With the inevitable incorporation of a virulent anti- illegal immigration stance and nativist rhetoric into its informal platform against government overspending, the Tea Partiers have cobbled together a quasi-coherent narrative that purports to explain the sorry state of America. The narrative itself has little grounding in reality, but as an instrument for mobilizing popular support against a myriad of government initiatives, it has the potential to imperil not only the Democrats who are up for reelection in 2010, but also many incumbent Republicans who are viewed by the Tea Partiers as RINOs—Republicans in name only.
Or not. Perhaps the Tea Partiers will be nothing more than a curious footnote in the annals of American political history—just another fleeting fringe political movement whose basic platform was co-opted by one of the major parties in time to gain critical support in an election year. I suspect that the historians of posterity will say of the Tea Parties something like the following:
In an era of rising dissension in the United States, the Tea Partiers created a rhetoric appealing to a cluster of basic values that the nation still found compelling, no matter whether the hearer was from North or South. For a time, it molded the perceptions of a large number of Americans by providing a precise cause and simple solution for all the social ills. The values selected by the Tea Party imply an audience that embodies these values, reveres them, and seeks to practice its principles. Thus, by accepting the Tea Party role, Americans of the period became heroes, defenders of Americanism in every sense of the word.
Tea Party rhetoric cast the audience as united Americans who could save the union by reinforcing traditional American values at the ballot box. This vision of the audience had two weaknesses, one which was intrinsic to the nativist message, and one which was extrinsic. The intrinsic flaw arose from the contradiction between noble values and ignoble actions which violated the audience’s newly created self-concept. The second problem arose because the party did not adapt its vision of the audience to fit political reality.
The rise and fall of the Tea Partiers lends hope to those who fear similar “paranoid” political parties might someday garner enough power to rule in the United States. Americans have seen the rise of many prejudiced political movements, and have also, with no small amount of relief, seen them fall. But the sentiments persist, and may rise again.
Now for the full disclosure. I did not write this passage. Professor Cheree Carlson of Arizona State University did. And not only that, her essay that this passage is excerpted from is not about the Tea Parties, but rather the anti-immigration, anti-Catholic Know Nothing Party of the 1850s. All I did was replace “Know Nothings” with “Tea Partiers.” If it doesn’t seem like there’s much of a difference between these two factions, that’s because there isn’t. Like the Know Nothings, the Tea Partiers have made their ascent during a time of internal strife and “rising dissension.” The charge by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other liberals that the Tea Parties are “Astroturf”—a faux popular movement devised by corporate interests to sabotage Democratic legislative efforts—has a parallel in criticisms of the Know Nothings:
Genuine free soilers [a pre-Civil War political movement against the spread of slavery into the western territories] deplored the Know-Nothing craze as a red herring that diverted attention from “the real question of the age,” slavery…[Indiana politician] George Julian even suspected that this “distracting crusade against the Pope and foreigners” was a “cunning” scheme of proslavery interests “to divide the people of the free states upon trifles and side issues, while the South remained a unit in defense of its great interest.”
James McPherson
Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 138
As tensions mounted between North and South, immigration became decreasingly important as a political issue. Just like the much more politically successful Whig Party, the Know Nothings were done in during the 1850s mainly by the fact that party members split along geographical lines on the slavery question.
The Tea Partiers have no such disadvantage. They are mobilizing against and speaking to the “real question of the age,” the economy. Despite the recent troop surge in Afghanistan, Americans are focusing more on domestic problems—unemployment, underemployment, stagnant wages, tight credit. Americans know that there is indeed something terribly wrong with the country, and the Tea Partiers have an answer that’s been spoon-fed to them by the right-wing media: liberals want to bankrupt America by enacting “socialist” policies, and grant amnesty to illegal immigrants who “take jobs from Americans.” The reason for the financial crisis, says the narrative, is that poor people—often minorities—took out mortgages they knew they couldn’t afford, and defaulted on them en masse, leading to the collapse of the housing bubble, sending shockwaves through the rest of the economy. Furthermore, the resulting high unemployment is thanks in large part to illegal immigrants, who work for very low pay. As a corollary to this, Barack Obama—who is a Muslim immigrant from Kenya—is seeking to help the illegals at the expense of hardworking Americans by proposing several “Marxist” reforms.
Anyone with her head screwed on properly knows that this explanation is pure fantasy. But for people who don’t know what a derivative is, or what the Gramm-Leach-Bliley and Commodity Futures Modernization acts did, the narrative makes perfect sense. Ingrained in just about every Tea Partier’s brain is a preconceived set of notions about traditional American values: freedom, individualism, and capitalism are the common denominators, and these have made the United States “the greatest country on earth,” whatever that means. The idea that the White House is presently inhabited by the Manchurian Candidate means trouble for these values. If America became the greatest country ever by championing capitalism and fighting communism, then surely with a Marxist president at the helm, America has nowhere to go but down.
Again, all this is loco. Actual capitalism hasn’t prevailed in the United States for at least seventy years or maybe ever. The dirty little secret of the World War II economic boom in America was that it came during a time when government intervention in the economy was at its peak. During the war years, the U.S. ran a Soviet-style command economy centered on the production of military hardware, and experienced unprecedented growth and prosperity. This development did not go unnoticed by America’s elites, and ever since, the government has been running a permanent war economy, characterized by heavy taxpayer subsidies to defense contractors in what has been a horrifying vindication of Eisenhower’s warning about the military industrial complex.
There is no indication that these considerations enter the minds of Tea Partiers, and with good reason. Part of the mythology of America the Greatest is that it has the mightiest military on earth because as the saying goes, “Freedom isn’t free.” So attacks on defense spending have been nonexistent from the Tea Partiers, which is hardly a surprise because the Pentagon’s budget is off limits in public discourse generally. Any talk of cutting its mesospheric budget is liable to be perceived as an attempt to weaken America and make it more susceptible to terrorist attacks and other foreign machinations. But what is a surprise is the almost total lack of outrage at Wall Street and its deregulatory enablers in Washington. Without question, the Tea Partiers are angered by the bailouts, but they have inexplicably already moved on from the ongoing government subsidization of the financial services sector. Now, the brunt of their fury is aimed at the Democrats and their efforts to reform health care, which, unlike TARP and related programs, is actually designed to provide some measure of relief to regular people—people who cannot afford private health insurance. The bill is not great by any means, but it nonetheless has the potential to help millions of Americans, including many of the poor working stiff Tea Partiers who have haplessly misdirected their anger at red herrings such as immigration and phantom socialism. Never mind that key economic advisers to Obama are former investment bankers and other corporate-types. Obama’s a Marxist because Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Sean Hannity say so. And between the three of them, they have zero college degrees, which means they haven’t been corrupted by the liberal intelligentsia.
Like the Know Nothings during their heyday, the Tea Partiers are succeeding because they are providing a coherent answer for the perceived ills of the country. Ultimately, the former party was rendered irrelevant by the slavery issue and the rigidity of the its rhetoric. The Tea Partiers, on the other hand, are addressing the big problem on everyone’s mind. However, their prominence will last only as long as the economy is in the tank. I suspect that the significance of the Tea Parties will have an inverse relation to the perceived strength of the American economy. As long as Americans think the economy is in trouble, the concerns of the Tea Partiers will seem salient to them. But turn the economy around—or at least convince the American people that it’s turned around—and the Tea Partiers will become a nonfactor.
If America were a sane place, there would indeed be mass protests, but ones directed at the megabankers in Lower Manhattan, and the deregulators and the bailer-outers in Washington. But America is not a sane place. Instead, it is a place where popular outrage manifests itself in absurd attacks on illegal immigrants, gays, nonexistent Marxist politicians, and whatever other nonsensical scapegoats can be conjured up by the delirious, paranoid masses who have been taking it on the chin ever since Reaganomics started to chip away at the average American’s standard of living.
Source: Macroblog
It is to be hoped that the Tea Partiers either redirect their outrage at the real culprits of the times, or fade into obscurity. That they are accusing Obama—a man who has packed his administration with shameless corporatists—of being some kind of communist, illustrates the preposterous and misguided nature of the movement. The Tea Partiers are right to criticize the president, but they are doing so for all the wrong reasons—reasons which amount to laughable non sequiturs.
In light of these considerations, the Tea Partiers aren’t just similar to the Know Nothings, they are Know Nothings, literally. They know not the instruments of their oppression, and popular ignorance is the most valuable asset that Wall Street and Washington could ever possess.
- Max
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