Back in the day – as
in, back in the days immediately following President Obama’s election in 2008 –
the Tea Party made quite a splash. All over the country, all we saw
was “Taxed Enough Already” and “Don’t Tread on Me” signs with the creepy coiled
snake. Rallies abounded. Pissed off racists had endless energy for
mischief and making badly spelled signs insulting our new, black President.
There’s some quote
about cutting off the snake’s head, and the body will die; well, the tea
party’s head has been cut off, and all that’s left are muscle spasms and
dawning death.
The Sarah Palins and Herman Cains and Allen Wests and scores of other tea party politicians who jumped on the fast-running bandwagon, combined with the uninformed, highly uneducated, nearly illiterate, blindly racist, bullying, ignorant hordes of white folks determined to upend the presidency of the black guy with the foreign name, added a bit too much venom to the mix, and spoiled the tasty broth of 2010 tea party wins leading to the worst Republican Congress in history.
Despite tea party
optimism that the movement can rise from the ashes, it’s dicey; even
conservative Americans can only take so much bitterness, anger, racism, and
idiocy.
One screaming example:
Operation
American Spring – a sort of right-wing Woodstock’y event in
Washington for fun-loving patriots, designed to “restore the Constitution” and
“save our nation from the
‘outlaws’ or ‘commies’ or ‘Muslims’ or ‘Constitution haters’ who have now taken
it over the government” (Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Harry Reid, Mitch McConnell,
John Boehner, Nancy Pelosi, and Eric Holder, mainly) – fell a little short of
the 10-30 million people it was expecting.
Okay, it fell about
10-30 million short – only a couple of hundred showed up. And they blamed Glenn
Beck. Cool.
But the tea party has
plans to regroup, according to Amy Kremer, chairwoman of Tea Party Express – she’s looking at
a relaunch, “Tea Party 2.0.” They’re pretending to look past President
Obama’s presidency to a point in the future when he’s no longer president but
there are still problems to resolve; but in reality, the problems of the tea
party will be resolved once the White House is restored to the House of Whites.
And for the short
term, it’s the new Tea Party same as the old Tea Party: Annual cuts to
government spending (meaning cuts to food stamp programs, housing assistance,
heating assistance, and continued tax breaks for big money), a constitutional
amendment for some kind of flat tax, and, of course, a new end-run against
Obamacare consisting of attempts to trash it at the state level.
With the tea party now
boasting a 47% negative rating, Obamacare becoming more popular, and many
more people, including Republicans, relying on government assistance, that
whole 2.0 plan is going to be a hard sell.
Mitch McConnell,
despite a heavy disapproval rating in his home state of Kentucky, easily won
the primary on May 20th against tea party candidate Matt Bevin. The U.S. Chamber of
Commerce is said to be pouring millions into races backing “establishment” – instead of tea party –
candidates.
The likely outcome is
that as more mainstream Republicans begin to filter into political offices,
ousting tea party backed candidates, a number of former tea partiers will begin
to move left, leaving only a handful of hard-core tea partiers who will
continue to be the ten standing out in a crowd of 20.
This country has seen
extremism in its history, and the tea party is simply another extremist blot on
the historical landscape. But as the pendulum swings too far left or too
far right, we as a country begin to correct the balance.
The tea party may be
in it for the long haul, but most Americans, even conservative Americans, are
pretty much viewing it in their rear view mirrors. As the tea party dies,
what rises in its place is a more moderate, “establishment,” conservative
movement.
So-called “Reagan
Republicans” have become alarmed at the misogynistic, racist temperament the
tea party projects. When Republicans happily joined forces with the tea
party to sweep greater numbers of right-wingers into office, they sold their
souls to the devil; it’s finally beginning to dawn on the more savvy
Republicans that the tea party needs to be filed in the “long walk/short slide”
category.
Although the tea party
surely thought it was love, it was just another one-night stand
for establishment Republicans. The night is over, the bed is messy,
there’s a lot of clean-up ahead, and Republicans simply need to find a way to
skulk away before the tea party wakes up and wants to start talking
relationship.