The short answer is, I hate them. I hate their ignorance, their naked bigotry, their embrace of violence in word and deed, their selective reading of the Bible and the Constitution. Hell, I even hate their costumes -- a kind of demented cross between "Deal or No Deal" contestants and used-car salesmen doing President's Day TV spots.
And certainly, much of what we've learned about these folks has not done much for their image. You may have heard about the recent New York Times survey indicating that -- for all their yelling about economic oppression -- the majority of Tea Partiers are doing quite well financially. Their main complaint is not that they are too heavily taxed, but that the tax dollars are going to government programs (such as "Obamacare") for the benefit of certain people -- wink, nudge -- who don't deserve it. And the fact that the current president is one of those people makes them even angrier.
And yet, and yet... maybe it's my liberal's love of nuance and complexity, but I believe there is more to this story.
This is nothing new. As the late historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. observed: "The radical right appealed especially to the incoherent resentment of the frightened rich... It flourished particularly in states like California and Texas, overflowing with raw new money..." Schlesinger wrote this in the early '60s, describing the rise of groups such as the John Birch Society during the Kennedy administration.
So it seems that these are the same rich country-club racists who have been with us for at least the past half-century, if not longer. And since many of these folks are themselves long past the half-century mark, we can comfort ourselves in the knowledge that their days are numbered, that they represent the last gasp of a species of American dinosaur that can't or won't adapt to the realities of a new social order.
For surely -- as one can glean from even a random sampling of news stories -- not everyone in the movement fits the profile. The fellow who protested an appearance by Obama in New Hampshire with a gun strapped to his leg, carrying a sign calling for "the tree of liberty to be watered with the blood of tyrants," clearly had not driven up in a Porsche. The hardcore Palinites who cheer their heroine in spite (because of?) her numerous gaffes are unlikely to have big stock portfolios or homes in Palm Springs.
Their anger springs from a different source. Basically, it is the latest expression of the chasm between two species of Americans: those who live in small towns and rural areas and those who do not. This conflict is as old as America (think of the arguments between the pro-rural Jefferson and the urban booster Hamilton), but it has become even more intense, and angry, in recent decades.
Let's examine this in more detail (and please excuse the occasional oversimplification).
Put yourself in the shoes -- the mind -- of a small-town or farm-country American born, say, around the start of the baby boom. You grew up in a world of certainties, where family farms were still common, government was distant and irrelevant (no one thought of a teacher or a mail carrier as a "civil servant") and it was a good bet that everyone you knew was white and Protestant. A family consisted of a man, a woman and a couple of kids, though of course there was the occasional "maiden aunt" or the bachelor cousin who "just never found the right woman." Sex before or outside of marriage was frowned upon, which is not to say it never occurred; but if a woman found herself "in trouble," there were two acceptable options -- give the baby up for adoption, or leave town. From newspapers, radio, movies and TV, you knew that there was a world beyond yours, sharply different in many ways; but you shrugged it off. Red China and the USSR were not America. France and Germany were not America. New York and Los Angeles were not America. America was where you, and all the people who looked and sounded like you, made their home.
Now imagine how it felt to have the certainties shaken, one by one.
You went to Vietnam, or you knew someone who did, even if you weren't worried about the spread of Communism. It was a matter of duty -- Uncle Sam called, and you answered; so it had been for your father and grandfather and would be for your son. Then it was over, and not only had America lost -- shocking enough in itself -- but the war was being described as "a mistake," "a tragedy," even "a crime." You heard about returning veterans spat upon or called baby killers -- not in your town, of course, but still. And you learned of people using Vietnam as a basis for attacking America itself, questioning her greatness, denying her noble intentions, even as the rest of the world was thumbing its nose at us (the Arabs jacked up the price of oil, the Iranians took diplomats hostage).
Meanwhile, in your town, your state, your country, you witnessed bewildering, even frightening changes. You saw people who didn't look or sound like you take to the streets, loud and angry, shouting about "non-negotiable demands." You saw your taxes go up as your income stagnated, and every year, it seemed like there were more government forms to fill out. You saw the cousin and the maiden aunt "come out," declaring their right to have sex with people of their own gender. You heard other women insist that they could sleep with any man they wanted, whether married to him or not -- and if they got in trouble, they had the right to go to a doctor who would fix it, the baby be damned. You couldn't turn on the TV or radio or go to the movies without seeing explicit sex and violence or hearing filthy language.
And you were expected to cheer on these changes or if not, to keep your mouth shut. That was the message you got from all the smarty-pants types you saw on TV, the professors and lawyers and "advocates" and liberal politicians throwing around their ten-dollar words -- "feminism," "liberation," "empowerment," "diversity," "people of color." If you didn't get it, too bad. If you questioned any of it, you were a racist or a homophobe or a member of "the repressive patriarchy." You saw the values you cherished -- patriotism, religion, sexual "morality" -- mocked and disdained, and you and your friends dismissed as ignorant hicks because you lived in "flyover country" and hadn't gone to a fancy college. And all of this while family farms disappeared, swallowed up by agribusiness giants with no roots in the community, and factories closed or moved overseas.
Before long, you had gone from bewilderment to anger. You didn't take to the streets -- that was not your way -- but you voted for politicians, almost all Republican, who promised to fix things. You voted for Nixon, who promised to restore law and order; he turned out to be a lawbreaker on the grand scale. You voted for Reagan, who insisted that nothing had changed, America was still a great nation, and you felt good for a while... but then he was gone, and you saw that maiden aunts and family farms had not come back, and the people with demands were as loud as ever. You voted for George W. Bush, though you suspected he was a spoiled rich kid; he spoke your language, and the people who ridiculed you were ridiculing him. Even at the end, with two-thirds of Americans regarding his presidency as a disaster, you were proud to be in the other one-third. But if you were honest, you had to admit to yourself that things had not improved, and had probably gotten worse. And that was before October 2008.
Where did that leave you? You could never support a Democrat -- certainly not Obama, the black Muslim with the weird name, who sneered about how you "cling to guns and religion" and promised change, big change, of which you'd had more than enough. But you were sick of the Republicans as well, sick of them showing up at your county fairs and holiday parades, gobbling your food, signing autographs, promising the moon... then forgetting about you for the next four years. The truth is, you'd had it with politicians, period.
Your only solace, other than your friends at the VFW hall or the neighborhood bar, was Fox News. Every day, sure as the sunrise, they told you what you wanted to hear, what you needed to hear: that you were right and everyone else was wrong; that the liberals had no call to mock you -- your religious faith and common sense counted for more than their fancy college degrees; that America was still great, or would be if we could just get back to the way it was before the liberals messed it up, before Clinton or Kennedy or Roosevelt (or according to Glenn Beck, Teddy Roosevelt) imposed their power-mad schemes on the average American, before the big-city radicals stirred up the blacks and the homos and the women to make all those demands. Your country has been taken from you, was the daily message. Take it back.
None of this in any way justifies the words and actions of the Tea Party and the rest of the radical right. But to simply dismiss or condemn the entire movement without understanding the very real feelings -- of loss, of alienation, of pain -- driving many of its activists is to ensure that even after it loses strength or goes underground (as has happened in the past), it will someday rise again, perhaps even angrier and more violent.
I wish I had an easy or sweeping solution to propose (a national Beer Summit?), but none comes to mind. The chasm did not arise overnight, and bridging it will have to begin with small, incremental steps. Those of us on the left can support and learn from "purple state" politicians like Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, media figures like Ed Schultz, religious leaders like Rev. Jim Wallis -- men who advocate for progressive causes without sounding at all elitist or condescending. We can also re-examine our own thinking on a number of "values issues" (patriotism, religion, sex and violence in popular culture) in the hope that -- who knows? -- there could be some small common ground to be found.
The wealthy retiree from Florida (that would be the state's western coast, the east being too Jewish for his taste) howling "get your government hands of my Medicare" is beyond redemption. But maybe, just maybe, the mechanic from Ohio, the small farmer from Iowa -- or their wives or grown children -- are open to talk, and to listen.
My former editor at Tikkun magazine, Michael Lerner, who has written extensively on this subject, put it best when he said: "I'm not worried about the 25 percent of Americans who are hopelessly racist, sexist, anti-Semitic, homophobic, xenophobic -- I'm worried about the other 25 percent who sometimes vote with them." Reaching that other 25 percent would be a great thing for the progressive movement... and for America.
