Many of my friends would like to consider themselves good-natured socialist-populists. Aside from the fact that they won't be running for office anytime in the near future, this means that they consider themselves to be open-minded yet distinctly anti-establishment political thinkers. And like many on the far left, I think that they have a disguised but distinct sense of relief now that the Tea Party has imploded into a right-wing values-fest (in the media, at least).
The existence of a third party — an anti-establishment, for-the-people third party — stirred up some strange feelings for a left feeling betrayed by Obama's centrism. After all, the Tea Partiers embodied a kind of grassroots outrage, an indignation on behalf of the people, that the left had practically patented. Broad political stereotypes paint liberals as anti-conformists and conservatives as status quo up-holders, not the other way around. The cause bringing people into the streets and encouraging social deviance is supposed to be world peace, not fiscal responsibility. In the public imagination, it's the hippies that hold protests for ridiculously unattainable ideals and found third parties with no hope of winning. The Tea Partiers burn with an anti-establishment fervor of which most liberals did not think the right was capable.
Although I doubt many would admit it today, when the Tea Partiers first emerged, there seemed to be some respect from across the aisle for their refusal to endorse either party and attempt to forge their own middle path to their goals. To make matters even more confusing, the Tea Party was ostensibly founded on libertarian grounds — in other words, the right of the people to do as they please without government interference. Libertarianism not only has admirers among the left, but is essentially the default perspective for the mainstream left when it comes to social issues.
Any of that respect has since vanished. With Christine O'Donnell's primary win in Delaware and the ensuing leakage of videos of her speaking out against everything from masturbation to evolution, the worst fears of the left seem to have been confirmed: The Tea Party is little more than a front for the same-old right-wing Christian kookiness. Since O'Donnell's underdog campaign beat out her Republican opponent, talk about the Tea Party's signature small government issues has been completely replaced by talk about what appear to be its new social issues. Somehow, on the liberal side, there seems to be a sigh of relief. What at first appeared to be a new, libertarian, third-party movement has morphed into the least libertarian viewpoint of all. The new and unpredictable has become the old and familiar and seems likely to fracture the Republican base right as Democratic faith was beginning to falter.
And somehow, despite my non-Tea Partyish, slightly bigger-government leanings, it all seems a shame. There seems to have been a point, that point when the left did not know how to react to it, when the Tea Party was saying something. Something like "All we ask for is the freedom to succeed and the freedom to fail" in response to the government bailouts — a quote, it turns out, originally taken from Terry Pratchett, who is by all accounts a liberal novelist. Something like "America is living beyond her means and lacks fiscal responsibility," which was a rallying cry for many on the left during the Bush years. Their focus on the country that will be left to future generations, rather than the country as it exists today, can be traced to the arguments that environmentalists have made for years, replacing concern for natural resources with concern for fiscal resources and future tax burden. Many Tea Party groups seem to have co-opted the "Dissent is the highest form of patriotism" slogan that became so contentious during the Bush years.
I am cherry-picking, of course, skimming over aspects of Tea Party ideology that would anger most Brunonians, such as the use of the word "socialist" in a negative light. Yet at a time when so many Americans are angry over so many different things, and so little is being done, it seems worthwhile to highlight the commonalities and origins of the many different movements of American politics.
The Tea Party, like most movements fuelled by grassroots-populist anger, was probably never destined for the big stage, and perhaps it's for the best. The line between social and fiscal issues, which Tea Party leaders fought so hard to draw, was bound to fracture as soon as they had an actual candidate. Unless O'Donnell can rescue her image and turn the conversation back from social to financial issues, this is likely the end for the Tea Party's chances at becoming more than a branch of far-right conservatism. However, at a time when the only thing that the parties in power seem capable of agreeing on is that certain issues are intractable, from the war in Iraq to the hand-off to big business, it is nice to have a reminder of the power of third-party fury, no matter how misdirected it may appear to have become.
