What the Tea Party Is About

I'm watching some conservatives, quoted on Rachel Maddow's show, talk about how the Tea Party isn't about the social issues, it's just about limited government and economic and fiscal conservativism and Madisonian restraint and libertarianism, blah blah blah. Rachel, being her usual awesome self, is demonstrating how flagrantly wrong that is. It's true: there's a whole frickin' lot of evidence that Tea Partiers are, if anything, more socially conservative and hawkish on foreign issues than Republicans as a whole. But I thought I'd take a moment to reiterate my own personal conviction about what the Tea Party is about. Here's the thesis: it has nothing, exactly and identically nothing, to do with the issues, or matters of public policy at all.

Before I go on, I should note that there is one exception to this theory, which is the social stuff. The Tea Partiers are, by and large, a genuinely socially conservative bunch, anti-abortion, anti-non-mainstream-Christianity, anti-being-nice-to-the-rest-of-the-world, blah blah blah. I don't really know why people think the Tea Party is distinct from the evangelical movement that's been brewing in the Republican Party for decades. I recently read a few very interesting posts about how Michele Bachmann kind of represents the growing lack of separation between those social conservative evangelical types and the rest of the Republican Party. But anyway, with that caveat out of the way, let's get on to the main course:

The Tea Party has nothing to do with issues or public policy! This, of course, goes rather aggressively against everything you hear about them, which is that they're about opposition to some kind of giant economic government overreach, and they just want to limit the government's intrusions into the economy. Rubbish, I say. Why do I say that? Because the positions the Tea Party takes on various issues, especially economic ones, are incoherent. What I mean by this is basically that, speaking as a proud resident of the reality-based community, nothing adds up about the policies they favor (or mostly oppose) and the reasons they give for their positions. Anti-tax fervor drove opposition to the largest tax cut of all time. Opposition to government intrusion into the private sector drove opposition to a health-care reform bill that was clearly bending over backwards to avoid imperiling private insurers. Opposition to debt drives a current desire to do something that will definitely increase our debt long-term, namely raising the effing debt ceiling. I could go on.

The point is, these aren't just "opinions" I disagree with. They're opinions that simply don't fit the actual realities of public policy. Some Tea Party positions, like opposing Medicare cuts, can be explained as pure power politics: the Tea Party is largely elderly, Medicare gives them money, they don't want to cut it. But then, why the fuss about debt? After all, the elderly will be dead by the time any long-term debt problems materialize, so a pro-elderly platform ought to say "spend like a drunken sailor giving our old people health care!" Do they understand that there literally aren't options other than a) continue a policy of bailing out failing banks, b) regulating the banking industry to prevent excessive risk-taking, and c) allowing the economy to implode at some point in the medium-term future? Evidently not. They fulminate about the government takeover of everything, despite the fact that taxes are at historic lows, aggregate government spending is only very slightly up if at all, and the public sector is shedding jobs. The market-based approach to global warming is a gigantic government takeover of everything.

Now, one can concede that much or all of this is driven by misinformation, much of it driven by Fox "News." But the point is, if these people really cared about policy and the issues, they would find this stuff out. There is no impulse among the Tea Party, as a group institution at the very least, to figure out the details of how public policy works and how it could work to advance goals. People who care about policy make at least a mild effort to have the things they say line up with the realities of policy. That doesn't describe the Tea Party.

What I believe motivates the Tea Party is, at bedrock, vehement personal opposition to Barack Obama. Some of that is racially or quasi-racially motivated. Some of it is derived from John Boehner's comment about how the world he grew up in is disappearing. A lot of types of people did very, very well in the 1950s, but a lot of other types of people did very very poorly. The types that were winning aren't worse off today than they were then, because the world as a whole is a lot better than it used to be, but they aren't winning, at least not as much as they were then, because the people who were losing the '50s are not losing, now, at least not as much. And some of the people in those groups that won the 1950s and aren't winning as much now don't like this trend. I think Obama embodies this phenomenon rather powerfully, and that drives some of the opposition to him. Some of it might just be the same old thing that happened to Clinton, namely that he was a Democrat who won, and therefore Republicans hated his guts.

The point is, though, that however we want to explain the personal opposition to Obama, once we notice it as a motivating factor all of the Tea Party's positions become rather obvious. Anything Obama proposes is the evilest, most despicable socialist communist Islamofascist plot ever. Since there's no particular reason why a set of positions diametrically opposed to everything in a coherent policy platform should be a coherent policy platform itself, the Tea Party's "positions on the issues" look kind of, well, incoherent and uninformed. That's because they are! They aren't positions on issues, they're just reflexive opposition to Obama and all things associated with him. It isn't about policy, it's never been about policy. They just hate the guts of the black man in the White House. It's that simple.