A Liberal's Questions For The Tea Party Movement

These are traumatic times in America. Unemployment tops 10%. Homes aren't worth what we paid for them. Personal debt (and public debt) are at record levels. Many Americans' personal savings took a dramatic hit in the last year and a half. We are still engaged in two wars and live amidst the continuing threat of terrorist attacks. The overall standard of living for the average American is not rising, as it once did, and has not risen for many years. The American dream of raising children who, if they work hard and educate themselves, will likely live a better life than we did, is dying out. Our political system, originally designed to respond to our individual voices, has instead become hijacked by special interest groups from all sides of the political equation, which use their monetary advantages to drown out our voices. All of this and much more has created an environment in this country of tremendous fear and anxiety which can sometimes border on outright panic.

In this atmosphere of dread and uncertainty, there has emerged an activist political movement which seems, for some, to offer an outlet of self-determination amidst all of the current turmoil. They call themselves "Tea Party Patriots". It is a decidedly right-wing movement. However, liberals may be wise not to simply dismiss such activists as uneducated, illiterate, racist and xenophobic conspiracy theorists. We know that nothing is ever that simple. Conversely, if Tea Partiers want to avoid being stigmatized as nothing more than "proud right-wing extremists" (as their own t-shirts signify) and get past the perception that they are nothing more than a tool of the cannibalistic conservative wing of the republican party, they are going to have to take a long, hard look in the mirror and satisfactorily answer a few tough questions.

Why now?

Government has been growing for many decades. The responsiveness of government to the average American has been declining for just as long. Debt has been piling up for even longer. More recently, the Bush administration accelerated all three of these core Tea Party complaints dramatically, turning inherited surpluses into deficits, revving up government intrusion into our private lives and creating many new bureaucracies. Yet, the Tea Party movement was not born until just weeks after a black Democrat took office as president. Why? Doesn't the timing seem more than a little suspicious? Especially when coupled with all of the aid which right-wing corporations, policy groups, talking heads and other activists funneled into the movement in it's inception. There are a lot of "grassroots" members now but the movement's origin was hardly one of spontaneous populism. Why now?

Why all of the Conspiracy Theories?

Most mature Americans realize that internet blogs are hardly a source of solid information. I, myself, don't pretend to report news here as much as express my opinions. When some extremist liberals advanced the notion that the Bush administration cooperated in the events of 9/11, all of right-wingdom derided the notion as paranoid ravings. Yet, just a few years later, many of those same people and media outlets are all too willing to promote such disprovable theories as Barack Obama not being born in this country, his being a "closet" muslim extremist and that he is preparing to enslave America to communism (even to the point of possibly setting up internment camps for the unwilling). I've even seen a discussion on an anti-Obama Facebook page about the government using the H1N1 vaccine nasal spray to implant a chip in the heads of unsuspecting Americans. This reversal of incredulousness is remarkable.

Begging the "Why Now" question again, where were the outraged right-wing cries of fascism when Bush supporters were telling us that "if you don't support the president, you're against the troops"? When government agents were infiltrating anti-war activist groups? When Sinclair Media, which owns over 20% of the nation's TV stations, forced it's on-air news personalities to inject statements supporting Bush into their broadcasts? Or when former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay crowed that he had rigged the political scales so as to guarantee Republican majorities as far as the eye could see? Yet, let one overzealous schoolteacher in New Jersey teach her pupils a song commemorating Obama's election and the entire right-wing is gearing up for civil war while images of the new president morphing into Adolf Hitler seem to pop up wherever you look. That fact-starved internet is once again fueling much of the anti-Obama, anti-Democrat paranoia. Why do so many in the Tea Party crowd seem to rely almost solely on such an untrustworthy information source?

Why no minorities?

In a recent special comment, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann noted the glaring lack of diversity among Tea Partiers. He asked if there weren't African-Americans who feel over-taxed or hispanics and asians who fear that government is too big. Olbermann's comments shed light on a larger question. Why is it even more of a challenge to find a minority face in a Tea Party crowd than it is at the Republican National Convention? I suspect that the knee-jerk defense of the movement would be that they don't discriminate or turn away anyone who supports their causes. I also suspect that this would be technically correct. The larger questions, then, become; Why do minorities not feel welcome to attend Tea Party events? Why is it such a predominantly white movement?

An opening night speech at the Tea Party National Convention in Nashville, Tn. reveals an answer to both questions. Former Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo used the Tea Party platform to call for the return of so-called literacy tests before Americans can register to vote. Worse, he put forth the theory that such tests would have prevented the election of Barack Obama. Since anyone who pays attention to voter demographics is aware that better educated voters sway Democratic more often, one can only conclude that Mr. Tancredo is calling for such "literacy" tests to be used again as they were in the south prior to 1964's Voting Rights Act, when they were expressly manipulated to prevent blacks from becoming enfranchised.

Given that Tancredo's remarks were enthusiastically welcomed by the crowd that night, the reason why an African-American, of any political persuasion, might feel uneasy among the Tea Party crowd becomes crystal clear. It is the movement itself, with it's virulent hatred of President Obama, militant anti-immigrant language, it's over the top stance against "multiculturalism" and it's warm embrace of a very thinly veiled racism, like that of Mr. Tancredo, which will ultimately result in a reputation for being nothing more than a haven for closeted white supremacists. Tea Partiers have no one to blame but themselves if this happens.

What is the true nature of the movement's relationship with the Republican party?

You don't have to be smarter than a 5th grader to understand that the national GOP intends to ride a wave of Tea Party activism to take over congress this November and possibly into the White House in 2012. However, you need look no further than a special congressional election in NY's 23rd district last year to identify the potential pitfalls in this strategy, both for republicans and Tea Partiers. When local republicans chose a somewhat moderate candidate in the district, the right-wing and Tea Party activists, revolted and backed the Conservative party candidate instead. When the national GOP joined in supporting the conservative, the local republican choice withdrew, frustrated, from the race and endorsed the Democrat. The result is that the 23rd district of NY is now represented by a Democrat for the first time in over a century.

The question of "who's going to use who and to what ends?" remains unanswered in this sometimes tenuous relationship. In fact, some local Tea Party chapters have already distanced themselves from their local republican establishment. Tea Partiers themselves frown upon the idea of a "from the top down" centralized movement. This will make it harder for the GOP to design the kind of national gameplan necessary to take over congress in the mid-terms. Will the Tea Party movement pull enough republican candidates so much further to the right as to open the door for more Democratic wins? Thus negating much of the GOP's expected gains? With most Tea Partiers fervently opposing the Senate re-election bid of 2008's republican presidential candidate, John McCain, the chances for a harmonious relationship seem very poor.

There are more questions which I could pose here, like, "Why so much talk about violence?", but this is a good start. Right-wing activists would undoubtedly respond to this column by insisting they don't have to answer such questions for a liberal. Fair enough. But they will have to answer them for themselves and for the future of the movement. Most political uprisings in this country ultimately fan themselves out. Angrier uprisings, like the Tea Parties, usually turn off more people than they turn on. Recent polls show that a majority of Americans who have a preference, view the Tea Party movement unfavorably. This will enable Democrats to use extremist speech, signs and incidents from Tea Party events against republican candidates this fall in much the same way that televangelists use seemingly shocking clips from Gay Pride parades to frighten and motivate their audiences against a "radical homosexual agenda". The question of the Tea Party role in politics, now and future, will not truly be answered until I can no longer reasonably pose the above questions. Only time will tell.