On his blog, Kevin Moore writes:
The argument goes that if the Obama White House had done more to create jobs and had done a better job advertising this fact, the demise of Blue Dog Democrats and the rise of Teabag Republicans could have been avoided. There is truth there, but what I don’t understand is why the electorate would put in place people even less likely to solve the country’s economic problems. If the GOP or the Tea Party had actually advanced real ideas about creating jobs and strengthening the economy’s fundamentals, their victories on Tuesday would make more sense. But they didn’t. They espoused only a more extreme version of the same tax-cut-and-small-government rhetoric we heard ad nauseum during the Bush years — an eight-year reign that ended only two years ago, mind you, with disastrous results. They should have been “shellacked” at the polls just as harshly as the Blue Dogs.
But by what? This is a two-party system. If you punish one party, you can only do it with the other. The only virtues of the Tea Party has been their espoused distrust of both parties and their tactical infiltration of GOP. A more reasonable and more productive response by voters would have been to form a strong third party to propose policies and solutions that the other two parties are incapable (by virtue of their corporate backing) of formulating. So far, this has not happened.
If anything, I think what this election shows is that although third parties aren’t viable in the USA, it is possible for a “second and a half” party like the Tea Party to succeed. The Tea Party sees itself as separate from the Republican Party, but nonetheless they’re running against the GOP in Republican primaries, and supporting some ideologically compatible GOP candidates. You can argue over whether or not this strategy has been good for the GOP — but it’s certainly been good for the Tea Party. And it’s certainly given their views more power in Congress (both because of the members they’ve elected, and because of the GOP incumbents who will now hesitate to vote moderately for fear of being primaried by the Tea Party).
Could the Tea Party model – a “second and a half” party — work for progressives?
Yes and no.
Yes in theory, because all you need is a consensus issue, something that is both compelling enough to attract a critical mass and feasibly salable to the electorate as a whole. For the Tea Party, this is taxes are “too high/government is too big” with the particular spark being the Bush banking bailouts. Social issues (and some economic issues) on which Tea Party members have all the same divisions as the rest of the country, are subordinated to the consensus issue. Me and Fred are both TP supporters; Fred is vociferously pro-life, anti-war and pro-cop, while I am squishily pro-life, not anti-war in any meaningful way, and quite suspicious of the police. Those things don’t matter; we agree to disagree on them, and both work to support Senator Cheap, who promises to make the Marines have a bake sale and replace food stamps with nutritious cardboard.
You guys have some issues like that. I don’t know exactly how you’d spark it (I would not have guessed that Republican-led bank bailouts would be what galvanized all the incipient loathing of big government) but I am sure that something about constructing a racially harmonious society would be popularly salable and endorsable, in theory anyway, by everyone in the “Progressive Tea Party” movement.
In practice, no. Start adding progressives to a room one by one, and by the third person you have four factions, most combinations of which aren’t speaking to one another. My impression is that people on the left tend to ride their hobby horses pretty hard, and they aren’t willing to put them away. When you guys schism, you schism hard. I don’t see the trans activists and the gender-essentialist feminists agreeing to just put all that stuff aside to work together for the common good. “I’m not giving up on [card check|gay rights|women’s issues|w/e] just so we can play kumbayah about how everything is great racially!!!”
You guys seem to form medium-sized groups on single issues or issue groups where everyone in the group agrees, and the people who gravitate to the groups are the ones for whom the issue is the Be All End All. Then your politicians try to stitch up coalitions of the groups. (If that reads as dismissive, it’s not meant to be. That’s a pretty good political strategy.)
So could it happen? I guess. I don’t see it though.
I agree with Robert.
The reason why the Tea Party was effective is because it took a lot of people and focused them on a single issue. Add to that the fact that there are not many conservative grass-roots movements.
The “problem” with progressives is that they have already divided up their grass-roots efforts into many small factions (e.g. environmentalism, animal rights, abortion, feminism, civil rights, gay rights, pacifism). These groups may agree about a lot of things, but it would be difficult to unite them under a single banner.
The progressives would have find a unifying principle and convince the people that that principle is more important than the subordinate factions. The only such principle I can think of would simply be “progressivism.” But, I don’t think that that is a very tangible idea to rally around.
-Jut
third party progressive candidates have a tendency to split the electorate. i’m thinking here of our experience here in VT in the 2008 gubernatorial elections, where anthony pollina, the progressive, neatly halved the democrat vote (which still wouldn’t have overcome the vote for the incumbent republican). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Pollina#2008_State_Governor
the trick would be to get these second-and-a-half party progressives in as democrat candidates, infiltrate the race via the primary process, as many of the TPers did this round and stop running progressives as a bona fide third party. that’s where the real success came for the TP.
… what I don’t understand is why the electorate would put in place people even less likely to solve the country’s economic problems.
If you don’t understand why people voted for the Tea Party movement endorsed candidates, I don’t think you’re going to be too successful in a) formulating the basis for what you would consider to be a left-wing equivalent and b) getting people to vote for it.
So I’d say you’ve got some analysis to do. You might want to start by talking to some actual Tea Party supporters and find out what they were thinking. I’d further suggest that you do not ask them “If you’re so concerned about the economy, why did you vote for someone that isn’t likely to be able to fix it?” Listen to them. Don’t lecture them.
Could the Tea Party model – a “second and a half” party — work for progressives?
No.
Liberals–or, more accurately, “progressive” liberals–run cliquey groups. Both the feminist and ant-racist movements, for example, are heavily invested in deciding who is listened to; who gets classified as a “supporter” or “member” or “ally” or “person entitled to tell others to shut up and listen” or what have you.
Also, those same groups tend to focus on the perfect at the expense of the good. Trying to minimize collateral damage is one thing; trying to eliminate it entirely means that you can hardly fight or act. Lots of potential solutions get discarded because even though they’re good and would produce an improvement, they’re not good ENOUGH for the group leaders.
Finally, the groups often focus on inclusion of disempowered political minorities. But the obvious problem with including any political minority group is that you either have to give them special privileges, affirmative-action style, or you have to be OK with the fact that they’ll get outvoted most of the time. Progressives don’t like to admit to the first solution, and aren’t willing to accept the second solution.
All of those traits are a losing battle in terms of power.
If you want to start a movement with political power, you need a lot of members; a defined issue on which they agree; a focus on that issue as primary; a willingess to look past other competing issues in order to reach your goal; and a reasonably simple organizational and participatory process.
If you want Bob’s vote on the ERA and if you’re like the tea party then you need to be nice to him and invite him to your rallies and not insult him, even if he’s only voting because he promised his daughter he would, and even if he really thinks that women are better off staying home and having kids.
If you want Mary’s vote on DADT and her public support for gay rights, and if you’re like the tea party, then you need to refrain from calling her a homophobe if she asks you whether perhaps some of the gay activist parades could cut down on the leather and nudity and, you know, that stuff?
As a comparison:
I’m a solid Democrat, and though I’m sure there are a few things we agree on, largely I disagree with TP issues. But if I were to support it just for the “shrink government!” movement even if I didn’t like the rest, they’d probably have signed me up–pro-choice, atheist, as I am. They seem more likely to care about my vote, not my bona fides.
vs.
I’m a solid Democrat, and though I’m sure there are a few things we disagree on, largely I agree with progressive issues. But if I were to sign on just for a main issue I but not all of the collateral or minor issues, they’d quite possibly have denied me membership–white, male, privileged as I am. Or I’d have been a “supporter” or an “accepter,” but not an “ally” or “participant” or whatever. They seem more likely to care about my my bona fides than my vote.
G&W – atheistic democrat pro-choicers welcome. Make a “Show us the Birth Certificate” sign and I’ll pick you up for the next rally.
No, we will not see a two and a half, left, Tea Party. The reason why the Tea Party got attention is because powerful interests with money and powerful media outlets liked what they saw. The Tea Party rallies got much attention in the media, interviewed on talk shows, pundits attended their meetings, etc. There was no corresponding interest in the left’s anti war rallies. No one is interviewing Answer (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism), http://www.answercoalition.org/national/index.html, to see what makes them tick, or to laugh at how crazy they are. The media does not cover their rallies and most Americans have never heard of them.
Few government regulators, small government , low taxes, is a corporate wet dream. The Tea Party represents working class anger co-opted by the managerial and elite classes to further their own oppression. Of course they are allowed to have attention focused on them. A left alternative party structure would challenge corporate power and will not be tolerated or encouraged
I don’t think small government is a defined issue on which all TPers agree. They don’t want government to be less big nearly so much as they want it to be less Democratic. This is, after all, a movement that didn’t spring up in response to the Bush years of big spending and wiretapping and defining simple dissent as some kind of crime against America, but one that sprung up the week Obama was inaugurated.
Their ‘defined issue on which they’re all agreed’ is that they don’t like having a black Democratic president. They’re not a second-and-a-half party; if they were, they’d be entering Democratic as well as Republican primaries. They’re the Republican party.
The question isn’t whether the left needs such a movement, but why the Tea Party has seen much more visible success than its Bush Era parallels. farmgirl #7 seems to have this one covered.
I think the answer is no, and it has to do, in part, with authoritarian tendencies. This is similar to the reason there is no left-wing version of Fox News. A significant proportion of the right is attracted to conservative authoritarian messages. The proportion of the left that is attracted to authoritarian messages is not likely large enough to support a left-wing tea party any more than it is likely to support a left-wing Fox News.
farmgirl has the correct answer. The nominal populist Tea Party never formed any sort of coherent organization, and suffered from significant factionalism between fundamentalists and libertarians, but it didn’t matter because a small group of very rich people and major corporations decided to pour money into far right candidates (who we call Tea Party candidates this year).
If George Soros and Bill Gates decide America needs a Coffee Party, then it has a chance of being as big a thing (although it would help if progressives had a Fox News to publicize it).
On the other hand, the key component is recruiting serious progressive candidates in 50-60 swing districts, and that I think Dems can do. Our disadvantage is that we are limited to competent and relatively moderate progressive candidates, rather than being able to run actual radicals with no government experience as the Republicans were able to. However, there is no reason that we can’t win primaries with people who will join the progressive caucus instead of the blue dogs. We’ve seen from the success of the tea party (and progressives like Alan Grayson and conservaDem populists like Perriello) that it doesn’t require a blue dog to win in a swing district.
Bull hockey. You’re bringing up a deus ex machina to try to blame it all on a few rich folks.
Is it really necessary to blame all the differences on them? Do you not consider that the ability of those people and organizations to (a) band together, and (b) attract other rich folks, was itself related to the underlying issue selection, framing, operation style, and presentation?
I know it may seem easier to rest securely on one’s laurels, proud in the (unproven) assumption that things would work just as well with the same money and a different platform. But I think that’s an odd mix of sour grapes and hubris.
And this: The Tea Party represents working class anger co-opted by the managerial and elite classes to further their own oppression. has to be one of the most bullshit patriarchal lines I’ve ever seen.
No, farmgirl. The tea party isn’t filled with uneducated idiots who are sheep to the corporate overlords, any more than the progressive movement is filled with uneducated idiots who are sheep to the most-progressive-cause-celebre-of-the-moment. Which is to say, both are true but not to really different extents.
For example, the party represents people who disagree with the concept that we should “have solidarity with Iran,” and who disagree that economic sanctions against Iran are an act of war (that site you linked.)
As for this: “If George Soros and Bill Gates decide America needs a Coffee Party, then it has a chance of being as big a thing (although it would help if progressives had a Fox News to publicize it).”
Actually, Soros has far from shirked from using his money to avoid political causes. And although Fox News is a pain in the ass, it’s bloody ridiculous to pretend that there aren’t equivalent liberal media, as balanced across the spectrum of importance.
The problem is that the coffee party doesn’t exist, or that if it does it has a message which can’t attract Soros and gates to give money to it.
My feeling is that no, we don’t need a Tea Party of the left. We’ve been there, done that, bought the t-shirt. Remember the New Left and McGovern? How well did that work out for the left or the US? This time, why not sit back and let the right assemble the circular firing squad. I’m sure they’ll be every bit as adept at it as the left was.
ETA: Ok, maybe that was a bit overly cynical. The leftist movements of the 1960s certainly did have a positive effect on the country. Whether the Tea Party will leave any damage…probably. But I don’t like the idea of a movement based on the Tea Party with leftist ideals. It just seems like a bad idea.
The double — er, triple — negative here is confusing — I honestly can’t tell if you mean that Soros has, or has not, used his money for political causes. I’m guess you meant “has.”
I don’t believe there is an equivalent to Fox on the left, that matches Fox for ideology and reach. MS-NBC is the closest there is, and they’re far from as loyally lefty as Fox is loyally right-wing; witness the firing of Phil Donohue for not marching lockstep with Bush on being pro-war, or the recent chastisement of the annoying yelling man with the white hair.
No, there’s no direct Fox News equivalent.
However, Fox news basically stands alone. I am not sure how to precisely classify the liberal bent of the media, but its not reasonable to look at Fox outside of context. If fox is a Grade A conservative channel, it can be countered by a Grade A liberal channel, or by a bunch of Grade B liberal channels.
What Fox has done–successfully–is to identify its goals, stick to a particular message, and sell it. Hmm. That sounds familiar….
Farmgirl –
The TP viewpoint is not, in fact, a corporate wet dream. Corporations love regulation, because it serves as a free barrier to competition. In addition, they can usually capture the regulators and turn the regulation into part of their business plan. Low taxes have no impact on corporations; corporations do not pay taxes in any meaningful sense. Liberals never understand this, and their understanding of the motivations for corporate behavior always seem to be ludicrously off-base. Big companies like big government, so long as the big government isn’t Chavez-esque, but rather orients its control efforts toward ordinary citizens and consumers, rather than corporate citizens.
Charles –
I have seen no evidence that “big money” donations on the side of Republican candidates had any notable influence this year. Do you have any such evidence?
It’s a lot more emotionally comfortable to decide that billionaires bought attention and results, than to think that a huge chunk of the population rejects one’s political preferences. I think that comfort might be luring you a little bit.
To put it another way, which corporate donation is responsible for the fact that stay-at-home me, who hasn’t attended a political rally in 20 years, made time to drive to Denver five or six times in the last two years to hold up a sign?
Because I’d like to get my check.
I think the best issues on which to galvanize a progressive tea party would probably be either election reform, anti-war, and/or global warming.
But I will say this. I think it’s time to do away with things such as “everybody’s racist” styles of diversity training along with all these “privilege checklists”.
***For what it’s worth I’m an Irish American female.
I think that particular brand of diversity training is divisive and tends to sing a similar tune to the Vietnam (and now Iraq/Afghanistan!!) Dolchstosslegende in many subtle but devastating ways. I think it is based on this sick idea that you have to make authorative statements about the life experience of everyone in the room to argue that certain prejudices even exist.
We should go back to the sort of diversity training that was more common in the 70’s and 80’s. The kind that used humor as a way to underscore the prevalence of certain social stereotypes and their absurdity. I think that old variety was a lot more effective and a lot less divisive. There will have to be some changes to account for the changing times of course. But I think we need to throw away this sort of nitpicking form that tries to hard to “make it personal” and doesn’t allow people to think for themselves.
Also I think we need to question that whole “coasts vs. middle America” nonsense and base our understanding of these things on the Albion’s Seed model (from the horse’s mouth of course, not tendentious spin offs like “Born Fighting” by James Webb). We need to stop buying the myths about horrible hippies “alienating the working classes” and start understanding the truth about regional identities in America and their deep connections to the colonial past. That way we can gain a more sophisticated idea of how American voting patterns work. And this includes stopping this dumb business of conflating what Albion’s Seed model describes as “Borderer culture” with the “white working class”. We need to understand that the idea of a monolithic “white working class” is nonsense. And that “white working class Republicans” is largely a Southern/Appalachian phenomena rather than the result of some horrible failing by the left or corporate scheme.
Finally, we need to stop buying into this sort of “right wing poor mouth” and realize that if you look at the actual tea party that is it NOT about “working class anger”. Certainly the tea party has plenty of working class members. But if you look at actual figures on income distribution on the tea party and on how frequently (or infrequently!!) most of them actually go to church, you will find that the claims about the tea party as very religious and very blue collar are obvious nonsense.
I think we can have a strong left movement. But it’s time for some fresh ways of approaching problems.
How about The Daily Show? Not to compare the two in terms of quality (TDS wins hands down) but in terms of popular appeal and freedom to broadcast pretty much whatever they want no matter how op-edy it is.
Robert,
Your side did very well at motivating voters to get out and vote. The campaign to motivate voters cost lots of money, and received plenty of free support from Fox News. If you are unaware of who was funding the organizations that organized the rallies you went to (and the candidates you voted for), well, google is your friend.
Certainly, the entire thing wasn’t astroturf (astroturf doesn’t vote), but pretending that having hundreds of millions of dollars in money poured into your efforts by a few very rich people and some huge corporations (a) didn’t happen or (b) didn’t matter, just makes you look either incredibly ignorant or completely disingenuous.
There is another thing about this that I’d contest.
This big wave election driven by hatred for the president for being a black muslim war criminal, and how wouldn’t it be cool if the Democrats were capable of doing that? We did that in 2006, and then again in 2008. Go hunt up the paper that everyone cites as showing that elections can be predicted based on the economy, number of new seats won last election, and presidential popularity (and which the Republicans beat this year). That paper is actually talking about how the usual models based purely on the economy and seat overhang didn’t work in 2006 because people hated Bush so much they came out and swept Dems into power.
The big difference is that the money in the Republican party backs far right Repubs like many of those who just got elected, while many of the Dems who got elected in ’06 and ’08 were corporate Dems (which is what the big money backs on the Dem side). Even so, the Progressive Caucus grew from 58 in 2004 to 69 in 2007 to 81 members in 2009 and will likely grow even further after this election. Hey, come to that, how many of the new Repubs are actually far right Tea Partiers, and how many are just standard right-wing Republicans? Can anyone tell me, or are we just all assuming that Republicans won because of the Tea Partiers, therefore the Republicans who won must be Tea Partiers?
Furthermore, a member of the Progressive Caucus heads the House Democrats, while neither the House nor the Senate Republican leader is a credible Tea Partier (they both voted for TARP), and it doesn’t look likely that Jim DeMint will be able to become Senate Majority leader (“Tea Partier” Marco Rubio says he supports McConnell) or that Michelle Bachmann will be able to get even the lowest position in the House leadership. And the Progressive led Dem controlled House passed some damn good legislation (which was then bottled up in the Senate by the Republicans and the few most conservative Democrats). While the Tea Partiers have few legislative objects (and will probably be happy with just shutting down the government), if the Tea Party voters think the people they elected are going to repeal the ACA or impeach Obama, or cut the deficit, or spend more money creating jobs, they are going to be very severely disappointed in the next two years.
One last thing.
The most important first step to getting a second and a half party on the Left, the thing that needs to happen right now (well, next January)?
End the fucking filibuster. Kill it dead, and allow the Senate to actually pass legislation again. We’ll need this when we retake the house in 2012… (a 30 seat swing is not unlikely, holding on to the senate is the harder task). A majority isn’t worth snot if you can’t actually use it to do anything.
Actually, that is one big advantage the Tea Partiers have over the Progressives. Making the government not work is a lot easier than making the government work.
All this says to me is that Americans need a proportional voting system.
And don’t worry about the Tea Party. They’re saying a lot of “we need change” messages now, but like Obama, once they actually get down to the business of governing, they will have no choice but to moderate their tone. People don’t change Washington, Washington changes people.
Honestly, your nation has survived successive Republican and Democratic governments. Yet every single time one side wins, the other cries that it will be the death of the US, while the victors triumphantly crow that this time, THIS TIME, they’re here to stay, FOREVER. Which is ridiculous.
The left doesn’t need a “tea-party” like group – it won handily in 08 without one. But after an election victory, the base stopped caring as much. It happens after every election. It’s why it is very rare for either party in the US to hold on to power for more than two terms.
Look, go read some history. The Tea-Party aren’t all that new, nor are their views. The fact that parties can lose elections now and win elections later is not especially startling. Everyone wants to believe that they live in special times, when the truth of the matter is that the US is going to continue to plod along the same path of excruciatingly slow change, as it has been for decades.
It’s just funny that every time a party loses or wins, commentators make a huge fuss like it’s some sort of gigantic, never before seen event, when in reality, this sort of stuff has been going on since the US began. It’s all about perspective people.
@Charles –
And the liberal candidates received no donations of time or money?
Both parties attracted enormous sums of money, from both grassroots donors and from big-money groups.
The presence of money doesn’t delegitimize one side while leaving the other standing. Our side spent hundreds of millions. Your side spent hundreds of millions. There was some variation in categories, but both sides raised and spent broadly equivalent sums of money.
General question for whoever wants to answer it: Why are supposedly rational and profit driven business people like Koch supporting the Tea Party? I can’t imagine anything worse for business than a major Tea Party success. Do they really think that a President Palin would be good for the economy or your business? Think about what “centerist*” Bush did to wreck the economy already, guys and reconsider…
*Per Tea Party standards.
Why are supposedly rational and self-interested minority groups like blacks supporting the Democrats? I can’t imagine anything worse for genuine racial reconciliation than a major Democratic success. Do they really think that a President Obama is going to be good for race relations and for their daily lives?
This reminds me a bit of a “disproof” of the existence of God an agnostic acquaintance was toying around with. Basically, God’s observed behavior didn’t make sense according to the assumptions and structures that the agnostic had set up. Therefore, there is no God! The acquaintance came (on his own) to recognize that logic doesn’t work that way. I can’t prove that cats aren’t real by defining a cat as a 10-pound mouse with tentacles, and then showing the lack of 10-pound betentacled mice in the natural world.
“Your viewpoint doesn’t make any sense, when I frame it according to my worldview.” Not a big shock.
I can’t imagine anything worse for genuine racial reconciliation than a major Democratic success.
Why? What evidence do you have that a Republican win would be more likely to bring about genuine racial reconciliation? (Starting with a definition of “genuine racial reconciliation” would be nice.)
Here are a couple of reasons I think a Tea Party win would be bad for the economy:
1. History. Bush was a disaster for the economy. Hoover the same. Reagan’s record was mixed, but mostly pretty bad.
2. Industry (using the word loosely) in the US is dependent on having educated workers. The days where you just needed a bunch of people with strong backs, literacy optional, are long gone. Reducing support for public education means reducing your available work force.
3. A conversation I keep having with the admin here:
Me: “We need to hire another X.”
Admin: “We can’t afford it.”
Me: “The salary for X is only Y. That’s about what X could make in [increased number of patients’ seen/increased bill collection/decreased risk of error by overworked practitioner and subsequent lawsuit] a few weeks [usually an optimistic estimate]”
Admin: “It’s not just the salary. We can’t afford to pay benefits”
One of the biggest benefit costs is health insurance. Take health insurance out of the equation by making it government sponsored and you’d get lower unemployment and better functioning business organizations. Plus higher bonuses for the stockholders.
4. Cutting taxes means cutting infrastructure. How are companies going to get their products to customers without roads?
5. History again. The US used to be a libertarian paradise, back in the 19th century. Life expectancy was lower, there were regular “panics” on Wall Street that make the current economic slowdown and the Great Depression look like minor blips, poor food, air, and water quality, regular loss of life due to adulterated products…Do you really want to go back to the days when sausage was literally made by scraping the cow poop off of the slaughter room floor and putting it in intestines? I suppose that’d be good for the manufacturers of Imodium, but other than that, I don’t see how it will help the economy.
So you ask me for evidence, and then you present a bunch of opinion and anecdote and subjectively-expressed history for your query’s premise. See how that works? I can provide you with a bunch of opinion and anecdote, too. Neither of the functional premises of our queries are objective.
“Abortion rights mean that men are never held responsible for the children they father! Why do feminists support abortion rights, when it means the oppression of women!!!!!”
You can’t frame MY preference in YOUR terms and come up with anything meaningful about me.
My thinking is that strong public option for health care would be the best possible thing for business in America. Especially small businesses.
Why? They would no longer have to pay for their employees insurance anymore!!
They don’t have to now.
They aren’t required by law. But there is a lot of pressure to do so by labor unions, by the need to attract “quality” employees, and the fear of losing certain employees at the wrong time.
If we had a public option it would be unnecessary for any employer to even raise the issue of paying for health insurance. Which I think would benefit employment and business tremendously.
People who need to be attracted and kept, i.e. high-skill, high-status individuals, are not going to be interested in signing on to the welfare health insurance option. The “public option” was not for a lavish healthcare net, it was a subsidized basic insurance program.
If you’re trying to differentially attract high-end workers, you’re still going to have to offer them something above and beyond what your competitors offer.
It seems to me like the Tea Party became the “change we can believe in” more than Obama’s administration, at least in the eyes of the public. This incredible amount of hype backlash against Obama – who really could only become a President and not Superman – plus the unequaled skill of the right’s marketing, led to TP being seen as the underdogs who were shaking up the government.
Is it true? Probably not. As Korolev said in a previous comment – “People donâ��t change Washington, Washington changes people.” Robert has a damn good point as well about the levels of grouping/excluding in the Democratic party – actually, Robert’s first post is basically the roadmap I see as well. Dems need a uniting issue that isn’t complicated (something that doesn’t need a 101) and that touches everyone’s lives – and that they can be active in.
I think everyone has shown a lot of insight on this particular thread and I really hope the conversation keeps up.
I would really like the left to continue to consider the Tea Party movement as being made up of uneducated white people being led around by the nose by Fox News commentators backed by huge amounts of corporate money. As long as the left completely misunderstands who’s involved and what’s going on they’ll be sure to fail in their attempts to re-take the House and hold the Senate.
The tea party supporters are mostly upper-middle class, older white people. they are better educated than average (although I suspect in line with the rest of their demographics). 2/3rds get their information from Fox. They believe Obama is much further left than the rest of the country does. The core activists of the tea party are significantly motivated by a personal dislike for Obama (they just don’t like him). Nearly 2/3rds have a favorable impression of George Bush. 50% believe that too much has been made of the discrimination that blacks face, and 1/4 think that Obama has favored blacks over whites.
source
So, yes, if anyone is claiming they are uneducated (as opposed to misinformed), that isn’t true…
… and they had presidential election level turnout.
At Ron’s urging, I decided to learn a little more about the Tea Party movement so I can maybe figure out why they voted the way they did. From previous interactions I had formed the impression that they were mostly a bunch of ignorant whackos, but I realize that my evidence was anecdotal and likely to be subject to sampling bias. So I let the professionals do the sampling for me, and checked out the New York Times/CBS poll of TP supporters to find out what makes them tick. (The poll is from April of this year.)
The following jumped out at me:
The overall impression that I get is that they are very angry at the government and they don’t like the way things are being done. They feel that the government is out of touch with ordinary Americans. Although they tend to be conservative socially, they are far more concerned with economic issues.
Specifically (and I intended this part to be small, but so much just made my jaw drop): They are overwhelmingly white, and tend to be older and Republican and around 70% make more than the median income. Though they are rather dissatisfied with the Republican party, their dissatisfaction with the Democratic party, Congress, and Obama in particular is overwhelming. They were twice as likely to blame the poor economy on Obama than on Bush, despite his only being in office for 14 months vs. 8 years for Bush. They are opposed to federal economic stimulus programs. They overwhelmingly want a smaller government, but about a quarter of those don’t want to achieve this by cutting programs like SS, Medicare, education, or defense. (???) They like Medicare and SS by a 2:1 margin. They think of Obama as “very liberal”(77%), and that he is moving the country towards socialism(92%). When asked if Obama was born in the US, 59% (!!!) did not answer yes. (The survey did not ask if this was because they thought he was born in Kenya, or because they thought Hawaii was not part of the US.) 64% thought that, as of 4/2010, Obama had raised taxes for most Americans. They VASTLY overestimate the amount of Federal income tax that most Americans pay; their average guess was around 20%, while the IRS has the median taxpayer somewhere between 3-7%. Surprisingly, about half think that the amount they’re paying is fair. (I guess if I thought that the average was 20% and I was only paying 7%, I’d think it was pretty fair too.) 85% think people should not be required to have health insurance, but 59% think that insurance companies should have to cover people with pre-existing conditions. (After factoring in the no-answers, it works out to at least 47% who think that people should be able to forego insurance while healthy, then be able to buy it AFTER they get sick.) 73% think that government benefits encourage poor people to remain poor. They overwhelmingly think that illegal immigration is a “very” serious problem. 66% think that global warming either doesn’t exist or won’t have a serious impact. 73% think that white people and black people have about an equal chance of getting ahead (So why haven’t they, then???), and 52% think we’re making too much of black people’s problems.
So, after learning about the Tea Partiers, I am left with the impression that they are angry, but ignorant and misinformed, and that logical thought comes difficult to them. This is probably the reason why they voted in ways that are unlikely to bring about the results they desire; they will likely find the job of governing more difficult than they thought it would be. Aside from aggressive education campaigns, I do not know how to correct this. (Perhaps if we encourage them to start insurance companies that are required to sell insurance to sick people, we can at least reduce their economic influence.)
I do not think that this is a model that we should emulate on the Left; although it might increase our influence in Washington, it would greatly undermine our ability to govern in a way that would bring about the results that we desire. In general, we understand that our government is behaving suboptimally; the difference is that we lack the conviction that the fix is easy.
Oh Jeff, your delicious political analysis makes me pitch a tent. A big tent. A big tent that’s ready to party.
Hm. Let’s see where I fit in with all that.
B.S. in Biology and M.S. in Biochemistry. I think it’s safe to say I’m better educated than the average American.
I make more than the median income. I am by no means “rich” or “wealthy”, however. My income is well below the $200,000 individual/$250,000 family cutoff proposed for imposing tax increases.
I claim no party affiliation. I voted for both Republicans and Democrats at all of the Federal, State and county/local levels during this last election.
I think the causes for the current economic state of the country reach back into the Clinton administration when Rep. Frank claimed that Fannie Mae et. al. were in sound financial shape and that those who claimed differently were against home ownership for low-income Americans. I think that both the Bush and Obama administrations have added to the problems.
I watch the local NBC affiliate’s news most days. I rarely listen to any of Fox, CNN, MSNBC, etc. – when I do it’s generally during lunch when I’m working out at my company’s fitness center, and at that time I put them both on (there’s two TV’s up) and watch (with captions-for-the-deaf) whatever story is most interesting. I’m not paying real close attention. I never listen to any of their commentators. I wouldn’t know Glenn Beck or any of these other guys whether I bumped into them on the street or if someone put their shows on. Except Keith Olbermann, I watched his meltdown when Sen. Brown was elected and found it to be a) memorable and b) some of the best TV I’ve seen in years. Especially when I figured out that he meant it, it wasn’t a parody.
I think that everything’s going to have to be cut, including SS and Medicare – we just don’t have the money to pay for it. I don’t expect to see much out of SS anyway.
George Bush is a nice guy and not at all stupid (inarticulate != stupid). But he’s a Republican, not a conservative.
I don’t doubt that Pres. Obama was born in Hawaii, but I don’t consider that definitive proof of that has been provided. I don’t dislike him. But he has said that the Constitution is flawed in that while it defines what the government cannot do to you, it fails to define what the government must do for you. He sees that as a bug. I see it as a feature, and to my mind that is a fatal misunderstanding of what government should be about and why the U. S. Constitution structures the Federal government the way it does. There’s no way the man should be President.
I think that requiring people to buy medical insurance is very likely to be found unconstitutional, and should be.
I think that illegal immigration is a serious problem.
Regarding the average amount of income tax that Americans pay; I wonder how much income tax those people who pay it pay if you factor out the people (some 47% of Americans I’m told) who don’t pay any at all – and I wonder if the people that were questioned took that into account. Also, be careful of the statistics you use. The question seemed to be how much the average American paid, but the answer given was how much the median American paid. Those are two different things and can be very different values.
I think that a white person and a black person with equal values can get ahead the same. I think that a lot more blacks than whites are in a sub-culture that puts them at a disadvantage I think that racism is in part responsible for that; I think that a failure to take individual responsibility for one’s own actions and a belief that American society owes you something because your ancestors were discriminated against is also a factor. I do not think that the first answer for every issue regarding minorities is racism, but I additionally do not think that doesn’t mean that racism cannot be the correct answer. A racist nation doesn’t elect a black man President. I believe that the vast majority of people who voted against Obama did so on his merits, not his race. But I very definitely talked to people who voted against him for racist reasons.
I am very suspicious of the claims regarding the anthropogenic origin of global warming and need to do some detailed reading on the matter on both sides.
I suppose I should add my attitudes towards the Tea Party movement. You can’t say that you belong to a party when there is no formal party structure to join – unlike, e.g., the Democratic or Republican parties. I am in general sympathetic to the principles that those who claim it support. I would have supported the majority of the candidates that claimed support from it, but there were notable exceptions such as O’Connell in Delaware and Angle in Utah. I think it’ll learn from those and do better in 2012, though.
Oh, Hell yes.
What do you compromise on? What do you stick to principle on? This will be interesting. Obama calls for the Republicans to reach out to the left while a large cohort of new House members were just elected specifically because they were to the right of the establishment GOP candidate. And they didn’t take that position just to get elected – they believe.