It is capitalism at its finest.
— Tea Partier Kim Lefner quoted in Boiling Mad, p. 149.
It is claimed that18-30 percent of Americans are Tea Party movement supporters. Many people have conceptions about who the Tea Partiers are and what their motivations are.
Writer Kate Zernike examines the origins and coalescing that led to the current incarnation of the Tea Party movement in her book, Boiling Mad: Inside Tea Party America. She says the Tea party movement is difficult to pin down “… it had a different shape and texture depending on what was in front of you.”
Zernike explains that Tea Partiers are conservatives who despise the Left but seek to exploit the organizing techniques of liberals. Supporting the Tea Party movement is the right-wing media. The Tea Partiers reward Fox News with their viewership.
The Tea Party movement is predominantly White, older, with a higher formal education, and is better off than the average population. Within the movement, there are “fringe elements,” some many people would find quite repugnant.
Boiling Mad: Inside Tea Party America
By Kate Zernike
Publisher: Times Books,
September 2010
Hardcover: 256 pages
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9348-3
ISBN10: 0-8050-9348-6
Contradictions Abound
Although TP views are very libertarian and focused on individual rights, there is a contradiction when it comes to issues such as abortion and gay marriage.
They are staunch defenders of individual rights but not when applied to certain others.
Zernicke effectively reveals the split personality of TPers. She quotes 62-year-old Tea Party supporter Jodine White: “I guess I want smaller government and my Social Security.”
Is it up to the individual to provide in the case of retirement, loss of job, loss of health, or is it up to the government? What does it matter who runs social security? Privatized Social Security will be run for profit and will be more costly than a government-run Social Security monopoly. One way or another people will pay for security.
The TPers claim to focus on economic matters: deploring a burgeoning government and out-of-control spending. Yet why do the so well-off TPers claim to want to focus on economic issues?
Zernike runs through the gamut of TP characters: they are opposed to rewarding “losers” – like those with foreclosed homes — and encouraging bad behavior; a heavy dose of Christianity runs through the movement; they are opposed to financial institute bailouts, health care, and are anti-union (hence anti-labor).
Their grievance against public assistance is that it can be “debilitating.”
Debilitating? How about living under a bridge, scrounging through dumpsters for a bite, looking for work but having no money to print or send resumes, no bus fare for trip to interview, etc.?
Does the complaint that some people abuse the social safety net mean that the vast majority of people needing social services should be deprived?
The argument is futile because it can also be applied to capitalists who cheat the system. By the same reasoning should not capitalism also be abolished?
Adherence to Tea Party Ideals
How fidel is the TP movement to being leaderless, and how fidel is the TP movement to its professed ideals?
Zernicke questions the prominence of old school Republicans within the TP movement. Of Dick Armey, a major figure in the “Republican Revolution” in 1994, she notes that the TP movement did not seem inclined to ask why he [Armey], as a member of the House leadership, had not been able to stop the expansion of big government and the runaway spending …”?
And then there is the fact that big government and deficit budgets ballooned during the GW Bush years, especially compared to the Clinton years. Where were the TP protestors during the Bush years asks Zernike.
The TP Movement’s Dark Side
“Race,” writes Zernike, “certainly played some part in the [TP movement] opposition to Obama—or in creating the sense that he was Not One of Us.” Zernike has written an even-handed account of the TP movement, providing an account without injecting much bias. The use the word race and not racism is evidence of her even-handed account.
However, Zernicke notes critics responses to the TP signs demanding TAKE OUR COUNTRY BACK: “’Back where?’ Presumably to a time when no black man would dare run for president.”
The xenophobia of the Tea Partiers is also apparent in their opposition to “illegal immigration” (the concept of immigrants being illegal is not one I agree with).
The Sacrosanctity of the Constitution
Zernike writes that the TPers are “largely libertarian and marked by a purist and ‘originalist’ view of the Constitution.”
The TPers want smaller government, but funding the military is as big government as government gets … and it flies in the face of the TPers’s declared adherence to the Constitution and their revered “founding fathers.”
Zernike wonders about the coherence of TP thought; for example, “… the fact that any meaningful cuts in the deficit would require deep cuts in programs that most Americans, and most Tea Partiers, supported: the military, Medicare.”
Although some libertarians, like Republican congressman Ron Paul, eschew wars waged abroad by American fighters, few TPers have identified war an issue of concern. And 57% of TPers had a favorable view of the “war president” and deficit spender GW Bush. ((See Boiling Mad‘s appendix containing the results of a New York Times/CBS News Poll of Tea Party Supporters.))
The man said to be the major architect of the Constitution, James Madison, warned: “Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.”
What is with the sacrosanctity of the Constitution to the Tea Partiers? What is with the unquestioning reverence for the so-called founding fathers?
Why should a society 300+ years later be beholden to words scribed by men from another era? Were these men perfect, gifted with otherworldly prescience, and representative of the entirety of society? If so, why were there no women, no Original Peoples, no Black people among their ranks? Why were the Original Peoples referred to as “merciless Indian savages” by the “founding fathers”? ((As written by John Hancock and agreed to by the signers of the Declaration of Independence.)) Why did the “founding fathers” participate in the greatest genocide in human history? How right and forward thinking were the “founding fathers” who were slave owners? Would the United States be better off as a misogynistic, classist society that the founding fathers established when only male land owners were permitted to vote? That is what the “purist and ‘originalist’” adherence to the Constitution of the “founding fathers” entails.
Antediluvian
The TPers rue the New Deal and support its dismantlement. Yet, that dismantlement led to the collapse of the financial sector that required a whopping government – socialism for the wealthy – bailout. Just another example of paradoxes the TP movement cannot grapple with.
Zernike elaborates on the TPers dislike of government: “It wasn’t that tea partiers wanted no government, it was a question of which government would be in charge, and they believed it should be the states.”
The author addressed this throwback of the TPers: “To talk about states’ rights in the way some Tea Partiers did was to pretend that the twentieth century and the latter half of the nineteenth had never happened, that the country had not rejected this doctrine over and over.”
Zernike explains what equal rights means for TPers. She cites John Birch defender W. Cleon Skousen who postulated “Equal rights, not equal things.”
Did not Original Peoples have an equal right to their land and the things on that land as the Europeans had to their land across the Atlantic Ocean?
Did not Africans have an equal right to freedom as did European men?
Nonetheless, TPers push for a “rewind” to the beginnings of the Constitution.
If a rewind is to take place, why not go to the earlier stages of the Constitution (a constitution that had its origins in the Kaianere’kó:wa of the Haudenosaunee ((Kanatiyosh, “The Influence of the Great Law of Peace On The United States Constitution: An Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Perspective,” Me & U, 23 June 1999: 1-4.)) ) when the Original Peoples lived in relative ecological harmony on the land … a rewind to a time before Africans were colonized and sold into slavery?
TPer Jared Taylor, is quoted by Zernike: “We the people are now facing ‘progressives’ whose agenda violates the Constitution.”
“We the people” is a jargon term that TPers like to toss out with seemingly little thought as to what it means. Because for TPers, it seems to mean that Tea Partiers solely are “We the people.” Are “progressives” not people?
One can only wonder about what drives many people to join the TP movement. Zernike tells of Don and Diana Reimer, two of the “losers” whose house mortgage was foreclosed in 2008. They joined their detractors and pledged allegiance to a country whose system saw them dispossessed.
How to understand this illogic?
Zernike lays out the story of the Tea Party movement from its roots to its current manifestation, its ideology, its contradictions, its followers, in an easy-to-read fashion. Readers are left to draw their own conclusions.
I cannot help but conclude that the professed TP ideal of individualism is nothing but greed guised in unsound, incoherent mumbo-jumbo. The TPers, by and large, are doing better than most economically, and they want to preserve this situation. It does not matter that other “losers” find themselves in dire straits. Furthermore, why should TPers help others and contribute to their debilitation?
It seems that TPers are in need of both a brain and a heart.