Where Disappointed Conservatives and Blind Ideologues Meet

A negative image of the social welfare state: right-wing conservative Tea Party patriots are striking fear in both Democrats and Republicans alike.

There’s no lack of grandiose rhetoric in Nashville, where the ultra-conservative Tea Party movement is having its conference. Neither is there a lack of reckless historic comparisons. “Watch out, Obama, we’re the counter-revolution!” one attendee shouts out to thundering applause. Another draws parallels to the counter-revolution that took place in East Germany in the 1980s, to the Polish labor union’s “Solidarity” movement and to the Tiananmen Square protests in China.

About 600 so-called Tea Party patriots have gathered this weekend in the country music, bluegrass and hillbilly capital to express their displeasure with Barack Obama and his policies. They come from every corner of the United States and are unified by one idea: Obama is a socialist out to destroy their America.

They claim his policy of taking on more debt has to stop, and the sooner the better. Enough of bank bailouts; stop showering dollars on auto manufacturers, homeowners, road repair and green technology! Many of them dress in the costumes of their heroes, the Revolutionary War era Boston Tea Party revolutionaries, wearing three-cornered hats and teakettle waistbands as they fight for lower taxes and smaller government.

They are united by one common goal. On November 4th, the entire House of Representatives and one-third of the Senate will run for reelection and the Tea Partiers want to get rid of the spendthrifts, leftists, liberals and moderates and replace them with representatives who share their goals. And, ultimately, a Republican must regain the Oval Office in 2012. But not one who empties America’s horn of plenty like George W. Bush did; it has to be another purist like Ronald Reagan, who considered government to be the cause of and not the solution to people’s problems.

But that’s where agreement comes to a near-total end. There was a good deal of friction even before the conference began. At least five separate organizations claim the right to the name “Tea Party.” Many of them boycotted the Nashville get-together because they thought there were too many high-profile politicians attending who damaged the organization’s grass roots image. They also didn’t like the sinfully expensive admission ticket prices — $549 not including travel and hotel costs — and the $100,000 honorarium being paid to Sarah Palin for giving the keynote address on Saturday evening.

The Tea Party is not a political party per se and doesn’t want to be one. They see themselves rather as a big tent, as an informal conservative alliance made up of disparate groups. The libertarian Tennessee antique dealer and pro-choice advocate Jamie Teal met up with abortion opponent Kathleen Gotto from Colorado. Businessman Steve Scott from Seattle, who favors a secular government, encountered lay-pastor William Temple from Georgia. He’s a supporter of America’s “Judeo-Christian traditions.”

Tea Party members also include people disenchanted with politics altogether, such as retiree Alan Davis from Ohio, who is “really angry” with “these corrupt politicians” in Washington and with places like Obama’s home city of Chicago, with its numerous financial fraud and sex scandals. To Davis, it’s symptomatic of “the current catastrophe.”

It would be a mistake to imagine the Tea Party as a group of stubborn conservatives, kooks or crazies. It’s a political melting pot, an unusual mixture of people with justifiable worries and primitive conspiracy theories. Mixing with these people is akin to taking a trip through America’s conservative heartland; through the world of white, God-fearing, government-hating Joe Sixpacks with a deep mistrust of their distant capital and its political cliques. One has to search for blacks and Latinos here with a magnifying glass.

It’s not just blind political ideologues that make up the Tea Party, but political independents as well as disappointed Democrats; the unsatisfied and the disillusioned. Obama’s vision of renewal awakens the ancient conservative fear they harbor deep within themselves that government is becoming too powerful, that a never-satisfied social state will dig too deeply into their pockets and ultimately destroy their liberty.

And somehow, many Tea Party members are also in denial of reality. Climatic catastrophe, healthcare emergency, educational failure — they consider them all liberal concoctions or exaggerations, at best. Even those who acknowledge these problems want to keep government out of solving them. Nashville this weekend is hosting the political, psychological and cultural divide between continental Europe and the North American continent in all its clarity. The European social state is a negative image here.

No one can predict how long this movement will endure or how successful it is likely to be. It’s also uncertain whether the Tea Party will strengthen the Republican Party or vice-versa. Each wants to use the other as a means to gain more power. It’s also within the realm of possibility that the movement will collapse under the weight of its own contradictions or that extremists might seize control of its agenda.

Here in Nashville, thoroughly likable grass-roots types are encountering less likable prominent people, such as the former Alabama Supreme Court judge who was run out of office by his own party for trying to erect a monument displaying the Ten Commandments on public property.

Or they’re encountering people like former Republican congressman Tom Tancredo of Colorado, who stirs up sentiment against immigrants, dabbles with racist sentiments and depicts people who voted for “Barack Hussein Obama” as uneducated illiterates who would never have put their X after his name on the ballot had they been able to read.

Despite all the unknowns, one thing is certain: Tea Party members are instilling fear in Democrats and Republicans alike. Last September, they brought tens of thousands of demonstrators to Washington to protest; in Massachusetts, they brought the Democratic political monopoly to an end and with their protests against moderate incumbent Republicans they’re creating real havoc. Hardly a single politician is safe from their wrath.

Unless that politician is named Sarah Palin. The darling of the Tea Party and former governor of Alaska who ran as John McCain’s deputy is seen as supportive of John McCain once again, even though the far-right would prefer to send someone more conservative to the White House.