A Political Season has a thoughtful post on the Tea Party. They quote extensively from Britt Hume’s thoughts on the Tea Party caucus and its motivations when driving the latest shut down/debt ceiling crisis. From the Hume quote:
“It was a hopeless strategy that has not only failed in its stated goal, but helped send the Republican Party to its lowest favorability ratings ever. “In conventional terms, it seems inexplicable, but Senator Cruz and his adherents do not view things in conventional terms. They look back over the past half-century, including the supposedly golden era of Ronald Reagan, and see the uninterrupted forward march of the American left. Entitlement spending never stopped growing. The regulatory state continued to expand. The national debt grew and grew and finally in the Obama years, exploded. They see an American population becoming unrecognizable from the free and self-reliant people they thought they knew.
But A Political Season says that Hume is dancing around the elephant in the room which is that the “unrecognizable American population” is code for a browner American population.
I remain uncertain about the extent to which race motivates the Tea Party. I tend to think Tea Party opponents are probably a little quick to call racism. But, it’s undeniable that the Tea Party is a lot whiter than the nation as a whole and that the concerns about the debt, if they existed, were not nearly as vocal until after the election of a black President.
I suppose the answer is that it’s complicated. The Tea Party sympathizers with whom I come into contact are not people I would consider racist. They tend to be educated people with strong opinions who regard poverty as often the result of a problem of motivation, foresight, and decision making rather than a structural issue. Their problem with debt and spending isn’t really about money but about priorities — money spent on national defense and debt from tax cuts are unremarkable, but money spent on poor people is objectionable.
But it’s not all poor people. Taibbi pointed out back in 2010 that it’s poor people who are not “them” that’s the problem:
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.
I guess I’d say that the Tea Party movement is incidentally about race but not primarily about race. Brown people aren’t part of the “us” – but there are plenty of white people who aren’t part of the “us” either. The blackness of the President isn’t, I don’t think, why they hate him. It’s often a handy cudgel (Muslim/Kenyan etc.); but they would have abused a Democratic President regardless of race. For example, Bill Clinton’s opponents weren’t really all that concerned about sexual indiscretions by politicians.
In any event, the Tea Party did not cover itself in glory during this recent bout. It will be interesting to see how the mainstream Republicans and the Tea Party Republicans interact going forward.
The comments of the Tea Party and cut government spending on things that do not affect me is an interesting point. Locally, one of the strongest supporters of the Tea Party is a farm family who happen to be one of the top five in the county receiving farm subsidies and benefactors of research concerning farming.
It would appear that the major funding for the party comes from those with a vested interest in less regulation and more spending in selected areas which brings up the point of “corporations” being persons who can contribute millions.
The corporate form has always been an interesting one. It’s a government construct primarily designed as a tool to limit individual responsibility. From that perspective, it ought to be antithetical to promoters of personal responsibility and champions of limited government. But, in practice, not so much.
Or, turning the corporate form a few degrees, it’s a way to privatize profit while socializing risk.
Good post. Two things really struck me:
“They look back over the past half-century, including the supposedly golden era of Ronald Reagan, and see the uninterrupted forward march of the American left.”
Meanwhile. those of us on “the American left” (I consider myself a generally pro-market liberal, but tea party types I talk to act like I’m Karl Marx) hear things like this and wonder if we’re living in the same country.
“They tend to be educated people with strong opinions who regard poverty as often the result of a problem of motivation, foresight, and decision making rather than a structural issue.”
The key thing here I feel like conservatives don’t get is that these two possibilities aren’t mutually exclusive. “Motivation, foresight, and [good] decision making” don’t spring forth naturally from the ether, they are contingent on how you are raised, what experiences you have, and what you are taught. Blaming someone who was never taught bourgeois virtues for not having them is little different than blaming someone who was never taught to read for their inability to do so.
Your original inclination that the Tea Party is unrelated to race is correct. What you happens is that with any movement you have people from the fringes that latch onto a movement. Then you have people from the other side using those extremists to try to define the entire movement. It’s actually an old hate group tactic…try to define your opponents by their most extreme members, even if the issues the extremists propound is unrelated to the issues pushed by themovement.
The tea party is an economic populist movement that arose during the last year or so of the Bush II presidency, a result of people’s aversion to the corporate bailouts paid for by incurring more debt. President Obama was merely the President that has taken the Bush II policies and expanded them. So of course he’s a target. It certainly has nothing to do with skin color.
In your article, you say:
“Their problem with debt and spending isn’t really about money but about priorities — money spent on national defense and debt from tax cuts are unremarkable, but money spent on poor people is objectionable.”
This assumes that Tea Party people support an interventionist foreign policy and foreign wars that has lead to huge spending on national defense. You are very much mistaken. The Tea Party is the isolationist wing of the GOP, the wing of the party that is actually raising questions about foreign wars like Iraq, Afghanistan and very much opposed going into Syria. You propose trimming the defense budget to reduce the deficit and you will find a lot of Tea Party support.
I think what people on the right object to the most aren’t Tea Party policies, but the scorched Earth, no compromise strategy often employed in advancement of those policies. Then again, the compromise route hasn’t worked very well either.
I don’t think I am very much mistaken and I don’t think you speak for the Tea Party. My guess is that if you take the population of anti-war activists in advance of the Iraq War and the population of Tea Party adherents, you won’t find a lot of overlap.
Let me manually correct since there is no edit option. In the passage below I meant to edit out the phrase “on the right” in the first sentence.
I think what people on the right object to the most aren’t Tea Party policies, but the scorched Earth, no compromise strategy often employed in advancement of those policies. Then again, the compromise route hasn’t worked very well either. – See more at: https://www.masson.us/blog/tea-party-and-race/comment-page-1/#comment-1310254
I’m glad you brought this up. “I tend to think Tea Party opponents are probably a little quick to call racism.” Uh, yeah. I’m not part of the Tea Party or any other party but sheesh this has been beaten to death.
The branding of the Tea Party as racist has been as focused and widespread as an ad campaign for a new blockbuster movie. Most people left of center view the TP as one thing – racist. Even the word “Confederacy” as applied to the TP appears in articles on Slate, Think Progress, etc. The TP “brand” is as broken as Edsel. This is right out of Rules for Radicals – demonize your opponent. Calling your opponent racist is the worst think you can say, but it’s just a political tool and a marketing ploy.
The TP isn’t more or less racist than any other party or organization. They oppose illegal immigration, but so do trade unions. About 99% of its members are white, but that’s the same ratio as a Dean For America Meetup.
The TP began with one idea – that public money shouldn’t be used to bail out banks. And Occupy Wall Street began with one idea – that public money shouldn’t be used to bail out banks. So which one is racist ? Both sides have a point – the Democrats and Republicans believe in bailouts, corporate welfare, deficit spending, and endless war.
Another meme is that opposition to Mr Obama is racist. Being white I’ve thought this over many times to see if I’m reacting to his policy or skin color. I’m conscious of the advantage white people still have. I want to listen to all arguments. I believe that Reverend Wright’s famous quote, “God Damn America”, taken in context, probably (I’m white, I can’t speak to this directly) does represent the views of many black people, who’ve been tromped on for 400 years. Mr Obama has combined and enhanced the worst policies of his predecessors – he has:
1. Expanded the NSA’s spying on citizens.
2. Claimed the right to kill US citizens with drones, without due process.
3. Violated the War Powers Act (the first president to do so) by bombing Libya, and he pushed *hard* for attacks on Syria….remember Syria ? Whatever happened to Syria ?
4. Refused to prosecute the widespread fraud and crimes by the financial industry.
5. Hatched a heinous, complex, and intrusive healthcare scheme that brings the IRS into the medical sphere, all while enriching bastards like Wellpoint (Anthem). Wellpoint stock (WLP) has tripled since passage of Obamacare, cause they helped write the thing.
6. Plagued the press like no other president, going so far as to employ the Sedition Act.
I am to the left of Mr Obama on healthcare. Obamacare isn’t bad just because it’s an intrusive mess, it’s bad because it doesn’t go far enough. Healthcare is a fundamental human right, and getting medical coverage should be as simple as getting a library card. I don’t hate Mr Obama because he’s black, I hate him because he’s f*cking things up royally.
And I hate that the left calls me racist for opposing Mr Obama, even though I’m more liberal than he on almost all issues.
Taibbi has written some great stuff about the bank bailouts; his view was about the same as the TP and the OWS. But he can’t resist lobbing verbal grenades like “They’re full of shit. All of them.” Clever stuff. But the TP doesn’t oppose government spending to the degree Libertarians take. And it’s obvious there’s a lot of people in the US who game the system; 60 Minutes just did a piece on rampant disability fraud, for example. I believe in them-vs-us, if the “them” is ripping off tax dollars – whether it be AIG or Citibank or GM or disability fakes. It’s all theft from a finite pot of money that should be applied to the greatest need.
Taibbi also fired an early salvo against Rand Paul, who along with Bernie Sanders are the only non-whores in Congress. Paul scares Taibbi. Paul just gave a speech about the US putting too many black people in prison, and before that he filibustered against the use of military drones to kill people inside the US.
Here is an interesting take on the Tea Party, if you haven’t already read it.
http://www.salon.com/2013/10/06/tea_party_radicalism_is_misunderstood_meet_the_newest_right/
Doug, have you been able to survey your readers who are people of color as to their feelings about racism as discussed?
i think some of these tea party defenders oversimplify what we mean when we say the tea party (and other republicans) are obsessed with race:
http://www.democracycorps.com/attachments/article/954/dcor%20rpp%20fg%20memo%20100313%20final.pdf
‘We expected that in this comfortable setting or in their private written notes, some would make a racial reference or racist slur when talking about the African American President. None did. They know that is deeply non-PC and are conscious about how they are perceived. But focusing on that misses how central is race to the worldview of Republican voters. They have an acute sense that they are white in a country that is becoming increasingly “minority,” and their party is getting whooped by a Democratic Party that uses big government programs that benefit mostly minorities, create dependency and a new electoral majority. Barack Obama and Obamacare is a racial flashpoint for many Evangelical and Tea Party voters. ‘
If the Tea Party was expounding the same effort on the NSA disclosures as they are on the ACA, I’d have more respect for them.
It’s hard to convince me that the ACA is ruining what America is about when the government is tracking your every communication and you’re being passive about it. Unless I am mistaken, almost everyone is sitting on their hands about it.
I just don’t see intellectual rigor in the Tea Party. For instance… you can have all the economists and business people in the world talk about how a default would be a disaster on many levels. The Tea Party response is “Well, I don’t agree.” Based on what, guys?
I mean, when it comes to the default, whose opinion do you trust… Warren Buffett or Todd Rokita?
This is an excellent and most interesting thread. Not being involved in Tea Party politics, pro OR con except as a person against it on Facebook, I have little to add, but could I just remind us that the defining elements of human nature may be at work in all this? That is to say, selfishness, lust for power, and group identification (on this side of the line, friend; on that side of the line, enemy.)
When we add the history of the Folk Era and how it morphed into the anti-war views of the Vietnam Era, and Reagan’s teachings that government is the problem with the end of the unifying effects of the Selective Service, I think we have a culture that is very dangerous to itself, because the people with power are a danger to others: and why are they dangerous? Because they are selfish and resentful.
[Note: my ideas for living have always come (since I was 22 years old) from a short story by Leo Tolstoy entitled “How Much Land does a Man Need.”] Thanks for letting me think out loud with my fingers.
As a Tea Party supporter (there are no members, it is not an actual party in the political sense), I can tell you it is all about one thing: fiscal responsibility. There was a definitive moment at the beginning of the Obama administration where Tea Party events started to occur.
But Doug is absolutely correct, the frustration that led to these events started with TARP during George W. Bush’s second term. Rewarding corporations for bad decisions just isn’t a good idea and, as Doug also mentions above, corporations are far from being reflexive supporters of the Tea Party ideas. In fact, the largest corporations have done well by the Obama administration.
When the Tea Party events started, they were strictly nonpartisan. Anytime party politics entered into an event, it was roundly shut down. Then the media decided they didn’t like it and started to characterize it as a conservative movement. The result was predictable: it actually became a conservative movement because everyone else dropped out.
I’m sure that wasn’t the case everywhere, but that was the experience here.
If people want to say race is a part of the dynamic, I don’t think Tea Party supporters are much bothered by it. Quite frankly, since most have experience with conservative political support, they expect to be called racist, homophobic, misogynist, whatever; pile it on, facts and feelings be da–ed.
On this side of the accusation, it only illuminates the character of the accuser. Rather than meet in the realm of ideas and argument, such a person prefers the intellectually lazy way out, and utilizes one of the classic logical fallacies.
Yes, many people listen to those accusations and believe them. There is nothing we can do about it. Where does that leave them? They are worse off for a host of reasons, the first being the encroachment of hate into their character, or at least their political outlook.
Just a point of fact for Steve Smith: Selective Service as an involuntary military draft ended during the Nixon administration and Ford got rid of Selective Service registration. It was re-instituted under Carter. You seemed to suggest Reagan had something to do with it, but there were no policy changes that affected the system during his years in office.
“As a Tea Party supporter (there are no members, it is not an actual party in the political sense), I can tell you it is all about one thing: fiscal responsibility.”
So then.
Why the defund ObamaCare jihad?
ObamaCare reduces the deficit and is far more fiscally responsible that the system it is replacing.
“When the Tea Party events started, they were strictly nonpartisan. ”
Utter nonsense.
If people want to say race is a part of the dynamic, I don’t think Tea Party supporters are much bothered by it. Quite frankly, since most have experience with conservative political support, they expect to be called racist, homophobic, misogynist, whatever; pile it on, facts and feelings be da–ed. –
As well they should be called.
The Tea party demographic is conterminous with far-right GOP factions and southern yellow-dog republicans. To call the Tea party supporters what they are, the far right and all of the racism, misogyny and xenophobia is to state the obvious.
” I’ve concluded that the whole miserable narrative boils down to one stark fact: They (Tea Party) are full of shit.”
From day one. Never a doubt.
If the Tea Party were truly interested in fiscal policy, they would raise taxes immediately to balance the budget and pay off the debt. Since that is anathema to the whole Conservative crowd, I really don’t think fiscal ‘responsibility’ can be said to be a part of the Tea Party/Republican/whole Conservative reason for existence.
If the Tea Party is not racist, why are there extremely few African-Americans involved? I’ve been to a couple of large TeaParty rallies in Indianapolis but the Black presence there is like hens teeth.
And there you have it–their core error.
They think their worldview somehow constitutes “freedom.”
It does not, except in the most vulgar and reality-detached sense of the term.
Wilson46201 – why are 98% of the Deans at IUPUI white ?
As to your point that the Tea Party isn’t explicitly racist — well, no, but it’s got plenty of code to make racists feel welcome. And I’m speaking here of “Tea Party” not as an organized political entity (such as all the Koch Brothers money), but as a catch-all for a particularly strain of conservatism that has taken hold, hard, since Obama’s first election. Or, at least, got a mainstream hearing after (or during, in the person of Sarah Palin) Obama’s first election.
I found this particular story interesting. It’s about separate focus groups of self-identified Republicans: Tea Partiers, evangelicals and moderates. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-04/why-republicans-shut-down-the-government.html
The kicker:
“The moderates are in some respects a breed apart. They share the antipathy Tea Partiers and evangelicals have toward President Barack Obama, but lack the other groups’ default position amid demographic, political and cultural change.
“That default is essentially abject terror.”
Yes, the Tea Party is racist. At the very least, the movement was founded by people who may not be racist themselves, but know how to play to the racism of others and recruit them to their cause.. Honestly, I think you’d have to have been sleeping since January 2009 to *not* think the Tea Party is racist.