They are the Nickelback or Twilight of political fronts: so easy for us to make fun of that it’s hardly worth doing so. We mock them on The Daily Show and walk around in shirts that read, “Hillbillies drink tea?!” There are efficient little blogs and Flickr accounts devoted to displaying pictures of men in tri-cornered hats holding misspelled signs so that we can laugh and dismiss their protests as sheer madness. They are the Tea Party, and they are political cartoons unto themselves.
Considering the people that Tea Partiers choose as their leaders, it is not all that difficult to understand why so many people fail to take the group seriously. Glenn Beck, a pundit for Fox, encouraged early protests and continues to serve as major figure in the movement. But Beck is little more than an alarmist standing in front of a blackboard, grasping at straws to spread unfounded claims. While obnoxious, Beck is only slightly more radical than the politicians aligned with the Tea Party. Joe Miller, the Republican nominee for senator in Alaska, is running on a platform of reducing foreign aid and eliminating the Department of Education. Christine O’Donnell of Delaware staunchly maintains that that homosexuality is an “identity disorder.” In Nevada, Sharron Angle decries the United Nations as “the umpire on fraudulent science such as global warming,” as well as to say that 13-15 year-old girls raped by their fathers have the opportunity to turn “a lemon situation into lemonade” by refusing abortion.
It’s tempting to immediately discredit these opinions—to label Miller, O’Donnell and Angle part of the lunatic fringe and move on. But all three of these would-be senators are endorsed by not only the Tea Party, but the Republican party as well. The fact is, there are enough voters who agree with them that the GOP was willing to sell out more moderate candidates, some of whom had been in office for more than a decade. Americans who have been ignoring the Tea Party out of disdain must now come to the conclusion that it is totally irrelevant whether or not its members are uninformed or even stupid. Tea Partiers are changing the face of our political system, and it’s time to start taking them, or at least their impact, seriously.
To anyone who looks beyond the factual errors and blind outrage, it’s obvious that the Tea Party is part of a much larger trend in American attitude toward Washington. As Obama’s approval ratings sink and the House and Senate prove as ineffective as ever, more and more citizens find themselves frustrated with not only the opposing party, but their own as well. As Mark McKinnon, a Republican consultant who worked to promote George W. Bush’s 2000 and 2004 elections, says, “It’s gotten to the point where people don't even like their own representatives anymore. They want them all out, they want to start from scratch. They want to burn the house down. It's ugly.”
Disappointment in bipartisanship is something common to moderate Americans, and a grassroots organization was the inevitable conclusion. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately), the Tea Party isn’t really an organization. The views of its supporters are so dissimilar and their policies so impractical that, were Tea Partiers ever to seize control of the government, they wouldn’t know what to do with it. It is a fundamentally flawed crusade, but that doesn’t make its existence any less potent. At the very least, it is the manifestation of Americans’ dissatisfaction with the way that their government functions.
When a nation’s political spectrum is reduced to a single scale on which its people and politicians must lean to one side or the other, political opinion is reduced to pure reaction. The fumbles of one party simply push support into the other, regardless of whether the second party has actually done anything, and this process is repeated ad nauseam. But personal politics should have more depth than the hit-and-run philosophy too many of us employ. We express ourselves with angry signs and clever bumper stickers so that we can subject others to our opinions without the threat of being challenged. Americans seem to have forgotten that the foundation of real democracy is discourse. When we scream at each other with our fingers in our ears, we accomplish nothing and our system stagnates. This is the real value of the Tea Party: to remind us that we as citizens have the ability to affect radical shifts in our government. Don’t like what the Tea Partiers have to say? Good. Talk about it. That’s the whole point.
