Timothy Rutton of the Los Angeles Times makes an astute observation.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s epoch-changing New Deal coalition survived only so long as its constituent groups agreed not to discuss the one difference between them they could not reconcile — race. When the civil rights movement made that silent, and shabby, accommodation impossible, the coalition shattered.
The tea party’s internal contradictions are so numerous, it’s difficult to see its coalition of discontent surviving a single Congress.
However, Rutton makes one important mistake. He notes the libertarian streak of the Tea Party movement, including their calls to shut down whole departments of government and to repeal amendments to the Constitution. But he takes that as a sign that social issues aren’t important to them.
The tea party has been the big beneficiary of this year’s stealth funding, and the movement’s unique character has helped push social issues off the table. Essentially, the tea party is a populist expression of deep anger at what is regarded as both the regular political parties’ mismanagement of the economy and anxiety over the consequences of that failure.
Social issues may not be what the Tea Party candidates are emphasizing in their campaigns, but Joe Miller, Sharron Angle, Ken Buck, and Christine O’Donnell all oppose abortion even in cases of rape and incest. They all oppose gay marriage or even civil unions. The first three on that list could very well be senators next year and serve for six years before they face the electorate again. They have counterparts running for House seats. And this is where the the GOP has the beginnings of an accommodation between the social conservatives and the libertarians. If they can agree to oppose reproductive choice, then their differences are small enough that they can get along.
Some libertarians might sneak in who question our foreign policies or the War on Drugs, and that could lead to some interesting cooperation with progressives. But the poisonous atmosphere created by a caucus with the following beliefs is going to make any kind of cooperation unlikely.
If you simply go down the list of tea party candidates for the House and Senate, you can find four who want to repeal either or both the 16th and 17th Amendments, which provide for a progressive income tax and popular election of U.S. senators. Eight want to abolish whole federal departments and agencies, including Energy, Education, the Internal Revenue Service, Commerce and Homeland Security. One wants an end to everything except the departments of State, Justice and the Treasury. Many of these tea-party-backed office-seekers urge privatization of Social Security and Medicare. In the Bay Area’s 11th Congressional District, the front-running Republican candidate has argued for the abolition of public education because it’s “socialistic.” At least three candidates are such programmatic libertarians that they’d really be more at home in that party.
On Friday, the New York Times reported that its pre-election analysis has 33 tea party-backed candidates running in congressional districts that are either leaning Republican or too close to call. Eight “stand a good or better chance of winning Senate seats,” the paper says.
While Rutten says that such a large caucus “may bring social issue tensions back to the fore,” he doesn’t examine that angle. The truth is that the Tea Party candidates’ positions on social issues are every bit as radical as their positions on the economy, the environment, immigration, race, and the federal government. The internal contradictions are less than they appear to be. But there is one problem that will put extreme tension on the GOP caucuses.
The Tea Party agenda is not popular. People want the federal government to do certain things, like provide funding for public education, and administer Social Security and Medicare, and enforce our civil rights laws, and protect our our environment and our food and medicine quality. When these folks get into office, they are going to knock heads with the Republicans who don’t want to eliminate the departments under their jurisdiction, and who don’t want to commit political suicide, and who don’t want to repeat the fiasco of the 1995 Government Shutdown. And then some time will go by, and these Tea Partiers will realize that they won’t get reelected if they privatize Social Security or they continue to oppose abortion in all cases. So, the problem isn’t really about keeping a coalition together. The problem is that you can’t run an institution (the federal government) that you don’t believe should do anything when that is a politically untenable position. They are going to think ‘the people sent us here to trash the place,” but they’ll be wrong. The people just got apathetic and didn’t take care to really think about the consequences of putting nutjobs in Congress.
The tea party has been the big beneficiary of this year’s stealth funding ..
What a surprise! This ‘movement’ wouldn’t even exist if it weren’t for stealth funding. Imho, this is a massive dog & pony show given substance only by the media echo-chamber, which is, of course, its own stealth money institution. Once the TP candidates sucking at the big-money teat take their seats in Congress they’ll be beholden first & foremost to the interests that put them there, assorted ideologies be damned. There will be renewed interest in contributing to the proper functioning of the government — especially if the GOP presence develops in Congress — when it’s working so well for the big money folks, who actually really hate institutional instability.
The population being shipped around to these rallies/protests in order to give the TP its real-world substance — inspired in their civic duty by lifesize cartoons like Glenn Beck — will never, ever be served, leaving them hungry to continue to support big-money TP candidates, thus the status quo, despite themselves.
IOW, the TP isn’t change they can believe in either.
You just buy off the people causing the tension. Or buy a new caucus. Or start a new ‘popular uprising.’ Or something.
The people running this clown show have more money than God. They own the lion’s share of the richest country on the planet. They’ll think of something, don’t worry.
The Tea Party has been the beneficiary of the past two years’ media narrative. The idea that the stealth funding is going primarily to Tea Party types is ludicrous. Enough to help them win maybe, but the serious money is going to corporate Republicans, such as Pat Toomey and a bunch of “moderate” Republicans who are flying under the radar.
Just watch. Folks in the mold of Eric Cantor are the ones who will show the most stealth money, if they are in challenger races (which Cantor isn’t).
they have been hiding their actual positions. they are frauds
How is that different from the rest of the “small government” – large pork Republicans?
I keep thinking back to What’s The Matter With Kansas?, or how people came to vote against their own best interests. I’m gonna read it again one of these days.
If you listen to this segment of a recent Bloggingheads episode with Sarah Posner and Robert Jones, it seems to suggest that the extent of genuine libertarian influence on the rank and file Tea Party is greatly exaggerated.
This is probably true – the Tea Party form of “libertarianism” isn’t as “principled” or “nuanced” as “Real Libertarianism”. Tea Party libertarianism is “I’ve got mine so fuck you” libertarianism. It’s “keep the government out of my Medicare” libertarianism. It’s “I’m worthy of my welfare check but you’re a parasite” libertarianism. Basically, it’s “I’m a short-sighted asshole” libertarianism.
But then, when you get right down to brass tacks, pretty much all forms of libertarianism actually practiced in the US fall into the “I’m a short-sighted asshole who has mine so fuck you” libertarianism. So it’s not much of a surprise that libertarians and others project libertarianism into the Tea Party – even if the path that they use to get there is different, the end result is the same.