Crashing the Tea Party

Mass Media and the Campaign to Remake American Politics

Paul Street, Anthony R. Dimaggio

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317261926
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política

The Tea Party has been the most high profile and controversial social movement in the US of recent times. But real analysis of the Tea Party remains slim - is it a genuine social movement or a topdown interest group created by the Republican Party and corporate funding? Crashing the Tea Party is based on first-hand observation of local Tea Party chapters, and undertakes a critical journalistic and scholarly examination from the national and local level. Paul Street and Anthony DiMaggio provide a carefully documented account which challenges conventional wisdoms. Crashing the Tea Party fills the gap in public understanding about this particular social movement, and how social movements in general relate today to the ideologies of left and right and the mass media.

1
The Tea Party Does Not Exist

Reflections on a Not-So-New “Movement” and the Deeply Conservative Essence of U.S. Political Culture

Almost Overnight: “The New American Tea Party”

It didn't take long for President Barack Obama to become the new King George—provocatively and preposterously aligned with Marx, Hitler, and Lenin—in the shrill rhetoric of a supposedly vast new American social and political "movement." In the late winter and early spring of 2009, just months after the first black president's inauguration, consumers of American news and politics were presented with a purportedly great and novel protest phenomenon—a supposedly new "third force," in the words of the Wall Street Journal, in the nation's political life—"the Tea Party."¹ Wrapped in the potent historical symbolism of the American Revolution, this swiftly emergent "movement" seemingly out of nowhere spoke the traditional national language of "freedom" and "liberty" against the supposedly "left," "big government," and even the "socialist" and "Marxist" agenda of the president and his fellow "radical" Democrats. Its participants and conductors had been curiously silent about the significant expansion of the federal deficit under the big government presidency of the messianic-militarist Republican war president George W. Bush, who transferred massive billions of taxpayer dollars to defense contractors and Wall Street investment firms and significantly advanced government assaults on cherished civil liberties. But here they were in the streets because of the "out-of-control spending" and statist agenda of a black Democrat in the White House.

This revealing inconsistency notwithstanding, the American people beheld "the New American Tea Party," said to be a great, bottom-up, citizens' "backlash" against the "radical left" Democratic totalitarians in Washington. By early 2010, as leading Tea Party coordinator and propagandist John O'Hara claimed, "Few Americans haven't heard of the Tea Parties." This was an exaggeration: An April 2010 poll by the Pew Research Center showed that 31 percent of Americans had never heard of "the Tea Party and 30 percent had no opinion of it." Nevertheless, 69 percent awareness of something called "the Tea Party" was not irrelevant, and the rest of O'Hara's assertion was unassailable. "Love them or hate them," O'Hara continued, "they are in the news, they are growing, and they are making a difference in the political arena."² With notable rapidity, supporting "the Tea Party" became something like popular shorthand for anger about the state of life and politics in the United States—a lightning rod for a sense of being "pissed off" about how things were going in America under the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression.

It wasn't the first time that people on the American right had tried to use the legacy of the Boston Tea Party against "big government" Democrats (see Chapter 2 for details) But in early 2009 and through 2010, the term "Tea Party" caught real fire for the first time in America's heavily mediated political culture. A Google Web search in late 2010 found that attention to the Tea Party was extensive, as mentions of the group were competitive with mentions of other political institutions such as the Democratic and Republican parties and discussion of President Barack Obama.

In the spring and summer of 2009, after a summer in which "Tea Party" activists received extensive media coverage of their efforts to disrupt congressional town hall meetings on Democratic Party "health reform," "the Tea Party" became a leading target of fear, loathing, disgust, and mockery on "liberal," Obama-friendly media outlets like MSNBC's Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann shows and the widely read liberal Web site Huffington Post. The term "tea-bagger" became standard liberal opprobrium for right-wing "Obama-haters" (and even, in our experience, sometimes for Obama's left critics). Nonetheless, an April 2009 Rasmussen Reports survey found that "fifty-one percent of Americans have a favorable view of the 'tea parties' [Tax Day protests held across the country by 'Tea Party' activists on April 15, 2009] held nationwide last week, including 32 percent who say their view of the events is very favorable."³ A World Public. Opinion.org poll in August 2010 found that fully 52 percent of Americans felt "sympathy" for what the survey designers called "the Tea Party movement."⁴ A December 2009 NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found that "the Tea Party activists—those angry opponents of health care reform and government spending who flooded last summer's town hall meetings—are now more popular than Democrats or Republicans" (emphasis added). The survey showed that 41 percent of likely voters had a favorable opinion of "the Tea Party," compared to 35 percent for the Democrats and 28 percent for the Republicans, leading the Los Angeles Times to conclude that" if the Tea Party really were a party it would be at the top of the food chain" (emphasis added).⁵

The designers of a Pew Research Center survey of U.S. voters in April 2010 almost seemed to think that the Tea Party was in fact an independent political party. It gave respondents the following possible choices as answers to the question, "Which of the following groups best represents your views right now?" "(a) Democratic Party, (b) Republican Party, (c) Tea Party, (d) Some other group, (e) None of these, (f) Don't know." "Tea Party" got the nod from 28 percent of Republicans and 30 percent of Republican-leaning Independents.⁶

"In the space of one year," leading right-wing pollsters Scott Rasmussen and Douglass Schoen proclaimed in the late summer of 2010, "the Tea Party movement became the most potent political force in American politics, with the potential to change America" (emphasis added).⁷ This assertion was far too strong, as (we shall see) are numerous other Tea Party claims made by Rasmussen and Schoen. Nevertheless, the "Tea Party movement" already boasted a number of victories in the electoral arena by the time Rasmussen and Schoen wrote. It was reported to have played key roles in a number of races, including the election of Republican Scott Brown to the U.S. Senate in the special election to fill the late Edward Kennedy's seat in January 2010 and in the later U.S. Senate Republican primary victories of Joe Miller (Alaska), Mike Lee (Utah) and Marco Rubio (Florida) and the U.S. House primary victory of Charles Perry (Texas). Self-described "Tea Party candidates" won 2010 Republican primaries in Kentucky (Rand Paul for a U.S. Senate seat), Illinois (Robert Dold for the Tenth Congressional District), Arizona (Sharron Angle for a U.S. Senate seat and Jesse Kelly for the Eighth Congressional District, a House seat), Colorado (Ken Buck for a U.S. Senate seat), Wisconsin (Ron Johnson for the U.S. Senate), Florida (Allan West for the Twenty-second Congressional District), and Delaware (Christine O'Donnell for the U.S. Senate). According to New York Times reporter Kate Zernike in September 2010, in an article looking forward to the November midterm congressional elections, "Of the 18 Senate races that [the paper] considers competitive, there are 11 where the Tea Party stands to be a significant factor. While it is harder to predict the Tea Party's influence in the House races, given the diffuse nature of thousands of local groups across the country, there are at least 48 out of 104 competitive seats where it could have a major impact."⁸ The next month, Zernike reported in a front-page Times story that "enough Tea Party-supported candidates are running strongly that the movement stands a good chance of establishing a sizeable caucus to push its agenda in the House and Senate" (emphasis added).⁹ Bloomberg News reported breathlessly, "Thirty-One Percent of Likely Voters Say They Support the Tea Party."¹⁰

By mid-September 2010, the Tea Party phenomenon was the subject of—or played a central role in—no less than thirteen books available through Amazon.com.¹¹ Consistent with the notion that "the Tea Party" had become a major factor in U.S. political life, Newt Gingrich, a likely presidential contender in 2012 and the former Speaker of the House of Representatives, dedicated much of his 2010 book, To Save America, to channeling core "Tea Party" themes. He explicitly linked his fate to the "the Tea Party movement" by claiming that the United States was oppressed by a deadly conspiracy of "secular socialists" that included Democrats, big business, most of academia, and nearly all of the media. "The secular-socialist machine represents as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union once did," Gingrich intoned, using language tuned to the hyperbolic and paranoid spirit and style of "the Tea Party."

The Myth of a Great, Authentic, Nonpartisan, Antiestablishment, and Grassroots Social Movement

Though much of the discussion of "the Tea Party"* strikes us as excessively dramatic and exaggerated (Rasmussen and Schoen's book is an egregious example), we think there should be little doubt that the Tea Party is of considerable significance in contemporary American political history. The large quantity of high-decibel coverage and commentary it has received in the mass media since the spring of 2009 has—along with sponsorship, funding, and direction provided by top Republicans and corporations and political investors (e.g., the Koch brothers)—granted it a relevant place in America's political life. But what is the Tea Party phenomenon exactly, and where might it lead? Even though there has been a considerable amount of discussion of the Tea Party in mass media news and commentary, there has been too little systematic and comprehensive investigation of it as a social, political, and—as shall receive particular emphasis in this study—media phenomenon. We seek to overcome this gap by providing a thorough investigation based upon our in-depth and on-the-ground analysis undertaken during late 2009 and 2010.

In its own public relations and according to its own supporters, the Tea Party represents a great independent, nonpartisan, "grassroots," "insurgent," and "anti-establishment" uprising of "the people" against concentrated power and wealth. (The word "grassroots" appears at least forty times in O'Hara's 2010 book, The New American Tea Party.) By O'Hara's account in his widely read book, the Tea Party is "a powerful grassroots movement" that "has involved millions of Americans in the political process like never before and has permanently changed the political landscape of our time."¹² It is "genuinely a grassroots movement—something quite rare on the left or right." It is, O'Hara claims, "[an] organic grassroots uprisin g" without "any sort of command and control infrastructure." It is motivated by a "nonpartisan" determination to create "a chance for the people to speak to the politicians for a change." It reflects "the power of an informed, driven citizenry" and enlists "participants and organizers who run the gamut of the political and socioeconomic spec trum."¹³ Dick Armey argued in September 2010 on the Public Broadcasting System's NewsHaur that the Tea Party was an "outside-the-body, bottom-up group" seeking to reform the nation's political system by and for the American people.¹⁴ Gingrich claimed that "the rise of the Tea Party movement is a great example of the American people's courageous tradition of rejecting elitism."¹⁵ Right-wing activist Joseph Farah chimed in with the grandiose claim that "the Tea Party Movement is the most dynamic and powerful grassroots political movement witnessed by modern-day America. It arose spontaneously—and in the nick of time—to save this country from an advancing, fatal drift away from self-government, liberty and the promise of greater prosperity for future generations."¹⁶

Such flattering self-description is to be expected from Tea Party "movement" leaders like O'Hara and Armey* and from a Tea Party opportunist and/or ally like Gingrich. More startling perhaps is how ready allegedly disinterested and "neutral" observers and commentators have been to describe the Tea Party in remarkably similar, "movement"-friendly terms. In early September 2010, the New York Times Web site defined "the Tea Party movement" as "a diffuse American grass-roots group that taps into antigovernment sentiments."¹⁷ In a February 2010 portrait of what he called "the Movement," writer Ben McGrath at the elite liberal weekly magazine the New Yorker referred to the Tea Party as "the social movement that helped take Ted Kennedys Senate seat away from the Democrats" (emphasis added). McGrath mused that "the Tea Party movement, identified by some commentators as the first right-wing street protest movement of our time, may be a reflection of the how far populist sentiment has drifted away from the political left in the decades since the New Deal" (emphasis added). McGrath noted without disapproval the Tea Party's claim to represent "the needs and worries of ordinary Americans" against both leading parties and "the political class in Washington" and Tea Party activists' claim to carry the historical mantle of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.¹⁸

According to Zernike in her widely read Boiling Mad, the Tea Party may have been "fortified by well-connected Washington groups like FreedomWorks . . . and also by [Fox News right-wing superstar] Glenn Beck." But "even aside from these well-connected supporters," Zernike continued, articulating a reigning media refrain, "the Tea Party [is] an authentic popular movement, brought on by anger over the economy and distrust of government in both parties."¹⁹

On the widely consulted, supposedly authoritative Wikipedia Web site, the entry for "Tea Party Movement" in August 2010 listed politicians who had garnered "grassroots support" from "the modern-day Tea Party movement." The publishers of Rasmussen and Schoen's book described the phenomenon on Amazon.com as "a classic populist uprising and "an authentic grassroots movement of concerned American citizens demanding to be heard by an out-of-touch political establishment"—an impressive nonpartisan rank-and-file citizens' revolt against both of the nation's big business and big government parties (emphasis added). According to Rasmussen and Schoen, the Tea Party is "a genuine grassroots phenomenon [that] has unprecedented broad-based support [and reflects] a spontaneous outpouring of [mass] anger' (emphasis added).²⁰

In September 2010, David Paul Kuhn, the chief political correspondent of the widely read Web site RealClearPolitics, announced that the Tea Party was an expression of the fact that "politics has moved from top-down to bottom-up." By Kuhn's account in an essay bearing the ominous title "R.I.P. Political Establishment," it was a great new leaderless and popular phenomenon akin to a raw elemental force of nature:

The orchestras have overtaken the conductors. . . . Politics is increasingly de-centralized and influence more democratized. The tail easily wags the dog. . . . "The Tea Party is part of something. Something is not part of the Tea Party," said Republican strategist Alex Castellanos. "The phenomenon we are talking about is, yes, not a left-right phenomenon as much as it is a bottom up phenomenon." . . .

No single factor . . . sparked this movement. Tea Party activists want it to remain decentralized and independent of party leaders. One popular book within the Tea Party movement is the business text, "The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations." The starfish does not depend on a head to survive or even ...