There’s a New American Revolution afoot. No, not an old advertising campaign for Chevy trucks. Instead, it’s a grassroots uprising against big government that funnels taxpayer money to banks and well connected labor unions, while simultaneously intruding on the liberty of regular people who are suffering through the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. Or, at least, that’s how they describe themselves.
I am talking, of course, about the Tea Party movement. Are they the vanguard of populist disdain for President Obama’s policies? They would like to think so. But they are just disaffected conservatives who speak only for a demographically and politically narrow slice of the country — just like the real party they represent, the Republican Party.
The movement made up of grassroots conservatives is implacably opposed to the president’s agenda with the type of vigor not seen since conservatives were implacably opposed to President Clinton’s agenda.
The movement may not be novel, but it is certainly genuine. When it first emerged in the summer of 2009, spurred on by an impromptu speech CNBC reporter Rick Santelli gave on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange criticizing administration plans to assist struggling homeowners because they would be “promoting bad behavior” and that we shouldn’t “subsidize the losers’ mortgages” in February of 2009. Receiving cheers from the traders on the floors, Santelli said there was going to be a “Chicago Tea Party” in July and the rest is history.
And so grassroots conservative groups popped up all over the country, spurred on by conservative media types like Glenn Beck and organizing groups like FreedomWorks. Even though Sarah Palin, who headlined the Tea Party Convention in Nashville, mercilessly mocked community activists in her infamous RNC speech, her acolytes quickly imitated them. They organized local campaigns, held rallies and even had their own “march on Washington” on September 12. More significantly, these activists have started to get involved in elections.
They vigorously supported Doug Hoffman, a third party challenger in New York’s 23rd Congressional District over the moderate Republican nominee. Even though Bill Owens ultimately won the seat — with the Republican’s endorsement — the race was still seen as a display of the Tea Party’s strength within the base of the Republican Party. When Scott Brown won Ted Kennedy’s senate seat — with significant financial and organizational support from tea party activists — it was seen as a sign that public dissatisfaction with the economy and Obama’s agenda had finally gone mainstream.
Perhaps scared by the thought of their core supporters seeing themselves as unmoored from the Party that is their natural home, Republicans have been desperate to align themselves with the most hard core of the conservative grass roots. John Boehner, the House minority leader, even went so far as to say, “There really is no difference between what Republicans believe in and what the tea party activists believe in.”
Don’t expect this marriage to be an especially difficult one. It turns out that the Tea Party movement is like the Republican Party, only more so. According to a CNN Poll, the Tea Party tends to be “male, rural, upscale, and overwhelmingly conservative.” The Republican Party, of course, is disproportionally composed of white, rural, upper-income men.
That the Tea Party appears to be just an especially energized subset of a group of people normally just called the Republican base makes their emergence seem all the less extraordinary. Of course there was going to be grassroots conservative opposition to a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress. The president’s signature initiatives — health care reform, stimulus spending, global warming legislation — are all universally or near-universally reviled among Republicans and are totally despised by conservative Republicans.
Add the sluggish economy and the massively unpopular bank bailouts, and the novelty of the Tea Party all but totally drains away. Of course the Republican base is angry at a Democratic president, and of course people are going to be more sympathetic to the opposition.
But these people are always angry and the President is always less popular when unemployment is hovering around 10%. Just because they have a catchy name and some late-18th century imagery doesn’t mean we should find this phenomena anymore interesting than it is(n’t).