US Politics: The Tea Party and the Dangers of a "Leader" (Haddigan)

Lee Haddigan draws a lessons from this week's primaries for the US Congress:

On Tuesday night Rand Paul, the son of Congressman and former Presidential candidate Ron Paul, won a stunning victory in the Republican Party's primary for a US Senate seat from the state of Kentucky. By Wednesday morning, there were mutterings in the US press that the win marked the emergence of a potential national leader for the Tea Party movement. And by Thursday Paul --- like his father, a staunch libertarian --- was the target of a Democratic-led campaign to discredit him and, by association, the Tea Party.

Paul’s experience, and the example of conservative leaders of the past, are a warning for the Tea Party not to unite behind one "leader".

Paul got into hot water on MSNBC's Rachel Maddow Show on Wednesday night (part 1 and part 2 of video)  when asked to explain comments he made to a Louisville, Kentucky paper last month. Paul had explained to the Courier-Journal why he would have opposed one of the ten provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, specifically the clause that allows the federal government to enforce anti-discrimination laws on private property.



Paul's position is based on libertarian principles. For most libertarians, private property rights override the rights of any government in all circumstances. Thus in this case, a restaurant owner has the right to serve, or not to serve, any customer.

In a series of interviews Thursday Paul was at pains to insist he is no racist and supported the nine provisions of the Act that enforced anti-discrimination regulations on public property. But, as Paul recognized in an appearance on the Laura Ingraham show, he had made “a poor political decision”. The Democratic National Committee immediately seized upon the mistake by sending out nearly 30 emails on Thursday to the media attacking Paul and, by association, the Tea Party.

Haven’t We Been Here Before?

In 1964, conservatives backed the Presidential candidacy of Barry Goldwater, a Republican Senator from Arizona. Goldwater opposed the Civil Rights Act and voted against it.

Like Paul, Goldwater was no racist, and he disagreed with the Act over the principle that anti-discrimination laws were a matter for the individual states to decide. But that principled stand/"poor political decision" allowed the Democrats to flesh out their portrayal of the Senator as the representative of "extremism" in America (The iconic image of that extremism, although it was not seen widely at the time, was the Democrats' commercial of a small girl and a daisy, which linked Goldwater to the use of nuclear weapons.)

For those who don’t know:  Goldwater lost by a landslide to Lyndon Johnson.

The conservative campaign that ended with the defeat of Goldwater shares many similarities with the current Tea Party movement. His candidacy was the result of several years of grassroots campaigning to get a President who supported free markets, less taxes, a limited Constitution, and the prevailing liberal orthodoxy (of both parties) in Washington.

Even the symbol of the tea bag is not new. In January 1959, Willis E. Stone reported in his column, "Organized Tax Protests", that a group in New Orleans, “headed by Kent Courtney, is using the Boston Tea Party theme in their tax protest, sending teabags with their protest to members of Congress and the State Legislatures”.

In the vanguard of that grassroots effort to see conservative values reestablished in government was the John Birch Society, led by Robert Welch. They disavowed any connection to the Republican Party and took no position on partisan issues. Their focus was to educate the public in the reasons why America needed “less government and more responsibility in which to create a better world.” The John Birch Society called for the election of politicians, Democrat or Republican, who believed in those principles. And their primary tactic was the mass mailing of letters and postcards (the ancestor of the Tea Party's faxes and e-mails) to politicians in Washington.

The relevance of the John Birch Society to the Tea Party? Both offer warnings about the dangers of becoming identified with a national leader. In March 1961, Time magazine revealed to the nation that Welch had claimed a few years earlier that President Eisenhower was “ia dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy”. It was a revelation (along with some falsehoods in the article) that crippled the effectiveness of the Birchers. It also helped establish the validity of Democrat depictions of conservatives as "paranoid" members of a "lunatic fringe".

(How the letter became public is another caution for Tea Partiers.Welch made his statement about Eisenhower in a private letter to several hundred individuals he wanted to contribute to the John Birch Society. Frederick C. Schwarz of the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade, nominally committed to the same principles as the Birchers, made a copy of Welch’s letter available to the press. Welch believed Schwarz did so from resentment at the popularity of the new organization, which continued donations to Schwarz’s Crusade.)

A last consequence of the controversy that erupted as a result of Welch’s indiscretion was the infighting it provoked within the conservative movement. Welch and his Society polarized Goldwater supporters. Many defended him, but many, notably William F. Buckley, attacked him.

Risks of mutating into a unified national organization are widespread within the Tea Party movement. Shelby Blakely, Executive Director of the New Patriot Journal, advised readers in February, "Tea Party Not Interested In Media Appointed Leaders" (especially if that leader was to be Sarah Palin). Blakely’s opposition to a national leader rests on the conviction that from the beginning, “Those opposed to tea party ideas have tried to bait our movement into becoming something they could destroy: a top-down group with a visible (and therefore reachable) leader to focus on.”

The example of Rand Paul –-- and Goldwater and Welch before him –-- suggest that Ms. Blakely was correct.

Politics in America: The Tea Parties & The Religious Right (Haddigan)

Lee Haddigan writes his first analysis for EA:

As the Tea Party phenomenon continues to gather pace, commentators still struggle to explain the appeal of this latest grassroots conservative movement.

The Tea Party is not a national political “party” with a stated platform of policies and principles. It is a protest campaign composed of thousands of local and state-wide groups, each concerned with how the actions of the Federal Government affect them in their community, and each expressing their resentment of the liberal Washington ‘elite’ through local action. There are efforts to coordinate these groups in a national crusade by organizations such as the Tea Party Express and Tea Party Patriots, who use events like National Tax Day to show the mass support the Tea Party message receives, but they are secondary to the main objective of securing change in Washington through influence upon state elections.

What the different groups share, however, is a belief in certain traditional conservative values that need to be defended against the aggrandisement of Washington, which dates back to (and here you take your pick): President Obama’s healthcare and spending plans, Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, the 16th Amendment of 1913 that established the federal income tax, or the 14th Amendment (ratified 1868) that sanctioned the expansion of federal government into areas formerly reserved exclusively to individual states by the 10th Amendment in the Bill of Rights.


Central to these Tea Party convictions are the need for a return to an original interpretation of the Constitution, and the desire to see taxes cut. These are backed, for many TPers, by their faith in the argument that America is a nation founded by God on eternal Divine principles, and whose resulting “exceptionalism” is threatened by a secular elite hellbent on destroying the spiritual foundations of the United States of America.
So the Tea Party movement is the latest manifestation of conservative discontent with progressive liberal programmes, one that differs little in priorities and aims from similar protest movements that have gone before. But that does not explain why, generation after generation, millions of Americans feel so passionately about these recurring issues to spend their time, money, and endeavour in attempting to reform a political structure that has proved so obdurate to change.

Here is one way into the phenomenon. The religious right do not like taxes. This is not an expression of economic resentment, as many assume, but a deeply felt moral objection, derived from the word of God, to the principle of taxation. The argument goes like this:
Mankind was created with the individual free-will to choose to follow, or not, the moral laws of God. People cannot be forced to act morally by any authority. Jesus did not compel the rich young ruler to give up his wealth. He gave him the choice, as He did all of us, to act charitably.

When the government usurps that function, e.g. taxation to pay for health care, then it breaks the First, and Great, Commandment that “Thou shalt have no other Gods before me”. Government, instead of God, becomes the keeper of mankind’s conscience, and destroys the covenant between the individual and His Maker that salvation is achieved by voluntarily accepting the lessons contained in Scripture.

This desire to be allowed to pursue a personal relationship with God untrammelled by government interference underlies also the Tea Party’s calls for a limited Constitution and free markets. Their reverence for the intent of the Founding Fathers lies in the belief that they instituted a form of government that was based upon the word of God.
Not all of the TPers, of course, are believers in the religious roots of individual and political liberty. But the respect for God-given individual freedom imbues the movement, and gives it a moral impetus that those who dismiss it as merely a manifestation of disgruntled and myopic taxpayers would do well to understand. The question is whether the TP can harness that that religious impulse and turn it into a sustainable challenge to the hegemony of the Washington elite.

As a historian of conservative movements that have failed in the past, after exhibiting a similar burst of initial enthusiasm, I admit to a certain pessimism. But, as Frank Chodorov, the most influential individualist thinker of the 1940s and 1950s once remarked, at the seeming impossibility of conservatives taking back America from the New Deal liberal leviathan, “It’s fun to fight.”