Introducing the Green Tea Party

One tea to rule them allA reader mentions that media coverage of the Food Safety and Modernization Act has been conflicting.  On the one hand, it seems like the uneducated hicks of the Tea Party are behind the opposition, but on the other hand, the loudest denouncers of the bill seem to be dirty hippies.  Perplexing indeed.  

I imagine the Tea Party would be against the food bill because it increases central government control over food production, which - let's face it - is about as Soviet as you can get. We might as well rename Nebraska "Украина", set quotas, and send Grandma to the Gulag for violating provision 6655321 with her latest batch of steak-fried steak.

Hippies and their black sheep cousins, Whole Foods shoppers, would be against the food bill because it requires "safety standards" which would probably just entrench corporate food by making it prohibitively expensive to produce locally and organically and perhaps jeopardize hippie access to the crunchier and more bizarre varieties of honey, cheese, hummus, and dried fruit. (America has already suffered so much for so many years without unpasteurized cheese. If only we could be more like France.)

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"Patriotism, That Least Discerning of Virtues"

How many American flags are there in this picture? Closest without going over gets a free Inductive coffee mug.I thought of titling this one "Conservatism Eats Itself". but we've already got one of those, so I'll attribute the title of this post to Borges without providing a link. (press me on it and I will.)  What does it mean?  It skips over the incoherent question of whether or not patriotism qualifies as a virtue and goes straight to saying that patriotism is the easiest virtue to attain.  To be only patriotic is to settle for the lowest common denominator of goodness and to do so without thinking, without considering that there may be conflicts between patriotism and more sublime virtues.  To be patriotic is to acquiesce to groupthink for its own sake.  I'll leave it at that, because I don't want to violate Godwin's Law.

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Shame On You, Wisconsin

Russ Feingold was one of the few good men in Washington, but Wisconsin's liberty-loving Tea Party just removed the only Senator to ever vote against the USAPATRIOT act.  Feingold also championed campaign finance reform and was the recipent of the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award.  He is a child of two immigrants, a champion of fair trade and civil liberties, immigration reform, ending capital punishment, cleaning up Washington pork-barrel politics.  Feingold actually returned money to the government that he considered wasteful.  He was the first senator to call foul on Iraq, and the first senator to call foul on President Bush's wiretapping.  Feingold was the poorest member of the Senate.  In other words, he was the closest thing we had to what the Tea Party claims to represent.  Yet the Tea Party actively targeted Feingold for removal.  

The Taxed and Unrepresented

A Mad Tea Party

"(With Democracy) No man is obliged to put his powers at the disposal of another, and no one has any claim of right to substantial support from his fellow man, each is both independent and weak. These two conditions, which must be neither seen quite separately nor confused, give the citizen of... democracy extremely contradictory instincts. He is full of confidence and pride in his independence from his equals, but from time to time his weakness makes him feel the need for some outside help which he cannot expect from any of his fellows, for they are both impotent and cold. In this extremity he naturally turns his eyes toward that huge entity which alone stands out above the universal level of abasement. His needs, and even more his longings, continually put him in mind of that entity, and he ends by regarding it as the sole and necessary support for his individual weakness." - Alexis de Tocqueville

Joe's post from Monday got me thinking about the Tea Party and our two-party system: 

It's tempting in a democracy to represent the policies of our elected officials as the center, but this is not an accurate picture of the American republic.  Extremists of every political and ideological stripe exist (I don't necessarily mean that in the pejorative sense).  The Tea Party's existence shows both that our politicians are out of touch with what the people want and that the people themselves are out of touch with what they want.  The Tea Party's anger may be justified, but it is incoherent.  Why should it be coherent?  Different people want different things.

I'd like to conduct a thought experiment to see if we can get any closer to the origins of the Tea Party movement: who is really unrepresented here in America?  Let's look at the three traditional policy axes under the presumption that the stated goals of policy are the actual goals of policy.

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A Tea Party is Better than Two Party

From Ms. Murkowski's flckrWhen Lisa Murkowski launched her write-in campaign for the Alaskan Senate seat she currently holds it might have formally come without the blessing of Republican establishment, but their secret sympathies must lie with their former caucus member.  As the Tea Party's Republican body count grew, the marriage of convenience's true cost must have dawned on all but the most pure hearted of conservatives.  Sure, all this ginned up anger points left, but from a vantage so far right that even stalwart conservatives have become targets for venial ideological transgressions.  At some point politician self-interest had to kick in and Ms. Murkowski drew the line in the sand.  If the Tea Parties want to weaponize low-turnout primaries to punish even minor dissent then ousted Republicans can make their case to the general public.  Murkowski, and Charlie Crist, offer a path for moderate Republicans who fret about their seats.

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"The Million Moron March"

Image courtesy of Mario PiperniRiffing off John Batchelor's column ("The Festival of Fools") and John Avlon's column ("I Have a Nightmare"), both for the Daily Beast, I too came up with a pithy title for this post on the most recent Tea Party event (because that's really what Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor" march on the Washington Mall is.  The demographic is exactly the same.)  I generally agree with Batchelor that this particular march is a non-issue:

The celebrity Glenn Beck has organized a festive and apparently harmless public event for the Washington Mall that he calls “Restoring Honor.” This theme is so deeply bland that it invites us partisans to look for inner meaning, such as the fact that August 28 is the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s revolutionary March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, or such as Beck’s Fox News Channel seeking a low-budget reality show to sell for the dog days of summer programming.

The trick here may be that Beck’s event, which will feature the celebrity Sarah Palin, is not about anything at all. It is a farce of an event in the way the bookish Karl Marx meant it, “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”

However, I disagree with Batchelor's contention that we should take Beck's idiocy at face value: and I have a few general qualifications for the "Tea Baggers are morons" crowd.

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A Victory for Heterodoxy in Kentucky

Image courtesy of dailypaul.comRand Paul, son of Texas Congressman, Ron Paul, is the very probable winner of the Kentucky Republican Primary Senate election, and liberals should be thrilled.  Of course, the Media has latched onto this thing and milked it for all the ratings its worth.  The imposed narrative structure is that Paul has been elevated by the "Tea Partiers" (or "Tea Baggers", depending on which party the reader hacks for.), and of course Paul has run with it:

I have a message, a message from the Tea Party, a message that is loud and clear and does not mince words: we've come to take our government back.  We've come to take the government back from the special interests who think that our government is their own personal ATM..

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Be Human: Don't Let the Politicians Win

Democrat Congressmen who voted for heath care reform have been getting death threats and the natural reaction has been to blame the heated rhetoric of the right in stoking up tea party outrage.  Let's start with the obvious: Congressmen who supported health care reform did it out of a genuine interest in bettering the country, even if you disagree with them threatening violence, or worse doing violence, is deplorable.  The debate got ugly, but all sides should immediately condemn the violence in the strongest terms possible.  That out of the way, I find myself in the uncomfortable position of agreeing with The Corner.  Victor Davis Hanson:

This week’s talking point is the sudden danger of new right-wing violence, and the inflammatory push-back against health care.  I’m sorry, but all this concern is a day late and a dollar short. The subtext is really one of class — right-wing radio talk-show hosts, Glenn Beck idiots, and crass tea-party yokels are foaming at the mouth and dangerous to progressives. In contrast, write a book in which you muse about killing George Bush, and its Knopf imprint proves it is merely sophisticated literary speculation; do a docudrama about killing George Bush, and it will win a Toronto film prize for its artistic value rather than shock from the liberal community about over-the-top discourse.

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The Democratic Electoral Apocolypse

After a triumphant 2006 and 2008 the Democrats had reason to believe that 2010 would continue the trend of Democratic gains in Congress.  Specifically, the 2004 Senators elected with President Bush's victory over John Kerry would be up for reelection and should have provided ripe opportunity for further Democratic gains.  In Nate Silver's January 2008 Senate Rankings, which list the possibility of a Senate seat changing parties, 10 out of the 13 seats most likely to change parties were Republican.  In his last Senate Rankings, 8 of the top 13, including 5 out of the top 6, are now vulnerable Democratic seats.  The worm has turned.  

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Edutainment: Stewart's Feud with Hannity

Ted Koppel and Howard Dean, among others, have pointed out that the Daily Show is a platform where young people get their news.  Host Jon Stewart skewers recent headlines, engages in witty banter with guests, and provokes regular public feuds with Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity, the respective hosts of the number one and two rated cable news shows on television.  On Tuesday, Stewart called out Hannity for mixing together clips from various tea-party protests to make a recent event look better attended than it actually was.  On Wednesday, Hannity admitted the deception and apologized.

According to a September 2009 report by the Pew Research Center, 72% of Republican viewers rate Fox News coverage as favorable, with only 43% of Democratic viewers and 55% of all viewers feeling the same way.  Fox News also had a 25% unfavorable rating, the highest among cable news networks.  This 25% roughly corresponds to the young, liberal demographic that shares Jon Stewart's views.  As the Pew Research Center concludes from the study, "partisan differences in views of Fox News have increased substantially since 2007." 

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