The ‘Tea Party’ Reality Deficit
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The problem with the recent furore over the anti-tax ‘tea party’ movement is that no one knows what its message is. Some say it represents a platform against all forms of taxation. Most of the newcomers to the movement seem to suggest they just want the proliferation of targeted taxes (gasoline, tobacco, property) to be minimized. Some radicals seem to favor anarchy (obviously not thinking much about the risks). And the Republican party has clearly latched onto this libertarian-originated movement as a way of sowing fear and opposition to Obama.
Many observers have commented that the tea party anti-tax movement has morphed into a kind of tea-bag obsessed hate-Obama movement. Reporters have fanned out across the country on the lookout for signs of the kind of racist agitation that spun loose at some Republican rallies last summer, despite efforts by the candidate to moderate the party’s line on Obama’s origin. Cardboard semi-simian effigies of Obama have been spotted, and irrational claims about Obama’s quest to steal people’s money, homes and guns, has been caught up in what was supposed to be a day of tax-policy rallies.
And all of this despite Obama having successfully passed legislation that would give most of the people attending the rallies, indeed 95% of working families across the country, new tax cuts and sustained tax relief, including incentives to help pay college tuition and to expand the reach of private healthcare coverage. All this unashamed assault on the American government, despite such patriotic verbiage and claims of being closer to democracy than the people actually trying to make the government work like a democracy.
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Then there’s the ‘tea party’ reference. On 16 December 1773, a band of politically motivated colonists boarded three ships in Boston Harbor and threw their shipment of tea into the Harbor, as a protest against the British Parliament’s having imposed a tea tax, another in a series of arbitrary taxations the colonists felt would not be imposed, had they had a vote in Parliament.
In a strange twist of history, the British crown likely sowed the seeds of revolt by its allegiance to a scheme whereby taxes on the colonies were used to fund colonial governments. This practice highlighted the position of the colonists, who lacked full representation in Parliament. So, though the Tea Act of 1773 was meant in part to help the East India Company expand its market, after tariffs in Britain had hurt its revenues, helping the Company cut out resellers (a move which could bring prices down), the colonists were further outraged by yet another round of “taxation without representation”.
The Boston Tea Party was not an outcry against government per se, and the tax against which it moved did not create highly inflated tea prices; instead, it was a cry for more democratic government and a recognition of the principle that taxes were more legitimate if imposed by elected representatives of the people. This served as the basis for much of the philosophy of the American revolution and for the later forming of a Congress that “holds the purse-strings” of American government.
The present-day tea party movement suffers from the logical incoherence of a frenzied outcry against any and all forms of taxation, despite the historical tea party having been essentially a call to back up the process of taxation with real democratic forms of representative government. The colonists wanted representation in government in exchange for their taxes. The ‘tea-baggers’ of today want the littlest government possible; they decry the evil inherent in an American government and neglect the virtues of the Constitutional system that keeps that government from abusing its powers.
This is, perhaps, why it has been so frustrating for all involved to come together in support of any genuine ideas. The libertarians want less taxation so that government has less means by which to decide the fate of the people. The extremists want no government at all, but claim to be American patriots supportive of ‘democracy’. The Republicans are happy to bash Obama however they can, regardless of whether the arguments are flimsy, inverted, or directly meant to mislead. And FOX News thinks it has just become ‘movement television’ with its finger on the pulse of the next successor to Obama-mania.
The time is ripe for such hysteria. We are in the bewildering haze of the Great Recession, teetering on the brink of depression, and a popular president has outwitted the conservatives and taken over the center-left, the center and the center-right, winning the public’s faith on fiscal conservatism, national security, economic reform and loyalty to the Constitution.
A populist revolt —fueled by confusion over the provision of taxpayer money to Wall Street and the banks, and enhanced by the quest for a way to explain what is essentially the indefensible nature of the policies that got us here— is the perfect vehicle for out-of-favor committed rightists who no longer know what their platform is or how to defend it.
The problem is: the populist revolt has been channeled into the election of a new president, and the popular reformulation of the goals of our political culture. There has been a massive shift away from the false linkage between conservatism and supply-side economics. Both have lost their bite and now look more like shades or tonalities in a broader spirit of pragmatist politics, which has inspired liberals and conservatives to rethink their views on economic ideology and the culture wars.
The tea bag movement, a kind of armchair quarterbacking suited up for populist haymaking, lacks a moral center, because its message has no specific purpose that would improve anyone’s condition who needs it. It is being funded by wealthy interests who contribute heavily to the Republican party, not because they are principled conservatives, but because they want the party to keep giving hardworking people’s tax dollars to the wealthiest among us.
The myth of the no-tax, no-government democracy renders the message of the tea parties incoherent. The fact that President Obama is further along the road toward responsible tax policy that eases economic hardship for millions means the incoherent message is fundamentally irrelevant to the reality of the current environment. It is the clearest sign to date of how rudderless the ‘opposition’ is in its quest to find a cause.
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