The Tea Party Movement: An Image of American Society

In the contemporary revival of the tea party, the movement that originally led to the independence of the United States in 1776, libertarian conservatives ride the nation’s growing distrust of Barack Obama and flood the Republican Party. They prioritize individual liberty and share an aversion to all federal government intervention: they oppose policies including reflation, even at the price of bankruptcies.

“When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.” These words, attributed to Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, were right on target with voters and allowed Christine O’Donnell to beat the prominent politician Mike Castle, and his 40 years of political experience, in the Republican senatorial primary for Delaware. Christine O’Donnell is a member of the new rising force, the tea party. After her victory, she declared, “This is more of a cause than a campaign.”

The tea party references America’s pre-revolutionary spirit of insurrection against British power. In 1773, settlers disguised as Indians threw 342 cases of tea into the sea at the port of Boston to protest taxes charged by the English crown. This tea party uprising was the starting point of the American Revolution, which led to the Declaration of Independence of July 4, 1776. It appears that the tea party now stands at the forefront of the revival of core American values; values that had become muted by the flurry of doubts caused by the nation’s financial, economic and social crises.

Indeed, to win the presidential election, Barack Obama made eloquent and powerful use of a discourse founded, in the democratic tradition, on the value of equality of opportunity, the necessity of state intervention to regulate the excesses of unbridled capitalism and the need to provide medical insurance to tens of millions of Americans. His immense charisma helped lift spirits and return hope to an America destabilized by the collapse of Lehman Brothers. His optimistic messages of “everything is possible” were perfectly in line with the protestant ethic of this country, which makes use of its difficulties in order to better overcome them and advance.

Since the elections, times have changed. The libertarians of the tea party are reviving other core values of American culture. Their insurgency has flooded the Republican Party, which seeks to regain the majority in the Senate and the House of Representatives in the November 2010 elections. These fundamental values are essentially fourfold. First is the freedom of speech of all citizens defending a cause. In a “bottom up” spirit, they organized themselves into “grassroots” pressure groups. They use the Constitution’s first amendment, which gives citizens the right to petition the government to redress their grievances. In contrast, the Republican Party utilizes a method of organization that is intrinsically “top down,” structured to organize campaigns against the Democrats.

The second is the notion of individual responsibility. The regard for “self reliance” is deeply engrained in American society and has been since the arrival of the country’s first immigrants. On this line, the Obama administration is judged to be a major failure due to its efforts to construct a welfare society. The federal government must stop interfering in the daily lives of its citizens and should let the states produce appropriate, local, legislation.

The third is an aversion to federal government, which is seen as the root of all evil. As Thomas Paine declared in 1776, “Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.” The technocrats in Washington D.C. are at the center of these attacks; specifically, the tea party targets the presidency and of course the Democratic Congress, but also the Republican establishment, judged insufficiently revolutionary. The tea party wants to downsize the government, which they believe should only focus on its sovereign roles (defense, justice…) and privatize all its other responsibilities. They want to lower taxes, fight the stimulus package’s use of public money and reject any form of redistribution financed by taxes or deficits.

The fourth is an open and unimpeded market, which is understood as the only way for Americans to exercise their entrepreneurial liberty. For tea party activists, the private sphere must reclaim its right against state intervention. In 2009, many Americans were viscerally opposed to the rescue of large automobile companies. Tea party followers believe that private enterprise should not be rescued by citizen taxes, even if bankruptcies among subcontractors could put hundreds of thousands of employees out of work. As far back as the first settlers, Americans have always strongly believed in personal initiative and free enterprise as the engine of development.

Today, numerous observers doubt the capacity of the tea party to become a strong and long lasting political force, especially since certain of its members drive the movement toward ultraconservative ideologies. Nevertheless, it’s clear that this movement could gain momentum because it has, in many eyes, reconciled so many Americans with their fundamental values: individual responsibility and free enterprise.