Tea Party Profile

Image by Pargon via Flickr

If you haven’t read Matt Taibbi’s excellent article on the Tea Party in the latest Rolling Stone, you should give it a look.

He descended into the Tea Party culture like an anthropologist traveling to the far reaches of the world — making observations about a completely alien way of life and thought.

Titled “Tea and Crackers” , Taibbi pulls no punches about what he found and makes many of the same observations I have made about this faux movement:

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

Taibbi outlines how the movement — what there was of one — has it’s roots in Ron Paul’s run for president, and details how it has been co-opted by the Republican establishment.

The Rolling Stone writer suggests that the Tea Partiers (those who actually care about “out of control spending” etc) are likely to be disappointed when their candidates (most of whom are perpetual candidates who have taken up the Tea Party mantle to tap into the visible energy and anger of the movement) abandon all their positions — except for tax cuts for the wealthy.

Taibbi’s opening image of a Kentucky rally with dozens of Medicare-funded personal scooters and protesters on similarly-financed oxygen is at the heart of the Tea Party base. He argues that the Tea Party base is the same old Republican base:

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.

Addressing the accusations of racism, Taibbi states:

It’s not like the Tea Partiers hate black people. It’s just that they’re shockingly willing to believe the appalling horseshit fantasy about how white people in the age of Obama are some kind of oppressed minority. That may not be racism, but it is incredibly, earth-shatteringly stupid.

I’m not quite so sure. I’m convinced that the Tea Partiers have a strong racist element among them. I do agree that many, if not a majority of these aging white folks holds the paranoid persecution mindset Taibbi describes.

Anyway, the article makes clear that the Tea Party folks are not people that can be reasoned with.

They are the fringe, conspiracy-minded base of the current Republican Party, and Karl Rove and friends have found a way to tap into their anger to keep their wealthy friends comfortable.

-Chris

Related Articles

• The Tea Party Demographic (themoderatevoice.com)
• Sorry Tea Partiers, This Is No Revolution (newser.com)
• The Tea Party’s religious roots exposed | Sarah Posner (guardian.co.uk)

Tax Cut Morality

Image by jerrysEYES via Flickr

 

There’s a good post by Ned Resnikoff up at Salon.com. 

“The non-existent moral case for tax cuts” outlines the Tea Party and elite argument for cuts: 

It goes like this: We earned this money. We deserve it. It is therefore immoral to take it from us. 

Resnikoff correctly points out that the argument is silly because it is impossible to give an accurate accounting for how much of a role circumstance and environmental factors played in achieving that wealth, and how much of it was sweat equity. 

The word “deserve” is extremely loaded, and eminently debatable: 

When you control for environmental, genetic, social, historical, and biological factors, what differentiates my own distinguishing features from Charles Manson’s — or, for that matter, Obama’s, Palin’s, Lincoln’s or yours — is either imperceptible or completely nonexistent. And if that’s the case, I don’t see how you can argue that either of us deserve more or less than any of those people. 

What this suggests to me is that the only way you can coherently argue that a person inherently deserves a certain level of privilege or material comfort is to also argue that all persons deserve it, by virtue of their personhood. We already have language to describe these things that all persons innately deserve: we call them rights. 

If this is so, and I personally agree that it is, then the argument from the right is pure bluster and a manifestation of privilege. 

The conclusion is one that I am also convinced of. It is, however, not a subject  that you can discuss with extreme partisans: 

Mostly it falls back to a question of economics: how to balance the state’s ability to provide needed services for all citizens, including its most needy, while preserving a capitalist system which rewards achievement, and therefore (one would hope) innovation, productivity and excellence. 

-Chris