TNR: The Tea Party is a Real Movement
John B. Judis writes:
On the eve of the November elections, we are suddenly awash in books, articles, and monographs about the Tea Parties. Some of these—I would single out Sean Wilentz’s historical piece in The New Yorker—deepen our understanding, but most of them don’t get it right. They are too quick either to dismiss or to stigmatize the Tea Parties. And the mistakes they make are not just academic; they contribute to a misunderstanding of what it will take for liberals and the left—not to mention the Obama administration—to turn around American politics after November.
Here are some of the most common misconceptions:
1) “The Tea Party is not a movement.” In a front page story in last Sunday’s Washington Post, Amy Gardner wrote that the Tea Parties are “not so much a movement as a disparate band of vaguely connected gatherings that do surprisingly little to engage in the political process.” As evidence, Gardner cites the lack of a common platform, the lack of a common national candidate, and the absence of a single dominant national organization. The Tea Parties, the author suggests, are a much weaker brew than commonly thought.
But many powerful movements lack one or more of these features. In their first years, the Populists (aka Farmers Alliance, etc.) lacked all these of these features. In 1892, they came together around a candidate and a platform, but that didn’t last. The populist movement of the 1880s and 1890s was basically a highly decentralized and fractious movement. Or consider the New Left of the 1960s, of which I can speak personally. There was a multiplicity of organizations: student, black, Chicano, feminist. And some of the organizations that claimed to have thousands and thousands of members were themselves disorganized and decentralized. I belonged to an SDS chapter in California, but we never—and I mean never—consulted the national office in Chicago. When some would-be Leninists tried to consolidate SDS into a cadre organization in 1969, it splintered and eventually dissolved.
The conservative movement that began in the mid-’50s also lacked a common platform and dominant national organization. The American Conservative Union was and remains a paper organization that puts on conferences. Conservatives coalesced around national leaders in 1964 and 1980, but in between these times, they were not committed to a single leader. It is easy to forget that in the 1980 election, some new right leaders backed John Connally against Ronald Reagan! And by Reagan’s second term, conservatives were feuding again. In other words, American politics has almost always had disorganized, decentralized movements like the Tea Parties—and they have had a significant impact.
I don’t want to read too much into Gardner’s analysis, but what I suspect in these cases is that the writer is imposing a continental European model of a political movement onto American politics. In Europe’s multiparty systems, movements cohere more easily into parties, but in America, the two-party system discourages the transition from movement to party except when the movement takes over one of the two parties.
2) “The Tea Party is a fascist movement.” Several authors have claimed that the Tea Party, far from being incoherent in its views, is really an American “fascist” movement. Sara Robinson from the Campaign for America’s Future cites the definition of fascism from a book, The Anatomy of Fascism:
...a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.
“Sound familiar?” she asks. Not to me. The Tea Party isn’t a party, has not yet abandoned democratic liberties, and has not pursued “redemptive violence.” A few fights here or there, maybe, but not Brown Shirt violence.
The problem here is very similar to that of denying that the Tea Party is a “movement.” In both cases, the author is imposing abstract definitions that are rooted in European, not American, history. What I would say about the Tea Party is that like the European fascism between the world wars, it is a deeply reactionary movement. People often look backwards for solutions when faced with adversity. In continental Europe, that meant looking back to an authoritarian past—in the case of Italy, all the way to the days of the Roman Empire. In the U.S. it has meant looking back to an anti-statist past, when liberty was defined in opposition to government. That’s how the Tea Party movement sees it. It’s our American version of political backwardness, not of fascism.
