by Jonathan Kay
The economic tribulations that began in the last year of Bush’s presidency hang heavy over the Tea Party and its events: Virtually every conversation comes back to joblessness in some way. In an echo of the populist fervor that arose amidst the economic ruts of the late nineteenth century—when Greenbackers, Free Silver types, and bimetallists all railed at the gold-hoarders in New York City and London—there is much dark talk about the banking system and those who run it.
The analogy between the populist movements of the nineteenth century and the Tea Party phenomenon holds up in some ways: Both championed a constitutionally inspired counterrevolution that would empower ordinary working people by casting off the deadening hand of society’s parasitic plutocrats. Yet there are also many major differences. The late nineteenth-century populists of the Great Plains and the Southern states cast their movement as a campaign by rural yeomen, who produced real things like timber, ore, and food, against the city folk who did nothing but count gold and trade stocks—a populist subphilosophy described by American historians as “producerism,” and encapsulated in William Jennings Bryan’s “cross of gold” speech at the 1896 Democratic National Convention: “Burn down your cities, and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the street of every city in the country.”
As recently as the recession of the 1980s and 1990s, producerism took expression in anti-Japanese protectionism, Ross Perot, and pick-up-truck-commercial imagery that depicted proud, unionized American workers facing off against foreign sweatshops. There are thin wisps of this in the Tea Party movement: Sarah Palin, in particular, tends to fill her speeches with homages to the common workingman that would not have been out of place a century ago. (It isn’t a coincidence that the greatest populist figure of our generation comes from Alaska, one of the few places in America that still relies on dirt-under-the-fingernails industries such as oil and fish.) But for the most part, such appeals are outdated: America doesn’t really produce much out of steel and wood anymore. And a lot of what it does produce tends to be welded by robots or plucked out of the ground by illegal immigrants. Most Tea Partiers, like most other Americans these days, tend to be well-educated urban desk jockeys—consultants, health care administrators, mortgage brokers. Unlike farming and other rugged pursuits, these are hard professions to romanticize.
Another major difference comes in the prevalent attitude toward capitalism. In the 1890s, populists typically demanded government intervention to protect the rural way of life from the predations of monopolists and bankers. The Populist Party platform of 1892, in particular, declared “that the power of government—in other words, of the people—should be expanded.” The manifesto called for more powerful unions, a state takeover of the railroads, and an increase in the money supply.
Tea Partiers, on the other hand, tend to embrace capitalism unreservedly. They agree with the preamble to the 1892 Populist Party platform, which declares that “the fruits of the toil of millions are badly stolen to build up colossal fortunes [by those who] despise the Republic and endanger liberty.” But they identify the thieves as Washington tax collectors, not railway barons. One telling moment, for instance, came in April 2010, when the SEC charged Goldman Sachs with civil fraud relating to its marketing of securitized mortgages—exactly the sort of move that would have caused populists of old to cheer. Instead, many Tea Party types denounced the move as another instance of Obama-style socialism. According to one WorldNetDaily writer, “The SEC action is part of a populist campaign to demonize banks and Wall Street as Democrats try to regain independent voters and the far left.” In May 2010, likewise, when many Americans were railing against BP following the Deepwater Horizon fire and oil spill, then-newly nominated Republican U.S. Senate candidate Rand Paul declared such criticism “un-American.”
The smug left-wing take on the Tea Party movement is that its members are nothing but shell-shocked racists. (In the words of Janeane Garofalo: “It’s not about taxes. They have no idea what the Boston Tea Party was about. They don’t know their history at all. It’s about hating a black man in the White House.”) But I saw little evidence of that in Nashville.
True, the conference floor was an almost unbroken six hundred-strong sea of white, middle-aged faces: I counted just four black people at the entire conference. But two of those people ended up speaking from the podium—including Washington, D.C. media personality Angela McGlowan, who received a series of massive ovations for her barnburner speech.
Most Tea Party activists do indeed distrust Barack Obama, but not because he’s black. Instead, they’ve latched on to him as a living, breathing symbol of the expansion of government that’s taken place in America since the New Deal, and of the decline of American influence on the world stage—the anti–Sarah Palin, in other words. Federal spending, they correctly note, has spiked radically upward in the years since he’s come into office—moving America toward a European-style tax-and-spend model, complete with universal health care.
Many Tea Partiers in Nashville went further, and told me that Obama is a Marxist who hates capitalism, that he is deliberately trying to sabotage America’s position as a superpower, that he has a secret plan to sell out Israel to the Arabs, or even that he is a closet Muslim in league with Iran. In building their case, they often focused on small, symbolic gestures: Obama’s decision to bow to Saudi King Abdullah and Emperor Akihito of Japan, his lack of an American flag lapel pin at a 2008 campaign event, his failure to hold his hand over his chest during the playing of the national anthem in 2007—all of which they take as proof of a secret hatred of America and its values.
It would be entirely wrong to call Tea Partiers a straightforward conspiracist movement—and I don’t want to stand accused of doing so here. Many of their political gripes about big government are shared by tens of millions of mainstream Americans: In a September 2010 survey, 71 percent of Republican respondents said they have a “positive opinion” of the Tea Party movement.
But as with all populist uprisings, it has attracted a fringe of angry extremists who will swallow just about any accusation launched against the nation’s elite. Like the John Birch Society types who came a half-century before them, some Tea Party radicals believe Washington is packed with fifth columnists seeking to undermine the country’s Christian character and its will to fight enemies abroad. The most obvious difference is that the word “Russian” has been replaced with “Muslim” in the accusatory lexicon.
This conspiracist fringe had a sizable presence at the Nashville conference. Roy Moore—the former Alabama chief justice who was fired for refusing to remove a five-thousand-pound sculpture of the Ten Commandments from his courthouse—gave a blistering Sodom-and-Gomorrah speech in which he warned of a “UN guard being stationed in every house.” There was also an “emergency preparedness” seminar in which we learned what to do when Armageddon comes. During one meal, I sat next to a conference attendee from Clearwater, Florida—an accomplished and well-spoken computer programmer who worked for a major American technology company—who suggested to me that the American government had deliberately sparked the financial crisis of 2008 so they could devalue the currency to zero, pay off the nation’s debts with worthless currency, and then create a new currency—the “Amero”—in monetary union with Mexico and Canada. At first, I dismissed him as an outlier. But later on, the entire conference was subjected to a screening of Generation Zero, a conspiracist film arguing a similar theme.
Steve Malloy, the author of Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Ruin Your Life, told the crowd that America is controlled by the “three-headed totalitarian monster of Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid.” Hitting on what would become a major conference theme, he warned that Obama and his minions are conspiring to control every aspect of Americans’ lives—the color of their cars, the kind of toilet paper they use, how much time they spend in the shower, the temperature of their homes—all under the guise of
UN greenhouse-gas-reduction schemes. (Every single person I spoke to in Nashville took it for granted that global warming is a scam.) “Obama isn’t a U.S. socialist,” Malloy thundered. “He’s an international socialist. He envisions a one-world government.” Everyone applauded wildly.
The next speaker, Memphis Tea Party founder Mark Skoda, put up a dramatic slideshow depicting heroes who’d risen up against tyranny around the world—the anonymous figure blocking tanks at Tiananmen Square, Lech Walesa, Iranian political martyrs . . . and then concluding with images from a Tea Party demonstration.
Is the situation in America really that desperate? Apparently so. The election of Barack Obama, Skoda said, was “the Pearl Harbor moment” of our time.
Then came celebrity Texas preacher and self-described “Christocrat” Rick Scarborough—one of the many overtly religious figures to appear at this convention. In a fiery speech that sounded like a Sunday sermon, he portrayed Obama’s America as a sinful hellhole now facing one last chance for salvation: “America has forsaken God. But the good news is that God has not yet forsaken America. And the Tea Party movement is the evidence, I believe, of that reality.”
In between speeches, we would all file out of the main conference room and into a wide hallway area where various conservative groups had set up kiosks. There were also small businesses selling Tea Party–themed jewelry, T-shirts, and books. Inevitably, though, the center of attention was a middle-aged man from Brunswick, Georgia, named William Temple—a sort of unofficial Tea Party mascot who crisscrosses the country, appearing at events dressed in his trademark three-cornered hat and authentic Revolutionary garb. When journalists interview him (which is often—his outfit draws them in like a magnet), he cheerfully holds forth, flecking his speech with antique turns of phrase drawn from the days of Thomas Paine.
It’s a charming shtick, and one that puts a great face on the movement for the uninitiated. At best, one supposes, these folks are proud patriots standing up for the original values of the Founding Fathers. At worst, they are merely libertarian oddballs—the political equivalent of the high school teachers who spend their weekends recreating the Civil War. But as the weekend convention progressed, it became clear to me that the movement’s most radical activists really do imagine themselves to be protagonists in an existential struggle against a malign despot, just like their eighteenth-century forebears.
“We’re in a crisis, a crisis as profound [as that] of the [American] Revolution, the Civil War, the Great Depression, or World War II,” filmmaker Stephen K. Bannon told the crowd on Friday night. “You just have to ask the Kaiser, you have to ask the military junta that ran Japan in World War II, or the Nazis, or the fascists—no power on earth has ever stood against the common workingman part of this country.” This statement seemed like a massive exaggeration—as extreme as anything I’d heard from the Iraq War–era activists who compared George W. Bush to Hitler. Yet, as with Farah’s conspiracism, everyone around me nodded their head and applauded, confident in the notion that they were the appointed vanguard who would protect America from Barack Obama’s “three-headed totalitarian monster.”
Sarah Palin’s speech the next day—which attracted more mainstream media attention than the rest of the conference put together—was actually quite moderate and sensible by comparison: Most of what she said about the war on terrorism, spendthrift Washington policies, and Barack Obama’s lobbyist cronies sounded like talking points borrowed from a stack of clipped Wall Street Journal editorials. (To her credit, she even had a kind word for some of Barack Obama’s policies—promoting nuclear power, and staying the course in Afghanistan, for instance—something no other speaker at the conference had provided.) Nevertheless, she was received rapturously by the Tea Party faithful, especially when she dropped allusions to her son in the infantry and the plight of “special-needs children.”
A common image evoked by Palin, and by many other speakers, was that of decent, godly people awoken from a long political slumber by Washington’s steady drumbeat of liberal outrages. “For too long, we stayed at home, taking care of our families, going to work, paying our taxes, going to church, taking our kids to school,” Skoda told the crowd. “We expected the government to do what was right. But they chose to do otherwise, while we remained silent. Well, we are silent no more!” A delirious standing ovation duly ensued—one of many that Skoda and the others received as they shouted slogans to the crowd.
The theme of uplift and revival was much in keeping with the evangelical tone that was everywhere in evidence—something I hadn’t expected. Virtually every keynote speaker appealed directly to America’s Christian character, and specifically identified the Tea Party project as a direct manifestation of divine will.
“This event is a miracle from you [God],” declared a preacher, brought on stage to bless the food on Friday night. “Because we know it is beyond [the organizers’] human strength to have done what they have done. We thank you for using them—and we ask you to continue using them—and use us in this great battle. [May] these festivities be pleasing in your sight, in order that we may gather together one day, again, and celebrate the fact that we have gotten our nation back in Jesus’ name.” One scheduled speaker, who missed the conference because of illness, sent in a letter, which was read aloud to deafening applause, claiming that her ailment was divinely ordained, since God knew that the woman replacing her at the podium was the more effective speaker. Hosannas to God’s will also rang forth spontaneously from the conference floor. At Rick Scarborough’s speech, a pamphlet titled “Mandate to Save America” was distributed, in which a coalition of social conservatives enunciated a ten-point agenda to “break the bonds of tyranny.” The first one was: “Acknowledge the centrality of faith in America.” After Scarborough spoke, a middle-aged woman rose from her chair and declared: “Everyone wants to know why we’re here. I say to them, ‘We’re here for some R&R—revival and revolt.’ If you’re not a Christian, a person of faith and principle, you can’t understand what we’re doing!”
For anyone looking to neatly categorize Tea Partiers using conventional poli-sci typology, their odd combination of extreme libertarianism with social conservatism appears confusing: On one hand, they are deeply suspicious of any government effort to redistribute wealth and manage the U.S. economy. On the other hand, they demand that this same government muscularly assert itself in the social sphere, and remake America in a Christian image. What binds these two strands of the movement is not any single notion of government, but a generalized nostalgia for America’s past.
There’s something deeper at play, too—something that explains not only the linkage between the Tea Party movement, Evangelical Christianity, and Barack Obama conspiracy theories, but also Joseph Farah’s seemingly odd comparison between Obama and Jesus Christ.
Throughout recorded history, crisis, conspiracism, and millenarianism all have tended to flare up at once, following a script first set out no fewer than 2,500 years ago in the book of Daniel. Norman Cohn called this script “revolutionary eschatology.” In his classic study of eschatology in the Middle Ages, The Pursuit of the Millennium, he summarized its main plot elements this way: “The world is dominated by an evil, tyrannous power of boundless destructiveness—a power moreover which is imagined not as simply human but as demonic. The tyranny of that power will become more and more outrageous, the sufferings of its victims more and more intolerable—until suddenly the hour will strike when the Saints of God are able to rise up and overthrow it. Then the Saints themselves, the chosen, holy people who hitherto have groaned under the oppressor’s heel, shall in their turn inherit dominion over the whole earth.”
According to this narrative, the Tea Party’s radicalized activists are the self-appointed Saints. As for Barack Obama, he might not be the “tyrannous power of boundless destructiveness”—but he’s the next worst thing.
Enter the False Prophet
The book of the Revelation of John—known simply as Revelati
on—almost didn’t make it into the Bible. Many early Christian scholars believed the text’s lurid, phantasmagoric images were simply too disturbing. In his preface to Revelation in the first edition of his New Testament, published in 1522, Martin Luther declared, “I can in no way detect that the Holy Spirit produced it” and, “My spirit cannot accommodate itself to this book.” Even for a modern lay reader, it’s easy to understand Luther’s thinking: Revelation reads like a treatment for a full-on horror movie, a sort of Cujo meets 2012 for the age of Domitian.
In the popular imagination, Revelation is known primarily for its climax—in which the forces of God and Satan engage in an epic battle, after which Satan is cast into a lake of fire, and the righteous live on forevermore in a perfect, deathless world known as the New Jerusalem. But Revelation—which many scholars believe was inspired by Rome’s intense persecution of the faithful during the reign of the Emperor Domitian—is far more complicated than that. The opening chapters, in particular, are full of obscure Church propaganda, numerology, bizarre animal behavior, an edible book, and a succession of random apocalypses—including the destruction of a third of the Earth’s population by a two-hundred-million-strong army. There is also a fantastic menagerie of divine beings and creatures. On Satan’s side, for instance, there is a beast who arises, Godzilla-like, from the ocean “having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy”; a “great red dragon, having seven heads”; and a great harlot of Babylon, “arrayed in purple and scarlet color, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication.”