Tenured Radical offered an interesting analysis of the Tea Party rally in Washington D.C. and their ultimate political viability. I am going to quote extensively from just a part of her post; the photos are from a Time magazine slide show.
Accidentally in D.C. during the rally, Tenured Radical took the opportunity to chat with some of the protesters. Here were some of her observations:
…while the media and the Republican party may want to bill this as an anti-health care march, as someone who was on the ground, I have to tell you that this was but one of many issues…
I would say that the spine of this protest is not any well considered opposition to health care, but to taxes, and to the idea of government itself…
One of the pamphlets I picked up was from FairTax.org, which proposes to run what is left of the country, and the gargantuan military that right-wingers believe is indispensable to preserving “our freedoms,” through sales taxes. The IRS would be abolished… But everyone else was there too: the anti-abortion folks; the gun folks; the anti-sodomy folks, the birthers, the anti-immigration folks, the home schoolers, the prayer-in-schoolers, and the folks who are always telling you the end is near. There was one person carrying a sign with his three issues, none of which had to do with health care: “The CIA protects our freedoms; End forced abortions; Child molesters deserve life in prison”…
I am sure the Republicans will try to bill this as “the people” rejecting “the President’s proposals,” but take it from me — there was something far more opaque and interesting going on than that. I think the Republicans are holding on to these shock troops by a thread, and perhaps not at all. Astonishingly, one theme that seems to be emerging… is that there is no difference between Obama and George W. Bush, a fantasy that I thought was the exclusive purview of Ralph Nader and Alexander Cockburn. One sign that pictured Obama as the Anti-Christ, when flipped, displayed Bush as the Anti-Christ. In fact, the Obama victory is proof-positive of the conspiracy that this right wing fringe has warned us about since the 1930s. In this apocalyptic scenario, Obama’s election is part of the Wall Street plot to bring America to its knees, and now it appears that George W. Bush was a critical agent in that plot. This was a very interesting discovery…
There’s more, but I think you get the picture… a group that is so internally fractured, unfocused and opposed to the political system is not a powerful interest group but a Frankenstein monster. These folks hate the Republicans too, and I think a lot of them are disappointed Goldwaterites for whom the conservative revolution that we historians are so fascinated by never happened. Their history is a story of decline, and of brave individuals fighting back against freeloaders, financiers and foreigners. “Everything Barack Obama says means something different,” The Obama Deception warns, For the Teabag people, this is a lesson to be learned more broadly about a political class that, from their perspective, only pretends to be a two party system. When they protest big government,” they are not Republicans, or even conservatives in the conventional sense of the word. They are defenders of personal liberty against a one party state linked to a secret global system, a state that floods a nation of good white working people with illegal immigrants and freeloading welfare cheats, chuckling relentlessly about how they are fooling all of us.
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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.
