The Ironies of the Teed Off Party

The age and racial composition of the “Tea Party” means that it is doomed to constantly shrink as a political force as older white members become an increasingly small minority. That fact, however, does nothing to explain the fervor of the members nor the effectiveness of the “movement” in not only getting people in office aligned with them but, more impressively, influencing people who would otherwise be moderate compromisers to literally cower in fear of political retribution if they were to seek compromise.

Because the tea party (I’ll dispense with capitalization since there is no single “entity”) is a product of both local action, co-ordinated media support and centralized national funding. It is difficult to understand its origins as well as its future. In “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism”, authors Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson, do a remarkable job of delineating all three aspects of this phenomenon.

I began to appreciate the irony inherent in the beginnings of the movement as the authors described the moment on February 19, 2009, when from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, CNBC reporter Rick Santelli raged against the Obama administration’s foreclosure relief plan and invited America’s capitalists to a “Chicago Tea Party”. Anxiety producing cognitive dissonance was thick as I recalled an article from the New York Times of December 20, 2008…”From his earliest days in office, Mr. Bush paired his belief that Americans do best when they own their own home with his conviction that markets do best when let alone. He pushed hard to expand homeownership, especially among minorities, an initiative that dovetailed with his ambition to expand the Republican tent — and with the business interests of some of his biggest donors. But his housing policies and hands-off approach to regulation encouraged lax lending standards.”

So, kind of like waging the trillion dollar plus Iraq war “off the books” and contributing directly to new huge deficits, the intentional loosening of mortgage policies led directly to people not being able to afford them. Apparently incapable of informed judgments, Santelli instead rants against the new President for trying to defuse the disaster.

Perhaps to the authors credit, nowhere do they mention the fact that Barack Obama is black and what effect that might have had on older white male voters, especially republicans now largely reflective of the once democratic, now republican, south with deep segregationist and “states rights” roots. That would require at least another whole book.

It wasn’t until I got to page 171 where the authors quoted Jerry Delemus (New Hampshire Tea Party leader) in April 2011 characterizing liberals as “trying to destroy this country”, that I realized how starkly polarizing (and irrational) the groups could be.

The inherently opposed idea of plutocrats leveraging localized political movements to further legislation especially favorable to the wealthy seems lost somewhere in the movement (but well covered starting on page 178 in the book). Further, the idea that the plutocrats were getting middle and lower class whites to strenuously argue for tax policies that would be wildly advantageous to the rich and deeply detrimental to society in general was just as ironic as the fact that these tax policies, while greatly advantageous to the rich in the short term, by literally eviscerating the middle class they were destroying the very source of their own wealth creation in the country. I you haven’t seen Nick Hanauer’s TED Talk, I highly recommend it … https://www.ted.com/talks/nick_hanauer_beware_fellow_plutocrats_the_pitchforks_are_coming .

Since the tea party does not have more than 30% of the general electorate, they cannot do without the republicans. Nor can republicans afford to lose half of their base of voters no matter how ideologically “pure”. This is a situation the democrats ought to be able to exploit except for the fact that their strength in diversity and tolerance of views is also their weakness and thus they have much difficulty galvanizing voters (especially in off year elections like 2010 when a co-ordinated tea party and wildly effective gerrymandering combined to produce legislative gains that will take organized democrats, an oxymoron, ten years to unravel.

So as Edward R. Murrow famously ended his shows, “Good night and good luck.”, I am left to hope for the best for our country and that informed rationality might find a more influential role in achieving that.