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Why the Tea Party is Dangerous

By Mike Appleton (Guest Blogger)

In 1773 the British East India Company was broke.  In an effort to prevent bankruptcy, and the resulting loss of the crown’s investment, the British government eliminated all taxes on domestic tea sales and granted the company a monopoly on tea shipments to the American colonies.  In December of that year radicals boarded ships in Boston harbor and threw $75,000.00 worth of tea overboard.  The first Tea Party was a violent reaction to monopolistic economic power protected by government.

The modern Tea Party doesn’t understand history, so it can’t be expected to appreciate irony.  It is a mongrel movement, its leaders self-proclaimed, its agenda by turns unfathomable and incoherent, its philosophy grounded in vehemence.  So how can it possibly be dangerous?  Here, in no particular order, are my four Rs of the Tea Party.

1. It is racist.  I know.  I just played the race card.  But the best way to stop someone from playing the race card is to quit dealing it.  Public expressions of bigotry began as soon as Barack Obama was nominated at the Democratic convention, and continued throughout the campaign, during which prominent Republicans referred to him as “boy,” “uppity” and other vulgarities.  In short order he became a socialist and a Marxist and was then transformed into an extremist Arab Muslim.  Sarah Palin eventually settled on the euphemistic “let’s take our country back,” but we all knew what she meant.  The Tea Party began forming before the inauguration and was printing “Don’t Tread on Me” posters while the Obama family was still unpacking in the White House.  On April 15, 2009, the Tea Party was protesting a tax burden that was, and is, the lowest in 60 years.  

The Tea Party has promoted ugly forms of nativism, including punitive immigration laws,  English only legislation and bans on the teaching of ethnic studies.  It is the 1840s once again, but the targets are Muslims and Hispanics rather than Germans and Irish.

2.  It is a religionist movement.  I don’t know if religionism is a word, but I use it to describe a phenomenon distinct from traditional religion: religion as political philosophy.  It is the view that the Constitution was divinely inspired, that America is God’s gift to mankind, that capitalism is mandated by Holy Scripture and that the notion of “social justice” is the work of the Antichrist.  It is a culmination of the fundamentalist reaction in the early 1900s to Darwin and the progressive movement.  It has spawned a form of Christian imperialism that justifies the “crusades” in Iraq and Afghanistan, supports Israel uncritically and sends American politicians to Africa to lobby for the death penalty for homosexuals. 

3.  It is repressive.  The Tea Party is committed to authoritarianism.  Lawmakers in Congress and throughout the country, particularly in states with heavily Republican legislatures, have been imposing humiliating burdens on women’s constitutional rights at breakneck speed.  They are simultaneously reducing taxes on business  and cutting funding for education and health care.  The regulation of entire industries is being eliminated in certain states.  The integrity of public employees has been impugned and their rights to organize curtailed.  Laws banning the phony threat of sharia are pending in a dozen states.  The independence of the judiciary has been threatened by proposals to reduce courts’ rule-making authority and politicize the judicial selection process.

4.  It is revisionist.  The Christian right and its supporters in legislatures and on school boards have demanded that high school history texts be rewritten to eliminate references to the deism endorsed by many of the Founders in favor of promoting the false notion of America as an exclusively Christian nation.  The history of slavery and the Civil War is being falsified to satisfy the desires of apologists for the Confederacy and southern “values.”   Science cannot be re-written, but it can be denied.  The sciences of climate change and evolutionary processes have become the subjects of unnecessary controversy.

Robert La Follette, a founder of the progressive movement, became governor of Wisconsin in 1900 and immediately took on the railroads, forcing them to pay higher taxes on their assets.  When the new governor of Wisconsin took office this year, he immediately took on labor in an effort to destroy public employee unions and cover the cost of new tax reductions for business.  But like I said earlier.  People who don’t understand history can’t appreciate irony.

254 thoughts on “Why the Tea Party is Dangerous”

  1. Here’s some good news for Democrats and bad news for Paul Ryan and the Republicans:

    70% of Tea Partiers Don’t Want to Cut Medicare Either
    By Elspeth Reeve Apr 19, 2011
    The Atlamtic Wire
    http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2011/04/70-tea-partiers-dont-want-cut-medicare-either/36820/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed:+TheAtlanticWire+(The+Atlantic+Wire)&utm_content=Twitter

    The Tea Party movement is supposed to be the engine driving Republicans’ push for sharp cuts to spending and reform entitlements. Representative Paul Ryan’s 2012 budget, which passed the House last week, phases out Medicare for people under 55 and turns Medicaid into block grants. But it turns out that Tea Partiers, like most Americans, strongly oppose cutting Medicare and Medicaid. A new McClatchy-Marist poll shows 70 percent of “Tea Party supporters” oppose cutting those programs–and 80 percent of registered voters agree.

    So though The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait has argued that “the Ryan budget represents the victory of the Tea Party mentality over mainstream conservatism within the Republican Party,” it looks like Ryan’s plan doesn’t represent the activists, either. Slate’s Dave Weigel calls the Marist poll a “nice present” for Democrats, and “pretty ugly numbers” for Republicans. He adds: “If Democrats can keep portraying the cuts as worse than they are–this was done successfully in the 2005 Social Security fight–there’s a win here.” For another articulation of this view, recall that even when House Republicans passed Ryan’s budget Friday, NBC News’ Mark Murray marveled at their political gambit: “Either the normal rules of American politics have changed, or Republicans have walked into an electoral buzz saw–on a Medicare plan that won’t pass the 112th Congress and that many of them didn’t campaign on in 2010.”

  6. I had not thought about the JBS in forty years until it popped up here. And I am one who keeps on top of news about hate groups and other fringe groups who do not believe in the democratic process. That is how relevant they have become.

    And yes, they are, or were, a fringe group that did not really believe in the Constitution. Especially that part about freedom of association and speech.

  7. Isn’t it funny how you guys keep saying the JBS is “irrelevent”, but yet, you keep mentioning them. I didn’t bring them up on this thread, YOU all did. The very ones who call them irrelevent are the same ones who keep bringing them up in conversations on blogs—-amazing. Apparently, you think they have some influence or you wouldn’t keep mentioning them. It’s like when liberals say the Tea Party is a “fringe” group but they keep bringing them up, showcasing they have a large following.

  8. What is wrong with opposition to flouridation? I read that scientists even in the 50’s said this was very bad. That’s a “conspiracy theory” that scientists actually said this?

    Otteray Scribe said:

    “Larry, you just listed several reasons to think the JBS not on is, but SHOULD have been relegated to the dustbin of history.”

    Wanna re-word that? This time, in English?

    Let me guess, you all don’t think the creation of the Fed is conspiracy? Of course it was! It was BANKERS and a few politicians beginning something that is not even a governmental agency—-according to Alan Greenspan, the Fed is an INDEPENDENT agency and takes NO instructions from ANY governmental agency—–translation: they are above the law. Want me to post the clip where he says this to Jim Lehrer?

  11. Mike A.,
    I agree about the fluoridation oppposition from JBS. That group is not only irrelevant as OS suggested, they are non-existent.

  12. Larry, you forgot to add opposition to fluoridation and impeaching Earl Warren to your list of JBS “principles.” You apparently weren’t around in the ’50s and ’60s.

  13. Larry, you just listed several reasons to think the JBS not on is, but SHOULD have been relegated to the dustbin of history. If you try to find them in a history book, they are a footnote in the section about the Cold War, if they are mentioned at all. Does the word “irrelevant” ring a bell?

  14. Otteray Scribe—-the JBS core principles are:

    •Anti-totalitarian

    •Anti-socialist

    •Anti-communist

    •For limited government

    •Defenders of the original intention of the Constitution

    •Opposed to wealth distribution, economic interventionism and fascism.

    •Opposed to a one world government

    •Supports immigration reduction

    •Opposes the United Nations

    •Opposes NAFTA

    •Opposes CAFTA

    •Opposes the North American Union [cites the Security and Prosperity Partnership as evidence of NAU]

    •Supports ending the Federal Reserve

    Why on Earth would anyone have anything against these core principles??? Unless you’re anti-American?

  19. 43north,

    “As “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” remains true, therefore I hold to my 4 degrees of separation.”

    Something has to have been true to begin with to remain true.

  20. Sorry to be cryptic and elsewhere, but other fires raged, as OS knows.
    ps: hit me with an email folks, if possible (given internet access) I’ll chime-in.

    First:
    Elizabeth Warren was so worthy as I relentlessly campaigned my Senators on her behalf.

    The ‘business-as-usual / thanks for the check’ crowd opposed her as real fiscal policing vs. cardboard cut-out policing would occur. Some people enjoy the comfort of “nothing to see here, ignore the man behind the curtain” – blissful ignorance.

    As to my circular comment, lottakatz was correct.

    Those who seek to overthrow the establishment have the same goal if different ideology. I used Fascists and Communists as an example against the Weimar Republic.

    Otteray Scribe noted The Night of the Long Knives consolidated Hitler’s power in Germany, killing or jailing not only the SA, but the fringe party members with communist leanings.
    That didn’t however, end Hitler’s cooperation with Communists, it merely required them to be out of the country.
    The partition of Poland as an example.

    Now two scoundrels can’t make a treaty*, as one recognizes his own avarice and greed in the other, so war between the USSR and Nazi Germany resulted.

    I’m not so naive as to believe that (anarchists for lack of better word) forming an alliance against the national establishment would result in a long-term relationship benefiting the country as a whole, despite just that forming the basis of our revolution. Planters, speculators, and merchants seeking more gain, with less supervision, coupled with firebrands like Patrick Henry formed a revolutionary core.

    I dare say they weren’t representative of the yeomanry of citizenship, and yet they set the course of politics for over two centuries.

    As “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” remains true, therefore I hold to my 4 degrees of separation.

    *OK, so to every rule there’s a Mao and Nixon… whatcherpoint?

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