The New Republic
Four Myths About the Tea Parties
And why liberals are too dismissive of the movement.
* John B. Judis
* October 28, 2010 | 12:00 am
On the eve of the November elections, we are suddenly awash in books,
articles, and monographs about the Tea Parties. Some of these—I would single
out
Sean Wilentz’s _historical piece_
(http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/18/101018fa_fact_wilentz) in The
New Yorker—deepen our understanding,
but most of them don’t get it right. They are too quick either to dismiss
or to stigmatize the Tea Parties. And the mistakes they make are not just
academic; they contribute to a misunderstanding of what it will take for
liberals and the left—not to mention the Obama administration—to turn around
American politics after November.
Here are some of the most common misconceptions:
1) “The Tea Party is not a movement.” In a _front page story_
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/23/AR2010102304000.html)
in last Sunday’s Washington Post, Amy Gardner wrote that the Tea Parties
are “not so much a movement as a disparate band of vaguely connected
gatherings that do surprisingly little to engage in the political process.” As
evidence, Gardner cites the lack of a common platform, the lack of a common
national candidate, and the absence of a single dominant national
organization. The Tea Parties, the author suggests, are a much weaker brew
than
commonly thought.
But many powerful movements lack one or more of these features. In their
first years, the Populists (aka Farmers Alliance, etc.) lacked all these of
these features. In 1892, they came together around a candidate and a
platform, but that didn’t last. The populist movement of the 1880s and 1890s
was
basically a highly decentralized and fractious movement. Or consider the New
Left of the 1960s, of which I can speak personally. There was a
multiplicity of organizations: student, black, Chicano, feminist. And some of
the
organizations that claimed to have thousands and thousands of members were
themselves disorganized and decentralized. I belonged to an SDS chapter in
California, but we never—and I mean never—consulted the national office in
Chicago. When some would-be Leninists tried to consolidate SDS into a cadre
organization in 1969, it splintered and eventually dissolved.
The conservative movement that began in the mid-’50s also lacked a common
platform and dominant national organization. The American Conservative Union
was and remains a paper organization that puts on conferences.
Conservatives coalesced around national leaders in 1964 and 1980, but in
between these
times, they were not committed to a single leader. It is easy to forget
that in the 1980 election, some new right leaders backed John Connally
against Ronald Reagan! And by Reagan’s second term, conservatives were feuding
again. In other words, American politics has almost always had disorganized,
decentralized movements like the Tea Parties—and they have had a
significant impact.
I don’t want to read too much into Gardner’s analysis, but what I suspect
in these cases is that the writer is imposing a continental European model
of a political movement onto American politics. In Europe’s multiparty
systems, movements cohere more easily into parties, but in America, the
two-party system discourages the transition from movement to party except when
the
movement takes over one of the two parties.
2) “The Tea Party is a fascist movement.” Several authors have claimed
that the Tea Party, far from being incoherent in its views, is really an
American “fascist” movement. Sara Robinson from the Campaign for America’s
Future _cites_
(http://www.alternet.org/teaparty/148588/fascist_america:_is_this_election_the_next_turn_)
the definition of fascism from a book, The
Anatomy of Fascism:
...a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with
community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of
unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist
militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional
elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence
and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and
external expansion.
“Sound familiar?” she asks. Not to me. The Tea Party isn’t a party, has
not yet abandoned democratic liberties, and has not pursued “redemptive
violence.” A few fights here or there, maybe, but not Brown Shirt violence.
The problem here is very similar to that of denying that the Tea Party is a
“movement.” In both cases, the author is imposing abstract definitions
that are rooted in European, not American, history. What I would say about
the Tea Party is that like the European fascism between the world wars, it is
a deeply reactionary movement. People often look backwards for solutions
when faced with adversity. In continental Europe, that meant looking back to
an authoritarian past—in the case of Italy, all the way to the days of the
Roman Empire. In the U.S. it has meant looking back to an anti-statist
past, when liberty was defined in opposition to government. That’s how the Tea
Party movement sees it. It’s our American version of political
backwardness, not of fascism.
3) “The Tea Party is racist.” I dealt with this argument _at some length
before_ (http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/75241/the-tea-party-movement-isn
’t-racist) , and I am not going to repeat what I wrote. But an _extensive
new study_ (http://www.naacp.org/pages/tea-party-report) put out by the
NAACP and the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights has
appeared, and it requires a response. There is some new information about the
Tea
Parties in this study, but the basic thrust of it is to stigmatize the
movement as incurably racist by associating it with people like David Duke.
Now, I am not denying that there are “anti-Semites, racists, and bigots” in
the Tea Party movement. Nor would I deny that there were people in the
anti-Iraq War left who thought that the U.S. had it coming on September 11.
But
it is a mistake to reduce the Tea Party to a racist movement—the way one
could justifiably reduce something like the White Citizens’ Councils of the
1950s (which claimed only to be for “states’ rights”) to a racist
movement.
The Tea Party is an _accretion of various movements_
(http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/tea-minus-zero) of the past decades,
including the
Christian right and, as Wilentz shows, the older anti-Communist Right. But it
fits
above all into the framework of American populism, which has always had
right-wing and left-wing variants, and which is rooted in a middle class cri
de coeur—that we who do the work and play by the rules are being exploited
by parasitic bankers and speculators and/or by shiftless, idle white trash,
negroes, illegal immigrants, fill in the blank here. What’s important is
that these movements, which gather strength in the face of adversity, can go
either right or left. During the 1930s, they tended left rather than right.
During Obama’s first term, they have gone primarily to the right. There
are many reasons for this, but at least one has to do with how the White
House has blamed Main Street and Wall Street equally for the financial crisis.
4) “The Tea Party is a conventional Republican group funded by big
business.” My former colleague Michael Lind _argues_
(http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a3467258-dbbb-11df-a1df-00144feabdc0.html) that the
Tea Party is really a
Republican offshoot. “Its adherents are angry for the same reason that
Democrats were angry between 2001 and 2007: their party is out of power,” he
writes. But I think that is too simple, as are the assertions that the Tea
Party
is a tool of big business. There are groups like Tea Party Express that
were founded by Republican consultants and that have the apparent purpose of
getting the Republicans back in power—but as The Washington Post study
shows, many of those who identify with and are active in the Tea Party are new
to politics and are moved by specific grievances rather than by an
allegiance to the Republican Party. That was also true of Perot voters, from
whom
the Tea Partiers partly descend. They leaned Democratic in 1992 and
Republican in 1994, but overall their primary allegiance was not to party.
There are also Tea Party sponsoring organizations like Americans for
Prosperity that are funded primarily by big business. But again, as The
Washington Post survey shows, most of the local groups are improvident;
they’re not
George W. Bush and his “pioneers.” What’s undeniable, though, is that
those most likely to benefit from right-wing middle class insurgencies are not
the embattled middle classes, but the business interests and the wealthy
associated with the Republican Party. That was certainly true of the “Reagan
Revolution,” which put an end to the movement toward income equality that
had begun in the 1930s. So who benefits from these movements is not the same
as who controls them on a day-to-day basis. That is likely to become
apparent after this November’s election.
--
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