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http://www.thenation.com/article/156524/talking-tea-party
How the Tea Is Brewed
By Gary Younge
The Nation: In the December 6th edition
Over a breakfast of pancakes, scrambled eggs and bacon in a back room of the
Nugget Casino in Pahrump, rural Nevada, shortly before the midterm
elections, the talk among some forty men turned to the most propitious
moment for armed insurrection.
The government needs to know that we will use [our arms] if they continue
down the path they're on. We're not even ready. We need to get ready."
Another, fearing this could give a visiting journalist the wrong impression,
insists that few in the room would agree with such a ridiculous view.
But it turned out that quite a few did. "Look how much damage Barack Obama
and his socialist Congress did in eighteen months," bellows another. "It
could take us ten years to undo this crap. And you say we can't consider
using weapons."
They call it the Old Farts Club: a gathering of elderly conservative men
that has been meeting every Friday morning for the past five years at the
Nugget for breakfast and a bull session that ranges from judges-one man
calls for Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan to be removed from the Supreme
Court-to the fate of a local park.
A straw poll reveals that none think Harry Reid can beat Sharron Angle
without stealing the election.
Four days later, in a plush suite at the Aria Hotel, the Tea Party Express
watched Harry Reid win fair and square. They'd chosen the Aria because they
wanted to taunt Reid, who was holding his election-night event there.
Despite the open bar and the catered treats, it was a tough one to swallow.
Those two scenes-at the Nugget and the Aria-illustrate two distinct faces of
the Tea Party. The first, at the base, is a very loosely affiliated group of
like-minded people who may "identify" with the Tea Party but have no
connection beyond that. The second, purportedly at the helm, is a series of
well-funded competing organizations that pose as leaders of that base but in
fact have no control or even link to it outside the media. Politically
speaking, neither really exists. Or at least not as billed.
Where the base is concerned, there is no structure, leader or membership
that links it to a bigger movement. Beyond "small government" and
Obama-bashing, it's not clear what the various groups would agree on. Some,
like the Old Farts Club, meet regularly and, while they may get their
talking points from Fox News, are nonetheless independent.
To those who dismiss the Tea Party as nothing more than "astroturf" (fake
grassroots), such activity poses a challenge. The country has a long history
of grassroots conservative activism. Indeed, one of the problems with the
Tea Party label is that, far from describing a new phenomenon, it depicts an
old one-the hard right-that happens to be enjoying an episodic resurgence.
These people didn't join it; it joined them. But even following Republicans'
midterm victories, the nature of that resurgence can be overstated and
misunderstood.
An attempt over several months by the Washington Post to contact every
single Tea Party group found that it was unclear if many actually
functioned. Seventy percent said they had not been involved in a political
event in a year-the very year the Tea Party made its most dramatic gains.
The Post described the Tea Party as "not so much a movement as a disparate
band of vaguely connected gatherings that do surprisingly little to engage
in the political process."
"When a group lists themselves on our Web site, that's a group," Mark
Meckler, a founding member of the Tea Party Patriots, told the Post. "That
group could be one person, it could be 10 people, it could come in and out
of existence-we don't know."
This comes more by way of description than derision. It is how
movement-building goes. I have seen local antiwar and healthcare groups that
live or die by the energy of just one or two people. Nonetheless, such facts
are incompatible with the portrayal of a vibrant insurgent ideological
entity capable of taking over first the Republican Party and then the
country.
For that, one must go back to the second Tea Party, on the twentieth floor
of the Aria and elsewhere. It is groups like the Tea Party Express, Tea
Party Patriots, FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity that claim in
different ways to speak for that base. Each one is run by veteran right-wing
operatives who at some stage have been part of the GOP establishment. With
the help of uncritical and unending coverage by Fox News, they have been
able to amplify the inchoate, incoherent demands of the base and thereby
transform it into what looks like a formidable electoral force.
The trouble is that these groups-and the Congressional representatives they
have helped elect-have almost no relationship to that base beyond partial
listservs. No threat, demand, assertion or ultimatum made in the name of the
Tea Party is credible. That doesn't mean it's not possible to deliver on any
of them, but nothing in the immediate aftermath of the election has
suggested that might be likely.
Early on, Minnesota motormouth Michele Bachmann, leader of the Tea Party
Caucus in the House, challenged a Republican establishment candidate for the
number-four spot in the House, only to withdraw within a week after her bid,
launched primarily through the media, failed to gain traction. Elsewhere
there have been laughable scuffles between Tea Party organizations
competing, mostly in vain, for the attention of Republican freshmen.
Several voices without a body; several bodies without a voice: Tea Party, a
name with electoral appeal in search of ideological coherence and a
political purpose. None of which should make liberals complacent. If these
groups can do this much damage when they are this disorganized, imagine what
might happen if they got it together.
Gary Younge
Gary Younge, the Alfred Knobler Journalism Fellow at The Nation Institute,
is the New York correspondent for The Nation.
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