As a political junkie, I've watched various trends and movements come and go, but I find the Tea Party oddly fascinating because, like so many other observers, I still don't quite know what to make of them. They have certainly generated more buzz than their size would seem to warrant. It's entertaining to watch commentators and journalists spending inordinate amounts of time discussing this group, if only to tell us that journalists and commentators are spending inordinate amounts of time discussing this group. The Tea Party movement seems to be something of a political Rorschach test that different people look at and see very different things.
The Tea Party was essentially formed from various factions of the political right although there are exceptions. The most obvious constituency are those who think that the government has grossly overstepped its mandate, and the processes through which it has illegitimately seized power and insinuated itself increasingly into our lives must be reversed. They believe in a very strict and narrow interpretation of the Constitution and they wear three-cornered hats to celebrating the patriots of the late 18th Century, the era in which both the original Boston Tea Party took place and the Constitution was framed. If this were the movement's only core group then they would be garden variety small government conservatives. However, there are other elements that make this movement different.
If those wearing the felt three-corner hats represent one core Tea Party group, then another part of the its base should be wearing hats of any shape as long as they're made of tin foil. This is the crazy conspiracy theory lunatic fringe. The final group I want to discuss should be wearing hats made of any material as long as they're tall, pointy and fashioned to be worn over a hood. These groups are undeniably a part of the movement, but the bone of contention between supporters and detractors concerns their relative size. Advocates say that you will find kooks and bigots in any group and this one is no exception. They should be no more stained by these elements than the local Elks Club, union hall or bowling league. Opponents argue that while any large organization will have some bad apples, the share of teabaggers driven by hatred is so disproportionately high that without these people the movement would be dramatically reduced. This is the crux of the disagreement. Those who see the unsavory characters as a fringe to be found in any group praise the movement, and those who see them as one of the main pillars of the Tea Party condemn the movement. As is often the case, the truth may lie in the middle.
At its best, the Tea Party can be to politics what Paddy Chayefsky's 1976 satirical masterpiece, Network was to TV. They both essentially implore the masses to run to their windows and shout, "I'm as mad as hell and I'm not gonna take this anymore!" With 30 years of reckless deficit spending putting our future in hock, someone needs to sound a clarion call. At its worst, the Tea Party summons humanity's baser side, promoting the fear and hatred that will shame us once we return to our senses. Yes, if the policies of this administration were being advanced by a president who was a blue-eyed Mayflower descendant named James Wellington, there would still be strong and vocal opposition, but we wouldn't see the level of insanity we're seeing now. Too many people who were already uneasy about having insufficient control over their lives see the election of this president as their "Leave it to Beaver" world being preempted by "Soul Train" and they've gone stark raving mad.
The claims that President Obama is essentially the living embodiment of Leon Trotsky, or that he's a Kenyan born Muslim, or other nonsense coming from teabaggers destroy the Tea Party's credibility and that's a shame because someone does need to speak up about the troubling gap between the government's spending and its revenue. Speaking of which, they also lose credibility when they claim their rage comes from big government spending piling on debt, but they applaud George W. Bush's presidency. Likewise, they can't be taken seriously when they roundly support Medicare (a system where the government seizes your money through taxation to fund a single-payer health care system) while simultaneously saying that a mandate to carry health insurance is a cataclysmic socialist nightmare that reminds them of Hitler. If they stuck to a legitimate argument against big government, they could potentially have an important voice.
