Tag Archives: Tea Party

Age and Perspective

One of the (very few) benefits of growing old is that you gain perspective. Sometimes, that also leads to a modicum of wisdom, sometimes not–but it does mean that one’s frame of reference is larger and longer. To use a very common example, you can’t truly appreciate how dramatically the internet has changed society if you were born after the invention of the world wide web.

This morning’s Paul Krugman column reminded me again that those of us born in the mid-twentieth century have a vantage point to assess political change that younger folks don’t have.

My students are frequently aghast when they learn that I was a Republican for most of my life–that I even ran for Congress as a fairly conservative Republican, and won a primary. But as Krugman points out, and as I try to explain to my students, the positions that made me “conservative” in 1980 make me a pinko/socialist/liberal today. Most of my students grew up in an environment where conservative Republicans reject evolution and the science of climate change, talk a lot about fiscal prudence, but practice “borrow and spend” economic policies, and are totally without compassion for the less fortunate. The only Republicans they’ve known are those who preach limited government while insisting on their right to control women’s reproduction and their right to discriminate against gays. They are shocked to learn that I was pro-choice and pro-gay rights and still was able to win a GOP primary.

Krugman explains the change with his usual clarity, beginning with the example of the Tea Party’s “let ’em die” eruption at the recent GOP Presidential debate:

“In the past, conservatives accepted the need for a government-provided safety net on humanitarian grounds. Don’t take it from me, take it from Friedrich Hayek, the conservative intellectual hero, who specifically declared in “The Road to Serfdom” his support for “a comprehensive system of social insurance” to protect citizens against “the common hazards of life,” and singled out health in particular.

Given the agreed-upon desirability of protecting citizens against the worst, the question then became one of costs and benefits — and health care was one of those areas where even conservatives used to be willing to accept government intervention in the name of compassion, given the clear evidence that covering the uninsured would not, in fact, cost very much money. As many observers have pointed out, the Obama health care plan was largely based on past Republican plans, and is virtually identical to Mitt Romney’s health reform in Massachusetts.

Now, however, compassion is out of fashion — indeed, lack of compassion has become a matter of principle, at least among the G.O.P.’s base.

And what this means is that modern conservatism is actually a deeply radical movement, one that is hostile to the kind of society we’ve had for the past three generations — that is, a society that, acting through the government, tries to mitigate some of the “common hazards of life” through such programs as Social Security, unemployment insurance, Medicare and Medicaid.”

What Krugman fails to note, and these radicals fail to understand, is that if they actually are successful in their frantic efforts to keep government from “stealing” even a penny in taxes to be distributed (in their fevered imaginations) to the “less deserving,” they would also be impoverished. What Hayek understood–and what those who invoke his name without reading his arguments do not-is that, just as a rising tide lifts all boats, an ebbing tide lowers all boats. They remind me of a two-year-old snatching a toy from a playmate while screaming “mine, mine, mine.”

What we are seeing from this radical fringe is not a political shift. It’s a tantrum.

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Sticks and Stones

I largely agree with Matt Tully’s “take” on Andre Carson’s controversial words in this morning’s Star. As Tully notes, Carson has been a substantive, hard-working legislator who has steadily gained stature, and the language he employed was unnecessary to and a distraction from the points he was trying to make. “Why,” Tully asks, did Carson deviate from his usual civil demeanor?

I agree with Tully that this was out of character and unfortunate. I also have a possible answer to his question “why?”

If I were an African-American Congressman who’d been spit on, who had watched the country’s first black President demeaned from the first day he was elected, who had seen the racist emails, the “clever” signs with watermelon patches on the White House lawn, the posters at Tea Party gatherings showing Obama as a witch doctor–if I had heard colleagues on the floor of the U.S. House ask for “proof” that the President was born in the USA, and political figures supported by the Tea Party call for repeal of the 1964 Civil Rights Act (Rand Paul)–if I had heard Rep. Peter King compare a settlement of the discrimination lawsuit by black farmers to “reparations”…..well, I could go on, but I’ll stop there–I might address the motives of these people in less than civil language.

The Tea Party spokesmen who are demanding an “apology” insist that only a small fringe is responsible for the racist signs at their rallies. Perhaps they are right–but I must have missed their calls for those people to apologize.

A lot of people who are well-meaning and not racist will excuse the bile and excessive, irrational hatred of the President by comparing it to Bush hatred. The problem with that comparison is that most of us who came to detest Bush really were reacting to his behavior in office. Most of us were agnostic about him early in his tenure, as polling from that time reflects, and if you asked us why we were so angry with the administration, most of us could give you a long list of policy decisions with which we strongly disagreed . In contrast, the venom directed at this President began before he even assumed office.

I had a recent conversation with a woman who self-identified as a member of the Tea Party, and asked her why she hated Obama. “He’s a socialist,” she told me. Leaving aside the fact that Obama’s “socialism” would have placed him in the middle of the Republican party back when I ran as a Republican, I asked her for an example. “Obamacare,” she said. I asked her if she was aware that “Obamacare” was pretty much the same program advocated by Bob Dole and actually enacted in Massachusetts by Mitt Romney. She refused to believe me. “Ok, what other evidence of Obama’s socialism is there?” No response. “What other proposals/policies has he advocated that you disagree with? “He’s a socialist, and he’s Muslim and he wasn’t even born in this country!”

I know there are Tea Party people who aren’t racist, aren’t hysterical, and who have genuine policy differences with the President that they can articulate. Unfortunately,they aren’t spending their time trying to weed out the folks carrying banners with the “N word” or those self-identified Tea Partiers who post to this blog (I spam them) to argue that Obama wants to give all “our” tax money to lazy drug-using mothers who have children so they can live on welfare.

None of this excuses the use of uncivil language. But it sure goes a long way toward explaining it.

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Tea and Very Little Sympathy

Ever since the emergence of the Tea Party–with its intransigence, ideological rigidity and hostility–there has been a robust debate about who they are, what they want, and whether they are a genuine grass-roots movement or the product of some canny (and wealthy) Republican operatives. Other than poll results, however, there has been very little empirical research informing that debate.

That has changed. In a recent issue of “Perspectives on Politics,” a peer-reviewed journal published by the American Political Science Association, Vanessa Williamson, Theda Skocpol and John Coggin published “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism.” I don’t know Williamson or Coggin, but Theda Skocpol is a widely-respected Harvard Professor who–among other things–has served as the President of the American Political Science Association.

The article is worth reading in its entirety, but here are some highlights:

  • The Tea Party is a new incarnation of “long-standing strands” in American conservatism.
  • Tea Party opposition to the Affordable Care Act is not a manifestation of hostility to social programs per se; the opposition is based upon resentment of “perceived government handouts to “undeserving” people. (Tea partiers see themselves as entitled to Social Security and Medicare.) Their definition of “undeserving” “seems heavily influenced by racial and ethnic stereotypes.”
  • The Tea Party owes its emergence not only to the Republican elites that initially bankrolled it, but to Fox News. The authors believe that “the best way to understand Fox News’ role is as a national advocacy organization actively fostering a social protest identity.” (63% of Tea Party members watch Fox, as opposed to 11% of the general population.)
  • Tea Party members are a very small minority of Americans. Only one in five of those who claim to be members have actually attended an event or donated money. Members are older, white and middle-class, and a majority are men. The vast majority are conservative Republicans.

There is much more, but the central finding (in my opinion, at least) was that at the grassroots level, Tea Partiers judge social programs “not in terms of abstract free-market orthodoxy, but according to the perceived deservingness of recipients.” It will not come as a shock to most of us that deservingness is “an implicit cultural category.” Hence the hysteria over immigration (the study finds–surprise!–that “fears of immigration are closely linked to the ethnic identity of the immigrants in question”). Support for the Tea Party “remains a valid predictor of racial resentment” even after controlling for ideology and partisanship, and this finding goes a long way toward explaining what seems to most of us as an irrational hatred of Obama. As the authors put it, “At a fundamental level, Obama’s policies and his person are not within the Tea Party conception of America, so his election seems like a threat to what they understand as their country.”

And they want “their” country back.

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Of Debt and Taxes

I haven’t written about the congressional impasse (polite word for food fight) over the debt ceiling, because really, what could I say that hasn’t been said many times by many people? But being here in Split, surrounded by evidence that human efforts at civilization have persisted over thousands of years, I’ve grudgingly recognized that our species has persisted through many periods of collective craziness, many characterized by even more self-destructive psychosis than now.

In other words, humans will survive the current capture of Congress by unreflective fanatics who believe God has instructed them not to raise the debt ceiling. (To be honest, I’m less sanguine about our ability to survive the climate-change deniers….previous generations haven’t had the means to destroy the Earth.)

But even though my brain–such as it is–tells me we’ll get through this crazy time, I have a lot of trouble understanding the emergence of the Tea Party. Not their existence; we’ve always had strains of malcontents–anti-social or anti-intellectual or white supremacist or other odd movements–but their ability to make resentment of taxes a rallying cry and a focus for so many people’s anger. And not anger at a particular tax or tax policy, but at the very idea of taxes. They have somehow convinced otherwise reasonable citizens that taxes levied for the general welfare are somehow illegitimate.

During this trip, the things we’ve most enjoyed are the products of just such taxes–great public transportation, preservation of historically significant sites, museums…Do these troglodytes think such services are supported by magic? Let alone police and fire protection, garbage collection, etc.? Are they really willing to forego the very things that make us civilized–trade with other cultures, which depends upon confidence that we will pay our bills, the myriad services that make our common lives easier and more pleasant, any sense of common purpose–for gated communities and personal gun collections?

Everywhere we’ve been, we’ve met lovely people who are not remotely anti-American but who are mystified and worried by what is happening to our political system.

Me too.

We have another day and a half in Split, then two days in Rome before we head home. I wonder what we’ll find when we get there.

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Hate to be a Broken Record, but….

This morning, the American Constitution Society blog referenced a recent report from the Associated Press:

“The Associated Press has provided new details about a push by the nation’s largest Tea Party umbrella group to teach the Constitution in public schools using materials from an organization that promotes the Constitution as a divinely inspired document.

As originally reported by Mother Jones, the Tea Party Patriots are encouraging public schools to participate in “Constitution Week” in September by utilizing teaching materials from the National Center for Constitutional Studies, a group that ACS Executive Director Caroline Fredrickson called so outside the mainstream that even the conservative Federalist Society would object to its materials.

Mother Jones’ Stephanie Mencimer participated in a daylong seminar with NCCS last year, and reported:

If its public school curriculum resembles anything like what I witnessed, it has no place in the nation’s classrooms. Among other things, NCCS uses materials written by Skousen suggesting that Anglo-Saxons are descended from a lost tribe of Israel; Skousen claimed this meant the Constitution may have been inspired by God, who intended for America to be a Christian nation. The very same bogus history has been perpetuated by the white supremacist movement.”

When the public schools fail to teach real history–when most “social studies” classes are taught by people hired for their ability to be athletic coaches rather than their ability to teach American history or the constitutional architecture–students are defenseless against this sort of propaganda.

Here’s a proposal for those of you reading this. Ask the next three teenagers you encounter to answer a couple of these questions: what was the Enlightenment? What are checks and balances?  What does the Establishment Clause do? How did the 14th Amendment change the Constitution?

My guess is the results of such an experiment wouldn’t be very pretty.