Radicalization of the Tea Party

The federal government shutdown is the latest episode in a very tough offensive begun in 2009, led by the tea party, an ultraconservative wing of the Republican Party. The tea party does not just consider the federal government to be simply a “problem,” like Ronald Reagan once said, but rather an enemy that needs to be weakened as much as possible. The tea party has not been born out of nowhere: It is a symbol of the conservative revival that began in the 1960s, when a mixture of discontented people began to form a group, denouncing the jumble of social assistance programs on the basis that they kept the poor in poverty and increased taxes, the management of federal lands in the West and the federal response in the civil rights battle for blacks, who offend a significant part of the Southern white population.

The novelty of the tea party is not so much in its ideology as in its diehard political strategy, which leads to violation of the normal functioning of the state. Through a guerrilla war in Congress, elected tea party representatives follow the old recipe of radical conservatism, with classic ingredients including the most rancid of them all: the issue of race. Of course, it is not possible for the heads of the tea party — except on a slip-up or when imprudence betrays them — to claim any white identity. These spokesmen only speak about balancing the federal budget, drying up “Obamacare” — the health insurance plan — financially and other topics that are devoid of racial issues.

If military spending is approved of in the eyes of most of the elected tea party representatives, it is the social programs that create their most violent diatribes: Federal spending to reduce social injustice is illegitimate and counterproductive, and the same applies to income tax.

Of course, the current law on health insurance exasperates them, since it seems to them to represent a “socialist” state. More generally, it is what remains of the welfare state and heir to the New Deal, with the creation of social security, jobs in the public sector, the reduction of wealth disparity and, since the 1960s, health insurance for the very poor and for the elderly, which is in their line of sight.

However, these issues are particularly interesting to minorities, who make up half of the 40 million uninsured people in the United States. One-third of black Americans and two-thirds of Hispanics are uninsured, which is the case for “only” one-fifth of white Americans. Blacks and Hispanics receive poorer quality medical care, dying much more frequently than the national average of diabetes, cancer and strokes, not to mention those who are — often poorly — insured.

Currently, 71 percent of white Americans are covered by insurance due to their jobs, which is not the case for one-third of Hispanics and half of African-Americans. In states where black and Hispanic populations are the highest, like Alabama or Texas, the effects of the new law will be the most evident, since access to care is the most deplorable there. Obamacare is good news for millions of Americans. It would reduce geographic and ethno-racial public health disparities in the United States.

Targeting Obamacare with such tenacity and with so many resources — the Koch brothers, right-wing billionaires, have spent millions of dollars to try to defeat it — tea party strategists draw a line between “their” America, which Sarah Palin calls “the real America” — white, Christian — and the “other” America — more colored, more poor — as the one that interests the federal government to increase income tax to fund social programs.

Finally, the fact that this law has Barack Obama as its leading architect puts the tea party voters into hysteria. Surveys have shown that they do not, for the most part, understand the details of the law, which is admittedly complex, or even its general principles. In fact, a number of these ultraconservative Americans have, for themselves and for their families, objective interest in the law, but at present they do not care: The presence of a black man in the White House destroys them, obsesses them. The health insurance law is in their eyes an additional symptom of an imaginary drift: That the federal government lavishly spends to benefit “others.”