I have mostly not commented on the Tea Party movement, because in all honesty, I am not sure what the overall point is. Don’t get me wrong, I think political expression is a healthy thing, and if people want to get together and state their opinions, it is their constitution right and part of democratic governance.
Still, I find myself ultimately puzzled over these Tea Parties.
First, because it isn’t as if the spending just started–it has been going on for some time. Indeed, whether it is massive social expenditures (the Medicare prescription drug benefit) or bailouts (TARP, loans to Chrysler and GM, bailout money for AIG, etc.), not to mention war spending, it all started under the previous administration, and some of it has been going on for years. So while I understand at some point enough is enough, it is difficult for me to take seriously all of this outrage on this topic right now.
Second, there have not yet been any tax hikes. Yes, some are on the table, which encompass the moving of the top marginal bracket to Clinton-era levels. One may not like those levels, but I don’t recall street protests over them in the 1990s. Further, I would wager that (like J. T. Plumber), that the vast majority of people protesting will get tax cuts if Obama’s plan passing Congress. As such, there is some cognitive dissonance going on here that I am having a hard time sorting out.
Glenn Reynolds tries to explain the whole thing is today’s WSJ, but really there isn’t an especially good rationale in the piece. Mostly, it seems that Glenn is trying to get us to focus on the flash mob/internet-based organization of these events to counter the argument that they are being organized by Fox News and GOP interest groups. I won’t weigh into that issue here, but I would have been more interested in an actual explanation of what the point is, and what the longer-term goals are.
Yes, he notes that it is an “anti-establishment protest” (an odd position, btw, for a basically GOP group) and there is “outrage” out there, but it all seems rather non-specific. It all honesty, to me it seems like outrage for outrage’s sake, which has been a hallmark of a great deal of rightish punditry of late (e.g., Santelli and Beck, to name two off the top of my head). In so many ways these Tea Parties feel like Talk Radio1 made manifest, and little else. That is to say: bluster, drama and criticism without much actual substance all aimed at an audience predisposed to agree. Sure, there are kernels of ideas and policies, but ultimately very little in terms of actual policy prescriptions. There certainly isn’t an actual argument being proffered.
All this describes, by the way, the current state of the Republican Party: populistic, critical and yet empty.
Along these lines, I concur with Andrew Sullivan:
Protesting government spending is meaningless unless you say what you’d cut.
[...]
All protests against spending that do not tell us how to reduce it are fatuous pieces of theater, not constructive acts of politics. And until the right is able to make a constructive and specific argument about how they intend to reduce spending and debt and borrowing, they deserve to be dismissed as performance artists in a desperate search for coherence in an age that has left them bewilderingly behind.
Indeed.
And it is time for the Republican Party to go beyond assuming that every problem can be solved by a tax cut and getting rid of wasteful spending. It is, unfortunately, far more complicated than that (even if we might like it to be so).
Sphere: Related Content- I use “Talk Radio” as a catch-all to include not just Rush and Hannity, but cable news programs like O’Reilly and Beck and bloggers like Michelle Malkin [↩]
April 15th, 2009 at 5:14 pm
Perhaps it’s akin to last year’s outrage over $4/gallon gasoline. It was a quick doubling of the cost at the pump. Perhaps $4/gallon, if done incrementally, would’ve been fine over the course of a few years. But it got there in only a few months and it really put a hurt on people. They [we] yelped!
Similarly, the gov’t spending has been going up pretty steadily tracking at a certain % of GDP even considering financing a war on two fronts, and then WHAM! the bail-outs, TARP, Stimulus…it was just too much all at once. People yelped again.
April 15th, 2009 at 6:25 pm
Steven, I was at a Tea Party rally today and I got the sense that conservatives are starting to band together in fear of where Obama is taking the country. The spending may be the catalyst to organize, but, conservatives, typically more individualistic than collectivist, are difficult to bring together. The fact that they are coming together is significant. Where it will lead is anybody’s guess, but it is significant that conservatives are massing, which isn’t in their DNA
April 15th, 2009 at 6:52 pm
Neither do I (in the sense that I haven’t bothered to look at the speeches all that closely, nor have I attended any rallies).
My interest is that big media outfits have covered other political gatherings where the reporters outnumbered the attendees (eg., the AIG executives bus tour), and gatherings which still had smaller attendance than the Tea Parties (eg., march on a coal fired power plant in DC — http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/03/02/jim-hansens-newfound-peers-at-the-capitol-climate-action/ ).
I personally don’t see why one story merits front page coverage, and another is only covered after months of repeat rallies. It’s hard to say “nobody’s interested” when in fact a large number of people are interested enough to show up. We all know it couldn’t be partisanship at the newspapers, so I’m at a loss.
April 15th, 2009 at 8:26 pm
Pete,
I got the sense that conservatives are starting to band together in fear of where Obama is taking the country.
This is what I mean by “Talk Radio made manifest”: if I was listening to, and believing, people like Beck and Limbaugh, I would be scared too.
However, I am unclear on “where Obama is taking the country”–what? deficits? nothing new there. Increased debt? no new. Bailouts? not original to his administration. An increase in taxes on the top bracket? it was that level under Clinton, and hence, not new.
One may not like any of that stuff, but the notion that it is some new, dangerous and dark place makes no sense.
April 15th, 2009 at 8:27 pm
Max,
I think it is possible that your own filters are at least in part responsible for your perception. I know I have been quite aware of these events over time, so the news is getting out somehow and somewhere. Since I haven’t done a systematic study of news coverage across multiple papers and such, it is really impossible for me to say that these events have been undercovered in a relative sense or not.
April 15th, 2009 at 10:31 pm
This protest is more a case of party-based pouting in the guise of a genuine concern.
I also would like to know this: does the frustration from watching things like this ever wear off? I don’t know if I should laugh or weep.
April 16th, 2009 at 12:01 am
Tanstaafl is not that hard to understand but to practice. Well, we know how that goes.
Maybe whatever passes for the ideologist for the movement will grasp it.
April 16th, 2009 at 1:08 am
[...] whole conservative/libertarian movement has been pretty much taken over what Steven Taylor calls “Talk Radio made manifest”. That is to say: bluster, drama and criticism without much actual substance all aimed at an [...]
April 16th, 2009 at 6:56 am
Steven, I should have been more specific by pointing out that what I sensed at the Tea Party was the fear that Obama’s agenda would grow government further. Conservatives did not like the government expansion under Bush, so they are frightened even more with Dems holding Congress and the WH. Their attitudes may not be formed by serious study of politics like yours, but through perception, and, as we all know, that can be dangerous. Yet, as I said in my earlier post, the fact they are coming together signifies a degree of uneasiness not apparent heretofore. Whether justified or not, it is happening. An example of the type of agitation/explanation read by conservatives is here:http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/04/tea_parties_about_far_more_tha.html
April 16th, 2009 at 7:53 am
pete, you’ve basically just validated steven’s statement, to wit:
i’m not saying that there’s no reason not to be uneasy about the times we are living in, but the repeated cries of socialism, fascism and other -isms coming from that particuar corner of the ideological universe make it very difficult to interpret this kind of theater as a serious opposition.(to say nothing about the drama that is glenn beck)
as you said- this is based more or on your gut feeling than actual, factual evidence. as far as i’m concered, i’m simply dumbfounded by the things i have seen from the ‘right’ since nov. 4th. to see grown-up, otherwise rational people throw hissy fits about barack obama, a democratically elected president of a free country makes me fear not for the safety of my country, but for the sanity of my fellow citizens.
April 16th, 2009 at 7:57 am
[...] one by one” fits exactly what I was talking about yesterday when I said the Tea Parties are Talk Radio made manifest and how that is infecting the Republican Party writ large. One expects the drive time radio guy to [...]
April 16th, 2009 at 8:06 am
(Imagine it’s 2006):
I have mostly not commented on the ~Anti-War movement, because in all honesty, I am not sure what the overall point is. Don’t get me wrong, I think political expression is a healthy thing, and if people want to get together and state their opinions, it is their constitution right and part of democratic governance.
Still, I find myself ultimately puzzled over these ~Anti-War protests.
First, because it isn’t as if war just started – it has been going on for some time. Indeed, whether it was Johnson’s dubious escalation of Vietnam (the Tonkin canard) or Clinton’s Balkin foray (Milosevic, you s.o.b.!), not to mention Bush the Elder’s U.N. spank of Saddam Hussein for invading Kuwait, U.S. military action all started under some previous administration, and some of it has been going on for years. So while I understand at some point enough is enough, it is difficult for me to take seriously all of this outrage on this current ~Iraq War right now.
*****************************
Imagine it’s 2006 and you never wrote an opinion like the one above - probably because you wouldn’t dare - even when the protesters proffered no specifics, only ‘end the war’ & ‘impeach the chimp’, that would be labeled “outrage for outrage’s sake”.
War is, unfortunately, far more complicated than that (even if we might like it to be so).
PS: I second Pete Burgess recommended reading from The American Thinker.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/04/tea_parties_about_far_more_tha.html
April 16th, 2009 at 8:15 am
locomotivebreath1901,
In fact, I considered the anti-war movement at the time to be of even less importance that the Tea Party movement because I never thought that that anti-war movement, especially it’s more wacky elements, were representative of the direction of the Democratic Party at the time.
You do realize, btw, that you are saying the following:
1. The Tea Party Movements are Like the Anti-War Protests.
2. The anti-war protests were ridiculous.
Ergo, via the transitive property (using your own logic), the Tea Party movement is ridiculous.
After all, if A=B, and B=C, then A=C
Although, I will note in fairness, that the anti-war movement started before the timeframe you are suggesting. And, even though I was not an anti-war protester, it was pretty obvious what those protests were about: they were anti-war.
April 16th, 2009 at 10:43 am
The reason that tea parties are happening is because Americans are tired of the corruption and irresponsibility in our government. Why should my tax dollars subsidize the greed and stupidity of others? Obama is taking us towards socialism… and it doesn’t work. The shining example is the USSR. Socialism in its most extreme form (a.k.a. communism) did not work in the USSR. It is not working in Europe (France is a good example) and it sure as hell won’t work here in the U.S. Our tax money bailed out companies that managed business poorly and rewarded those at the top with millions in bonus money. Why should executives be paid millions when the companies they managed had to take a government handout? The bailout was done by rich people for rich people. While the politicians and the executives line their pockets with tax money, they screw the rest of us as we lose jobs and homes. Maybe it’s time to invoke the first part of the Declaration of Independence: “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” We need a real direction in government, away from the path of tyranny that we are seeing now. It’s time to vote out the fat bastards in Congress and the White House that make themselves rich on our hard work and exempt themselves from the consequences of their actions. Once Americans wake up and get these fools out of office, the tea parties will no longer be necessary.
April 16th, 2009 at 10:58 am
Here’s the deal, if you are going to tell me that the USSR=France, then I have to say that you have no idea what you are talking about in re: “socialism.”
Beyond that, there is a great deal of irony is proclaiming that “Obama is taking us towards socialism” and yet also proclaiming that one of the underlying problems that you see is “he bailout was done by rich people for rich people.”
It is stuff like this that makes it difficult to take the Tea Parties (and the alleged threat from the current administration) seriously.
April 16th, 2009 at 11:33 am
[...] a comment to my post yesterday about the Tea Parties, a reader (I don’t think a regular) noted not only [...]
April 16th, 2009 at 3:21 pm
From what I understand, these have been held and organized by Libertarians for some time, and they’ve been in protest of BOTH major parties and their misuse of tax dollars. THAT I can understand the rationale for. (It’s also why you saw several Ron Paul supporters at these events.)
If I hear correctly from the Libertarians, the events were suddenly hijacked by Fox News and Republicans as THEIR event to protest the Obama administration and Democrats, but the new “sponsors” of the event don’t seem to have quite as much clout or purpose as the previous organizers.
And yes, Fox News was sponsoring the events, or at least gave a good appearance that they were. Their pundits attended the events as speakers or featured guests, and on at least one occasion, they referred to the parties as the “FNC Tax Day Tea Parties.”
April 16th, 2009 at 8:17 pm
I have been making the case that they manifest discontent with the two party system.
April 18th, 2009 at 3:18 pm
The tea parties did offer “constructive and specific” suggestions about how to reduce spending, contrary to what Andrew Sullivan claims. Indeed, many of the tea parties arose in opposition to Obama’s $800 billion stimulus package, which the Congressional Budget Office says will actually shrink the economy in the long run, contrary to Obama’s claim that it was needed to prevent “irreversible decline.”
The tea parties specifically identified two massive spending programs that need to be cut. The first is Obama’s $800 billion stimulus package. The second is the Obama Administration’s mortgage bailout, which would benefit even high-income people with modest mortgages (hence the “I can’t afford your mortgage” sign wielded by many protesters).
For having the temerity to protest the Administration broken promises (like Obama’s promise to enact a “net spending cut”) and out-of-control spending, the protesters have been attacked elsewhere in the most vicious terms as “redneck, racist Republicons” and as “a bunch of white old people and rednecks.”
Andrew Sullivan dismisses the tea parties as “opposition to the Obama administration’s spending plans, manned by people who made no serious objections to George W. Bush’s.”
I certainly made “serious objections to George W. Bush’s” spending plans. I condemned his costly prescription-drug entitlement in the Washington Times, and repeatedly condemned the $160 billion Bush “stimulus rebates” in 2008. I called his $700 billion Wall Street “bailout bill dangerous, inflationary, unnecessary, and unconstitutional.” And I condemned his multibillion dollar auto bailout.
April 18th, 2009 at 8:59 pm
Hans,
I have no doubt that individuals had specific ideas and critiques. However, I would note that there was no unified set of recommendations from the Tea Parties in general. Second, objecting to the stimulus package is pointless. Not only is it not going to be repealed, but it is a one time event, and even if it was repealed, that is hardly a long term fix to our fiscal problems.