The Tea Party began to grow and spread across the nation with protest rallies in various states and in Washington, DC in 2009, largely in response to President Barack Obama’s universal health insurance plan, and against the principle that all Americans should have health insurance provision guaranteed by the government regardless of their financial resources. It was also born out of anger with the fiscal stimulus package and the mounting debt it created, as well as frustration with Republican support for the bank bailout. Tea Party members considered the bailout to be wasteful and beyond the prerogative of government to interfere with the markets on such a grand scale.
The Tea Party’s purpose is, according to their mission statement, “to attract, educate, organize and mobilize our fellow citizens to secure public policy consistent with our three core values of fiscal responsibility, constitutionally limited government, and free markets.” It defines itself as a “social welfare organization…dedicated to furthering the common good and general welfare of the people of the United States.” It perceives itself as a guardian of American democracy, not merely a benign force, but an ethical and protective one to benefit all Americans.
Its use of the terms “welfare” and “common good,” however, is an anomaly, as the policies it advocates systematically undermine the welfare of Americans, particularly the economically disadvantaged and racial minorities, who form a large portion of America’s most impoverished citizens.
The movement is antagonistic to government regulation of greenhouse gasses and government efforts to limit global warming. Oddly, this makes its policy stance encourage American dependence on foreign oil, which contradicts the Tea Party’s vigorous patriotic championing of American independence and self-sufficiency. Indeed, there is a wide gap between the Tea Party’s gratifying self-perception and the policies it advocates.
Anger is the best mobilizer. Fear of an enemy plus anger is a potent cocktail for potential social and political power results. The Tea Party movement contains elements of each of these. For now, its hatred is relatively muted, more an antipathy towards government than outright hatred. But within the leadership and lay sectors of the movement prejudice against minority groups including the economically disadvantaged and African-Americans exists and has been revealed in recent social attitudes surveys.
The University of Washington Institute for the Study of Ethnicity, Race, and Sexuality conducted a survey of Tea Party members that Professor Christopher Parker, the lead investigator, said confirmed that “people who are Tea Party supporters have a higher probability” —25 percent— “of being racially resentful than those who are not Tea Party supporters.”
Giving voice to class resentment within the Tea Party movement, which sometimes overlaps with race resentment, Richard Gilbert, a 72-year-old retired Air Force officer and teacher, expressed this antipathy in an interview quoted in The New York Times, “I do believe we are responsible for the widow and the orphan, but I think there is a welfare class that lives for having children and receiving payment from the government for having those children.”
The Tea Party movement allies itself with corporations and fails to see the logical inconsistency and hypocrisy in its selective moral indignation about alleged welfare abuses. Tea Party activists rarely critique the massive amounts of corporate welfare that the federal government provides corporations in the form of tax breaks and privileged access to natural resources in the oil sector, for example, draining far more funds from the government than the total amount of funds which undeserving welfare recipients claim. Yet they criticize the bank bailouts, even though these were necessary, unlike the aforementioned corporate welfare schemes, to prevent a larger economic collapse that would have had a devastating impact on the American economy and on all Americans.
Assuming that the government is the enemy and corporations are reliably benign forces, Rand Paul, the Tea Party candidate who won the Republican nomination for the Senate in Kentucky recently called President Obama’s criticism of the BP company for the massive and catastrophic oil spill in the gulf “un-American,” saying that “sometimes accidents happen.” For a high-ranking member of the Tea Party movement, which claims to promote the public welfare and the common good, Paul is radically out of touch with the tens of thousands of Americans suffering directly as a result of the spill, and from all Americans, who will suffer from the environmental degradation that the spill causes.
In the context of current economic events, most notably, the massive banking crisis and resulting recession, much of the Tea Party’s mission seems achingly dissonant. A lack of government regulation enabled reckless loans to be made to individuals that could not reasonably be expected to pay them back. There was a profound lack of transparency in the trading of debt and inflated and inaccurate credit ratings; under such circumstances the demand for less government regulation and oversight and the lionizing of radically free markets, idealization of corporations and demonization of government seems misguided and reckless, utterly divorced from contemporary realities.
A Tea Party activist recently interviewed in The New York Times illustrated the contradiction at the heart of the Tea Party movement—it advances emotions of indignation without linking them to reality. In the same breath, she attacks the government and its tendency for wasteful spending, while acknowledging how it protects her, and the inconsistency in her approach. The New York Times reported that while almost 75 percent of Tea Party members who favor smaller government in a recent New York Times/CBS poll said they would prefer that even if it meant cutting domestic programs, in follow-up interviews they clarified saying that preserving Medicare and Social Security was important, focusing instead on “waste.” Jodine Rhite of Rocklin, California said, “That’s a conundrum, isn’t it? I don’t know what to say. Maybe I don’t want smaller government. I guess I want smaller government and my Social Security… I didn’t look at it from the perspective of losing things I need. I think I’ve changed my mind.”
Many Tea Party members misunderstand Democratic public policies. Ninety-two percent of Tea Party members said in a recent survey that they believed that Obama was moving the country towards socialism. Obama’s policies do nothing of the sort—his healthcare plan keeps in place private insurance companies and actually expands their potential markets. Nor has he ever advocated the principle that the government should own the means of production and that major industries should be nationalized. In fairness, over 50 percent of Americans believe that Obama is moving America towards socialism. So clearly Tea Partiers manifest a tendency towards misunderstanding the definition of socialism and Obama’s policies that is already prevalent among Americans in general.
If one considers the last 30 years of American political history, and the dominance of Ronald Reagan’s philosophy of “limited government” during those years, the ideology of the Tea Party is not exceptional, although it is extreme. It has simply appropriated mainstream Republican rhetoric and ideology and increased its rigidity and severity. Given that the American media and public have largely accepted the arguments of Reagan, and that both Bill Clinton in the past and Barack Obama today have taken largely deferential approaches in both policy and rhetoric to the Republican ideology of limited government, there’s little that is surprising about the Tea Party’s rhetoric and policy stances. It grew in the rich soil of dominant Republican ideology.
If the Tea Party is the hyper younger sibling of the Republican Party—more pugnacious and at times outright hysterical—it may yet explode in the faces of the Republican Party, as it already has in Kentucky with the election of Rand Paul. The Tea Party operates independently of the Republican Party and at times threatens it. John McCain has been desperately clinging on to power in Arizona, shifting ever rightward in his quest to hold his Senate seat as Tea Party activists attack him for not being sufficiently conservative and support his opponent. Republican Governor Charlie Christ of Florida has chosen to run for the Senate as an independent because Tea Party activists within the Republican Party have been campaigning vigorously against his perceived political moderation. Even in one of the most conservative states, Utah, the Tea Party has demonstrated its power, helping to push a conservative Republican veteran, Bob Bennett, out of office because his conservatism did not reflect the aggressive conservatism of the Tea Party and because he supported Obama’s bank bailout as well as a compromise on healthcare reform.
Will the Tea Party movement collapse under the weight of its own internal contradictions? This is unlikely in the immediate future as the emotional and psychological satisfaction derived from finding a simple and clear enemy in the federal government, however spurious and imagined, outweighs the force of reality and truth. Moreover, the social bonds created by the Tea Party movement affirm at a time of economic losses and instability that a community of Americans can find mutual support in each other. Given the strength of the “limited government” philosophy in American public culture, Tea Party activists will find much sympathy amongst a broad swath of Americans and consequently, will not feel marginalized.
However, it’s also possible that the Tea Party movement will be an ephemeral phenomenon, something that began with a howling rage and ends in a whimper. It is disorganized and offers no practical solutions to economic problems aside from dogmatic and extreme commitments that are either blandly general, i.e. “less government” or too extreme, i.e. ending mildly progressive taxation in favor of a flat tax and closing down key government agencies such as the Department of Education. As Gary Younge has argued in the Guardian, “The Tea Party is an unruly, inchoate, and incoherent force with neither a leader nor a clear programme.” It is made up of conflicted divisions across the country with different priorities and a lack of clearly defined common purpose with specific and achievable policy aims that would be financially viable and socially sustainable.
But tea is not the only drink being served in the United States these days. Even less organized and receiving less media attention—yet addressing concerns about government efficacy and the welfare of American citizens from a liberal perspective—the Coffee Party has emerged. The Coffee Party Facebook page states:
“Anyone who wants our government to function in the interest of ordinary Americans, not corporations, is welcome to join this movement… We believe that the majority of Americans are regular folks like us, and some of us have been misled into thinking that the federal government is the cause of our struggles, our anxiety, and our fear. In short, our government has been presented to us as our enemy.”
Although the Coffee Party movement does not have nearly the same media attention nor name recognition as the Tea Party it clearly demonstrates that there is grassroots energy amongst liberals to challenge the Tea Party’s values, claims and political activity even as it shares some of their concerns about lack of government efficacy.
Until now the Tea Party has had minimal practical political gains outside of a few key states. Where it has succeeded most is in generating vast media attention, activating a passionate if ill-organized and disparate grassroots network, and pressuring a select few Republicans to push conservatism ever rightwards. As a movement it does not seem to have much staying power, but at a pivotal time, now and probably at least until the mid-term elections, Tea Partiers have their moment in the sun.
Noam Schimmel - London-based researcher and human rights practitioner with extensive development experience in the field.
