Tea Party

If you’d asked me a week ago about the Tea Party, I, as a good liberal, would have said that I thought that they were crazy and that I hated them. But if you’d asked me why I felt that way, I would have been in trouble. I don’t think that I really knew why they were ‘bad;’ I thought that they were extremist Republicans, headed by Sarah Palin. I’m from a liberal neighborhood in Chicago (Bucktown/Wicker Park for anyone familiar), a city that basically worships Obama. I remember one time, about a year ago, where I was walking down the street by my house, and there were these people playing gospel music, holding signs of Obama with a Hitler mustache, and screaming about how he should be impeached and killed; their signs also said something about the Tea Party. My first reaction was to wonder how long it would take them to get killed, standing where they were standing and saying what they were saying. But also, I think that’s the image that has stuck in my mind about the Tea Party.

After reading Zernike and doing other research, it’s clear that my impression of the Tea Party wasn’t totally accurate. I was shocked when, looking at the CBS/NYT Tea Party survey, I saw that 47% of Tea Partiers thought that Sarah Palin would not make an effective president (with 40% thinking that she would, and 13% being undecided). The Tea Party doesn’t actually seem to have any leaders; its members are the leaders. This goes a step beyond Adorno’s “Human Interest” technique. The leader doesn’t even have to feign interest in his followers; the movement is all about the followers, and what they want for themselves and their families. So clearly the movement isn’t just a group of people following and supporting Sarah Palin. But then what is it? It was really hard for me to find unbiased articles, though that makes sense when you think about it. It’s a hugely important current issue, so it’s going to hard for people to separate their opinions from the facts. One of the best sources that I found was actually the Wikipedia entry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_Party_movement): it lists the important issues for the tea party, without much bias seeming to seep in. The Tea Party “endorses reduced government spending, lower taxes, reduction of the national debt and federal budget deficit, and adherence to an originalist interpretation of the United States Constitution.” That actually makes a lot of sense, and those are platforms that, at least in theory, I can mostly agree with.

But then I look at videos of the Tea Party supporters (such as http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUPMjC9mq5Y), and all of my understanding of/sympathy with the movement leaves just as quickly as it came. To me, there’s no way around the fact that these people are nuts. I don’t understand how a logical platform gets warped into these crazy ideas that these people hold. As Zernike says, “every time you thought you could put the movement in a box, you encountered something that didn’t fit” (page 11 of Boiling Mad). And since the ‘followers’ seem to be the ‘leaders’ of the Tea Party, I guess their crazy rallies really are the face of the movement. And if that’s true, it’s a movement that I’m not going to ever be able to even sort of support.