US Tea Party may be a sign trouble is brewing much closer to home
Fortunately, this is an interesting time in US politics. Their mid-term elections are fast approaching, giving Americans their first countrywide opportunity to pronounce an interim verdict on President Barack Obama.
One thing is for sure: the president and Democrats are going to take a bath next month, losing a lot of seats. Their big majorities in both Houses of Congress will most likely to be wiped away. They might just hang on to the Senate where fewer seats are up for grabs.
There is still a lot to play for, of course, but the major factor running against the Democrats is the anti-incumbency mood: Congress has an approval rating which hovers around the 20% mark.
What should make what passes for the left in America doubly concerned is that Republican-inclined voters seem anxious to make their point. Traditional Democrats, African-Americans apart, are seemingly apathetic.
The African-American vote is significant: Obama, not surprisingly, is still wildly popular in that constituency. But it means that while Obama still has a reasonable 45% overall approval rating – with 50% disapproving – his figures among whites must be somewhere down in the 30s.
Given that blacks are gerrymandered into overwhelmingly black voting districts – for the well-intentioned purpose of ensuring their representation in Congress – the African-American vote doesn’t play much of a role elsewhere: Obama and the Democrats just pile up massive majorities in a minority of seats. Still, Democrats go into these elections with lots more money to spend so all predictions must be treated cautiously.
Discussion on the news channels, though, centres not on the president but the so-called Tea Party. This loose organisation takes its name from the Boston Tea Party of 1773 when colonists protested against (British) taxation without representation. The immediate catalysts for this protest movement were the bank bailouts in 2008 and Obama’s massive stimulus package last year. But who are the Tea Partiers – or Tea Baggers as the more liberal channels rather crudely refer to them? In some ways they defy description – partly because they lack much central organisation, partly because their views are diverse. In their own self-description, they are “concerned Americans” who want to “take back their country”. When you consider their demographic profile – middle-class, middle-aged, overwhelmingly white – that rhetoric might seem worrying. Are they seeking to “take back their country” from Barack Obama’s coffee-coloured hands? Certainly, their profile is in marked contrast to the young, multiracial throngs who thought ‘yes, they could’ in November 2008.
What concerns Tea Partiers are high taxes, 10% unemployment and a multi-trillion dollar deficit (Obama is pretty invulnerable on national security, the other issue Republicans traditionally hit Democrats on: Obama supports record defence spending and is wiping out more terrorists in Afghanistan than George Bush ever dreamed of).
But then the Tea Party movement is not just the Republican party in disguise. It emerged as a response to the Republican defeats of 2008 but outside the party, some would even say in opposition to it. Rather than indicative of a Republican revival, it is the product of Republican disarray in confused, anti-political times. It’s worth noting here that incumbent Republicans’ ratings are even lower than those for their Democratic counterparts.
Still, it’s not hard to fathom why the likes of Fox News promote the Tea Party as an attempt to inject some life into conservatism after all the recent setbacks. What is less obvious is why the liberal news channels are so preoccupied, even obsessed, with the Tea Party.
Since it is actually quite small – their conventions attract hundreds, not hundreds of thousands – liberals could have downplayed the Tea Partiers rather than give airtime to their message. Instead, they have exaggerated the Tea Party’s numbers and influence.
This might appear to make some sense. Voters not aligned to either main party tend to be concerned about wasteful spending, but they find any hint of craziness extremely off-putting.
Hence, Democrat attacks on the Tea Partiers as closet racists have given way to depictions of them as a bunch of nuts.
In one primary race, Tea Party support, and endorsement by Sarah Palin, the uncrowned queen of the Tea Party, led one Christine O’Donnell to win the right to contest a Senate seat for the Republicans.
Now, by any standard, O’Donnell is a bit loop-the-loop. This creationist, pro-abstinence, anti-masturbation crusader dabbled in witchcraft as a teenager and has made a series of astonishingly odd statements, among them that scientists are implanting fully functioning human brains into mice.
She first appeared on TV in the 1990s as founder of the Saviour’s Alliance for Lifting the Truth (SALT), claiming to value truth-telling absolutely. Asked if she would lie to Nazis seeking Jews who were hiding in her basement, she wobbled, insisting that “God would provide a way to do the right thing”.
The liberal attack line is that even if some of the more obviously nutty and ignorant Tea Party candidates lose, their supporters will continue to pull the Republican party into a right-wing wonderland.
SOME Tea Party candidates will get elected though and some will be eccentric. But is that so different from Ireland where some pretty oddball independents get elected when disenchantment with the traditional parties sets in?
The danger of highlighting freaks is that, when they win, it begins to look like an attack on the electorate. The Tea Party feeds off the sense on the part of many Americans that they are being condescended to. Voting for a Tea Party candidate is a way of giving sections of the liberal elite the middle finger.
Yes, liberals might mock but they exhibit none of the same passion on television for their own cause. The case for activist government and high public spending in times of economic crisis is falling by the wayside. Failing to appreciate the depth of popular alienation from the political establishment, liberals’ fear of the Tea Party’s rise has become a self-fulfilling prophecy: shining the spotlight has given the non-party Tea Party the aura of being something new and different, something willing to have a go at change.
Does the Tea Party have all the answers? Of course not. It is an expression more of a general discontent than a specific counter-ideology or alternative policy strategy. But the popular mood in America is in a funny place right now. The economic problems appear intractable and government looks hapless. If the economy doesn’t improve, voters will be inclined to keep throwing the politicians out, whoever they are, until someone gets it right.
There is a lesson there for politicians on this side of the Atlantic.
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