Attacking the Tea Parties

A year ago the Tea Parties were being dismissed as nothing more than astro-turfed demonstrations paid for and coordinated by Fox News. A year later and they have shown strength and resilience. The Tea Parties had their first anniversary in February. This caused a new series of attacks from several sources, particularly the New York Times. Here is how a few of the attacks were handled.

First up is the nastiest. Bob Cesca of the Huffington Post boiled his attack down to one word - racism.

Because when you strip away all of the rage, all of the nonsensical loud noises and all of the contradictions, all that's left is race. The tea party is almost entirely about race, and there's no comparative group on the left that's similarly motivated by bigotry, ignorance and racial hatred.

In todays' world, there isn't a worse thing you can call someone than a racist but how does he justify this attack?

Strike that. Correction. TeaParty.org founder Dale Robertson brandished a sign with the (misspelled) word "niggar." So they're not even as restrained as the generally unstrung Atwater anymore.

Two problems here. The first is that the Robertson has no standing in any Tea Party groups. The second is that Cesca is asking you to ignore everything that the Tea Parties have done and only pay attention to one guy with one sign.

New York Times columnist Frank Rich uses a similar tactic but is much more subtle. He starts out by associating the nut who rammed his plane into an IRS office with the Tea Parties, even though there is no direct connection at all.

It is not glib or inaccurate to invoke Oklahoma City in this context, because the acrid stench of 1995 is back in the air. Two days before Stack's suicide mission, The Times published David Barstow's chilling, months-long investigation of the Tea Party movement. Anyone who was cognizant during the McVeigh firestorm would recognize the old warning signs re-emerging from the mists of history. The Patriot movement. "The New World Order," with its shadowy conspiracies hatched by the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission. Sandpoint, Idaho. White supremacists. Militias.

This is guilt by association and this is not a line of attack that Rich really wants to open. For example, he points out that Ron Paul won the CPAC straw-poll then uses Paul to link the Tea Parties to the 9/11 Truth Movement. The implication is that anyone linked to the 9/11 Truthers is a nut-case but the only Truthers elected to Congress or appointed as a Czar but the President have been Democrats. It is easy to hang around the fringes of a protest and find nuts. The piece that Rich linked to does not quote any organizers nor does it try to give a breakdown of the composition of the Tea Parties. That would spoil the message - that you should fear the Tea Parties because they are made up of angry whites with guns.

An interesting comparison is how the Times and other sources covered the anti-Iraq war movement and the March 4th protests last week. Many of these were organized by International ANSWER, a pro-marxist, anti-American group. These people support real, bomb-throwing terrorists like Hamas. Does the Times ever imply that you should be afraid of them?

Finally, for my quick survey, there is Newsweek's Elenor Clift. In a piece entitled Weak Tea (Party), she asks if it will be a lasting force and denigrates its accomplishments. I think that she is too quick to dismiss the effect that the Tea Parties have had on the primaries. Look at Texas, Florida, and Arizona.

To Clift's rhetorical question, "will it last?", I will give a real answer - no, but it's not going away on its own. The Tea Parties have two main components - a call for fiscal restraint, and a counter push to the rise of the Progressives.

First, there is a real constituency for fiscal restraint. Bush never believed in fiscal restraint. That was the point of his "compassionate conservatism". Even ignoring his wars, he ran up the deficit to new heights. The left ran against this as far back as the 2004 MoveOn.org Super Bowl ad. Fiscal restraint was part of the Democratic platforms in 2006 and 2008. With Bush's retirement, the Republicans have again become the Party of Reagan but the Tea Parties are skeptical that they have really reformed. If the Republicans can establish a record of fiscal restraint then they will absorb some of the Tea Partiers. This will take time.

The urgency that created the Tea Parties started with the huge amounts being tossed around in bail-outs, the stimulus, and the 2009 budget. It was given a boost by the economic failure of Portugal, Ireland, Greece, and Spain (the so-called PIGS). Iceland and Italy are in equally bad shape. The Tea Parties look at these countries as examples of the direction that our leadership is taking us.

The other factor is the rise of the Progressives. During the 2007 and 2008 Democratic debates, most of the candidates identified themselves as Progressives instead of Liberals. They also talked about returning to Progressive values and goals. This might have been simple re-branding but it led people like Glenn Beck to look up what the Progressives stood for in the early 20th century. It turned out that Progressivism came from the same root as Communism and Fascism. They all call for a huge expansion of government power. Given Obama's majorities in both Congressional houses and his penchant for taking over industries and appointing Czars, conservatives had reason to be scared. Given President Obama's self-identification as a Progressive, everything that he did was assumed to be part of a Progressive take-over of the country. This is why the Tea Party members seem to see conspiracies everywhere.

The last year has shown that the Obama administration is not competent enough to implement a Progressive agenda but that is not going to sooth the Tea Partiers. They fear tiny incremental changes that will add up over time (something that advocates of the current health care bill are promising). They will not go away until the Progressives are out of power.