The "Feeling" Fueling the Tea Party Movement
Andrew Sullivan has very astute blog posting up on his website today in which he tries to make sense of what are the cultural and psychological underpinnings are of the current day Tea Party movement. He essentially argues what I have also been saying to people these days: the Tea Party movement represents what I like to call the "last gasp" of a dying notion of America. What is that notion? It's the America of baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, and Chevrolet. It's an America of an unmuddied/unmiscegenated racial/ethnic identity, whether white, black, or brown. It's an America of Christianity. It's an America where there's only one publicly-acknowledged form of heterosexual identity with any other identity tolerated as long as it's hidden in the closet. It's an English-only America where ethnicity is fully absorbed and integrated into the dominant cultural narrative of the WASP foundations of our country. But the simple fact is that our country today is simply not the Mayberry of the Andy Griffith show. And it never will be. And the uncertainty for many people, particularly of older generations, of what this means and the cultural discomfort that this causes is the socio-cultural roots of the "I want my America back!" meme so commonly heard from Tea Party faithful. Obama, as Sullivan notes, is the embodiment of this new America, which he argues accounts for the real visceral and passionate nature of the Tea Party's opposition to his Presidency. As Sullivan writes in a nutshell:
But the passion of opposition stems, I think, in part from a sense that the way the world once was is disappearing, that this is inevitable, and a repressed acknowledgment of the inevitability actually intensifies a resistance to it.It will play out. It will be nasty and uncomfortable as it does so. It will be hyperbolic and impassioned. But it will pass.
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It's partially about that kind of stuff Huck (minus the racial slams), in some geographical areas (not so much in others), but you seem to consistantly ignore the part where it is also quite ubiquitously about our social contract and the proper role of the government -particularly the federal government - in our lives.
The "feeling" that the federal government has run amok with unconstitutional mandates, corporate bailouts, ambition-crushing social equity schemes, and economically devastating legislation based on shady scientific prescriptions to poorly understood problems... that feeling has nothing to do with nostalgia.
Eric - I acknowledge that there is discontent with the scope and reach of government. But I'm not sure that this explains the intensity (what Sullivan calls the passion) of opposition. The part that you would emphasize about the federal government running amok would be easier to believe as a primary explanation for today's discontent if the Tea Partiers weren't so wedded to their Medicare and Social Security, to their Prescription Drug Benefits, to their defense of what seems an endless (and expensive) warmongering and foreign adventurism, not to mention the Tea Partiers' willingness to tolerate what I see as the more pernicious of government assaults on individual freedom through such things as the Patriot Act. I see a lot of rhetoric about an out of control government coming out of the Tea Party, but not so many specific details about where to pare back nor so many impassioned complaints about the kind of out-of-control government led by the Republican administrations of the past. To me, it seems abundantly clear that the anti-government memes are convenient add-ons to a cultural groundswell that is explicitly tied to the Obama administration. I'm not ignoring your point, I'm just insisting that your point doesn't strike me as the primary explanation for what's characterizing the Tea Party's primordial raison d'etre.
I read somewhere recently that to think of our current age as one in which government is more interventionist and regulatory than in previous years is actually quite a misinformed way of thinking. Banks were much more regulated, as were airlines, as were railways, as were mortgage companies, as were educational institutions. This is also true in terms of the taxes we pay. Even under Obama's current tax plan, we are much less taxed than under nearly every other modern administration. It is frankly a myth that we are less free today, even under an Obama administration, than before. And to the extent that any of our freedoms are curtailed in our current environmnent, a fair amount of them can be linked to the post-9/11 security state that conservatives created and seem to be the most stalwart defenders of.
So, the anti-government meme just doesn't really do much by way of explaining the intensity of the Tea Party movement now. Where was the Tea Party when we were much more highly taxed? When airlines and steel plants and banks were much more regulated?
"But I'm not sure that this explains the intensity (what Sullivan calls the passion) of opposition."
Given the Tea Party folks I talk to each day, I think it provides a much better explaination than your claims of racism and fear-of-change.
"...[arguments about] the federal government running amok would be easier to believe... if the Tea Partiers weren't so wedded to their Medicare and Social Security, to their Prescription Drug Benefits..."
So they can't oppose more federal entitlements if they don't advocate scrapping all the ones we currently have? A lot of the older Tea Party crowd have paid into these programs for 50 or 60 years, under the promise they would recieve benefits, and they feel entitled to them. And while I would still be willing to trade my Social Security and Medicare entitlements in exchange for the taxes I have to pay to support them, I'm not so sure that would be the case in another 20 years, after I've paid hundreds of thousands of dollars into the system (I've already paid well over $100,000 into it, and it would be harder today for me to cut my losses than it would have been 10 years ago). What most Tea Party people do support, as a form of COMPROMISE on the issue, is private social security accounts for younger people who haven't alreaedy been seperated from decades of their income via FICA taxes. And as for Medicare Rx, it was that very issue that turned many of today's Tea Party crowd against President Bush back in 2003. I'd daresay that Medicare Rx was even the first seed of the Tea Party, where conservatives and libertarians started opening their eyes to the fact that the GOP was not ideologically in tune with them.
"to their defense of what seems an endless (and expensive) warmongering and foreign adventurism, not to mention the Tea Partiers' willingness to tolerate what I see as the more pernicious of government assaults on individual freedom through such things as the Patriot Act."
I've not heard many Tea Partiers ever even discuss the Patriot Act, although a Democrat controlled Congress and a President you support have extended it's sunset provisions at least two times now. As for defense spending, I take issue with some Tea Party candidates on defense issues (while some are are also for defense contract reform and less military intervention around the globe), but I will credit them with at least having a correct understanding of what the federal government's enumerated Constitutional duties are... defense is one of them.
" To me, it seems abundantly clear that the anti-government memes are convenient add-ons to a cultural groundswell that is explicitly tied to the Obama administration."
I disagree. To the extent that the Tea Party movement is reactionary, it is in regards to a Republican Party that spent a decade in power ignoring the ideological tenents that put them there. Obama is cetainly ideologically in opposition to the Tea Party, but that's not why they exist... otherwise they would just be known as the Republican base.
"Banks were much more regulated, as were airlines, as were railways, as were mortgage companies, as were educational institutions."
I'd be interested in reading the article you cite, but I'd also ask, as compared to when, and regulated by who? You'll find that Tea Partiers mostly oppose regulation not because it is always bad, but because the federal government so often exceeds its Constiutional limits in administering it. For instance, you don't hear Tea Partiers calling for a reversal of the state mandates that require they buy insurance on their automobiles, becasue they see such regulation as a proper role of state governments. Even if the mandate is ubiquitous across all 50 states, that doesn't mean it would then be proper for the federal government to create such a law. Likewise, as a person living in Oklahoma, I wouldn't oppose Pennsylvania passing regulatory laws about the natural gas fracking process that is ruining water tables across their state, but I don't want the federal government passing similar regulations that effect Oklahoma, where we have a much different geological picture that doesn't react as poorly to gas fracking. Same with healthcare, most Tea Partiers don't mind MA having a (hopeless failure of a) program that looks strikingly like Obamacare. They just don't want a similar program imposed on them by the federal government.
Another problems with modern regulation is that it is often much closer to home than it used to be. People tend not to notice regulation on steel mills, other than perhaps an increase in the price of steel products... but they do notice when their house is overrun with ants because they can no longer buy ant poison that works well, even though it is the same stuff their 90 year old grandfather used for decades. They notice when they take their kid to a used bookstore and can't find a "kids section" because regulations forbid selling old books to kids due to lead in the ink, even though no kid has ever been admitted to a hospital with lead poisoning due to licking the pages of a book. They notice when they have to pay $100 for good allergy medication because the FDA requires it to be sold by prescription, even though it has fewer side effects than cheaper over-the-counter medicine designed to do the same thing. Whatever else federal regulations are or aren't, they are more insidiously active in our everyday lives than they have ever been. And now the Dems want to regulate the amount of dust cows are allowed to kick up in a pasture, prevent you from buying mercury free incandescent lightbulbs, and mandate increased energy efficiency standards that will drive up prices on every appliance in your home.
"Even under Obama's current tax plan, we are much less taxed than under nearly every other modern administration."
But, to the extent that may be true (mostly thanks to Bush), Obama and the Dems want to change that. And again, the Tea Party crowd seeks a federal government that looks much more like it did Pre-FDR, which would require much lower tax rates to sustain itself. That is part of the argument Peggy Noonan has made: The Tea Party probably wants federal taxes around 10-12% maximum, and more regressively structured. They are willing to compromise to, say, 15%. The Republicans and the Democrats keep giving them 25-30%. The Tea Party is a political effort to start moving negotiations back the other direction.
You may or may not agree with these arguments, but these kinds of things are much more substantive when you want to discuss what is driving the passion behind the Tea Party. Saying it is about racism and Mayberry just doesn't speak to the truth.
Eric - First, I want to be clear that I'm not calling anyone a racist, by which I mean intentional efforts to discriminate on the basis of skin color. Am I arguing that there is a discomfort among certain segments of our population with the growing miscegenation of our culture and everything that this implies, from music, to food, to clothing, to attitudes towards family, to popular expressions of all kinds of religion, etc.? Yes. Do I think people uncomfortable with this miscegenation are racists in the sense that they want to discriminate on the basis of race? By and large, no. And Sullivan says as much in his own piece. So I don't think it is fair to characterize my comments as driven by racism. My comments are pointing to a discomfort that comes with an acknowledged loss of cultural homogeneity, a percieved lack of cultural assimilation by different ethnicities to a dominant WASP cultural narrative with which many are familiar, and an exponentially growing diversity.
When billboards are popping up that paint Obama as a suicide bomber, a gangster, a Mexican bandit, and a gay man -- I think the cultural roots of the Tea Party movement are more dominant.
The Tea Party movement is steeped in a lot of nationalist jingoism, patriotism, "real" America, Christianity, etc., as well as the small-government stuff. The Tea Party rally at the Mall led by Glenn Beck was nothing if not rooted in the social and cultural conservatism of our current day.
I just think we see very different fundamental motivations for Tea Party organizing. I concede the small government stuff, just as you concede the social/cultural stuff; but I think the social/cultural stuff animates the Tea Party much more than the small government stuff. I think this in part because their just is very little evidence that the small government stuff is being taken seriously by conservatives, but the social/cultural stuff is. Why is it that, almost to a person, conservative Tea Party candidates refuse to identify specifically how they will make government smaller and balance the budget? Why is it instead that they hop on the Park51 opposition bandwagon and speak about illegal immigration and play the "real America" card, etc?
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