In the Tea Party narrative, victory at the polls means a new American revolution, one that will "take our country back" from everyone they disapprove of. But what they don't realize is, there's a catch: This is America, and we have an entrenched oligarchical system in place that insulates us all from any meaningful political change.
Matt Taibbi looks at the Tea Party movement, and after a year of interviewing members and attending events, writes what I suspect a lot of observers think, those observers being a sizeable chuck of the American population:
[Tea Partiers are] completely blind to how offensive the very nature of their rhetoric is to the rest of the country. I'm an ordinary middle-aged guy who pays taxes and lives in the suburbs with his wife and dog — and I'm a radical communist? I don't love my country? I'm a redcoat? Fuck you!
Taibbi's observations that "Tea Partiers expound at awesome length upon their cultural victimhood," and "they're shockingly willing to believe...[that] white people in the age of Obama are some kind of oppressed minority" square with parts of Mark Lilla's analysis in The New York Review of Books, "The Tea Party Jacobins," which was based on Lilla's review of five recent books concerned with US politics. Here's Lilla observation, published earlier in 2010:
The new Jacobins have two classic American traits that have grown much more pronounced in recent decades: blanket distrust of institutions and an astonishing—and unwarranted—confidence in the self. They are apocalyptic pessimists about public life and childlike optimists swaddled in self-esteem when it comes to their own powers.
Taibbi's article focuses primarily on the Tea Partiers themselves, but he gives attention also to realities that dilute the movement's grassroots creditentials, specifically, how corporate and billionaire interests have pumped millions of dollars into the movement, and to how the movement's organizational and promotional efforts were honed early on, and continue to be, by organizations like Dick Armey's FreedomWorks.
Frank Rich in "The Very Useful Idiocy of Christine O'Donnell," in The New York Times notes that:
some Tea Party groups and candidates like Sharron Angle, [Rand] Paul and [Christine] O’Donnell are being financed directly or indirectly not just by the Kochs (who share the No. 5 spot on the new Forbes 400) but by a remarkable coterie of fellow billionaires, led by oil barons like Robert Rowling (Forbes No. 69) and Trevor Rees-Jones (No. 110). Even their largess may be dwarfed by Rupert Murdoch (No. 38) and his News Corporation, whose known cash contributions ($2 million to Republican and Republican-tilting campaign groups) are dwarfed by the avalanche of free promotion they provide Tea Party causes and personalities daily at Fox and The Wall Street Journal.
Taibbi asks: "So how does a group of billionaire businessmen and corporations get a bunch of broke Middle American white people to lobby for lower taxes for the rich and deregulation of Wall Street?" He declares, "That turns out to be easy."
One reason for the ease may be that pro-corporation billionaire families and the organizations that they back that aim to popularize their interests have been around since well before the Tea Party movement. They've had practice, and they've been patiently persistent. One can turn back to Matt Bai's 2004 article, "Wiring the Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy," to learn about the funding of conservative and libertarian think tanks by billionaire Republicans going back decades, and as shown in a PowerPoint presentation created by Democratic operative Rob Stein, ''The Conservative Message Machine's Money Matrix." Bai writes of the presentation as making:
the case that a handful of families -- Scaife, Bradley, Olin, Coors and others -- laid the foundation for a $300 million network of policy centers, advocacy groups and media outlets that now wield great influence over the national agenda. The network, as Stein diagrams it, includes scores of powerful organizations -- most of them with bland names like the State Policy Network and the Leadership Institute -- that he says train young leaders and lawmakers and promote policy ideas on the national and local level. These groups are, in turn, linked to a massive message apparatus, into which Stein lumps everything from Fox News and the Wall Street Journal op-ed page to Pat Robertson's ''700 Club.'' And all of this, he contends, is underwritten by some 200 ''anchor donors.'' ''This is perhaps the most potent, independent institutionalized apparatus ever assembled in a democracy to promote one belief system,'' he said.
Jane Mayer's recent article in The New Yorker, "Covert Operations" concerns one especially powerful source of contributions to the institutionalized conservative message machine, the so-called "Kochtopus"--the billionaire Koch brothers heading the energy industry giant Koch Industries and their foundation, Americans for Prosperity, which recently
announced that it will spend an additional forty-five million dollars before the [2010] midterm elections, in November. Although the group is legally prohibited from directly endorsing candidates, it nonetheless plans to target some fifty House races and half a dozen Senate races, staging rallies, organizing door-to-door canvassing, and running ads aimed at “educating voters about where candidates stand.”
Rob Stein himself is cited in Mayer's article describing the Koch brothers as
at the epicenter of the anti-Obama movement. But it’s not just about Obama. They would have done the same to Hillary Clinton. They did the same with Bill Clinton. They are out to destroy progressivism.
And their patient commitment to a long-term plan may be paying off. Mayer interviews a Republican campaign consultant who has done research on behalf of Charles and David Koch. He remarkes:
The Koch brothers gave the money that founded [the Tea Party]. It’s like they put the seeds in the ground. Then the rainstorm comes, and the frogs come out of the mud—and they’re our candidates.
It might also be noted that those candidates are clearly less than ideally commited to purist anti-government Tea Party ideology. Again, Rich in his editorial on candidate Christine O'Donnell and the Tea Party:
most of the Republican Tea Party standard-bearers [besides O'Donnell] lack genuine antigovernment or proletarian cred. Joe Miller and Ken Buck, the Senate candidates in Alaska and Colorado, actually are graduates of elite universities like those O’Donnell lied about attending. Rick Scott, the populist running for governor in Florida, was chief executive of a health care corporation that scooped up so many Medicare and Medicaid payments it had to settle charges for defrauding taxpayers. Rand Paul, the scion of a congressman, is an ophthalmologist whose calls for spending restraint don’t extend to his own Medicare income. Carl Paladino, the truculent man of the people in New York, grew his fortune as a developer with government handouts and favors. His California bookend, Carly Fiorina, received a golden parachute worth as much as $42 million from Hewlett-Packard, where she liquidated some 20,000 jobs.
Like the donor network Stein spotlighted four and five years ago, the Tea Party phenomenon is not only billionaire-backed but also, for all intents and purposes, partisan. This flies in the face of the frequently heard Tea Party talking point that the movement is bipartisan or nonpartisan. Wendy Kaminer in "The Tea Party: phoney freedom fighters," draws heavily from a 2010 New York Times/CBS News poll, and relative to the partisanship at the heart of the Tea Party, she notes:
The Tea Party movement is sometimes at odds with the Republican establishment, but it is dominated by Republican voters (who constituted two thirds of members surveyed).... [T]he Tea Party movement, marketed as a novel, spontaneous uprising of mostly independent voters, is actually a more familiar, partisan revolt against a dramatic loss of power. Bush-era Republicans who envisioned a permanent majority were jolted out of their reveries by the 2008 election of a Democratic president, a clear majority in the House and (briefly) a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. Neither party likes losing elections, but Republicans tend to win and lose them with a vengeance.
Kaminer also cites the finding of the New York Times/CBS News poll that 63% of Tea Partiers "say they get the majority of their political and current events news on television from the Fox News Channel:"
[Tea Partiers] simply don’t believe that the Democratic president and Congress represent the majority.... [T]he 18 percent of Americans who identify themselves as Tea-Partiers are convinced that they represent the majority instead: 84 per cent of them agree that ‘the views of the people involved in the Tea Party movement generally reflect the views of most Americans’. This is perhaps the FOX News effect: if you get all or most of your information from one partisan Republican source that confirms your status as a patriotic American and characterises your opponents – including moderate Democrats – as extremists, you might reflexively universalise your own convictions.
This suggests a strong echo chamber effect among Tea Partiers, which in part may also explain why 64% of Tea Partiers believe
that the president has increased taxes for most Americans, despite the fact that the vast majority of Americans got a tax cut under the Obama administration.
To be sure, both statistics, along with the fact that around 25% of all Americans and 41% of registered Republicans believe that President Obama is or probably is foreign-born, likely seems consistent with the observation of numerous commentators and journalists, and the complaint of many progressive activists, that the Obama Administration's communication efforts have been surprisingly bad. This failure may be particularly damning given that the administration and Democrats in general ought to have been able to anticipate a conservative offensive, even including some of its rhetoric, such as that regarding socialism. The Tea Party might be new, but the anti-government backlash it represents is not.
As Kevin Drum notes in his Mother Jones article, "Tea Party: Old Whine in New Bottles:"
Ever since the 1930s, something very much like the tea party movement has fluoresced every time a Democrat wins the presidency, and the nature of the fluorescence always follows many of the same broad contours: a reverence for the Constitution, a supposedly spontaneous uprising of formerly nonpolitical middle-class activists, a preoccupation with socialism and the expanding tyranny of big government, a bitterness toward an underclass viewed as unwilling to work, and a weakness for outlandish conspiracy theories.
But each time a Democratic president is elected, the rightwing extremist movement Drum describes is more effective than the time before:
The Liberty League withered after it failed to make even a dent in FDR's 1936 reelection campaign. The Birchers improved on that record, winning lots of local campaigns and eventually helping Barry Goldwater win the Republican presidential nomination in 1964, before collapsing under the weight of Robert Welch's increasingly bizarre rants. The '90s activists were more successful yet, helping Gingrich take over Congress in 1994, impeaching a president in 1998, and eventually sending George W. Bush to the White House.
Where will it end? Drum dares to make a prediction:
[The Tea Party's] core identity will slowly fade away...while its broader identity becomes subsumed by a Republican Party that's been headed down the path of ever less-tolerant conservatism for decades.
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