The Tea Party Goes to Washington: Now What?

The Tea Party reminds me of political movements I have been involved with and studied in the past. The development of this movement well illustrates my conception of “the politics of small things,” a very real and powerful element of political life.

Jimmy Stewart in Frank Capra's 1939 political drama "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" (Columbia Pictures)

When people meet each other and speak and act in each others  presence based on shared principles about common concerns, and develop a capacity to act in concert, they create political power, a kind of power highlighted by my favorite political thinker, Hannah Arendt in Between Past and Future.   I saw this in the alternative cultural movement in Poland, and later in the democratic opposition in Poland and around the old Soviet bloc in the 1970s and 1980s.

People on their own, many my friends, reinvented their political culture, and the unimaginable and the hopelessly naïve became the realistic and the practical.  Solidarnosc was born.  The Berlin Wall fell.  The Soviet Empire imploded.  These opposition figures changed commonsense.  They presented an alternative to newspeak as a public language.  The unimaginable became the real. I wrote of many of these issues in my book, Beyond Glasnost.

In the anti-war movement, the Dean campaign and the Obama campaign, the same power was evident.  In the aftermath of the patriotic wave and mass support for the policies of the Bush administration, those who dissented started talking to each other, meeting, talking and developing a capacity to act in concert.  At first, this was accomplished by utilizing meetup.com and supported by Moveon.org. A dense network of conversation and common action was developed. The man naming himself as the candidate from the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party, Howard Dean, changed the discussion among Democrats. They lost the election, but then won big, in 2008, very much propelled by the social support that was generated by the politics of small things.

Their great success, I should say our great success, was viewed very skeptically by a significant portion of the population.  After all, while Obama won decisively, 45% of voters chose McCain – Palin.  And some of the opposition was particularly heated.  I fear that a certain amount of this heat is kindled by racism, people whose imagination of America looks more like Sarah Palin’s Wasilla, her real pro-America-America, than Barack Obama’s Chicago, and specifically the diverse and mostly black Southside (where he has lived and taught and where I studied).  But there is also principled opposition, based on a limited view of government, a commitment to low taxes and traditional morality, (the latter hasn’t been emphasized lately but it is still important for many tea party patriots).

There was a spark, a rant by a Cable TV commentator, Rick Santelli on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange condemning Obama proposals for mortgage assistance “for losers.” He went on to call for a Chicago Tea Party.  And then, in response, there were hundreds of independently formed, like-minded groups discussing the problems of government spending and the challenge to American way of life and American freedoms.  People met locally and organized against the bailout, the stimulus package, health care reform–all issues they saw as indicating the threat of socialism.

They demonstrated in colorful ways, in Town Hall meetings and national demonstrations.  They had media support from Fox News and from conservative radio talk shows.  They were financially supported by already established business groups, libertarian foundations and the like.  But the power of the Tea Party was in people acting together, who really were deeply concerned about the fate of their nation and their lives.   They changed the conversation.  In the transition from the Bush Administration to the Obama Administration, there was a consensus about how to address the imminent financial collapse, and coordinated action among Democrats and Republicans in Congress.  But the Tea Party subverted that consensus.

And now we live with the enduring legacy of that subversion.  Mr. Paul and the Tea Party have come to Washington, and confronting the complexities of the problems we face has become harder. There will be competing strategies of the Democratic and Republican leadership, but my sociological intuition tells me that to get out of the fine mess we are in will again require the mobilization of ordinary concerned citizens, such as the ones who gathered in the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear.  (More in a future post).