The Tea Party: Mutiny in the County

Beware of the American conservatives: They always want to change everything. At the end of the ‘70s, who was paying attention to the Christian right? Yet, it proved a subversive team. It was to rise along with Ronald Reagan (president from 1980 to 1988), bring the “values” discourse into the political debate and establish the right-wing position of a Republican Party that had so far been rather centrist. Some time later, who was showing any interest for another little group — of intellectuals this time — gathered under the neoconservative banner? “Upsetters” once again. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, they were to be partly responsible for shaping American foreign policy and inspiring the Iraq adventure.

Today, should the tea partiers — those nostalgic of the American Revolution (1775-1783) that saw the British colonies of America snatch their independence from the British Crown — be taken seriously? The organizers of the movement happily don black three-cornered hats and red frock coats in remembrance of one of the founding events of this Revolution: the Boston Tea Party on Dec. 16, 1773. On that day, Massachusetts colonists, denouncing the London-imposed taxes, threw into Boston Harbor a tea cargo from the East India Company and laid out the sound principle of “no taxation without representation.”

Washington, Saturday, Aug. 28, 2010. The tea party movement, launched in the summer of 2009, gathers in the heart of the capital more than 100,000 demonstrators, according to our correspondent’s estimates (see Corine Lesne’s articles in Le Monde of Aug. 26 and 30). Who are those middle-class Americans, angry with an unexpected enemy: their government — a government which they accuse of oppressing them like the British were oppressing the first colonists? Are they a backward-looking group with no future? The new vanguard of the Republican right? Or the light cavalry of a great populist movement? There are three schools of thought on the subject.

The first sees the tea party movement as the last avatar of the activist right that intends to represent the Republican Party and snatch the majority in Congress at the Nov. 2 elections, before chasing Democrat Barack Obama out of the White House. After all, the themes discussed at the tea parties are those that unite Republicans and right-wing independent voters: a drastic reduction of the budget deficit, described as a generational theft; the denunciation of social security programs; the defense of a foreign policy less “accommodating” to America’s enemies — all of this orchestrated into a very religious and patriotic sounding piece.

Supporters of this purely political interpretation of the tea parties are not short of arguments. They put forward the movement’s heroes as members of the Republican family: Glenn Beck, television presenter on Fox News, and Sarah Palin, former running mate of John McCain, the defeated Republican candidate to the 2008 presidential elections. And as if by chance, the movement rises into being only a few months from the Nov. 2 vote.

As such, the tea partiers do have their importance. This summer they have weighed on the Republican primaries, designed to choose the party candidates for Nov. 2. They imposed a few of their kind. They obliged the others to align with their radical views: There is less and less room for centrists within the Republican Party.

A second school of thought does not dispute the fact that the tea partiers are the new activists of the Republican right. But it considers the movement to be also a reflection of a larger phenomenon which has not spared Europe: the rise of conspiracy theories. The typical discourse at tea parties consists of chiming out their load of scapegoats to explain the misfortunes of the United States, the first of them naturally being Barack Obama — the “Kenyan impostor” and concealed Muslim, who harbors a “deep-seated hate for white people” (in Glenn Beck’s words) and who is surreptitiously leading the country into “socialism.”

In the tea party universe, the Democratic president is not alone in conspiring against the U.S. He is accompanied in this task by the G-7, the G-20, the U.N., the Federal Reserve, by progressive academics. … Which brings some leftists to call on historian Richard Hofstadter (1916-1972*) to explain the tea party movement. They quote from the Columbia University professor’s famous article published in Harper’s in November 1964: “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” Would the tea party movement be no more than the latest expression of a regular delirium of obsidional tendencies in the American public debate?

This is giving them a lot of credit, as noted by journalist Richard Bernstein in The New York Times (March 2010). The third interpretation is the most original, developed by essayist Mark Lilla in The New York Review of Books (May 2010). For him, the tea partiers go beyond the anti-government obsession characteristic of the American right. Amid their hatred of elites, specialists, Congress or basically anything that may claim monopoly of a knowledge or a power, lies a libertarian madness that goes beyond traditional right-wing populism.

It would thus be the expression of a massive exasperation with a society that is more and more regulated, where specialists are ordering people what to think about climate change, telling them when to fasten their seat belt or put on their helmet, where to smoke or use a cell phone, and so on and so forth. The tea partiers are the mutineers of the county — the common America — versus what could be called “the society of experts.”

And they could very well inspire others here in Europe.

*Editor’s note: Richard Hofstadter died on October 24, 1970.