Never On Sunday

TPM’s article on the NCNA’s evaporation is amusing enough to warrant a read on its own merits. You have to love a conservative organization founded to offer new, substantial conservative ideas only to find it has none. The “we didn’t fail; we succeeded too well” defense is…original. The article did something more for me than amuse, however; it crystallized some disorganized questions and thoughts I had on a different but related subject: Tea Party political activism.

The questions were all variations on just what the Teabaggers are, a question the Teabaggers can’t help answer, because they can’t agree on an answer, either, with different factions seeking to discount one another as “not really part of the movement.”

There’s the split over naked racism, homophobia, anti-communist paranoia, Islamophobia, and similar vitriol, and their place in the Tea Party. Some Teabaggers are eager to distance themselves from the politics of hate. The actual candidates come across as lukewarm and insincere in their protests; perhaps they don’t really mind racism, et al., and just don’t want to be seen to embrace it, or perhaps they honestly despise it but fear alienating any voter, no matter how despicable. But some of the grass roots seem genuinely embarrassed by their fellow Teabaggers shouting “nigger” and “faggot” at Congressmen voting for health care reform, and genuinely to mean it when they say the Tea Party wants no part of it. Still…the spitters and shouters and protestors calling for solving the Obama problem with a handgun are Teabaggers too, and don’t want anything to do with moderation, and who’s to say their estimation of who the Real Teabaggers are is any less valid?

There’s the split over moderation itself. YouTube hosts some clips of frightening Tea Party rallies, fascist wannabes egging one another on. But it also hosts some clips of perfectly decent people rightly worried about the deficit and willing to reconsider their positions right there at the rally. I recall one demonstrator responding to an amateur (and presumably liberal partisan) documentarian asking how she could oppose big government while defending Social Security and Medicare; she paused and looked skyward for a moment and agreed that, y’know, maybe she wasn’t entirely against big government after all, and should go home and think things over. A depressing message on the power of compartmentalized thinking—how many people at that rally would be so level-headed?—but proof nevertheless that Teabaggers aren’t all crazy, hateful stupid, and proud to remain so.

There’s the split between the anti-establishment sentiment that largely defines the movement and swells from its grass roots and the continuing efforts by conservative candidates deeply entrenched in the establishment to co-opt that angry sentiment and transform it back to the reliably Republican base it once was under Reagan’s charismatic performance. Sarah Palin, former governor and vice-presidential candidate, plays fast and loose in portraying herself as an outsider as she nurses Tea Party support; Newt Gingrich looks positively absurd in portraying himself as the very spirit of Tea Party revolution. Republicans courting Teabaggers are a small component of the movement, but they’ve got a disproportionately large voice, backed by experienced and well-funded image managers.

There’s the split between pro-business, pro-free market sentiment and the dawning realization that big business is not on anyone’s side but its own, and that big business controls an awful lot of our politicians, including politicians that the Archie Bunker little guys long thought to be working for them. And the split over whether the Tea Party should be fiscally conservative and socially neutral, even libertarian, or whether the Tea Party should be about restoring traditional values flouted even by conservative leaders in the past decade.

Even in the minutiae, there’s divisions, such as whether the term “Teabagger” should be used at all. Realizing too late what “teabag” means to younger generations, much of the movement did an abrupt about turn and began insisting on “Tea Party” and “Tea Party” alone. Others think this smacks too much of politically correct labeling: “Yeah, we’re teabaggers. Got a problem with that?”

All these splits and more confused me. They certainly made it difficult to talk about the movement in any coherent fashion. Obviously, the Tea Party has strong ties to the Republican party and conservative, even reactionary, politics, but some fraction self-identifies as Democrats, or at least leaning Democratic in its voting habits. It’s not a monolithic bloc of like-minded voters. So what the hell is it?

This is where the TPM article comes in. The video clip quoting founder Eric Cantor: “It’s not a rebranding effort,” in the doublespeak of politics, should be taken to mean that it is a rebranding effort. Cantor wouldn’t bother to renounce the suggestion if it weren’t obviously so. That’s what the Tea Party is, too, top to bottom: a rebranding effort. Cantor simply prefers that NCNA not be portrayed as one.

All those splits? Those are precisely the splits that have dogged the Republican party as a whole for thirty years or more—front and center since the Reagan revolution, with roots stretching back through Watergate, the Red Scare, and 19th century robber barons. The question of primacy of social or economic conservatism, the authoritarian urge of surrender to authority versus the ideal of the independent frontiersman, the balance between rural base and wealthy elite, the distasteful embrace of racism and homophobia because it wins the bigot vote, all of it. The Tea Party is the Republican party, with the same internal fault lines and the same vision for the nation. Even the few Democrats among the Teabaggers are the Reagan Democrats, the middle-class whites who don’t want to bash fags and niggers and abortion, but who vote for candidates who do because they’re really interested in their wallets, willing to sacrifice a little civil liberty for the Reaganesque vision of prosperity through heartlesness.

All that’s changed is that these Republicans, by loudly denouncing the Republican Party as an institution, and insisting the party somehow lost its values and forgot its voters, seek to cleanse themselves of association with the Bush years. They still think we should be tough on terrorism, yes, and we should be reducing government, naturally, and we need to cut taxes below even their current historical low… All that was fine. But somehow, it didn’t work out right. Must be the fault of saboteurs of the conservative message, from within and without the party. Can’t be the Teabagger’s fault. Teabaggers didn’t vote for all this stuff. They didn’t vote for Iraq, AIG, a vanishing middle class, Rovian politics, post-Katrina neglect, naked Constitutional violations, torture—none of that stuff. The Teabaggers didn’t vote for any of that. They didn’t even vote for Bush and company. Not really. They voted for some other guys, the people they preferred imagining Bush and company to be. The real conservatives. The super-secret, invisible conservatives. The ones who would lower taxes, deregulate markets, torture only the bad people who deserve it, make it all work properly, not create such a cesspool of failure as to compel even someone so cocksure and unapologetic as Teabaggers to pretend they had no part in it.