The True Meaning of the Tea Party

Rudolph H. Weingartner

   On March 10, 2010, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette published an op ed of mine to which the editor provided this headline:

                            Tea Party paranoia is nothing new

                           Fear-mongering has always been with us, but it never wins in the end

The editor there captured what I had argued in the piece, which had made use of Richard Hofstadter's 1965 essay,  "The Paranoid Style in American Politics."  This is how I concluded:

   History  teaches us  that  we've  been  here before. History teaches  us that  fear-mongering can  cause  great  annoyance, Injury,      turmoil,  even death.  But  history also teaches us  that  paranoia in  American  politics, in  the  end,  does  not  prevail. 

This  too  shall  pass.

   I may have been right in making paranoia the main impetus for the arrival on the American scene of Tea Party polititicos, but I can’t quite think myself back into those four-plus years ago.  However that may be, that’s not how I see the Tea Party now.  Paranoia is a disease; those afflicted with it may be disliked, but should not really be blamed, since they actually can’t help themselves.  Now I believe that people who identify themselves with the Tea Party—and their friends and sympathizers—are mean-spirited reactionaries—not a disease but a constellation of beliefs, not imposed but assumed voluntarily.  (Tackling the question of the plausibility of that common sense assumption would take us two hundred pages into the thicket of controversies about the freedom of the will.) 

   Yes, reactionary, because, without actually saying so, those proponents favor returning to a considerably earlier state of American society, that of the decade, say, of the presidencies of Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover, 1923 to 1933, that is, to the time before FDR changed the role of government with the creation of the New Deal.  To call Tea Partiers “conservative” is thus a grave misnomer; they want to change things to the way they were almost a century ago; they are not aiming to conserve what exists now.

   Mean-spirited, because many, indeed most, of their proposals aim at taking away some benefit provided to fellow human beings or of preventing their gaining such a one.  Obamacare, they claim, is a bad law.  The aim, therefore is to kill it off, without even a suggestion as to what might replace it, so that more of their fellow Americans have access to medical insurance.  In effect, the naysayers don’t regard it as a problem that so many of their confrères are without that safety net.  Similarly, Medicaid—an existing healthcare program for people with insufficient income to afford it on their own—need not be expanded to cover more people, even when you federal government will foot the bill. 

   And why has the Tea Party not tackled Medicare?  Surely only because a larger proportions citizens over 65 vote than does of the population generally.  Surely for similar reasons, there have not been loud demands to revive the George W. Bush proposal to privatize Social Security, though there has certainly been propaganda to reduce benefits and to up the age of eligibility—to be sure, not starting with the generation that votes now.

   Finally, to conclude with two additional economic targets, Tea Partiers have dragged their feet about increasing unemployment benefits.  Never mind that the surge in unemployment was caused by the recent Great Recession, for which those unemployed bear zero responsibility.  Wall Street does (and they are not suffering) and so do those Tea Party sympathizers avant la lettre who steadfastly opposed effective regulation of the financial world.

   And second, Tea Party and friends have persistently opposed raising the minimum wage, now a shabby $7.25 per hour.  Give me a couple of sentences to say what that means.  If someone who is paid that hourly wage works a full forty hours a week for each of the 52 weeks in the year (and who actually does?), he or she will have earned $15,080 for the year, supposing no deductions.  Posit against this that the poverty level for a family of four is now $23,850 a year and   for a family of two it is $15,730.  Think single mother with one child, working non-stop for the year and think of inevitable expenses for the care of the child.  Is it not the case that to be satisfied with this situation is a symptom of mean-spiritedness?  Also reactionary because, since asks for a return of the days before the New Deal.

   Finally, a couple of paragraphs about the Tea Partiers views concerning immigration, knowing full well that they will be inadequate, even though I will not take up the recent surge of unaccompanied children from Central America.  But let’s begin with children.  There may be as many as four million born in the United States, but to illegal immigrants.  According to our law, the requirement for citizenship (other than via naturalization) is not parentage, but the place of birth—that is America.  This simple criterion has historically distinguished us from many a more finicky country, in Europe and elsewhere.  But it has been a good law for the US and accounts in part for the “attractiveness” that has produced so varied and versatile a population.  Still, there are those who want to add further requirements: now that I’m a citizen, let’s introduce hurdles that resemble nothing so much as those of a class-stratified society of 18^th-century Europe.

   The central issue, however, for Tea Partiers, is what they have called amnesty.  At this time, there are about 12 million people living in the United States who entered the country illegally.  They all broke the law, so they should not escape an appropriate punishment—not to mention that they should not be rewarded for their transgression with legitimacy or, perish forbid, citizenship.

   I will confine myself to two observation, granted that this is a much bigger topic.  First, a significant number of those “illegals” are illegal in a Pickwickian sense at most.  A sizeable number—I was unable to find a reliable estimate—were brought here as children by their illegally arrived parents.  We consider giving amnesty (or not) to someone for something she or he did, for an action performed.  Those children did not do anything, they did not decide to come here and then come; their parents did that—they were just taken along.  The issue of amnesty is as irrelevant for those children as it would be for someone who failed to show up on time because he got lost in the woods.

   What about the issue of amnesty for the bulk of those 20 million illegals, that is, the adults?  As far as I can determine, Tea Partiers are opposed to a procedure that leads to any kind of legal status.  That would be rewarding people for having committed a sin, to express the point in terms of the Calvinism that underlies the ideology we have been discussing.  But on the other hand, no one proposes out loud that those millions should be deported, not because that would be found to be undesirable, but because it just isn’t feasible.

   Where does that leave us?  Nowhere.  Tea Partiers, to be sure, recognize that there is a problem, a serious problem.  But for them, no solution is acceptable.  So much for governing.

   A final observation of a quite different sort.  Those adherents of this ideology who are members of Congress or are officeholders in various so-called conservative foundations and institutes will not at all be negatively affected if everything all they agitate for were to come to pass. These folks are employed, “earning” salaries that vary from very comfortable to cushy, scare quotes intended.  The same cannot be said for the many ordinary citizens who subscribe to these Tea Party views.  Indeed, any number of those who put their vote where their beliefs are may be unemployed or in danger of losing their jobs, be without adequate health insurance or are liable to be, or are disadvantaged because of the stinginess of the minimum wage.

   To me it is a matter of amazement that so significant a number of people should vote against their own interest.  In the end, I can only suppose that for many the Tea Party ideology is not a bundle of mere beliefs, but amounts to a theological dogma.  After all, the United States is the most religious country in the developed world.