I have a friend who recently asked me whether I would prefer Lipton or Tetley this November 2. There has been plenty of talk, some of it from Republican quarters, framing the Tea Party as a spoiler for the GOP. The point is easy enough to grasp: in primary elections, even candidates with more radical views have a chance to win the party’s nomination but in the general election, where there is almost always higher turnout for both parties, it is more likely such candidates will lose. Even Karl Rove, who is basically the dentist from Marathon Man (“are we . . . safe?”), thinks the Tea Party may be a threat to his dream of a permanent Republican majority. Regarding the Delaware primary election upset of Tea Party candidate Christine O’Donnell over Republican congressman Mike Castle, Rove told Sean Hannity: “I’m for the Republican, but I have to tell you we were looking at [picking up] eight or nine seats in the Senate and we’re now looking at seven to eight, in my opinion. This is not a race we’re going to be able to win.” Tea Party Express organizer Amy Kremer responded that Rove should stay out of it and claims her candidates don’t need national GOP support, though she wouldn’t kick their money out of bed. Many Tea Partiers agree with Kremer: they don’t care about party alignment. For them, it’s about a movement.
Because the Tea Party is a movement, it’s hard to pin down. There is no central headquarters, no spokesperson, no-one to substantiate or refute rumors of racism or nativism. There are several organizations that fall under the Tea Party umbrella: Tea Party Express, Tea Party Patriots, Tea Party Nation, all of which do have organizers and main offices, none of which speak for the Tea Party as a whole. While Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin are closely associated with the Party, neither of them publicly claim the mantle of leadership. Tea Partiers have spoken about not needing a centralized headquarters because despite their name, they are not actually a party. Rather, they are a cluster of autonomous groups working independently of each other, sharing only ideals and a name.
But what are these ideals? This is where the Tea Party as a movement gets difficult. The opportunities of outsiders to criticize those in power are boundless. As a movement Tea Partiers are able to stay in the abstract: they can criticize wasteful spending without having to decide whether it's school funding or bridge repairs that are going to have to get cut or can claim to "defend freedom" without having to work out detailed foreign policy positions. You dig into Tea Party details and it feels like barely controlled chaos: some Tea Party cells exist only as single-issue groups: anti-gay marriage or pro-gun. Some have extensive goals but no details to enact said goals. Some of the Tea Party positions seem downright ludicrous: Delaware congressional candidate Glen Urquhart said into an open microphone that the separation of church and state started with Hitler. But to write off Tea Partiers as loons is to make a mistake. These people matter, and we ought to pay attention.
The American public is used to two types of Republicans. Those that call themselves values voters who believe in a kind of Christian nationalism, the sort that hold Jesus and the American flag dear to their hearts as the ultimate political statement. The second is the patrician conservative often seen on the tennis courts and dining rooms of country clubs, the sort that graduated from ivy league schools and have come to be very concerned about the estate tax. From these two kinds of Republicans, you can guess where the Tea Party draws from right?
Or can you? Your mistake is interesting and here is why: statistically, Tea Party supporters trend white, older, male, middle-class and educated. The Tea Partiers aren’t poor illiterate rednecks. But their style of politics is not the sedate bourgeois kind of the patrician Republicans, it is fully demotic. Mass grassroots movements on the right can provide plenty of room for worry and the Tea Party has mobilized a sizable minority of the country to its causes: it should be taken seriously. What happens when the bourgeoisie stop being sedate? What happens when people we think of as wealthy middle-class people start acting in ways that many people would consider provocative and rabble-rousing? In Germany, when the bourgeoisie stopped acting like the bourgeoisie they started throwing bricks through shop windows.
So let’s pose the question directly: Can there be an American fascism? Is the Tea Party a fascist movement? Grassroots dissatisfaction that mobilized into political movements and parties have caused massive destruction in the past. Does the Tea Party show the possibility of being one of those groups? While you may have a knee-jerk auto-response to the second question, it is important to remind ourselves what fascism really is and what fascism means, beyond an all-purpose epithet. In re-examining fascist movements its possible to learn what the Tea Party is and is not.
More to come . . . .
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