Matt Taibbi has an article in Rolling Stone entitled Tea & Crackers. He highlights a fundamental flaw in the Tea Party movement. It’s not that they’re predominantly white or they’re too angry or they’re insufficiently concerned with the plight of others. It’s that they are full of crap.
Vast forests have already been sacrificed to the public debate about the Tea Party: what it is, what it means, where it’s going. But after lengthy study of the phenomenon, I’ve concluded that the whole miserable narrative boils down to one stark fact: They’re full of shit. All of them. At the voter level, the Tea Party is a movement that purports to be furious about government spending — only the reality is that the vast majority of its members are former Bush supporters who yawned through two terms of record deficits and spent the past two electoral cycles frothing not about spending but about John Kerry’s medals and Barack Obama’s Sixties associations. The average Tea Partier is sincerely against government spending — with the exception of the money spent on them. In fact, their lack of embarrassment when it comes to collecting government largesse is key to understanding what this movement is all about[.]
. . .
[T]he Tea Party doesn’t really care about issues — it’s about something deep down and psychological, something that can’t be answered by political compromise or fundamental changes in policy. At root, the Tea Party is nothing more than a them-versus-us thing. They know who they are, and they know who we are (“radical leftists” is the term they prefer), and they’re coming for us on Election Day, no matter what we do — and, it would seem, no matter what their own leaders like Rand Paul do.
But, Taibbi goes on to predict, no matter what the Tea Party thinks it’s doing, it will ultimately be castrated and co-opted into the two party system the way any other grass-roots movement is. “Its leaders will be bought off and sucked into the two-party bureaucracy, where its platform will be whittled down until the only things left are those that the GOP’s campaign contributors want anyway: top-bracket tax breaks, free trade and financial deregulation.”
Tea Party 1.0 was the (whatever his other faults) honest Ron Paul, anti- war, pro-legalization Republican. Tea Party 2.0 got rolling with Rick Santelli’s CNBC rant, not against the billions going to prop up Goldman Sachs and AIG, but rather the Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan which was 1/100th the size of those financial institution bailouts. Supporters of Tea Party 2.0 were conspicuously silent about that spending as well as the previous administration’s “gargantuan spending on behalf of defense contractors and hedge-fund gazillionaires.”
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? That turns out to be easy. Beneath the surface, the Tea Party is little more than a weird and disorderly mob, a federation of distinct and often competing strains of conservatism that have been unable to coalesce around a leader of their own choosing. Its rallies include not only hardcore libertarians left over from the original Ron Paul “Tea Parties,” but gun-rights advocates, fundamentalist Christians, pseudomilitia types like the Oath Keepers (a group of law- enforcement and military professionals who have vowed to disobey “unconstitutional” orders) and mainstream Republicans who have simply lost faith in their party. It’s a mistake to cast the Tea Party as anything like a unified, cohesive movement — which makes them easy prey for the very people they should be aiming their pitchforks at. A loose definition of the Tea Party might be millions of pissed-off white people sent chasing after Mexicans on Medicaid by the handful of banks and investment firms who advertise on Fox and CNBC.
O.k., I find myself wanting to blockquote the whole thing, so I’ll just stop. It’s good reading.
Interesting. I have heard reports that Tea party members skew to retiree status. Those folks that are receiving social security and Medicare, probably the two largest entitlements.
On perhaps a somewhat related note, Marlin Stutzman, the Republican candidate for the First District, stated that he is opposed to farm subsidies. Yet his family farm has received millions in such subsidies.
Years ago I coined the observation that: No one is in favor of government waste, unless the government is wasting it on them.(c)
Dude, this is a lot like the shit you posted about the Koch brothers. It is an article that reinforces your own prejudices against the tea party in the first place. It’s the same talking points regurgitated from NPR to the New York Times to MSNBC to… etc.
And it isn’t like the tea party has a lock on cognitive dissonance. Rich, educated liberals have that market cornered.
I was going to say something juvenile and dismissive, but I’ll just stick with dismissive. Nobody likes criticism of their pet affiliations, it’s always the “other guys” failings. But, that’s why a Senator can be the biggest pork barrelist around and gets rewarded for it. He (she) isn’t doing the country any favors, but he/she is sure greasing the palms back home in the home district. Those voters never see the truth, because it isn’t in their best interest to acknowledge that their Senator is feeding the pigs. What was the Pogo line? We have met the enemy, and he is us.
I don’t necessarily agree that the “Tea Party” (which isn’t a party, btw) will just be co-opted into mainstream Republicanism. Some group will be co-opted, but the jury is still out on the “who”.
Nothing much to add but would note that over the life of this nation (and many others) the arising of extreme groups has been a constant. In general, they do not do much more than detract from getting the business of government done, but if look around the world there are several examples currently of the left or right or where ever bringing serious problems for the nation. Where the rationale be for economics, political freedom (whether for freedom or for unified thinking), religion (almost unbelievable the number of religous driven “causes”), etc. the basic points exist. Not to diminish such efforts but generally they do not have a long life expectancy. Prediction: “Tea Party” will be dead by Spring and people such as Palin (as governor accepted every government funded thing possible with a Senator who holds some records for “pork”) will not be receiving six figure speaking engagements.
“They’re full of shit. All of them.”
Wow. What a gross generalization (I mean “gross” in both senses of the word).
First, let’s recognize that the deficits under the Bush administration were appalling. The yearly deficit was $500 BILLION per year. That’s alot of money, and it really pissed me off. Still, let’s compare the 2000-2007 deficits with the most recent three: :
2008: 962 Billion,
2009: 1.8 Trillion
2010: 1.5 Trillion (estimated).
On top of this record deficit, our current Democratic administration has added a huge new entitlement. Sure, they raised taxes to pay for it, but even if taxes are raised to pay for this entitlement, it makes it harder to raise taxes to pay some of this huge national debt. We had terrible fiscal policy under Bush, but now we are at the brink of becoming insolvent as a country. That tends to wake people up a bit.
Guess we’ll know for sure if, in 2012, a new administration is voted in, the deficit is not cut significantly, and the people who are currently angry go back to sleep.
Taibbi notes that the Tea Party people he has spoken with all claim to have been against deficits when Bush was in power:
Paul,
I believe your deficit figures are extremely high estimations. Everything I have read has said the deficit will peak in 2010 and fall gradually. Further, the monthly figures have shown the deficit/GDP % coming in lower than estimated. Economic recovery will take care of brining it back in control for the medium term. But from 2020 onward, who knows.
Todd: I obtained the numbers from Wikipedia. I hope they are lower than what I estimated. Every little bit helps.
I agree, every bit helps. The data i just looked at is based on Bureau of Economic Analysis GDP figures and estimates and US government expenditures. Since the economy came out of the recession in 2009 3Q, the deficit has started slowly down from a post-WWII high of 10.5 percent of GDP. CBO estimates put the deficit at 9% in mid 2011, 5% in early 2012 and 4% from 2013 on out.
The bigger indicator that the deficit is not “out of control” is the bond market. The market for US treasuries is robust as ever, and yields are very low.
The liberal talking point of, “where were you people when Bush was running up record deficits”, is off.
You guys realize that 2006 and 2008 were crushing defeats for Republicans, right? If this year is a landslide for Republicans, we MIGHT get back to where we were in ’05 in Congress.
Why did voters abandon the Republicans, and who exactly were the voters abandoning them?
I remember just before the ’08 primary, being in a Republican precincts committee meeting, and the level of apathy was appalling (I blogged about it at the time). Whatever you libs think that Dubya did to America, after 8 years, even hard core Republicans were worn out, and spending and deficits were a big part of the problem.
With that said, if you look at the trajectory of the deficits in the Bush years, they were falling from ’03 to ’07. If we had somehow avoided the financial collapse, we would have had a balanced budget in ’09, just doing a quick regression analysis of the numbers and extrapolating from there.
That would have been a good strategey, avoid the finacial collape. Why didn’t the Republican party leaderhip thiink of that?
I personally see the collapse as caused by securitization of mortgages and subprime. This is not a Republican or Democrat issue, both parties were pushing home ownership to those incapable of being homeowners.
And the still are. Freddie and Fannie are still around, after all.
I agree with your root causes. But the Republican party was in a position to regulate these markets and secondary swap credit risk arrangements. The Democrats did not occupy the exective branch and were virtuall powerless to intitiate regulation.
Todd: That’s not entirely true. Some of the deregulation programs were actually initiated by Clinton. Additionally, we need to recognize other factors related to the uniquely American idea that everyone should be a homeowner: this includes the operation of Fannie and Freddie Mae, incentives in the tax code to have large mortgages, the CRA, and others. I am not saying these are all primary causes, but they all are all govt. programs which increased demand to an unsustainable level.
My understanding is that the Fannie & Freddie stuff is a pretty small part of this pie. (Or, shit sandwich, if you prefer.) See, e.g., this debate between Matt Taibbi and Byron York about the relative roles of Freddie/Fannie defaulters v. Wall Street credit default swap speculators in the meltdown. Also see “AIG: Ground Zero of the Economic Melt Down.”
That seems to be the general consensus. Still, if it is only 5% of the cause, that would still be significant, no?
I’m actually much more irritated with the tax code. The mortgage deduction was a bad idea, and gives an incentive for taxpayers to leverage their home. That has to stop. We need to take away the mortgage deduction and lower tax rates accordingly.
Sure. 5% is not nothing. But, it seems like this thing gets wrapped into the culture war – of which Republicans versus Democrats is a large part – and, consequently, the Freddie/Fannie gets ignored entirely or it becomes an equal/greater cause of the collapse or (for the supposedly objective observer striving for “balance”) it becomes co-equal with the credit default swaps.
I’ll throw a bomb in here that Taibbi alludes to, but doesn’t say quite as directly as this article does: that white people have lost their minds.
http://www.villagevoice.com/2010-09-29/news/white-america-has-lost-its-mind/
Talk about your generalizations. But the article makes a good point: that a lot of older, white people see their gravy train drying up just as the America they once know is rapidly becoming blacker and browner. You can call it racist, or you can think of it, as I do, as people who can’t, won’t or don’t have the luxury of thinking of the bigger picture as to why they’re so agitated. For example, my wife’s south side Chicago relatives don’t think of the neighborhood “change” of the 1950s and 1960s as a city-condoned process of real estate agents playing on white fears to get them to sell their homes at rock-bottom prices so they could turn around and rent or sell them to a rapidly growing black population at five times the price. All they know is black people moved in, and white people were “forced” out of “their” neighborhoods, and it’s a mindset that still exists in a big way in Chicago (and elsewhere) today.
It just so happens a black guy just moved into the nicest house on the block, just at a time when nobody can sell theirs. (My tortured metaphor is about Obama, and the housing crisis.)
Sorry, Doug, credit default swaps are, in my mind, all tied up with Freddie, Fannie, subprime, etc. I think we’re saying the same thing.
The idea that this has anything to do with lax regulation is preposterous, unless you think that CDOs in and of themselves should never have been allowed in the first place (which, in hindsight, is now my view. No one understands them, and they’re quite obviously deadly now).
But even the executives at the Wall Street firms swaping them didn’t understand CDOs. The idea that some regulator could make them safe is insane.
We need to move towards a home ownership finance system that doesn’t have securitization, doesn’t have implicit or explicit subsidies by the Feds (no Freddie, no Fannie, no mortgage interest deduction, etc.) and looks a lot more like what they have in the UK, Canada, and Australia (no bubble in Australia, yet, and home ownership rates in all three countries very similar to our own, all without the subsidies).
Kiss your 30 year fixed rate mortgage goodbye, though. You’ll probably be getting a 5 year ARM if there is no Freddie or Fannie. Not the worst thing in the world, I’ve used them for the last 10 years or so (although I did grab a 30 year recently, just to hedge against the hyperinflation risk a little bit).
CDOs and swaps were not hard to understand with appropriate due diligence. But it is always “different” this time.,so no need to worry. And sorry, but CDOs are still being sold and traded. Probably with more transparency and a rational risk premium. I don;t have any bond or interest rate exposure, so I don’t take the time to actively research them.
Government security regulation has been damn effective since the 1930s. There has no comparable collapse such as happened to the secondary finanacing real estate vehicles.
You are probably right that an unsubsidized real estate market would be a more rational market place. But good luck with that. If one thought that the drug companies and health insurers were well-heeled, wait until you take on the real estate construction, marketing and finance industry.