I’m back and still thinking about the Tea Party Movement, mostly because it refuses to go away, which makes me wonder: What if this Tea Party thing is historically important? These are the types of thoughts I really don’t want to take seriously, so I do. Just in case.
Spent some time belatedly looking at the NY Times poll on the TP (can a political movement survive with the same initials as hygenic paper?–public chortle) . I must admit there were a few surprises but not enough to deflect my prevaling view that Tp’ers are a group of 21st century know-nothings. The poll indicates that a majority of TP’ers despise President Obama and like Glenn Beck. No surprise. A majority are white. No surprise there, either (the racial slurs aganist Obama helped give that one away. ) A majority of TP’ers are aganist universal health-care yet favor some elements like coverage despite pre-existing conditions. A majority also favor smaller government but want government programs like Medicare whose benefits are “worth the cost”. These views are not logically consistent but whose are. I give them a pass for being human beings.
Surprisingly, a majority of TP’ers believe that the US has more or less achieved racial equity and that the Obama administration treats both blacks and whites equally. Some pundits were quick to declare that this means that the TP is not a racist front. But at the same time, a majority of TP’ers believe that “too much has been made of the problems facing black people.” Compare this position with the hate-filled take back America rhetoric and a different picture emerges. If one asks the simple question, take back America from whom all answers remain fuzzy but one. After all, TP’ers are not looking to take back America from the oligarchs who rightly deserve their rage, they want to take it back from a percived socialist menace made manifest in the economic levelling programs of President Obama. In an age where overt racism is outmoded, TP’ers wage their racial struggle in code. When I was in high school I had an editorial battle with the Manchester Union Leader whose editor called Dr. King a “rabble-rousing, communist, savage.” TP leaders might say the same thing of President Obama, whom they hate because the election of a person of his phenotype to the presidency of the United States represents that the age of white hegemony is almost over. They can’t call only call him a nigger (a self-evident derison) so they call him a communist as well. As Ali Mazuri has intoned, Obama is the most powerful black person in the history of the world. That’s some shit and it freaks TP’ers out.
The recent Arizona immigration law represents a similar type of rear guard action. Another last skirmish at the end of a lost war. The most interesting question about the TP is what comes after. What happens to the Republican party and to our politics in general. Most importantly, what happens to all of us? How do we reconcile in the face of such naked aggression and racism. That remains to be seen.
