The so-called “Tea Party” movement certainly has its fair share of demons. There are a smattering of genuine bigots, some unreconstructed militia fantasy adherents, and a disturbing proportion of the kind of people who wear Revolutionary War costumes on their monthly trips to the local town council meeting where they rant about vast and shadowy conspiracies controlling the banks. But none of that explains the concerted campaign by some quite mainstream political elites to taint and marginalize the entire movement along with anyone who might ever agree with any of them about anything.
The last few months have seen the explosion of the vulgar “teabagger” meme, frequent implications that all “Tea Partiers” are just racists who can’t stand having a black President, and attempts by a few progressive activists to discredit the “Tea Party” by infiltrating Tea Party gatherings with racist signs. Another example is the effort by one popular columnist to discredit the “Tea Party” by revealing its populism as fake — the “populism of the privileged”:
Their findings suggest that the tea party is essentially the reappearance of an old anti-government far right that has always been with us and accounts for about one-fifth of the country. The Times reported that tea party supporters “tend to be Republican, white, male, married and older than 45.” This is the populism of the privileged.
The charge is tough to accept on two levels. First, the evidence presented that the “Tea Party” is false populism is less than persuasive. Even if true, the claim that “tea party supporters ‘tend to be Republican, white, male, married and older than 45′” doesn’t prove that they are “privileged” unless we first assume without any evidence that every single person who is white, male, married, Republican, and/or older than 45 is also rich. As one who fits in three of those categories and it at the margin of the other two, I can state for a fact that this assumption is wrong.
But more revealingly, the charge of false-populism against “Tea Partiers” conceals a certain blindness towards the privileges enjoyed by the various protest movements that have come from the other side of the political spectrum. For example, it is hard to overlook the students (and their professors) chanting “The People! United! Will Never Be Defeated!” at anti-war and social-justice rallies for decades have been disproportionately (and almost exclusively) comprised of relatively well-off children of the upper and upper middle classes. Similarly, anti-globalization and climate-change protests who claim to speak in the name of the Third World often find themselves totally without any representatives of the very Third World that they claim to represent. The protest game on ALL sides is usually whiter than a curling tournament and at least as wealthy.
The harsh truth is that all protest movements are pretenders to the game of populism because the only people who have the leisure time available to indulge in the travel and time of protesting are those who aren’t struggling to survive day-to-day. Protesting is by definition an elitist activity. That elitism says nothing good or bad about the actual substance of the protest.
So can we start talking about the substance of the “Tea Party” protest movement — out-of-control federal spending — instead of playing the meme machines?