying that the story should blow over. However, I think it is likely that it will blow over unless the summer is really slow from a cable news perspective.
“If Code Pink or Greenpeace had complained about IRS harassment, nobody would have risen to their defense. My point is that, in the eyes of the establishment, the Tea Party is closer to Code Pink or Greenpeace than to a respectable organization. ”
Couldn’t disagree more. Greenpeace is well connected into the environmental movement – if they had been targeted by the Bush administration there would have been calls for independent counsels to investigate. Code Pink’s connection is not so direct, but they seemed to get invited to the State of the Union address when Bush was president, as guests of Democrats.
There may be truth to your three axes theories, but it seems to treat each group independently of the truth. The truth may be difficult to discern, but it is there to be discovered.