The American Tea Partiers: Brewing a Hazardous Political Toxin

For all his sense of objectivity, commentator Leonard Pitts (http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/editorialsopinion/2011663096_pitts22.html)
bares a pat of his self at the end of his column by using the ‘us-them’ binary. He is not being conservative, but invites the accusation of displaying characteristics of one. On the face of it, the Birther politics may smell of racial discontent after Obama’s victory, but to limit the analysis to merely to the singular perception of race is not entirely correct.
In most capitalist societies, centrist politics of reconditioning have been answered not by the mainstream, politically-correct, rightists, but by the extreme fringe among them who cloak their politics under the garb of mere conservatism. The bring-back-America-of-my-dreams kind. The Republicans are happy to let the fringe have its day as long as they don’t have to officially support the fringe and yet derive political benefit out of its politics. The eat-cake-have-it-too kind.
The Tea Partiers pre-existed Obama. Remember, the post 9/11 days when Glenn Beck started his pet 9/12 Project? The ultimate conservative who is critical of Hollywood liberalism, supports of the war in Iraq, opposes multiculturalism, political correctness, euthanasia, anti-smoking regulations and overt homosexuality in TV and on film. He is also pro-life, by the way.
Even conservative analysts, for instance David Frum, describe Beck as “a product of the collapse of conservatism as an organized political force, and the rise of conservatism as an alienated cultural sensibility”.
Frum was right on the first one, marginally erring on the second. The American South – the original South – is becoming the fulcrum of conservative politics in America today. And those conservatives have a valid argument. Way back in the early 1980s, sociologist John Shelton Reed, in his book, ‘One South: An Ethnic Approach to Regional Culture’, labeled white Southerners a “quasi-ethnic regional group”. No American region values its local culture as the South. Socially conservative, part of the Evangelical Protestant Bible belt, this region has been, in the last few decades, trying to adjust itself erosion of its exclusive culture because of the arrival of northerners and Hispanics. Historian Edward L. Ayers writes in “What Caused the Civil War? Reflections on the South and Southern History” how difficult it is to the southerners to quietly accept what they call the declining exclusivity of “an earlier South that was somehow more authentic, real, more unified and distinct”.
This exclusivity bares itself prominently during election times in the USA: Go back to the Republican debates in the last election in states like Texas, Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee on issues ranging from race to abortion, gay rights, morality, religion and even foreign relations. Cowboy Bush could never make a mistake because he is a southerner!
But then economically, except for Florida and Virginia, the South has been suffering for a long time. Disgruntled tax payers on the one hand, the worst poverty rates in the USA on the other as reflected in lower household incomes, increasing number of unemployed and homeless and reducing number of graduates. Of course, it must be mentioned here that the South has a relatively larger population of African Americans than other regions and the whites-only statistics fare much better than the Southern average.
It is from this burning pit that the Tea Partiers have emerged, even notwithstanding the fact that some of their leaders have their political and economic bases elsewhere. At the height of the Obama Birth Certificate controversy, almost all of the law suits seeking Obama to come out with his ‘original’ birth certificate were filed in courts in Oklahoma, Tennessee, Missouri, Arizona and Texas! In the recent mid-term elections, from which states were most of the Republicans victors? No guesses.
I argue that the biggest conundrum for white and black America today is: What is Obama? In the last two years, they have not been able to succinctly resolve this issue. Obama is not your average African American, like Bush was the average Texan. He is an Ivy Leaguer. He is of the post-1960s America and thus escaped having to take the civil rights movement path to national politics. He is not a true American Black: His forefathers were not brought to the USA as slaves. He is not a heartland American, but a Hawaiian. He is not a religionist in the strict American sense.
So, how to categorise this person? Because without categorising him, you can’t attack him politically and as mentioned above, he does not fit into the traditional categories. Naturally, irrespective of what else he may be, he is still a Black. That is some consolation to his attackers. But race is not a politically correct tool to discredit a politician in the we-are-all-equal America; even the conservatives today shy away from raking up race at least in public.
But in politics where there is wile there is a way. Obama must be a ‘Marxist’ and Hussein definitely is a ‘Muslim’. If you go back to the early campaigning days of the last Presidential election, you will hear these two words among the most popular in the conservative rumour mill. The mainstream Conservatives would not dare use those words in public. Not that they would mind if some one else, with even a modicum of conservative credentials, utters them. Arrives on the American political scene a failed lawyer from Illinois, a frivolous politician, a known anti-Semite and an irritable litigator: Andy Martin. This fellow who was not allowed entry into the bar because he was paranoid was the saviour. And what did he say? In 2004 , weeks after the Democratic National Convention, for the first time, Obama was called a Muslim. By Martin. The New York Times says pernicious rumors that Barack Obama is “secretly a Muslim” can be traced back to him. That, if you recall, led to the Islamic Madarasa story which claimed that Obama had attended a Madarasa when he was Indonesia. Obama only once officially reacted to these religious insinuations saying: “I consider it part of my responsibility as President of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.” That brought out more rumours from conspiracy lunatics like the Martins that Obama is doing a disservice to American by not condemning the Muslims for 9/11!!
The Tea Partiers don’t openly call Obama a Muslim. They are the cowardly type who best shoot from somebody else’s shoulder. They call him a ‘Marxist’ instead. The ‘M’ word again. But the reasons given by Martin and the Partiers is the same: Obama is out to wreck America.
What is the solution they propose? They waited for an opportunity. Obama gave it to them in 2000 when House Democrats passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 without a single Republican vote. The $787 billion “emergency” expenditure was seen as a demonstration of wasteful spending and an egregious growth of government. |Then the stage was set for the Tea Partiers as rumours emerged that all types of tax increases were on the anvil. The Partiers finally had the motive and the masses to motivate. And the rest of the Tea Partiers movement is history. One small observation: The Tea Partiers want a small central government with more power to the states, thereby reducing the size and scope of government and “promoting the American ideals of self-reliance and personal integrity” in the bargain.
Did we hear this before? Yes, of course, from Glenn Beck and his 9/12 Project, regarded by him as a pro-limited government movement that favors honesty, hope, humility, hard work, personal responsibility and, gratitude. A media personality who is quite popular in the USA (?), Beck cleverly tied in the 9/11 attacks and what he calls the original American values in one string. Only fools would say there is no connection with the ‘Islamist’ attacks on America on 9/11 and the call for bringing back American values.
So, in the last couple of years, what we see is a third political lobby in the making in the USA which identifies itself neither with the Democrats nor with the Republicans. There are the Partiers of course. Then there are the Glenn Beckers. Then the Jerome Corsis and Alan Keyes. There are the dumb hacks who would do anything, even project the Partiers as they do, to catch eyeballs, like the Liz Cheneys, Lou Dobbs, Sean Hannitys or Camile Paglias.
Then come the big guns, the Presidential contenders for 2012, the likes of former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, highest-rated commentator of Fox News Glenn Beck, Minnesota Congresswoman Michelle Backman, former CNN commentator Lou Dobbs (ha!), former Florida House speaker Marco Rubio, Governor Gary Johnson, the most conservative of Senators Jim DeMint, Representative Joe Wilson, Governor Rick Terry, former Representative Dick Army.
As the 2012 Presidential election nears, we may well see these various political drifts trying to merge into one political entity – the third force – with a conservative agenda not palatable even to the worst of the Republicans, confident of victory. Their premise, at least, is correct. If the Americans can vote for a Bush and an Obama, why not the Tea Partiers? After all, the American dream is for everyone and any one, isn’t it?
The spirit of Barry Goldwater and his panacea form American ills -- small government, free enterprise and a strong national defense – lives on 50 years later in today’s America. Only, Goldwater’s crusade is now in the hands of social conservatives and the religious extreme right who call Obama a Marxist or a Muslim.
It’s not about race alone.
If only the average Mac-eating, Coke-drinking American sees through them. And in time.