In the short period after President Barack Obama’s election, a new force has emerged in American politics. The so-called Tea Party movement nowadays provides strong opposition to Mr. Obama’s policies.
In light of its growing influence, the Tea Party has come under attack as a movement motivated by racial animus. Some – such as New York Times columnist Charles Blow – have criticized Tea Party rallies for lacking diversity. The NAACP is planning to draft a statement calling on the Tea Party to repudiate extremists within its ranks.
All this leads to the question: is the Tea Party movement really a racist organization in disguise?
Last night, Rachel Maddow had a segment on the crazy world of imaginary rightwing facts, such as the recent furor over Obama’s trip to India supposedly costing $200 million a day, and involving 10% of the US Navy fleet. Of course it didn’t… but all manner of wingnuts, up to and including Michelle Bachmann were utterly convinced it was true. Maddow touched on a number of other examples, including the infamous “death panels”, which should be enough to tip folks off that this is not merely a matter of whacky annecdotal excesses. Here’s the first 8 1/2 minutes of the full almost 19 minute segment:
This phenomena of a separate reality sustained by a self-contained conservative media universe has serious policy consequences. And the fact that Obama and the rest of the Democratic establishment doesn’t realize this—they’re in yet another anti-reality bubble of their own—also has serious policy consequences.
In the that spirit, I thought of two recent examples that show how conservative media fantasy bubbles impact our politics in ways that are central to our politics, although both these examples have roots going back decades, and have been significantly enabled by the M$M for years. Still, in both cases–as in the cases Maddow cites–there’s a core of crazy kept alive by the conservative media bubble that’s utterly immune to outside debunking.
The first involves taxes and the size of government. The second has to do with the fact that illegal immigrants have been leaving a number of states since 2005. I’ll deal with that in a separate diary later on. For now, to preserve some semblance of focus, let’s just focus on taxes. A recent post by Brad DeLong dredges up something I remember commenting on, but can’t find a link to, from relatively-not-insane conservative Bruce Bartlet, “Ignorance Is Bliss for the Tea Party Crowd”. It’s about their wildly inaccurate sense of taxation levels, from a survey of folks at a Tea Party rally done by interns working for David Frum, another non-fringey conservative. A relevant passage:
Tea partiers were asked how much the federal government gets in taxes as a percentage of the gross domestic product. According to Congressional Budget Office data, acceptable answers would be 6.4%, which is the percentage for federal income taxes; 12.7%, which would be for both income taxes and Social Security payroll taxes; or 14.8%, which would represent all federal taxes as a share of GDP in 2009.
Not everyone follows these numbers closely and tea partiers may have been thinking of figures from a few years ago, before the recession when taxes were higher. According to the CBO, the highest figure for all federal taxes since 1970 came in the year 2000, when they reached 20.6% of GDP. As we know, after that George W. Bush and Republicans in Congress cut federal taxes and they fell to 18.5% of GDP in 2007, before the recession hit, and 17.5% in 2008.
Tuesday’s tea party crowd, however, thought that federal taxes were almost three times higher than they actually are. The average response was 42% of GDP and the median was 40%. The highest figure recorded in all of American history was half those figures: 20.9% at the peak of World War II in 1944.
So, in short, if one were to offer those Tea Baggers to cut federal taxes by 40% from what they thought taxes were, that would be a pretty dramatic offer that should make them all really happy, no? Well, Obama could do that very easily—and thereby raise taxes to 24%, an almost 7% increase. In which case, why should he ever think of actually cutting taxes? Especially since by “cutting” them 40% he could easily manage the budget deficit as well.
The questioning moved on to individual levels of taxation, and the Tea Baggers wildly over-estimated these as well. Then they moved on to the direction of change in recent tax levels:
The organism known as the Republican Party is composed of two distinct entities: Mind and Body.
Mind is capable of looking objectively at the organism of which it’s a part and of recognizing the organism’s true place in the universe. The Republican Mind is represented by men like Karl Rove, Mitch McConnell and the head of the United States Chamber of Commerce. These goal-directed individuals know that the Republican Party exists solely to serve the interests of corporations and the wealthy. “Politics” is merely a means to acquire the necessary power by theatrically misleading the masses.
The Republican Mind is – somewhat unfortunately – housed in a Republican Body. Body is incapable of rational thought. It responds solely to external stimuli. These stimuli excite certain strong and – in this case – predominantly negative emotions to which the organism becomes addicted. The Republican Body is represented by Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin and the Tea Party. It may be seen in toto on the floor of every Republican National Convention.
The Republican Body’s ceaseless quest to feed its destructive addictions is always a threat to the ability of the Republican Mind to effectively control the behavior of the organism as a whole. This will play out in earnest over the next several years.
[What’s This Election About, Anyway. Special Last Minute Edition.]
In a special Sunday edition of The Last Word Lawrence O’Donnell had leading members of four Tea Party-related organizations on his show, and in the course of trying to get to the bottom of what they are all about (a little late for that, one might think, but then, Sharon Angle is keeping her foreign policy under wraps until she’s elected, after that… watch out Klingon Empire! But I digress….) he tried to get them to explain what they regarded as socialism that they wanted to get rid of in the federal budget. What about Medicare and Social Security? Are they socialism? He asked. They said, “No,” he said “Yes”:
Eventually, some of them were able to name some things they’d cut, but the connection to “socialism” wasn’t particularly clear. The old “waste, fraud and abuse” mantra was heard. And dismantling the Department of Education. But the more they talked, the harder it was to find a correlation between “socialism” (whatever that is) and what they wanted to cut. Unless, of course, you just decide that “socialism” means “anything I want to cut, and am not afraid to say so on national TV.”
Oh, by the way, what we so often hear regarding the Department of Education is that it’s interfering with local decisionmaking. But we’ve got far and away the most decentralized education system in the world. (And funny how that never becomes the focus of attention amidst all the hysteria about how we’re falling bhind Outer Mongolia!) So, since O’Donnell’s quest for socialism turned out to be such a bust, why not take a little peak into the Department of Education, since it ended up getting the most prominent mention in the rest of the segment. Here’s Wikipedia:
My friend Erica Payne at the Agenda Project has developed this last week of the election project well worth checking out. Here’s the website, and here’s the video:
The idea is simple: pivoting off the Jon Stewart Sanity rally this weekend, progressives should close the election in part by making the point that the Republicans truly have gone off the deep edge. Their candidates and spokespeople have gone beyond being merely conservative, beyond even just garden variety extremist, but deep, deep, deep into wackadoodle land. As another friend, Drew Westen, likes to put it: “We want candidates who will hear the voices of the American people, but we don’t want people who just hear voices.”
Check out the video and website. They are funny and drive home a really important message: we don’t want crazy people running our government.
Experts are predicting major Democrat losses in 2010’s midterm elections, and pundits are already saying that this year’s unusually competitive cycle is a referendum on the size and reach of government in a year dominated by Tea Party conservatives.
There is little doubt that the electoral groups that in 2008 embraced Barack Obama’s message of “hope, action and change” and brought Democratic control to Washington are less engaged and less likely to vote in a similar manner in 2010.
Yet many of the features of this year’s election, from the drop-off in voter turnout, to swings in political representation, and the uptick in activity by partisan idealists, are predictable outcomes that have distinguished midterm from presidential election cycles in recent years.
This past Friday, Sara Robinson wrote a post at Campaign for America’s Future, “Fascist America: Is This Election The Next Turn?”, in which she returned to piece written in the midst of the Tea Party frenzy of August, 2009, “Fascist America: Are We There Yet?”, along with two followup posts (here and here).
First she quickly reviewed the foundations of those posts in Robert Paxton’s Anatomy of Fascism, first citing Paxton’s definition, then some key stages in the development of fascism, and finally a set of three questions to ask if you’ve crossed the line to the stage where there’s no turning back. There are very few movements that cross this line, but the ones that do enter into decades-long nightmares. Could we be next? With that in mind, she then looks at three possible outcomes of the coming election. All this, obviously, was written before Lauren Valle had her head stomped on by Rand Paul’s thugs. But it provides the historically appropriate background for understanding what we saw happening. Perhaps–just perhaps–this violent thuggery got out ahead itself, and tipped its hands to the wider public in time to turn the tide. We won’t really know until late election night. But it’s well worth reviewing what Robinson warned us of.
First off, there’s Paxton’s definition:
Paxton defined fascism as:
…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.
There there’s Paxton’s stages. She doesn’t go through them all–as she did in her original. But she goes through enough:
In the first stage, a mature industrial state facing some kind of crisis breeds a new, rural movement that’s based on nationalist renewal. This movement invariably rejects reason and glorifies raw emotion, promises to restore lost national pride, co-opts the nation’s traditional myths for its own purposes, and insists that the country must be purged of the toxic influence of outsiders and intellectuals who are blamed for their current misery.
(Sound familiar yet?)
In the second stage, the movement takes root, turns into a real political party, and seizes a seat at the table. Success at this stage, Paxton writes, “depends on certain relatively precise conditions: the weakness of a liberal state, whose inadequacies condemn the nation to disorder, decline, or humiliation; and political deadlock because the Right, the heir to power but unable to continue to wield it alone, refuses to accept a growing Left as a legitimate governing partner.”
(Paging the Party of No….)
In the face of this deadlock, the corporate elites forge an alliance with rural nationalists, creating an unholy marriage that, if it continues, will soon breed a fascist state. And, of course, this is precisely what’s happening now between the Koch Brothers, the oil companies, Americans for Prosperity, and the Tea Party.
And, of course, candidates like Sharron Angle:
This is where most proto-fascist movements die, primarily because of “the basic authoritarian ineptitude of their leadership,” as Robinson puts it. Now, however, we have some of the slickest, most experienced professionals around. But there are also some real loose cannons and wild cards as well. So were definitely still could get lucky. We can use all the luck we can get:
War chests from right-wing billionaires and corporate titans are funding tremendous portions of political activity, from the so-called grassroots activism of the Tea Party to the streamlined lobbying assaults of the nation’s largest corporations.
If the past is any guide, there’s going to be a wave of protestations, followed by grudging, modest, but real actions to reduce the influence of overt, outspoken racists in the Tea Party movement. That’s what happened after the NAACP passed a resolution last July condemning outspoken racist elements in the Tea Party and calling on Tea Party leaders to repudiate such elements. Now, the NAACP has gone further. It has just released a report–“Tea Party Nationalism: A Critical Examination of the Tea Party Movement and the Size, Scope, and Focus of Its National Factions”–documenting racist influences in the Tea Party movement from a variety of angles. The report was conducted for the NAACP by the Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights, and written by Devin Burghart and Leonard Zeskind, Vice President and President, respectively of IREHR. It focuses attention on six national Tea Party organizations–FreedomWorks Tea Party, 1776 Tea Party, ResistNet Tea Party, Tea Party Nation, Tea Party Patriots, and Tea Party Express-each of which is the subject of a separate chapter. And, as David Neiwert writes at Crooks and Liars:
The heart of the report is the section titled “Racism, Anti-Semitism and the Militia Impulse, which includes some previously overlooked facets of the movement and revealing details:
— James von Brunn, the white supremacist who killed a Holocaust Museum guard last year, posted on Tea Partner Express partner websites.
— Mark Williams, former chairman of the Tea Party Express, not only wrote racist screeds, he made death threats against President Obama,
— Billy Joe Roper, a member of the ResistNet Tea Party who also happens to be the founder of the overtly racist White Revolution organization, indulging in “Nazi glamorization” with his eulogy for William Pierce, author of The Turner Diaries, the notorious race-war blueprint.
We also get “profiles of troubling Tea Partiers,” including Roan Garcia-Quintana, a South Carolina Tea Party member who the report says belongs to the largest white nationalist group in the country; Karen Pack, another Tea Party member the report says is linked to the Ku Klux Klan; and Clay Douglas, a Tea Party member from Arizona the report says has pushed “militia-style ‘New World Order’ conspiracies” and “hard core anti-Semitism.”
The report also integrates some survey data about Tea Party supporters’ attitudes. For example:
Tea Partiers are more likely than white people generally to believe that “too much” has been made of the problems facing black people: 52% to 39%,
Of those who strongly disapproved of the Tea Party, 55% agreed with the statement that black people were “VERY hard working.” Of those who strongly approved of the Tea Party, only 18% agreed with the statement that black people were “VERY hard working.”
68% of the Tea party “approvers” believed that if only they would try harder, then black people would be as well off as white people. That number fell by almost half, to 35%, when the “disapprovers” answered it.
One can get a very good feel for scope, content and seriousness of the report from the first few paragraphs of the introduction, which reads as follows:
Tea Party Nationalism is the first report of its kind. It examines the six national organizational networks at the core of the Tea Party movement: FreedomWorks Tea Party, 1776 Tea Party, Tea Party Nation, Tea Party Patriots, ResistNet, and Tea Party Express. This report documents the corporate structures and leaderships, their finances, and membership concentrations of each faction. It looks at the actual relationships of these factions to each other, including some of the very explicit differences they have with each other. And we begin an analysis of the larger politics that motivate each faction and the Tea Party movement generally.
The result of this study contravenes many of the Tea Parties’ self-invented myths, particularly their supposedly sole concentration on budget deficits, taxes and the power of the federal government.
Instead, this report found Tea Party ranks to be permeated with concerns about race and national identity and other so-called social issues. In these ranks, an abiding obsession with Barack Obama’s birth certificate is often a stand-in for the belief that the first black president of the United States is not a “real American.” Rather than strict adherence to the Constitution, many Tea Partiers are challenging the provision for birthright citizenship found in the Fourteenth Amendment.
(I’ve written about Project Vote’s poll released last month, as well as front-paging their diaries about it. If we had a functioning hegemonic war-fighting machine on our side, we would have been talking about it all over the place. Instead, there was virtual media silence. But, belatedly, there appears to be some indication that their message is getting some echoes. – promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
Three weeks after reviewing (and deciding not to cover) Project Vote’s major new survey documenting how out of step the Tea Party’s anti-government agenda is with mainstream voters, the Washington Post has released their own poll confirming many of our findings.
Yesterday the Post reported that their own new survey finds—as Project Vote’s poll did—that there is strong support for government programs that provide a social safety net and protect ordinary people from the predations of the market. “Although Republicans, and many Democrats, have tried to demonize Washington,” write Jon Cohen and Dan Balz, “they must contend with the fact that most major government programs remain enormously popular…”
According to the Post/Kaiser Family Foundation/Harvard University poll, large majorities among the public say that Medicare (96 percent), Social Security (95 percent), food stamps (82 percent), federal aid to public schools (91 percent), unemployment benefits (91 percent) and environmental protection (89 percent) are important government programs. For the functions served by these government programs, large majorities also say they want to see more federal government involvement, not less. For example, 64 percent of respondents said they want to see more federal government involvement in reducing poverty; 61 percent want more government involvement in protecting the environment; and 52 percent want more government involvement in ensuring access to health care. And as our own survey found, presented with a choice, more people want government to spend more now to create jobs and improve the economy (50 percent) than do those who want government to avoid increasing the federal deficit (46 percent).
I’m you, dear readers. Well, actually, I’m not. But I’m also not a witch, so at least I’ve got that going for me.
The above is of course a reference to Delaware’s favourite Wiccan of Wilmington, Republican Senate nominee Christine O’Donnell, who began her most recent television advertisement by assuring viewers that she, indeed, is “not a witch.” In past political years this might have been considered a bit low-brow, to actually have to assure the voting public you didn’t spend most days at dusk swooping over the heads of the Lollipop Guild.
The bar has been raised among this year’s crop of weirdos and wackadoos seeking higher office in America. If you don’t have the Second Amendment tattooed on your buttocks or actually think you’re The Walrus, don’t even try and claim to be among the craziest third of aspiring politicos on the current American landscape.
For Jay Leno may have once called politics “show business for ugly people.” But the larger truth these days is that a run for political office is a surefire way for those seeking a moment in the spotlight, but lacking any discernible talent or a handle on the truth, to have their hour in the headlines. It’s show business for crazy people.
(Project Vote Asks, “Who exactly isn’t being listened to?” – promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
“Can you hear me?” That’s the recurring refrain in a radio promo for this weekend’s “Virginia Tea Party Patriots Convention,” which-with an estimated crowd of 3,000-purports to be one of the largest rallies yet of so-called “Tea Party” sympathizers. The 60-second radio spot by keynote speaker Lou Dobbs features allegedly outraged Americans repeating that line, interspersed with un-attributed stats about how Americans supposedly oppose stimulus spending, health care, and other government spending policies “Maybe Washington can’t hear us,” Dobbs intones dramatically, “because they’re just not listening.”
Not listening to whom? For two years media obsession with the Tea Party has drowned out nearly every other voice in the public debate, a self-perpetuating feeding frenzy that has raised the volume on this population’s views to a disproportionately deafening roar. Yet, as is shown all too clearly in Project Vote’s recent poll report What Happened to Hope and Change? A Poll of 2008 Voters, these shouts for attention are coming from a segment of the population that is overwhelmingly white, wealthy, and older—and one that is out of touch with the needs and views of most Americans.
One thing that Tea Party sympathizers say is confirmed by Project Vote’s poll: they are indeed almost universally angry. Yet, based on their responses to Project Vote’s survey, they seem to have precious little to be angry about. Three fourths of them report that their personal financial situation is fairly good or very good. Eight out of ten are employed or retired; they are overwhelmingly married; they went to college; and they make more money. Contrary to claims that the Tea Party represents a “wide swath of Americans,” nine out of ten Tea Party sympathizers are White.
Older, wealthier, White conservatives: this is hardly a population overlooked or ignored, either by the media or by Washington.
Can you hear me? This question is better asked by the 21 percent of young voters, the 37 percent of Black voters, and the 39 percent of low-income voters who reported to Project Vote that they did not have enough money to buy food for their families at some point during the past year. (Only 6 percent of Tea Partiers said the same.)
It is a question better asked by the strong majorities of black voters, young voters, and low-income voters who support stimulus spending, government programs to create jobs, and who say they agree with the statement that “government should work to provide for the needs of all citizens.”
It is a question better asked by the majorities of all American voters who support raising taxes on capital gains, ending combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and raising the minimum wage to ensure that no family of three with a full-time worker has to live below the poverty line.
Belying the exaggerated claims of Tea Party activists, Project Vote’s poll shows that most Americans—and particularly the black, low-income, and youth voters who increased their participation so decisively in 2008—share a common expectation that government should provide for the needs of all Americans rather than limit its activities to national security and police protection. This value translates into support for increased spending on infrastructure and public education and maintaining or increasing spending on income security programs such as Food Stamps.
In a press release about the Project Vote poll, Color of Change co-founder and executive director James Rucker said, “What Project Vote’s poll shows is that the views on government held by progressives represent the majority. We shouldn’t let Tea Party activists convince us that we, and not they, are the minority.”
Yet as the Tea Party minority turns up the volume on its microphones again this weekend in Richmond, Virginia, media attention will no doubt once again focus on their anti-government message. Meanwhile, the voices of the other 72 percent of American voters are calling for a different vision of government—one that does more, not less, to support and protect struggling Americans.
