Time marches so quickly that it is unsettling to recall that barely two years ago, there was no Tea Party. Then on February 19, 2009 in a rant heard round the nation, CNBC business news editor Rick Santelli from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange called for a popular rebellion against what he considered an out-of-control government that was then refinancing mortgages (see below). He asked traders to hold a tea party, dumping derivatives into the Chicago River. Soon there was a Tea Party, or many Tea Parties, or no Tea Party. But what IS the Tea Party?
Today there is much debate as to whether the Tea Party is growing in popularity or shrinking in consequence. Freudians once plaintively asked, “What do women want?” Today pundits echo Sigmund’s question, “What does the Tea Party want?” And in a year in which the politics of budgets will dominate domestic debate, our imaginaries of the Tea Party matter.
Space opened for a small government movement as many middle-class Americans felt that government spending, controlled by liberals, was spiraling out of control. Money was being spent too fast. There was the bank bailout, the automotive bailout, refinancing mortgages, and, most dramatically, the stimulus bill, cleverly renamed by some conservative commentators as the “Porkulus” bill. Rather than targeting government spending on easily justified projects, such as infrastructure, repairing aging bridges and highways, the government spent money without a plan. Republicans and independents argued that the Democrats dusted off their personal wish lists, lying in the bottom of their file cabinets, and proclaimed that those projects would save the republic. Any spending seemed to suffice to rescue the economy. Academics know fortunate colleagues who received stimulus spending to support their graduate students. Fairs and festivals were awarded tax dollars. Such a wild increase of the deficit was all-too-easy to mock. But beyond mocking, opponents made the argument, a serious one that even the President now embraces, that such spending poses existential dangers for the national welfare. When the unemployment rate sped (and remains) above the 8% level that President Obama promised would not be reached, something appeared to have gone terribly wrong. We were using our “seed corn” and jobs were not sprouting.
This spending spree, while perhaps avoiding a Depression, led to the belief that the Democratic majorities in Congress were King Georges to the red state Paul Reveres. Holding a tea party to remind the rulers of the fears of the governed had immediate appeal. Groups under the banner of the Tea Party organized rallies “for the rest of us.” The April 15th rallies were Ferris Bueller’s Dad’s Day Off.
These political hijinks are well and good, but, after all, what is this Tea Party? The rallies were spirited, but they lacked a permanent infrastructure. There was no there, there. The Tea Party is a critter lacking head or spine. Can a movement survive on heart alone?
The powerful appeal of the Tea Party, a mass without leaders, provides opportunities to control it for personal ends. Some were undoubtedly sincere, and others were grifters. Some are serious about controlling government spending; others focus on curios and clutter. The ambitious searched for followers to justify their desire for attention and fame. And like mushrooms, new groups appeared each dewy morning. We find the Tea Party Nation, the Tea Party Express, the Tea Party Patriots, the Tea Party Coalition, the Tea Party Federation, and on and on. Anyone with a microphone and a coterie can lead a Tea Party. While figures such as Seattle blogger Keli Carender have more street cred than others, many claim the mantel.
In such a world, what is the media to do? Reporters demand a steady font of information to organize their work life. A leaderless movement is an affront to professional journalism. To whom does one turn? While some colorful individuals are anointed as “Tea Party favorites,” assigned the leadership of a leaderless movement, often pundits turn to their typewriters. Without leaders who will object if a writer claims that the Tea Party is happy, engaged, angry, disappointed, or melting away? This week journalists ask whether John Boehner passed the Tea Party test, whomever the grader might be. Is it Rush Limbaugh? Dick Armey? Sarah Palin? Jim Demint? Or some unnamed Joe the Plumber in a red state suburb? The imagined Tea Party may be serious about the debt, fundamentally racist, supportive of small business, conservative, libertarian, or simply confused. Take your choice.
While what we casually label as the Tea Party is located in one sector of our political space, in truth the movement is amorphous. The Tea Party is whatever a writer wishes for it to be. The larger issue – an issue that transcends this movement – is that as a matter of course we refer to imagined groups to which we assign firm and sticky meaning. The voters want this. The public is demanding that, women desire this, blacks insist on that. We take diverse and divided non-groups and erase their differences. We create one from many. In so doing, we mislead. While social categories have central tendencies, they also have variance. We deceive ourselves if we assert that any unorganized public has a narrowly tailored creed. And in this sense, despite our claims, the Tea Party is truly no thing.
OK, even if you can’t easily define the Tea Party, there are many things I’d call it, and none of them good, so for the sake of civility, I’ll leave those adjectives to the imagination. Professor Fine, I’m not sure if you’re stating the beliefs of the Tea Party as you understand them, or expressing your own, but there are a few statements in this post, which are often said, and each time I hear them it drives me crazy:
1. The whole unemployment rate going above 8% argument – Christina Romer, with her academic credentials, as well as her plain and cheerful looks and manner, was a very good spokeswoman on the economy. She did make a mistake early on in the Obama administration in underestimating just how terrible George W. Bush left the economy. This cannot be used to discredit initiatives taken to lower the unemployment rate.
2. The stimulus didn’t do enough – First of all there were many worthy projects supported. Lost in the whole media frenzy to cover the Tea Party outrage, important stories were largely missed about the support for alternative energy, broadband, education, and health care. Infrastructure also got a boost, as I can attest by just looking around my local area. As people should remember, the term “shovel ready” was the phrase of the day to make sure things got going fast. If there’s anyone to blame for bigger infrastructure projects being scuttled, it’s the Republicans with their Tea Party supporters who didn’t want a bigger stimulus and seemingly would prefer bridges to collapse rather than more government spending. Obama highlighted his desire for more infrastructure spending for the “Winning the Future” initiative outlined in his State of the Union address. And finally, if grad students got money to spend, what’s wrong with that?
3. Avoiding a depression – That, in my opinion, is a pretty big deal. How can one complain about government spending, and then say it avoided a depression, and not be happy about it?
4. Taxes – The Tea Party people complain about paying taxes. Are they all rich and selfish? My guess is that a majority paid less tax under the stimulus program, and are just ignorant. Ignorance goes a long way, in my opinion, for much of what the Tea Party wants. It’s not that they don’t like what government gives them, they just don’t want to pay for it. And as religious as they may be, their idea for helping the less fortunate amounts to putting some change in the church collection box. The notion that government, as a collection of people working together for the betterment of the country as a whole,is beyond them. It’s just, me, me, me. Good ol’ American individualism.
Now everyone’s talking about the deficit and the debt. Is the Tea Party angry that Obama spent six hundred billion dollars, or Bush’s trillions? You can definitely credit the Tea Party for moving that issue forward, though spending should be a priority in the near future to make sure the economy keeps growing and people find jobs. I wonder what those Tea Party folk who said “Keep your government hands off my Medicare” would say to Paul Ryan?
I agree with William Milberg. Obama wins in 2012! Or at least he better, and with more Democrats elected along side him. The antidote for the Tea Party must be people, who might not be easily defined, but who nonetheless get motivated to oppose this wave of nonsensical, mean-spirited, conservative, libertarian destructiveness from doing more damage.
I recall Rick Santelli’s rant well. In it, he denounced a bailout for “mortgage losers,” somehow forgetting that Wall Street had recently received a bailout out of their own. Indeed, without that bailout, Santelli might not have had the opportunity to spew forth his mean-spirited hypocritical rant. If Rick Santelli embodies the spirit of the Tea Party, I can do well without both.
However, Dr. Fine is correct in his claim that the Tea Party is difficult to categorize, and cannot be reduced to the spirit of any single individual. This has left the movement vulnerable to being highhacked by wingnuts in order to serve their own personal ends. Original, and more sane voices, such as Ron Paul have been shoved out of the picture.
Regardless, the movement as a whole seems to suffer from a collective delusion, one among many I may add, that the present tax rates are too high. In fact, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, in 2009 they were at their lowest rate since 1950. It is because of such ironies, or what Iris termed “ignorance,” that I am not inclined to take the Tea Party seriously; that, and the fact that Michelle Bachman has somehow appointed herself their spokeswoman.
Although they do carry some political clout, it seems doubtful to me that they can make a significant impact on the 2012 race as there is currently a push back against what the Tea Party has wrought.
“No thing” is a fascinating concept. By applying this concept, “no thing” does become “some thing” and has attributes; however, because it is “no thing” the attributes may be either real or imagined, an interesting instance of the social construction of competing realities to borrow a term from Berger and Luckmann. What’s more, the constructions do have real consequences.
“The public is demanding that, women desire this, blacks insist on that. We take diverse and divided non-groups and erase their differences. We create one from many. In so doing, we mislead.”
I totally agree with you here, Gary. Precision is an essential intellectual virtue. How can we speak seriously without it? “The public”? The public has no agency nor consciousness, only individuals do. Furthermore, by referring to abstract groups rather than individuals, we lose that connection between two minds that provides the possibility for changing another’s mind. And this is the heart of a healthy democracy: serious, rational debate with the aim to convince, but also the openness to be convinced.