After months in which it was not clear just how influential the Tea Party would be and if the anger it channeled would have practical political implications, in the recent primaries, the Tea Party asserted itself decisively. Its victories were significant and unexpected, putting the Republican Party on the defensive and inspiring a mixture of anxiety and hope in Democrats.
On one hand Democrats were pleased to see division within Republican ranks, with the Tea Party clearly upsetting mainstream Republicans and helping to elect Tea Party affiliated candidates as Republican nominees whose politics may be too extreme as to render them unelectable in some states.
But Democrats were also concerned by the degree of energy, resources and influence the Tea Party has amassed and now wields. Although its more extreme candidates may be unelectable in politically moderate states such as Delaware—where Christine O’Donnell scored an upset victory for the Tea Party—they may well attract support in Florida and other such politically diverse and unpredictable states.
The Tea Party remains volatile and its impact on the November elections unclear. It is both helping and hindering Republicans, energizing the party and dividing it, inspiring new members and turning away moderates who are finding themselves estranged from its dogmatism. But on the whole, it seems to have galvanized conservatives, attracted massive media attention, and put Democrats on the defensive. As Gary Younge writes in the Guardian,
Democrats should be careful what they wish for. Just because Republicans are becoming more extremist doesn't mean they can't win. Two Tea Party candidates have already been selected in safe Senate seats and five are on the ticket in tight races. Of these, two hold double-digit leads and the remaining three are in dead heats. Indeed, the first of two certainties come November is that the Congressional Republican caucus in both houses will emerge even further to the right than it went in.
So while in moderate states like Delaware the Tea Party may have unwittingly handed a lifeline to Democrats, their net effect is likely to be sharply positive in terms of increasing Republican representation in Congress and shrinking both the overall Democratic congressional representation and its ability to pass legislation. As Younge notes, even with a substantial majority in the House and Senate, Democrats have suffered from a lack of solidarity and conviction with a great deal of internal dissent which rendered them paralyzed in the face of an increasingly broken economy. After the mid-term elections they will have even less freedom to advance their agenda.
New York Times columnist, David Brooks, argues that there is little evidence to show that the Tea Party is causing disaffection with Republicans amongst Americans, citing polls showing increasing support for Republicans across the country. The Tea Party seems to be drawing Americans to Republican ranks and has set itself up as the only opposition protesting what many Americans perceive as the failed economic and political policies of the Obama administration and of Congress as a whole. With no alternative, Americans are gravitating towards the Tea Party to vent their anger, fear and demand for change.
Brooks notes with concern the radical and irresponsible rhetoric of some members of the Tea Party—although this does not seem to have turned off most Americans, rather, it has galvanized them. Brook writes,
Along the way, the movement has picked up some of the worst excesses of modern American culture: a narcissistic sense of victimization, an egomaniacal belief in one's own rightness and purity, a willingness to distort the truth so that every conflict becomes a contest of pure good versus pure evil.
Brooks is a moderate conservative, not a liberal, and his characterization of the Tea Party offers a cautious commentary on the dangers of a political movement that is becoming increasingly shrill, antithetical to pluralism and reasoned debate, and prone to defamation. It is clearly stoking the fires of extremism which Brooks notes have already infected more mainstream conservatives. A recent article in Forbes by Dinesh d’Souza, for example, amounted to a paranoid and hysterical tirade against Barack Obama, claiming that his aim was to destabilize and undermine the United States, in keeping with his father’s anti-colonial beliefs.
The existence and success of the Tea Party highlights an issue that receives little attention but deserves to be addressed: why are conservatives so good at rallying the masses, stoking indignation, and giving indignation form and function? Why are liberals so bad at doing the same for their own respective ends? They’re no less angry but their anger rarely gets expressed in politically viable and productive ways.
There is no liberal counterpart to the Tea Party. Sure, a “Coffee Party” exists as a liberal/moderate alternative but it is not a political or social force, lacks resources and organization, and is more a product of wishful thinking and a rhetorical response to the Tea Party’s practical power than a genuine liberal parallel to it. There’s good reason why many people have not heard of it and why it has almost no media coverage: It is not a political and social force with which to be reckoned.
Democrats are going into this election with the disadvantage of not having a group of fiercely passionate advocates for unapologetic liberalism at the forefront. At a time when many Americans are suffering from economic insecurity, indignation and immoderate sentiments attract far greater support than the mealy-mouthed moderation Obama and Democrats have been able to muster. Many Americans are angry and there does not appear to be a liberal address for anger, only a conservative one, and only with the Tea Party.
Tea Party candidates are likely to be as obstructionist and hostile to bipartisanship and compromise in Congress as other Republicans. But because many are newcomers they are relatively untainted and can project an image of newness, integrity, and innovation even if in reality they are little different from conventional Republicans and will behave quite similarly to them, contributing to gridlock in Congress and government dysfunction.
The Tea Party’s main party platform consists of delegitimizing government and defunding it under the rhetorical mantra of promoting, “limited government.” There is no Tea Party plan that will increase employment, rebuild infrastructure, improve schools and state and local services. Anger does not lend itself to such practical improvements—but to the demagoguery and name calling at which the Tea Party excels.
Tea Party candidates have demonstrated bigotry and engaged in ad hominem attacks against a broad swath of Americans on the basis of class, sexual orientation, gender, and, less explicitly, race. Carl Paladino, the Tea Party nominee for New York state governor has called for putting welfare recipients in prison where they can purportedly benefit from learning basic life skills such as personal hygiene in a structured environment. He also said—lacking any evidence and reasoning whatsoever—that Obama’s healthcare reform plans would kill more Americans than the September 11 attacks. Christine O’Donnell is firmly against a woman’s right to control her own body and have an abortion, harshly skeptical of global warming and its implications, and hostile to gay rights. Tea Party activists—both lay leaders and leaders alike have made wild accusations against Democrats and President Obama that amount to character assassination.
The Tea Party projects an image of itself as a grass roots movement. There is some truth to this but as a recent New Yorker article explored, the Tea Party also receives a great deal of financial and logistical support from conservative billionaires David and Charles Koch. According to Bruce Bartlett, a conservative economist, the Kochs are “trying to shape and control and channel the populist uprising into their own policies.” The money that makes the Tea Party work then is not primarily small donations from individual Americans—as was so significant in Obama’s web based campaign fundraising—rather, it is the traditional large donations of wealthy individuals hiding beyond seemingly neutral names such as “Americans for Prosperity.” The Tea Party Express, for example, raises millions of dollars to support Tea Party candidates; it has raised over five million dollars, several hundreds of thousands of which were invested in the successful campaign of Christine O’Donnell in Delaware.
At present, the Tea Party has not fractured the Republican Party in two because it reflects the very extremism that has increasingly come to define the character and politics of the Republican Party. It frustrates the political drive of moderates such as Charlie Christ in Florida and of conservatives who are not quite as conservative as the Tea Party, such as Lisa Murkowski of Alaska who lost in the recent primaries there to a Tea Party candidate. Overall, it is energizing the Republican base. It is, however, polarizing politics in America and making the Republican Party ever less welcoming to independents and those who believe that the government has an essential role to play and that the mantra of limited government is neither a philosophy nor a plan of action but an unreflective and knee-jerk response to complex social problems.
In the short term the Tea Party may prove to be a boon to the Republicans and a threat to Democrats. But in the long term, the Tea Party is rendering the Republican Party hostile to moderates, Hispanics, and an increasingly tolerant American populace which has little interest in the anti-immigrant invective of the Tea Party, its lack of support for equality and civil rights for gay and lesbian Americans, and its relentless indifference and active hostility to economically disadvantaged Americans who are growing as a percentage of the American population while the economy contracts and new jobs are not being created. For now many Americans may be seduced by the Tea Party’s vivid indignation and uncompromising conservatism. But, with time, Republicans will likely rue their dependence on them.
Currently the Tea Party is the emperor and he looks in the eyes of many Americans resplendent, filled with emerging power and promise. But as is all too often the case the more one looks carefully and critically at the emperor the more one realizes that however rich one’s imagination and however generous, the emperor in fact has no clothes. The hope and enthusiasm of so many that is projected upon him cannot indefinitely mask the moral ugliness he displays and the fact that the instant people see his nakedness his empire will crumble.
Noam Schimmel - London-based researcher and human rights practitioner with extensive development experience in the field.
