by Joshua Kucera
Over the last year, the "Tea Party" movement has come out of nowhere to capture the imagination of many Americans (28 percent called themselves Tea Party supporters in a recent Gallup poll) and startle many others with its sometimes overheated rhetoric.
But what is the Tea Party? The closer you look, the more confusing the picture becomes. In the same week that the Tea Party held a rally in Washington to mark Tax Day, April 15, a New York Times/CBS poll found that the movement's supporters are wealthier and better educated than the average American. Simultaneously, Oklahoma politicians and Tea Party activists openly discussed the possibility of forming an armed militia. (Nothing came of their meetings.) It has a libertarian bent, illustrated by the thousands of small, identical "Don't Tread on Me" flags, sold by vendors at the Tax Day rally, that coexists uneasily with a socially conservative, nativist strain. And it has emerged partly spontaneously with dozens of local groups run by people who have never before participated in politics but also partly orchestrated by well-funded, well-connected conservative groups like FreedomWorks, run by lobbyist and former House Majority Leader Dick Armey. "It's the first time in history that an authentic populist movement has been funded by some of the wealthiest people in America," says Jeremy Mayer, a public policy professor at George Mason University who is studying the movement.
Common themes are distrust of the government and the belief that Washington isn't listening to people like them. At the Tax Day rally, Tea Partyers gathered to air their grievances with the country's direction. Protesters held signs lamenting what they see as President Obama's flaws: his practice of bowing to foreign leaders, his profligate spending, his devotion to socialism. But there were few suggestions of what the group might be for. The politicians who got cheers, like Florida Senate candidate Marco Rubio, haven't actually been elected. Former Tea Party darling Scott Brown, the newly elected senator from Massachusetts, was not mentioned; since his election, he's already fallen out of favor because of his cooperation on some issues with Obama.
But resistance alone is not much to build a movement on. Unlike previous, successful protest efforts such as those for civil rights and against the Vietnam War, there is no one goal that brings all Tea Partyers together. "There is a real lack of unity in terms of the issues" that drive supporters, Mayer says.
The most troubling accusation leveled against the Tea Party is that beneath the rhetoric about taxes and deficits is a hidden, and sometimes not hidden, racism in response to the nation's first black president. One Tea Party leader in the early days of the movement called Obama a "welfare thug," and some protesters allegedly shouted racist epithets at black members of Congress during the debate over healthcare. Tea Party supporters are overwhelmingly white, and the New York Times/CBS poll found that they are significantly more likely than other white Republicans to believe that "too much has been made of the problems facing black people."
Racism is a charge that clearly rankles Tea Partyers, and a significant number of signs in the most recent protests were simply statements that the bearer was not a racist. This defensiveness has put the movement back on its heels and belies its image as a rising force. "The Tea Party movement members realize that the charge of racism is so powerfully discrediting that they have to reject it," Mayer says.
While both critics and supporters of the Tea Party present it as a unique phenomenon, political scientists and historians who watch it say it is just the latest episode in a long history of fiery, but ultimately forgotten, popular protest movements. And those historical parallels suggest that the Tea Party, while it burns brightly now, may flame out quickly.
The Tea Party has much in common with previous conservative protest movements that tend to arise in times of economic crisis, such as the 1994 Newt Gingrich-led Contract With America, which promised to radically reduce the size of government, and the fight to institute Proposition 13 in 1978, which forced California to keep property taxes low. The energy that animated those movements dissipated once the economy improved, and the Tea Party could face the same fate, says John Geer, a political science professor at Vanderbilt University.
Rick Perlstein, a historian of conservative movements, says the Tea Party has much in common with the right-wing backlash, including the anti-communist John Birch Society, to the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960. Although that movement is largely forgotten now, it once drew larger crowds (though much less significant media coverage) than the Tea Party does today, Perlstein says. That history, too, doesn't bode well for the Tea Party. "This style of politics burns out very quickly because it's just all about rage and it doesn't allow for any constructive, engaged governance," Perlstein says.
In the short term, the Tea Party's lack of coherence won't necessarily be a problem, and there is little question that the energy around the movement will bring more conservatives to the polls for November's congressional elections. That could turn a moderate gain for Republicans (on average, the president's party loses 24 seats in a midterm election) into a landslide, giving the GOP control of the House.
In some races, however, Tea Party support could imperil Republican candidates. In Arizona, former Rep. J.D. Hayworth is running a strong challenge to Sen. John McCain in the primary, thanks to Hayworth's strong anti-immigration message that is popular among Tea Party activists. But if Hayworth beats McCain, it could make it easier for a Democrat to win the general election. In Nevada, an independent candidate running in a newly formed "Tea Party of Nevada" could split the conservative vote there and make it easier for Sen. Harry Reid, who is facing a tough re-election campaign, to come out on top. But the biggest wild card is the economy. "If [the economy] ends up growing, then the Democrats won't lose nearly as many seats as people think," Geer says.
Tea Party activists see the decentralized organization and big-tent approach as strengths. But they also contain the seeds of potential discord. There is also the question of whether Tea Partyers are willing to get in the political trenches and do more than protest. At a seminar that FreedomWorks held on the morning of Tax Day, the crowd responded enthusiastically to the panels of conservative pundits criticizing the new healthcare law and efforts to stop global warming. But when the topics turned to nuts-and-bolts lessons on political organizing, much of the crowd lost interest.
The Tea Party movement will ultimately be weakened without a clear focus, says Mark Rozell, a public policy professor at George Mason. "If they want to grow this into a long-term, viable movement, they need something that brings some clarity, some coherence," he says. And if history is anything to go by, the Tea Party may be too bitter a brew for the taste of most Americans.
Available at Amazon.com:
The Virtues of Mendacity: On Lying in Politics
Bush on the Home Front: Domestic Policy Triumphs and Setbacks
The Political Fix: Changing the Game of American Democracy, from the Grassroots to the White House