The Tea Party Rave: Much Ado About Nothing?

And it was Lenin who offered the classic definition of a vanguard party as involving "people who make revolutionary activity their profession" in organizations that "must perforce not be very extensive."

Note: Is the Tea Party phenomenon that has captured the public's attention and unnerved many in both the national Democratic and Republican hierarchies a true movement with lasting effect or a flash in the pan that will fade from the scene because it has nothing, fundamentally, to offer the country? Is it nothing more than a loosely organized "national temper tantrum," fed and directed by right wing media zealots and wealthy business interests who are out, at all costs, first and foremost, to ensure the Obama Administration and its policies fail? We've taken two recent commentaries, below, that examine these questions from E. J. Dionne, Jr., of the Washington Post, and Steven Stark of The Boston Phoenix, (that's Boston, MA, home of the original Tea Party). So far, there's not been a highly visible or vocal Tea Party presence here in Hays County, and some politicians on the Republican side are making no claim to the movement, which is an interesting statement in itself. Your constructive comments and insights are welcome.

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The Tea Party: Tempest in a very small teapot

By E.J. Dionne Jr.
Thursday, September 23, 2010
Washinton Post Online Edition

Is the Tea Party one of the most successful scams in American political history?

Before you dismiss the question, note that word "successful." Judge the Tea Party purely on the grounds of effectiveness and you have to admire how a very small group has shaken American political life and seized the microphone offered by the media, including the so-called liberal media.

But it's equally important to recognize that the Tea Party constitutes a sliver of opinion on the extreme end of politics receiving attention out of all proportion with its numbers.

Yes, there is a lot of discontent in America. But that discontent is better represented by the moderate voters who expressed quiet disillusionment to President Obama at the CNBC town hall meeting on Monday than by Tea Party ideologues who proclaim the unconstitutionality of the New Deal and everything since.

The Tea Party drowns out such voices because it has money – some of it from un-populist corporate sources, as Jane Mayer documented last month in the New Yorker – and has used modest numbers strategically in small states to magnify its impact.

[snip]

Last April, a New York Times-CBS News poll found that 18 percent of Americans identified as supporters of the Tea Party movement, but slightly less than a fifth of these sympathizers said they had attended a Tea Party rally or meeting. That means just over 3 percent of Americans can be characterized as Tea Party activists. A more recent poll by Democracy Corps, just before Labor Day, found that 6 percent of voters said they had attended a Tea Party rally or meeting.

The Tea Party is not the only small group in history to wield more power than you'd expect from its numbers. In 2008, Barack Obama did very well in party caucuses, which draw far fewer voters than primaries. And it was Lenin who offered the classic definition of a vanguard party as involving "people who make revolutionary activity their profession" in organizations that "must perforce not be very extensive."

But something is haywire in our media and our politics. Jill Lepore, a Harvard historian whose new book is "The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle Over American History," observed in an interview that there is a "hall of mirrors" effect created by the rise of "niche" opinion media. They magnify small movements into powerhouses, while old-fashioned journalism, which is supposed to put such movements in perspective, reacts to the same niche incentives.

There is also the decline of alternative forces in politics. The Republican establishment, such as it is, has long depended far more on big money than on troops in the field. In search of new battalions, GOP leaders stoked the Tea Party, stood largely mute in the face of its more outrageous untruths about Obama – and now has to defend candidates such as O'Donnell and Angle.

And where are the progressives? Sulking is not an alternative to organizing, and weary resignation is the first step toward capitulation. The Tea Party may be pulling a fast one on the country and the media. But if it has more audacity than everyone else, it will, I am sorry to say, deserve to get away with it.

The American Idol Party

By STEVEN STARK
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
The Boston Phoenix

Sarah Palin and Christine O'Donnell might not turn out to be good candidates, but they make great television

In their attempts to understand the Tea Party movement, analysts have looked to the Populists of the 1890s, the followers of Father Coughlin and Huey Long in the 1930s, and, of course, the original Boston tea partiers themselves. But in a nation whose pop culture is its politics and vice versa, the real antecedent for this political happening is a relatively recent phenomenon — reality television.

This is not to denigrate the movement. After all, popular culture is a primary outlet for political expression — a source of both candidates and mass sentiment, as Ronald Reagan well knew. And, while the roots of reality television derive from many sources, the principal one is the notion that "the people" can do a better job than the elites. Reality television is democratic to a fault, premised as it is on the idea that we no longer need "stars" because average men and women on the street are the real sources of talent and energy in the land.

[snip]

It's a very American sentiment, of course — the product of a nation that, beginning with its first tea party, defined itself as a place in which "the people" ruled. And that concept always has political resonance in eras in which elites on places such as Wall Street have appeared to prosper at the expense of Main Street.

But what has given that old idea a new cast this time around is television. Beginning, really, with America's Funniest Home Videos in the early 1990s, and continuing on through Survivor, American Idol, The Apprentice, and Dancing with the Stars, the television programming that has appealed the most in the modern era has been that which made "the folks," as Fox News host Bill O'Reilly calls them, the stars.