GOP goes back to the future
All the same, among those who are broadly sympathetic with the so-called “wacko birds” on policy, but not on tactics, there appears to be a creeping terror: what if the party keeps up this kind of thing? It’s hardly unheard of, even in recent political history, for a party to keep hammering a popular political point, but to such suicidal extremes that the point ceases to be popular. In fact, if that were all that was wrong, many GOPers might sleep easier.
No, what is most-troubling is the thought that the GOP will go the way of the Democrats in the 60s and 70s and allow ideology to completely carry them away; that it will cease to behave like a political party, and instead begin behaving like a revolutionary suicide cult, complete with quasi-terrorist tactics and purges of the insufficiently politically committed. Certainly, that’s the hope of many liberals. Just ask Howard Fineman, who had to apologize for his candidness after offending MSNBC’s audience of would-be Mario Savios by making this comparison in 2011:
But when the tea party arrived, they used this vote as an excuse for a kind of building takeover. I’m of the 60s generation, this feels to me like occupying the administration building, ok? That’s who the tea party people are.
Fineman’s remark, while dismissive, may be even more perceptive than is generally acknowledged. After all, while one can easily compare tea partiers to 60s era student protesters in their famous iconoclasm, their anti-establishment sentiments and their intransigence in the face of compromise, this doesn’t actually get to the root of the problem. Many groups can be compared to the 60s and 70s protesters — after all, protest movements almost invariably borrow their tactics from successful predecessors — but in the case of the tea party, it may be that more than a comparison is appropriate.
Therefore, I want to ask a different question: What if the tea party is not merely like those protesters? What if, in fact, the tea party is mostly made up of the same people? That is, what if the 60s and 70s protesters grew up to be the Tea Party?
Obviously, even if this is true in some particulars, it would be a broad generalization — after all, not every tea partier comes from the right generation to have been alive at the time of the protests. Certainly, tea party politicians like Rand Paul and Ted Cruz, as well as tea party folk heroes like Glenn Beck and Andrew Breitbart, are too young to have been involved (Beck, for instance, was all of eight years old when George McGovern — the ultimate 70s-era suicide candidate — was nominated). However, high profile exceptions are not refutations of broad demographic trends, and when it comes to the polling on the tea party, I suspect there is reason to believe the majority of tea partiers are, at the very least, of the same generation, with the same cultural roots, and possessed of the same ideological concerns (albeit skewed differently) as the protesters of the past.
Polling from 2010, at the dawn of the movement, bears this conclusion out. Begin with the New York Times/CBS poll in April 2010, which found:
The 18 percent of Americans who identify themselves as tea party supporters tend to be Republican, white, male, married and older than 45.
For similar data on age, turn to a Bloomberg poll from the month before:
Tea party supporters are likely to be older, white and male. Forty percent are age 55 and over, compared with 32 percent of all poll respondents; just 22 percent are under the age of 35, 79 percent are white, and 61 percent are men. Many are also Christian fundamentalists, with 44 percent identifying themselves as “born-again,” compared with 33 percent of all respondents.
Combine these, and you inescapably arrive at the conclusion that the tea party is overwhelmingly a baby boomer phenomenon. Therefore, if we are going to lay responsibility for its existence at the feet of any generation, it would be the same one that was responsible for the protests of the 60s and 70s.
However, this alone need not suggest that the tea partiers are the same people as the protesters of the 60s and 70s. Late boomers missed the boat on most of those, and besides, a great number of boomers were too busy fighting in the Vietnam War to protest it, to name one complicating factor. We need more clues.
No fear. Let’s turn to a Gallup poll, also from April 2010, which found that 50 percent of tea partiers were at least 50 years old, but also that 65 percent had at least “some college.” The New York Times/CBS poll mentioned earlier found that tea partiers were “wealthier and more educated” than the general public. This pans out in the data, where 70 percent of respondents are shown to have at least “some college,” in contrast with only 53 percent of the general population.
From this, we gather the second piece of evidence — the tea party is mostly college educated phenomena. Combined with their age, we can thus conclude that, even if most tea partiers didn’t actually participate in campus protests, they almost certainly would have been spectators, and probably absorbed at least some of the zeitgeist of that era.
But this doesn’t get to the final point, which is that tea partiers share, broadly speaking, the same concerns as 60s and 70s protesters, and often use the same icons.
Now, to many, this may be counter-intuitive. How could tea partiers share the same fears as 60′ protesters? Easily. Let’s start with this quote by Michele Bachmann, in the midst of the most recent government shutdown fight:
There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!
Oh wait. Actually, that’s Mario Savio speaking at Berkeley in the 60s.
Okay, well, what about this from Glenn Beck, talking about the bureaucracy in the health care law:
We asked the following: if President Obama actually tried to get something more liberal out of George Soros in his telephone conversation, why didn’t he make some public statement to that effect? And the answer we received — from a well-meaning liberal — was the following: He said, “Would you ever imagine the manager of a firm making a statement publicly in opposition to his board of directors?” That’s the answer! Now, I ask you to consider: if this is a firm, and if George Soros is the board of directors, and if President Obama in fact is the manager, then I’ll tell you something: the federal government are a bunch of employees, and we’re the raw material! But we’re a bunch of raw material[s] that don’t mean to have any process upon us, don’t mean to be made into any product, don’t mean to end up being bought by some clients of the university, be they the government, be they industry, be they organized labor, be they anyone! We’re human beings!
Actually, no, that’s Savio again, with a few names changed to bring the speech up to date.
I’m being glib, but this point goes deeper than the quote of a major student protester from the 60s and 70s, though that certainly shows how tea party rhetoric sounds almost exactly like the rhetoric of the 60s and 70s.
What is the issue, for instance, that galvanizes tea partiers arguably more than anything else? Obamacare. And what was the piece of Obamacare that provoked the tea party caucus to risk a government shutdown, specifically? The individual mandate. In fact, I could swear I remember a certain tea partier saying this about it:
The mandate was such an ominous thing, I felt as if it was going to trickle down to me.
No, wait, that’s Dylan McDermott talking about (what else?) the Vietnam-era draft, arguably the true predecessor of Obamacare’s mandate, insofar as it was a major policy instituted by a deeply liberal president in order to prop up a legacy-building policy which ultimately came to negatively define his presidency due to its poor execution. And lest we forget, the draft was also (though with more success) compared to slavery, and still is to this day by its opponents.
And speaking of slavery, let’s consider that one of the major icons of the tea party movement is Martin Luther King Jr. One sees this in the timing of Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally, which coincidentally featured Martin Luther King’s niece Alveda King as a speaker. Not only that, but Alveda King herself drew an explicit link between her uncle and the tea party movement:
“My daddy, Rev. A.D. King, my granddaddy, Martin Luther King, Senior — we are a family of faith, hope and love. And that’s why I’m here today,” King said. “Glenn says there is one human race, I agree with him. We are not here to divide. I’m about unity. That’s why I’m here, and I want to honor my uncle today.”
Numerous tea party websites have honored King as well. Granted, King is a major figure in American history, and an icon of moral courage. Yet he also figures prominently in the memories of those who (like most tea partiers) were alive at the same time and bore witness to his death.
And then, there’s the final common thread: generational paranoia. One sees this not only in the much-mocked tendency by some tea partiers toward paradoxical slogans like “keep your government hands off my Medicare” (a contradiction noted in the NYT/CBS poll from 2010), but also in the words of major tea party figures about those younger than them. For while the slogan of the 60s and 70s appears to have been “don’t trust anyone over 30,” these days, one could be forgiven for thinking it was “don’t trust anyone under 30.”
Don’t take my word for it. Just listen to Glenn Beck on young people:
The most important aspect to understand is this is not spontaneous and it will cascade throughout the Middle East. I hope to God that it does not but I bet it touches Europe and then the world. It will not have a singular ideology but it will mean revolution, destruction and change and it will be led by young people. Because anyone over 30 knows that chaos never leads to anything good.
Sociologist Theda Skocpol, who has studied the tea party and published on them, sums up the same attitude this way:
There’s certainly a worry about a change in the social composition of America. But we found in our research that they also resent young people — including in their own families. They think young people are not measuring up. That the grandsons and daughters and nieces and nephews expect to get free college loans, and don’t get a job, and hold ideas that are not very American in their view — like Obama. Obama symbolizes all of this.
This sort of outsized contempt, as opposed to mere disinterested eye-rolling, seems fairly abnormal. However, coming from a protest movement that was defined to a great measure by its opposition to the values of its elders, it makes perfect sense, especially when you consider that millennial values are basically the very image of the sort of dutiful, technocratic liberalism that boomers rebelled against in their youth, and are still rebelling against now, albeit from the right. For a thoroughly unscientific sampling of this, look at the comments on any article about young people on a conservative website, and see how long it takes for someone to mention the fear that young people will liquidate their elders in order to get a health care system that serves their needs — just like those “finks” who sent boomers to die for their wars.
To sum up, at bare minimum, the tea party rank-and-file appears to be motivated by the same concerns that motivated protesters of the 60s and 70s, albeit filtered through a conservative lens. It is so motivated, because it is demographically nearly identical to the profile of the people who started and perpetuated those protest movements — that is, highly educated baby boomers.
And based on the government shutdown fight, they appear to still want to put their bodies on the gears, wheels, levers and apparatus of Washington’s ‘machine.’ For the sake of the country, one only hopes they will not permit those who share their concerns to be crushed in the process.
