Rant: Tea Time

The Tea Party movement has me baffled: I can’t figure out exactly what they’re for.

As far as I can tell, they’re not for anything. Some are clearly social conservatives who are very much against liberties they believe threaten the social fabric of our society: reproductive rights, de-criminalization of drugs, same-sex marriage. But others seem to be hard-core libertarians who would strongly oppose government intervention in those very matters.

Since the movement seems somewhat ad hoc and spontaneous, it’s not surprising that its members don’t share precisely the same views and desires across the board. But, in general, they seem to be just very much against the federal government. They want the nation to adhere to a renewed and very strict interpretation of the Constitution, one that would do away with any law or agency not expressly mentioned in the document. And for them that means mostly reigning in Washington’s reach.

They would have us do away with the Federal Reserve, with federal income taxes, and with any number of agencies that regulate our lives for better or for worse: the EEOC; the FDA, USDA and CPSC; the CDC and HHS; the FTA, DOE, EPA, FCC, FEMA and USGS; the DEA, FBI and CIA, not to mention the Library of Congress, the NEA and NEH, to name just a few.*

Without all those taxes and the agencies which rely on them, we’d also lose Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and Unemployment Insurance. There could never be any form of national health care. Surprisingly enough, many of the movement’s adherents oppose all those programs, despite having lost their jobs or health coverage themselves.

Many members of Tea Party groups and other Patriot organizations may have aligned themselves with the Republican party in the past. But their dissatisfaction with the state of the nation — and the world at large — has alienated them from traditional red-state politics.

In a New York Times op-ed piece , Frank Rich makes a distinction between the Republicans — “the party of No” — and this “Party of No Government at All.” Their ideology is more troubling than “the boiler-plate conservatism and knee-jerk obstructionism of the anti-Obama GOP Congressional minority.” They embrace Glenn Beck, Ron Paul and Sarah Palin who don’t seem to be offering anything in particular beyond a vague (and often bitter) dissatisfaction with everything. They embrace the ideology of the John Bircher Society, whose founder may be most famous for calling Dwight Eisenhower a “conscious, dedicated agent of the communist conspiracy.”

And this has left the Republican party in an uncomfortable situation. Here’s this groundswell of dissatisfaction with everything going on in the current administration. It’s deeply suspicious of the legislature and frustrated with its inability to do anything without a few perks in exchange for a vote. [Tea Party members are usually in favor of limits on corporate campaign donations.] It harbors a deep distrust of the President. [Many Tea Party members also subscribe to the theory that Obama is not a natural-born U.S. citizen.] The stage is set for the Republican party to take back many of its seats in both the Senate and Congress. The problem is that Tea Party Patriots seem to hate the Republicans almost as much as they do the Democrats. And addressing the concerns of a group without a clear political leader and without a clear set of demands is very difficult.

Enter their Patron Saint and Martyr, Joe Stack.

On February 18, 2010, Andrew Joseph Stack, III, flew his single-engine Piper PA-28 airplane from an airport in Georgetown, Texas. He traveled about 30 miles south to Austin, where he smashed it into an office building which housed offices of the Internal Revenue Service. Besides taking his own life in the crash, Stack also killed 68-year-old Vernon Hunter, a long-time employee of the IRS.

Stack offered some explanation for his attack in a posting he made to his business Web site about 45 minutes before he struck the IRS building. In the document, Stack describes his deep frustration with the U.S. federal government — particularly with the federal tax system — and expresses his hope that “by adding [his] body to the count,” he’d spur a popular revolt.

Not surprisingly Stack’s murder-suicide, a desperate and crazy act framed as an act of political conscience, got the attention of many in the Tea Party movement. Many proclaimed him a hero.

The Tea Party Patriots are against big government. They oppose our involvement in affairs outside our borders. They want the U.S. to divorce itself from foreign investments. They fear that forces secretly in control of this nation (and most others) are working to build a New World Order, one that will usurp individual rights and prerogatives, will dissolve national, racial and gender identities.

In short, Tea Party Patriots seem to be terrified of the world we live in. Ours is a world in which the U.S. is quickly losing the power and influence of its cultural and economic empire. It’s a world in which queers are fighting from within the system to secure oddly traditional rights like those of marriage and admission to the armed forces. It’s a world in which our arch enemy and a former underdog of world economics, China, holds almost a quarter of all U.S. Treasury bonds in circulation. And it’s a world in which the leader of our nation is a black man.

In their panic, some Tea Party Patriots have now embraced a domestic terrorist as their hero. This isn’t simply a disenfranchised political group. These people seem ready to destroy everything without any clear model for how to rebuild the world in their likeness.  In their fear of a world they don’t understand, they just want to bring it all down.

So how can the Republican party capitalize on this opportunity? By reaching out to the downtrodden and disenfranchised and telling them that they understand. By making public statements which sound to me alarmingly like sympathy for Stack’s murder-suicide.

Texas Republican gubernatorial candidate Debra Medina says she doesn’t sympathize with Stack, but that his act reflected “the hopelessness many in our society feel. … There is a sense in all of our country that we are not on the right path.”

Representative Steve King (R-IA) told a reporter, “It’s sad the incident in Texas happened, but by the same token, it’s an agency that is unnecessary and when the day comes when that is over and we abolish the IRS, it’s going to be a happy day for America.”

And Senator Scott Brown, the Republican Party’s newest poster boy, told Fox News, “… I don’t know if it’s related, but I can just sense not only in my election, but since being here in Washington, people are frustrated. … So I’m not sure if there’s a connection, I certainly hope not. But we need to do things better.”

“No one likes paying taxes, obviously. But the way we’re trying to deal with things and have been in the past, at least until I got here is, there’s such a logjam in Washington. And people want us to do better. “

Now, let me make sure I understand:

A guy declares himself an enemy of the U.S. government, flies a plane into a building occupied by government offices, and kills a man in the process. This is an act of “frustration”?

Voting for a minor third-party candidate or boycotting an election all together are acts of frustration. Picketing in front of a government office or chaining yourself to its doors are acts of frustration. But killing government employees is a much larger and more specific act of aggression than U.S. military tribunals have been able to pin on most of those men incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay.

I’m still a bit confused here, so please bear with me.

About eight and half years ago, in September of 2001, several men flew some planes into two buildings that weren’t even affiliated with the U.S. government. The collective voice of our elected officials and of the press called the men “cowards.” A few people took exception to that idea.

On the September 17 episode of his program, Politically Incorrect, Bill Maher said:

“We have been the cowards, lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That’s cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building: say what you want about it, it’s not cowardly.”

Denounced by everyone up to the White House, the program’s major advertisers pulled out and the show was cancelled the following June.

In the September 24, 2001 issue of The New Yorker, Susan Sontag also took aim at the idea that the terrorists’ acts were cowardly.

“And if the word “cowardly” is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others. In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday’s slaughter, they were not cowards.”

Susan Sontag did not lose a job over the piece. But Andrew Sullivan, among others, suggested that her words constituted treason.

So what’s most disturbing in all this? Is it that we have this potentially dangerously disaffected group of people whose only common bond is their general dissatisfaction with the world around them? Is it that these Tea Party Patriots seem to be channeling their generalized terror of a changing world into a severe kind of nihilism?

Or is it that there may be a grain of something reasonable at the core of the Tea Party groups’ dissatisfaction? If Republican politicians are willing to tread that fine line between alienating what may prove to be a significant block of right-leaning voters and actually endorsing domestic terrorism, maybe there truly is absolutely no integrity in government. Maybe the American empire has become so fat and corrupt that its demise is inevitable and imminent.

Or could there be a silver lining to this very dark storm cloud? Maybe this cleft in the otherwise unified red side of the country will prevent a disaster in the mid-term elections and we’ll still have a small chance of making some progress on national healthcare and the Defense of Marriage Act.

Maybe I’m asking the same question that seems to have entranced the Tea Party followers: should we be terrified of or hopeful for what’s around the next corner? I’m counting on some of us to come up with an optimistic answer.

For more on the Tea Party movement, see the picture David Barstow paints in his February 15, 2010 Times article.

* I know it’s really hard remembering what all these acronyms even stand for, so I’ll translate: Equal Employment Opportunity Commission; the Food and Drug Administration, U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Consumer Product Safety Commission; the Centers for Disease Control and Health and Human Services Department; the Federal Transit Administration, Department of Energy, Environmental Protection Agency, Federal Communications Commission, Federal Emergency Management Agency, and U.S. Geological Survey; the Drug Enforcement Administration, Federal Bureau of Investigation and Central Intelligence Agency; the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities. The list could, of course, go on and on.