by Dick Armey
“THEY’RE CARRYING SWASTIKAS AND symbols like that12 to a town meeting on health care,” Nancy Pelosi said of health care town hall participants, implying that at least some of these citizen activists were Nazis. At the same time, liberal politicians and their allies were decrying the Obama is Hitler motif that they claimed dominated Tea Partier signage. The media loved to show photographs depicting protesters with a poster of Obama sporting Adolf Hitler’s infamous mustache. The image made it into virtually every news story about the Tea Party movement. The sign did indeed appear at some protest rallies. But they never pointed out that the signs were carried by the leftist supporters of Lyndon LaRouche. These folks had nothing to do with the Tea Party movement, either organizationally or philosophically. It’s hard to know what they want exactly (they used to protest with signs of George W. Bush with the same addition of facial hair), but it was easy to see they weren’t Tea Party activists. At least to those who cared to look.
MyBarackObama.com, the Web site for the partisan advocacy organization that replaced Organizing for Obama after the 2008 presidential election ended, took the rhetoric to a whole new level. In an effort to generate counterpressure for Obamacare, on September 11, they issued a call to action for “Patriots Day, designated in memory of the nearly three thousand who died in the 9/11 attacks. All fifty states are coordinating in this—as we fight back against our own right-wing domestic terrorists13 who are subverting the American democratic process.”
This post was quickly removed after Tea Partiers called them out, but the Democratic establishment continued to pursue this offensive narrative. Talk about out of touch with reality. The Democrats, suffering from a wicked case of rhetorical whiplash, went straight from calling Tea Partiers phony to senior White House adviser David Axelrod’s inferring that they were somehow dangerous. “I think any time you have severe economic conditions,” Axelrod told Face the Nation, “there is always an element of disaffection that can mutate into something that’s unhealthy.” When asked again if the tea parties were unhealthy, Axelrod hedged, saying “this is a country where we value our liberties14 and our ability to express ourselves, and so far these are expressions.”
While it was generous for one of the president’s top advisers to allow for a modicum of liberty and “our ability to express ourselves,” we worried that some on the Left didn’t take the First Amendment to the Constitution nearly as seriously as we had hoped. Were there now two sets of rules regarding our right to peaceably assemble and our right to petition the federal government with grievances?
Former president Bill Clinton would pick up the Democrats’ “domestic terrorist” narrative in 2010 in another attempt to score some points against the Tea Party movement and FreedomWorks. This time the attack strategically arrived the day after our big April 15 Tax Day Tea Party in front of the Washington Monument on the National Mall. In a speech commemorating the victims of the Oklahoma City bombing plotted by Timothy McVeigh, Clinton was none too subtle:
I loved seeing that picture of him in the Post today15—the outline—Armey with his cowboy hat on. I remember when he called Hillary a socialist. . . . But what we learned from Oklahoma City is not that we should gag each other or that we should reduce our passion for the positions we hold, but that the words we use really do matter because there are—there’s this vast echo chamber. And they go across space and they fall on the serious and the delirious alike; they fall on the connected and the unhinged alike.
You get the point.
PLAYING THE RACE CARD
PERHAPS THE MOST DIFFICULT and insulting attack Tea Partiers have had to endure is the charge of racism, first raised by one singularly angry comedienne, Janeane Garofalo. “They have no idea what the Boston tea party was about,” she said. “This is about hating a black man16 in the White House. This is racism straight up. That is nothing but a bunch of teabagging rednecks.”
Former president Jimmy Carter later took this charge from the lunatic fringe to the mainstream. His comments arrived several days after the massive September 12 Taxpayer March on Washington in an attempt to explain the unpopularity of the president’s health care proposal. “I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity17 toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man, that he’s African American,” Carter told NBC Nightly News.
Do Democrats really believe that any person who disagrees with President Obama’s policies is inherently racist? Of course they don’t, but it’s a great way to change the subject, to not talk about the fundamental problems with a government mandate that forces every American to buy a health insurance plan, the benefits of which are defined by the federal government, regardless of his or her income, age, health, or desire to do so.
President Carter obviously neglected to listen to any of the actual speakers at the event he targeted with his sweeping animus. There were Tea Partiers of every color on the stage on 9/12, including Deneen Borelli. As an African American, she is on the receiving end of more than her share of left-wing hate messages and racial slurs. Deneen has certainly paid her dues for daring to be part of this social network fighting for fiscal responsibility and limited government. Her rejoinder to Garofalo—“Hey, Janeane, my neck is not red”—got roars of approval from the sea of activists at the steps of the Capitol that afternoon. Indeed, her speech was so popular that she is now a regular fixture on the Tea Party circuit and a contributor on Fox News.
“The public is outraged about the president’s policies18—the spending, the budget, the deficit—not his skin color,” Deneen said of Carter’s claims. “It’s easier for the Left to play the race card than address the public’s legitimate concerns, but what the Left and the media are doing is damaging and dangerous. It’s damaging because when everything is racist, then nothing is.”
The charge of racism that the Left so casually throws around is like a nuclear weapon. It destroys more than its target. It tears at our social fabric and undermines Dr. Martin Luther King’s mandate of a color-blind society. These phony charges do real damage to the cause of a civil, tolerant, and compassionate society. We are a grassroots movement made up of people who believe in individual freedom and individual responsibility. Racism and hate are inherently collectivist ideas. As individuals who believe in individual responsibility, we judge people as individuals, based on the content of their character, not the color of their skin.
From day one, the good men and women who have risen up in peaceful dissent against a government that is bankrupting America have been subjected to the worst kinds of ridicule, name-calling, and downright hate. Most of these attacks were partisan tactics motivated by the political ends of the attackers.
MAN BITES DOG
WHILE TEA PARTY ACTIVISTS were absorbing abuse from the Left, there was “friendly” fire coming from the Right. Clearly, the Left has done its best to marginalize and dismiss the entire Tea Party phenomenon. While wrong, it is not surprising. What is more baffling, however, is that some from the right of center display a similar hostility toward the movement. Some in the comfortably established Republican old guard have also attempted to trivialize and ignore the importance of the Tea Party movement. Former Bush administration officials and think tank elitists alike have talked down the relevance and intellectual voracity of this new generation of grassroots activists, doing their best to take the steam out of a phenomenon they do not understand.
New York Times columnist David Brooks, for example, finds it hard not to look down from his lofty post as the resident “conservative” at the opinion page with a certain disdain for these activist rubes with their signs and bullhorns and their pocket copies of the Constitution. “Personally, I’m not a fan of this movement19,” he wrote on January 5, 2010, predicting that the “Tea Party tendency” could be the ruin of the Republican movement.
Fundamentally, his issue is with the philosophy of personal liberty and limited government embraced by these citizens. In March 2007, for example, just as his
brand of big-government conservatism was destroying what remained of Republicans’ standing with the American people, he argued against a return to the principles of Reagan and Goldwater. “There is an argument floating20 around Republican circles that in order to win again, the GOP has to reconnect with the truths of its Goldwater-Reagan glory days. It has to once again be the minimal-government party, the maximal-freedom party, the party of rugged individualism and states’ rights. This is folly.” People want security more than they want individual freedom, he argued then. Purposefully or not, the Republicans followed his advice. Political disaster followed.
As the Tea Party movement has ascended in popularity and grown in influence, Brooks’s attacks have grown more pointed. In a condescending missive entitled “Wal-Mart Hippies,” he argued that Tea Partiers have more in common with the New Left of the 1960s than with his brand of conservatism. The differences are trivial: sixties radicals “went to Woodstock,” and the Tea Party “is more likely to go to Wal-Mart.”
“The Tea Partiers have adopted the tactics of the New Left21. They go in for street theater, mass rallies, marches, and extreme statements that are designed to shock polite society out of its stupor. This mimicry is no accident. Dick Armey, one of the spokesmen for the Tea Party movement, recently praised the methods of Saul Alinsky, the leading tactician of the New Left.”
Besides the fact that we have studied the street tactics of leftists like Saul Alinsky, the decentralized grassroots network now commonly referred to as the Tea Party has very little in common with the “New Left,” as Brooks claims. We are deeply rooted in the American traditions of individual freedom and constitutionally limited government. If it looks antiestablishment, that is because the political establishment has become completely and arrogantly dismissive of these timeless principles. And if that’s radicalism, sign us up. The club is already populated with names like Jefferson, Madison, Washington, Franklin, and (Samuel) Adams.
Brooks claims that these pro-freedom protesters believe in “mass innocence.” “Both movements are built on the assumption that the people are pure and virtuous and that evil is introduced into society by corrupt elites and rotten authority structures22.” No, it is mass self-interest we see as the human condition. The founders understood this and structured the institutions of our government specifically to protect against the deadly collusion of individual interests and unlimited power. We know that public officials act in their own self-interest, just like everyone else, so our strategy aims to support good ideas with the right political incentives.
Brooks also mocks Tea Party conspiracy theories dealing with big banks and corporations, among others. True, we believe that too many business interests conspire to use the power of the state to “compete” for market share, but our source is Adam Smith. You might call Smith a sixties radical of sorts; he wrote in the intellectual foment of the 1760s, when there was revolution in the air. “People of the same trade seldom meet together23,” Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations, “but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” What do you suppose Smith would think about a $700 billion government bailout of banks authored by a former investment bank chairman turned government potentate, or trillion-dollar legislation mandating that every citizen buy the health insurance industry’s overpriced product? That’s right: it’s a conspiracy, and it needs to be stopped.
Brooks doesn’t like the new generation of small-government activists because, he claims, “they don’t believe in establishments or in authority structures. They believe in the spontaneous uprising of participatory democracy. They believe in mass action and the politics of barricades, not in structure and organization.”
Maybe it’s the decentralized, leaderless nature of the Tea Party movement that makes Brooks so uncomfortable. That’s because freedom itself seems to make him uncomfortable. “Normal, nonideological people are less concerned24 about the threat to their freedom from an overweening state,” he wrote in 2007.
Someone, Brooks seems to believe, needs to tell these people what to do, what to think, how to act in polite society. Is it possible that Mr. Brooks is the one, not Tea Partiers, with far more in common with those on the Left who desire order dictated from top-down structures, or as he puts it, “just authorities”? Someone needs to be in charge; that’s what he is really saying. On this point, he might find common cause with Abbie Hoffman. Or Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid.
Brooks and others on the right, such as David Frum, former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, who criticize the Tea Party movement for being too focused on the perils of too much government, appear more comfortable with the “go along to get along” approach to politics, vying for a seat at the table to make incremental changes to bad policies. This was very much the attitude that dominated Republicans in the House prior to the Contract with America in 1994. Accustomed to the perennial role of silver medalist, Minority Leader Robert Michel settled for negotiating improvements on legislation introduced by Democrats with very little vision for fundamental change. In effect, Republican leadership opted for a comfortable role as a permanent minority rather than a vehicle for change, settling for scraps at the Democrats’ feast.
Today, some of the carping from the Republican establishment and the self-anointed thinkers behind it can be chalked up to self-preservation. They are looking down from the castle walls at the unwashed barbarians pounding at the gate. Senator Robert Bennett of Utah, whose bid for a third term in the U.S. Senate was rejected by Tea Party activists in his state, best sums up this worldview: “I’m convinced that the movement working against me is a movement of slogans, not solutions,” he complained to the Washington Post. “Now I’m not a true Republican25 because I don’t go on Fox and CNN and scream.”
What is sending cold chills down the collective spine of the Washington political establishment is the now undeniable fact that the principles of limited government and fiscal responsibility have unprecedented political standing with the American electorate. There will be political consequences and those politicians out of step are losing their jobs.
This anxiety is echoed in the writings from the old guard of the political establishment. Michael Gerson, for example, another former speechwriter and an architect of compassionate conservatism for President George W. Bush, stated that much of what has recently come out of Tea Party activism is “a proposal for time travel26, not a policy agenda. The federal government could not shed its accumulated responsibilities without massive suffering and global instability—a decidedly radical, unconservative approach to governing.” In other words, big government is here to stay.
Perhaps what challenges the movement’s many critics is the fact that the Tea Party does not buy into the traditional Left vs. Right debate. It is better framed as “big vs. small.” It is a fundamental debate about the size and scope of government. Triggered by bailouts of irresponsible behavior on Wall Street, the Tea Party movement is first and foremost about fiscal responsibility—something that the political establishment across the Left-Right spectrum has failed to deliver. Trillion-dollar deficits and stimulus packages that only stimulate more deficit spending do not pass the commonsense test of kitchen-table economics.
THE THINKING MAN’S MOVEMENT
OTHER CRITICS FROM THE established think tanks seem more slighted that they were not consulted first, even painting the Tea Party movement as lacking tradition or intellectual underpinnings. Steven Hayward of the American Enterprise Institute, for example, wrote that “the conservative movement has been thrown off balance, with the populists dominating and the intellectuals retreating and struggling to come up with new ideas. The leading conservative figures of our time are now drawn from mass media, from talk radio and cable news. We’ve traded in Buckley for Beck, Kristol for Coulter, and conservatism has been reduced to sound bites27.” He laments the fact that “today’s Tea Party has abandoned the intellectual icons that nurtured and expanded the conserva
tive movement through the 1960s and 1970s. This reinforces the notion of the Tea Party as an angry, uneducated mob.”
In fairness, Hayward has since warmed up to the Tea Party movement, but the mythology that Tea Partiers lack an intellectual underpinning pervades the ivory towers of official Washington. Brink Lindsey, vice president for research at the Cato Institute, best represents this view. While “opposition to Barack Obama and the Democratic Congress has sparked a resurgence28 of libertarian rhetoric on the right—most prominently in the ‘tea party’ protests that have erupted over the past year,” real libertarians should not expect this uprising to translate into a fundamental realignment, Lindsey argued. “Without a doubt, libertarians should be happy that the Democrats’ power grabs have met with such vociferous opposition. Anything that can stop this dash toward dirigisme, or at least slow it down, is a good thing.”
“That, however, is about all the contemporary right is good for,” said Lindsay, because of, “first and foremost, a raving, anti-intellectual populism, as expressed by (among many, many others) Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck.”
One of the virtues of the online world we live in today is that mere citizens are no longer dependent on old-school institutions, like the U.S. Congress, or television networks, or the editorial page of the New York Times, for their information and their personal sources for good ideas. Like the Tea Party movement itself, access to information is completely decentralized by the infinite sources online. Like the discovery process that determines prices in free, unfettered markets, these informal networks take advantage of what philosopher Michael Polanyi29 refers to as “personal knowledge.” Bloggers and citizen activists on the Internet now gather these bits of knowledge and serve as the clearinghouse for the veracity of facts and the saliency of good ideas.
Do Tea Partiers read? You bet they do, and with a focus and discipline fitting a peoples’ paradigm shift away from big-government conservatism. We remember the woman who was one of the first to arrive at the front of the rally at the September 12 March on Washington. She draped a large white banner, almost as big as she was, over the crowd control barricade. It proclaimed succinctly: READ THOMAS SOWELL.