Atypical Tea Partier A Typical Tea Partier

Commentary on the tea party movement.

I was recently talking to a neighbor of mine about the role of race in politics, and about, more generally, the status of race relations in the United States. He told me a short anecdote about his job at a city school. He said he met the school’s newest principal who asked him (he cooks there) whether he “Only cooked Black, or [if he could] cook American, too.” Stories like these aren’t difficult to find. In the minds of many white Americans, such questions seem legitimate and inquisitive, rather than horribly offensive, and implicitly derogatory towards Black Americans. Debates in the public sphere have given rise to the worse sort of reactionary politics. The most recently awakened activists have tended to expend their energies quibbling over what constitutes viable citizenship, rather than focusing on issues that are actually affecting our communities. The Tea Party is not least among the notable movements to spring up in the wake of the election of Barrack Obama to a post held only by wealthy, white males for the previous 220 years of this country’s existence. Tea Party members are mostly white, mostly wealthy, and overwhelmingly conservative.

Mostly, though, isn’t a totalizing term, and I recently had the opportunity to conduct an interview with one of the many exceptions to the stereotype: Ayesha Kreutz. When the video of her speaking at the recent Tax Day Tea Party protest in Rochester begins, Kreutz comes to the podium, and says, laughingly, “[I’m] one of those angry racist tea partiers that the liberal media loves to hate…” The crowd cheers and laughs, clapping: Kreutz is an African American woman. In fact, she claims that she was raised in a “… Hippy atheist home and [she and her family] were raised as democrats.” Given media narratives about the Tea Party, I was intrigued. How did this individual find herself wrapped up in the Tea Party movement? In interviewing Kreutz, I found an inquisitive, intelligent woman who is clearly passionate about the things she believes. Like many Tea Partiers, her awareness of political issues came almost simultaneously with right-wing organs’ like Fox News and our own local WHAM station’s growing support for, and coverage of, Tea Party events.

Kreutz acknowledges the importance of Fox News, saying that “I think that Fox has helped in keeping us in this movement motivated in the sense of at least someone is paying attention to what we are saying, like the boo[s] t you get when being with like minded people.” This sense is echoed in almost any Tea Party interview one cares to search for. In some videos, signs can be seen saying things like “God Bless Glen Beck,” or “Thank God for Fox News.” Along with the more racially problematic signs bandied about by Tea Partiers, these are some of the most revealing about the essence of the movement as a whole. Tim Wise, the noted anti-racist scholar, recently posted a thought experiment on his blog, asking people who believe the nation has moved “beyond” race to imagine if the Tea Party were made of African American men, raising guns and claiming that the government may require violent overthrow and re-establishment, claiming that the president was racist against Black people, etc. This is an interesting experiment to pose to supporters, and the same can be extended to their media backers – What if people were protesting a conservative president, and carrying signs that said things like “Thank God for Keith Olbermann” or MSNBC, or even more substantial intellectual critics of right wing politics, such as Salon.com’s Glenn Greenwald, or the famous linguist Noam Chomsky? Such an experiment, however, unjustifiably casts MSNBC as a legitimate leftist alternative to Fox News, a claim that is laughable at best. (See, for example, these numbers from the nonpartisan media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting: http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1865).

The implicit logic of Kreutz’s opening comments are shared by the standard members of the tea party community: the inclusion of even a small number of minorities in the Tea Party invalidates any suggestions about the movements’ racial attitudes as a whole. But that’s not quite right; a few token people of color doesn’t absolve the tea party of its racist sub-narratives, openly racist signs, and guardedly racist language uses. A recent study by the University of Washington found that, if a member of the Tea Party, one was 36% more likely to resent the treatment of racial minorities by government (as if a history of slavery, lynching, xenophobic attitudes, mortgage redlining, segregation, political disruption through programs like COINTELPRO, and constant harassment by authorities are things to resent) than the general population. The idea, bandied around by the political right, is that African Americans, Hispanics, and other minorities have benefited from social programs in numbers disproportionate to “other” Americans.

Being a woman of color, herself, hasn’t shielded Kreutz from accepting these ideas, any more than it absolves the rest of her Tea Party compatriots of charges of what could be most kindly described as systemic racial insensitivity. When I presented her with a report, and with an article about the racial sub-narrative in a lot of Tea Party content, she replied that the author of the article (confusing him with the authors of the study) must be “…ignorant or agenda driven,” vehemently claiming that she herself has not experienced any racist attitudes during her involvement in the Tea Party. She, like most of the other people involved in the Tea Party, stick steadfastly to the claim that the Tea Party is about three main things: less taxation, less government, and more freedom.

The pursuit of these goals, though, don’t restrict Tea Party members from diverging from each other in interesting, and often, disparate ways. Among her more conspiratorial views, Kreutz believes that Obama is racist against Whites, (a suggestion proposed by Glenn Beck, and shared by many of his viewers), and that Democrats want to legalize immigrants who are here illegally because they think “… it will make it nearly impossible for America to continue to be a two party state.” What struck me as I read Kreutz’s responses to some of my questions is how the influence of what are essentially the subconscious fears of the Conservative Right, became, to her, overt and rational points of contention. While discussing the possibility of anthropogenic climate change, for example, Kreutz, in a bizarre aside, pointed out to me that:

V.I. Lenin was born on April 22, 1870. The first Earth Day was celebrated on April 22, 1970 in his honor… Does that mean that all the people who try to do things for the environment are evil? No, just that they don’t have a clue what’s going on or who or what is behind this movement… It is the communist movement that wants to destroy the United States, and because they can’t do it with force, they’re trying to do it by getting people in this country to voluntarily destroy our economy by making the use of energy more expensive through higher taxes… Instead of products being made in the US by Americans, they will be made in China where the communists don’t care about the environment.

Of course, there is no evidence whatsoever of a connection between Lenin’s birthday and Earth Day, beyond a few nearly incomprehensible diatribes against environmentalists on websites like capitalismmagazine.com. More to the point, however, is the striking scope of the conspiracy suggested by Kreutz’s comments: Apparently, Communists in the United States, who have besieged our government by rising to prominence as Democrats (a notion any actual communist would laugh at) are giving money to scientists to study something that doesn’t really exist, so they can raise taxes and have more money for other insidious ends, started Earth Day in 1970 so they could celebrate Lenin’s birthday without really celebrating Lenin’s birthday, and give jobs to the Chinese Communists, who don’t care about the environment. Though she doesn’t believe in anthropogenic global warming, she assured me she does believe that the Earth will eventually warm: it’s written in the bible, as part of the Book of Revelations.

Let’s just give this one more try: American Communists who love the environment, but hate America, are trying to tax us to death so that our jobs go to Chinese Communists, who hate the Environment, but love China. The level of paranoid fear mongering required to bring an individual to believe such a convoluted plot, it seems to me, must be absolutely astronomical.

The common thread between almost all of Kreutz’s responses, in fact, is a fear of government control (or, more accurately, basic regulation) as a means of abridging the liberties of individuals through a gutting of the constitution (she considers herself a “constitutional conservative”). This often leads her, along with the Tea Party, more generally, towards strange, contradictory assessments of national policy, and nearly incomprehensible positions on a myriad of issues. Kreutz supported with gusto the list of the 13 “non-negotiables” laid out by now discredited Tea Partier Dale Robertson (He gained notoriety for his poorly spelled sign: CONGRESS = SLAVEHOLDERS, TAXPAYER = NIGGAR) on his website teaparty.org. It “should be a given,” she says, that English is our “core language.” We need to continue to strengthen our military (the taxes it takes to do this are, apparently, not an issue), and guns are our sacred right. The government, she thinks, has overstepped its bounds, because, “God only asks for 10%,” (referring to taxes), and the government should not be entitled to take more than God. Like most Tea Partiers, Kreutz advocates a “return” to a free market economy, in which prices remain “satisfaction” and “consumer” driven, and that people should search out modes of legal immigration if they would like to enter the US. These talking points, of course, obfuscate a much more complicated picture and defer, in both cases, to rigid free market ideology. In the case of health care, Kreutz acknowledges that she herself was raised on Medicaid, as were her children, but now that she has benefited from it, she sees government-subsidized health care as a bloated, abused program that indicates exactly what is wrong with the idea of a nationalized health care. This ignores, of course, that health care costs have more than doubled in the last two decades, and that positive medical outcomes have declined over the same period. Why should the American people continue to trust private systems that, as Kreutz herself notes, are “driven by profit.”? Her case for legal immigration suffers from the same flawed logic: immigrants who make the harrowing trek across our southern border (lets not kid ourselves, when the Tea Party says “immigrant,” they aren’t talking about displaced Serbs, or Polish expatriates), it is to find a better life. Specifically, a better economic life. The costs of immigration lock out those most likely to benefit from immigrating. The bible itself contradicts the tact on immigration taken by most Tea Partiers. This decree from God comes from Leviticus 19, 33-34:

When an alien lives with you in your land, do not mistreat him. 34 The alien living with you must be treated as one of your native-born. Love him as yourself, for you were aliens in Egypt. I am the LORD your God.

Given that 83% of Tea Partiers identify themselves as being members of the Christian faith, the disjunction between the rhetoric of their religion and the rhetoric of their movement, stands in striking contrast. For her part, Kruetz estimated that as much as 50% of the Tea Party is made up of Atheists, and that the Tea Party should not be a Christian organization. There is one caveat, however – It doesn’t matter if a Tea Party member is Christian or not, because, being “constitutional conservatives,” they inadvertently “are in fact defending God or the Judeo Christian Values [sic] as the Constitution was founded on these principles, (Historically speaking).” She says this is obvious because “… we all know that God was the foundation of this nation and Christianity to be exact and with out Jesus Christ there would be no freedom of religion…”

Facing the facts about the Tea Party leads to a depressing picture: More than half of Tea Partiers (56%) are representatives of the 24% of people in the United States who make more than $50,000 a year, meaning the concerns of the wealthy are disproportionately represented by those involving themselves in the Tea Party. Eighty-nine percent of Tea Partiers identify themselves as White, meaning the concerns of people of color are under represented (in fact, according to the pole, 52% of Tea Partiers believe “Too much” attention has been paid to the plight of Black people in recent years). Fifty-four percent identify themselves as Republicans, and 36% identify themselves as independents, which inadvertently complicates the truth, as most independents tend to lean Republican, bringing the number closer to 70% or so. (See these statistics here and here)

Far from representing the middle of American politics, the Tea Party represents the extensive turn to the right of the political spectrum precipitated by George W. Bush’s ascent to power in 2000, and continuing as fears about our economic recession manifest themselves in unsavory ways. Economic downturns have historically meant resurgences in anti-immigrant, racist, political fear mongering. In this light, the Tea Party is revealed for what it truly is: the latest manifestation of a national trend at least as old as the Reconstruction Era. The enemies the Tea Party imagines are, as with the predecessor movements, the most disenfranchised of society: The poor, minorities, and immigrants. These groups, their narrative goes, are coddled by the government, are given special treatment that requires an unfair rise in taxes for the wealthy, productive members of society. This ignores the rapid drop in the tax rate on the top 1% from a high in 1952 of 92% to below 30% by 2005, which effectively shifted that burden to the middle class, who, along with the rich, now blame the poor for their high taxes.

The illusory nature of the enemies imagined by the Tea Party makes their “struggle” seem like quite the parody. At the same time, this displacement of the anger felt by real working people helps the conservative movement muddy the waters, and complicate issues that are basically very simple. Kreutz, in telling me about the lying scientists perpetuating the myth of global climate change suggested I do something often suggested by opponents of this or that cause: “Follow the money.” When one does so, it leads them, paradoxically, right back to the Tea Party – wealthy, white, conservatives afraid of the erosion of the privileges they’ve enjoyed for so long, and, unfortunately, using enough inflammatory rhetoric to pull in those whose interests should lie in the opposite direction – in the direction of caring for real people, with real problems, in caring for the balance of our delicate ecosystem, and in caring for the underprivileged, often maligned, destitute immigrant.

Jean Baudrillard, in his monumental Simulation and Simulacra, wrote extensively of a world in which what seems real has merely been designed to seem so, and what is real is obfuscated by the glow of what he called hyper-reality (his famous example is Disney Land). In the footnote to his section on The China Syndrome, he sardonically writes: “The incident at the nuclear reactor on Three Mile Island, which will shortly follow the release of the film.” There is something more to this than simply a humorous quip, to my mind. As the imaginations of wealthy, conservative individuals, become more haunted by immigrants, cultural, and religious minorities, pressure mounts on public officials to react in ways that quell their fears.

Witness the anti-immigrant rhetoric of the new Arizona laws that make teaching about cultural minorities illegal, and that opens law enforcement to ever more extreme militarism, the Texas school boards’ decision to gut American history of references to the Slave Trade, and to trivialize the Civil Rights movement, or the strength of pro-drilling sentiment among Americans even after the environmental disaster off of the coast of the already-struggling state of Louisiana, and try to say with honesty that the United States that exists in the imagination of Tea Partiers isn’t manifesting itself in our own country. It is easy to ridicule the Tea Party, and to punch holes in its often-faulty logic. Much more difficult is imagining the road ahead, imagining the struggles it will take to undo their campaigns of fear and intimidation, and to undermine the attempts of wealthy conservatives to maintain a narrative that pits intellectuals, minorities, environmentalists and immigrants against the United States, rather than as integral parts of the United States. As they fetishize the constitution, the prosperity (and segregation) of the 1950’s, and the conservatism of the Reagan Era, their message continues to be broadcast, becoming more real with each iteration: There was a real United States, and this isn’t it.

For Further Reading:
rationalrevolution.net/articles/history_of_the_separation_of_chu.html
www.nytimes.com/2010/04/15/us/politics/15poll.html
finance.yahoo.com/taxes/article/102817/How-Your-Tax-Dollars-Are-Spent
www.factcheck.org/2009/05/hr-1388-passed-behind-our-backs/
www.treehugger.com/files/2010/03/busting-facebook-myth-global-warming.php