Jan 20 2010
The movement explained….
This post deserves re-posting. My Canadian counterpart has accurately nailed why the tea bagger movement bears a better resemblance to French Revolution than to the American one. Reprinted in its entirety because its worth reading:
The Tea Party movement considers itself the spiritual heir of the Boston Tea Party that precipitated the American Revolution. Nothing illustrates their profound and almost desperate ignorance of their own national history quite like that.
As you likely know, the rallying cry of the Boston Tea Party was “No taxation without representation.” If like having your intelligence insulted, you’ve likely watched some of the modern Tea Party rallies on the TV machine. Something that is immediately apparent is the abundance of representation that these people actually have.
These rallies are – particularly the ones held in Washington, D.C – are actually infested with members of Congress. I can’t tell you how amusing it is to hear someone stand in front of a microphone and declare that “The American people are fed up with taxation without representation! Here to give voice to our anger are Representative Michelle Bachmann, Senator Tom Coburn and Governor Rick Perry.”
Moreover, I’m deeply suspicious of any movement that only discovered fiscal discipline on January 20, 2009. I can give you any number of statistics about the long-term spending of the U.S government and the debt it incurred long before President Obama came to office, but I doubt that anyone cares a whole lot about it. But here’s one fact that tells you what the Tea Party movement is really about: The United States rang up an impressive level of debt between the 1776 Revolution and the end of the Clinton administration. President George W. Bush doubled it in less than eight years.
Actually, the Bush debt might be considerably higher than that, since no one knows the extent of the loans and guarantees extended by the Federal Reserve in the fall of 2008, although it is thought to be in the trillions of dollars. Then there’s what’s happening to the U.S dollar itself, which lost approximately half of it’s value during the Bush years. That tends to hurt a country that no longer makes anything and imports all of it’s goodies.
Then there’s the cost of the War on Terror. For the first time in American history, the United States entered into a military conflict without end or serious prospect of victory. Since terrorism is a tactic and not a nation or even a group of people, a surrender ceremony on the deck of the U.S.S Missouri is impossible. Yet the Long War, as it is currently being fought, will involve interventions in dozens of countries and cost limitless amounts of money. However, the Bush administration and the Republican Congress cut the taxes expected to pay for such adventurism by nearly $3 trillion over ten years, which is so crazy that even Nazi Germany wouldn’t have considered it.
There were, as I remember it, no marches on the Mall or hysterical displays of teeth-gnashing during the Bush years. The fiscal insanity of the United States actually began during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, but it tore off the straight jacket once and for all in 2001. Yet the protests only began last February. Funny how that works, ain’t it? Had the outrage begun in, say, 2003, I’d be able to take it far more seriously than I do.
The Tea Parties have been described as a “populist explosion,” but by no historical definition has populism involved the financial backing and organizational skill of so many big-time think tanks and moneyed lobbying interests. One can hardly be presumed to be a “political outsider” when one finds his labors endorsed by Dick Armey, Esquire, of Texas and his FreedomWorks. When your money floweth from the teat of the insurance industry, you are perhaps little more than a tool of corporate interests, either wittingly, or worse, not.
I don’t question the sincerity of the vast majority of the protesters. Indeed, I’m usually rather pleased to see anyone protesting anything, these days. But I do question how thoroughly those people understand the issues and the history thereof.
The United States has been a debt-based economy since at least the early 1970s, not just at the governmental level, but at the personal level, which is far more dangerous. If the credit of the people is maxed out, you can’t really raise the tax revenue to pay for the services they demand, now can you? And that’s a key point the Tea Party movement misses, all of the spending and debt they decry is the result of representative government rather than the absence of it. Both parties have participated in the economic orgy equally, yet I don’t see the Libertarian Party picking up votes anywhere.
Which leads to another point that isn’t addressed nearly enough. The Tea Partiers are tools of the GOP. They might think that they’ll reshape the party, but that’s not what history indicates. The Tea Party movement isn’t wildly different from the John Birch Society of yore. And in the 60s, the Republicans co-opted the Birchers until their usefulness was exhausted, and then discredited them themselves. Does anyone really believe that Dick Armey, Tom Coburn and Michelle Bachmann are going intentionally destroy the GOP?
The Bircher comparison is more than apt when one considers the imagery and invective the Tea Partiers use. Does anyone think that painting a Hitler mustache on Barack Obama is any more intellectually serious than claiming that Dwight Eisenhower was a communist that wanted to indoctrinate everyone by fluoridating the water? The impact of that on the broader electorate is going to be the same as it was when Barry Goldwater thought he could “manage” the Birchers after William F. Buckley warned him of the folly of trying. No thinking adult equates President Obama with Adolf Hitler, regardless of what they think of his policies.
By the way, the Tea Partiers should note that Ike was the last Republican president to balance a budget. In fact, he did three times as he built the Interstate Highway System. Google it.
The Tea Parties are make for adorable television, and may yet give people like Sarah Palin their sixteenth minute of fame, but in the long run, they’ll amount to little else. Don’t get me wrong, I understand that hating the president is fun! I’m in my seventeenth year of doing it myself. Rallies, as the hippies of a bygone era taught us, are a neat way of meeting like-minded people and possibly getting laid, although the idea of “rugged individualists” feeling the need to form giant groups amuses me to no end.
But if painting Hitler mustaches and swastikas on stuff was going solve America’s intractable problems, I’m pretty sure that someone would have figured that out already. Just sayin’.
