Gypsysavage’s Weblog

Photo by John Schoen

I’ve been away for a while now, but I feel I have to poke my head out of the cave, brave the sunlight and speak about a subject that’s been bothering me for months now: the Tea Party— specifically its impact on our political well being. I know… it’s everywhere, and these demonstrators receive more attention than many, many would argue they deserve, but I personally have a problem the way the Movement has plowed full speed into American culture without any discernible policy message. It’s like grown child afflicted with Tourette Syndrome, screaming obscenities at anyone who dare look in his direction. It’s painful to watch.

Even Bill Clinton, one of the sharpest minds in politics, recently admitted he simply can’t predict the Movement’s impact on our electorate, warning Democrats not to underestimate the Tea Party, unwieldy as it is, especially this November.

Without any clear leadership or a unifying message in the Tea Party, an idealistic vacuum has been created. While many Tea Partiers have genuine grievances about healthcare, deficit spending and taxes, these demonstrations have attracted some of the seedier elements of the far-right that had been largely tolerated at Sara Palin’s rallies during the 2008 election season. Homophobic and racist rhetoric is all too common, and staunch anti-abortion advocates have hijacked the Movement, demonstrating a growing schism between free-market conservatives and the far-right.

As a result, infighting has occurred, denoting an identity crisis of rightist factions; last November a Georgia superior court granted an injunction against Amy Kremer, a former top Tea Party organizer who broke away from the Tea Party Patriots. Kremer defected with high-donor mailing lists and associated Tea Party websites, and helped form another group called the Tea Party Express. The Court’s ruling prohibits Kremer from using the mailing lists and websites as well as speaking on behalf of the Tea Party Patriots.

This past April I took the opportunity to cover the Tax Day Tea Party demonstrations in D.C. for a chapter in my thesis, which is primarily about belief and activism, a grueling examination of the lives of those individuals who are driven by their unshakable, unbendable, watertight convictions—our country’s bullhorn-toting, fist-pumping, sign-wielding, rock-throwing, bandana-wearing, car-tipping, gasmask-donning, conspiracy-theorizing, paranoid, blustering, bullying, radical constituency dominating our media. The Tea Party naturally fell into this category.

I arrived at the Monument in the early afternoon. There wasn’t a single black face in a sea of overweight Caucasians. The scene was like a county fair; children running wild, country music, sunburns, and people in tank tops hollering in thick rural accents. A gentleman who pulled up a lawn chair in front of me wore a leather vest and ass-less chaps, which made me more uncomfortable than I care to admit. In my life I’ve never seen so many middle-aged women wearing stonewashed capris and Wal-Mart sneaker knock-offs. Vendors strolled up and down the lawn hocking buttons and DON”T TREAD ON ME flags and t-shirts, which half of the crowd seemed to be wearing. I approached one vendor, a twenty-something hipster who sold buttons with a picture of Glen Beck dressed in a generic-looking SS uniform that said “Glen Beck, 2012.”

I was surprised to see that, at the height of the demonstration, only approximately 3,000 to 4,000 protestors had bothered to show up. Perhaps the biggest complaint of the Tea Partiers was (and still is) the lack of media coverage. “Our Movement is being downplayed,” a protester said to me. “The media won’t acknowledge how powerful we’ve become.” But this crowd was a mere shadow of the hundreds of thousands who had marched on Washington D.C. last year. What this comparatively diminutive number says of the Movement, I’m unsure. “Small but lively” was a recycled phrase the major networks had used that day to describe the event.

Photo by John Schoen

I struggled throughout the day to divine some coherent message, a detailed suggestion or two about our current domestic policies, and not just the same recycled rhetoric I’ve heard countless times before, i.e. complaints about big government and “socialized” healthcare or gutting the House and replacing the entire legislature with new blood.

“Our government’s full of lawyers,” a protester said. “If you look at the senators and congressmen we have here, most of them are lawyers by training. And what do lawyers do best? They like to write laws. So we’ve got all of these attorneys sitting in their ivory towers, who have never worked in manufacturing, never held another type of job in their life except in their law practices. And they can’t write a simple law of ten pages—they have to write a law of twenty-seven hundred pages that no one understands or even reads all the way through. And then they hire a huge bureaucracy to control and administer those laws and to audit them, and it creates this never-ending bureaucracy of federal workers. And they hike up the taxes higher and higher. We never stop to take a look at what we’ve already funded to find out if the taxes we’ve levied are actually working. We just keep refunding the programs year in, year out, without any metrics to measure success.”

But isn’t this is the price we pay for hiring professional politicians? I don’t want our leaders writing laws without understanding them. We had eight, long years of that.

There were countless demonstrators in D.C. that day who characterized the Obama administration as tyrannical and socialist, although no one could provide me with working definitions of these terms. Numerous participants wore t-shirts that said TYRANNY RESPONSE TEAM, and I caught sight of one sign that said 1984 ISN’T AN INSTRUCTIONAL MANUAL.

Although any even-headed observer would consider these statements gross exaggerations, this language does seem to imply a growing hatred of a Democratic administration, not to mention an intense mistrust of authority in general. Coupled with racist and other lowbrow characterizations, many of Tea Party signs and slogans I had seen on April 15 were apparently drawn from some deep, untapped hatred for the President himself. For example, later that day, I saw a man holding a sign that said A KENYAN VILLAGE IS MISSING AN IDIOT. I asked the man, who would not give his name, if he knew President Obama was a natural-born citizen of the United States.

“Of course I do,” he said.

Despite knowing the status of Barack Obama’s citizenship, the man willingly continued to perpetuate a racist misnomer that was widely used to slander the President during the 2008 election. Another sign said HEY OBAMA, WHOSE YOUR DADDY?—yet another demonstrator who intentionally disparaged the President with an infantile characterization.

Matt Kibbe, the president of Freedomworks, addressed some of the more incendiary remarks typical of these demonstrations when he took the stage that afternoon. Towering over the podium and shouting into the microphone, Kibbe blamed racist statements on “Tea Party crashers,” instead of actual Tea Party demonstrators, suggesting that infiltrators were responsible for the tone of past Tea Party demonstrations.

“If you see anyone holding a racist sign, I want you to surround them,” he said to the crowd. “Take their picture and post it online.”

At approximately 5:00 pm, organizers began to address the demonstrators. Freedomworks’ Field Coordinator Tom Gaitens was the first to speak, inciting the crowd by referring to a new American revolution.

“Hello patriots!” he yelled. “Welcome to the second revolution. This time we will not be firing muskets. We will be firing politicians!”

Speaker after speaker railed against big government and taxes, condemning the Obama administration and its policies. One speaker, Colin Hanna, a former county commissioner from Pennsylvania and the founder of a nonprofit conservative organization called Let Freedom Ring, announced a contest in which people can post videos of politicians “acting arrogant [sic]”—a cash prize awarded for the winning video. Another speaker, the government affairs manager for the National Taxpayers Union, Andrew Moylan, asked the crowd to take out their cell phones and flood the White House switchboard, effectively shutting down the system. Although Moylan didn’t offer a sufficient reason for doing so, everyone around me appeared to be dialing the number.

Later that day the thought occurred to me that, despite a variety of speakers and musical acts, Freedomworks offered very little information to the attending public. There were no statistics offered, no important facts—a way of informing the crowd about the issues. Most of Freedomworks’ guest speakers made statements like, “Who here likes freedom?”—to which the crowd of course stood up and cheered. Or, “We are sick and tired of taxes!”—to which the crowd of course stood up and cheered. Or, “We need to take back America!”—to which the crowd of course stood up and cheered. Throughout the late afternoon and evening, during which time well over a dozen speakers took the stage and criticized practically every known Democratic policy, to my knowledge not a single speech contained any factual evidence about the issues.

The truth is it doesn’t matter that the demonstrators don’t have a unifying message. They’re making noise on behalf of a smaller, more powerful constituency. The sheer amount of corporate money flowing into the Movement speaks volumes about the Tea Party’s agenda.

Although local Tea Party groups may be demonstrating and organizing for their own reasons, the national Movement itself appears to be wholly guided by corporate interests. If the fundamental concept of grassroots organizing focuses on community—relating to and starting from the local level, from the ground-up—the Tea Party Movement hardly qualifies as grassroots, having been designed and launched from the top-down, starting with political action committees financed by corporations and special interests.

The tenets of fiscal responsibility, constitutionally limited government and free markets mean something completely different to the middle-class demonstrators operating on the ground, as opposed to the lobbyists and corporate contributors whose businesses suffer under the weight of federal regulations. Clearly, the small business owner, the stay-at-home mom and the blue-collar factory worker are not organizing for the same reasons as Freedomworks’ board of directors. Their interests just happen to coincide. Without the critical support of its local organizations, the Tea Party Movement would have been dead on arrival.

“What is your opinion of the Tea Party Movement itself?” I asked a counter-protester that day.

“In the current day and age of politics, we’ve created a system in which whoever yells loudest gets the most attention and ultimately shapes public opinion,” he said. “I think what we’re seeing here is a Movement that has been based on causing commotion, expressing their opposition to government, which I think is healthy, of course, but doing it in a way that’s as loud and aggressive as possible. I am personally opposed to the unprincipled way in which they conduct themselves.”

Photo by John Schoen

Me too, brother. Me too.