The Rise of the Tea Party

Thursday, December 29, 2011 by CounterPunch

Where Did They Come From?

by Kevin Young 

 

US press coverage has usually cast the Tea Party as an authentic expression of popular anger against Washington insiders. Anthony DiMaggio’s new book, Rise of the Tea Party, shatters such myths, demonstrating that the Tea Party has never been a genuine social movement or political outsider but rather an elite-dominated group that was closely linked to the Republican establishment from its inception three years ago. The Tea Party’s goal has been to aid a struggling Republican Party in its efforts to further roll back the social safety net and funnel more wealth and power from workers to the rich. The book’s relevance extends well beyond just the Tea Party, though. DiMaggio uses the group as a case study to explore broader issues of corporate media bias, the rightward shift of US politics in recent decades, and the effects of material and non-material factors in shaping people’s attitudes.

The study is really two books in one: an authoritative examination of the Tea Party phenomenon and “a grand theory of public opinion and the larger social forces that influence it” (p. 29).

The first two chapters critically analyze the Tea Party’s emergence and growth in 2009-10, showing that the organization has never been an independent or mass-based movement. 

DiMaggio refutes the typical depiction of the group as maverick agitators who cause headaches for Democrats and Republicans alike: from the start the Tea Party and its affiliate groups had close institutional ties to the Republican Party and billionaire Republican sponsors like the Koch brothers. Common claims about the effect of the Tea Party on Congressional Republicans are also misleading. The shift of the Republican Party toward ever more extremist positions cannot be attributed to the influence of the Tea Party faction (and certainly not, as some claim, to any shift in public opinion). As DiMaggio observes, the Republican Party’s rightward shift has been underway for decades. Moreover, there is strong agreement among Tea Party and “moderate” Republicans in Congress on the vast majority of policy questions, belying characterizations of Tea Partiers as challengers to the Republican establishment. The Tea Party’s primary purpose has been to “rebrand” the Republican Party as a populist force and channel votes to Republican candidates in an era when the electorate views the Republican Party (even more so than the Democratic Party) with ever-increasing scorn.

Chapter 2, co-written with DiMaggio’s frequent collaborator Paul Street, offers a ground-level look at Tea Party campaigns in the greater Chicago area, often considered a Tea Party stronghold. The two observed local Tea Party meetings and events throughout 2009 and 2010. The chapter’s provocative title—“The Tea Party Does Not Exist”—conveys two key points: that the Tea Party has very little local presence and that it has never been an independent party but rather “a covert Republican operation” (p. 92). DiMaggio and Street’s research found that most of the typical features of a genuine social movement were lacking. Few chapters were active on the local level, few held regular open meetings, and there was little or no commitment among chapter leaders to movement-building and member empowerment. Meetings that did occur were conducted in a highly authoritarian manner with little open discussion. Chapter leaders engaged in outreach mainly in order to generate turn-out at periodic events that served as thinly-veiled campaign rallies for Republican candidates. Most chapter work was “dominated by partisan electioneering interests” (p. 89). (On these themes see also Street and DiMaggio’s study Crashing the Tea Party[Paradigm, 2011], which complements the current book.)

The US press has played an essential role in creating the illusion of a massive Tea Party uprising, as DiMaggio shows in Chapter 3. In mid-2011 one Tea Party leader admitted that “there would not have been a Tea Party without Fox” (quoted on p. 224). Right-wing outlets like Fox News have been crucial in promoting Tea Party events to increase turn-out and by providing a steady stream of favorable coverage. But centrist and liberal media share the blame. Even when featuring criticisms of it, they have consistently mischaracterized it as an authentic movement anduprising, thus legitimating it, while ignoring the facts presented in Chapters 1 and 2. DiMaggio’s quantitative analysis of press coverage also shows that media have systematically favored the Tea Party over antiwar, anti-corporate, and women’s rights protests, which unlike the Tea Party represent genuine grassroots movements. This pattern of coverage confirms the predictions of Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s “propaganda model” regarding media treatment of “worthy” versus “unworthy” protesters.

Another chapter on media coverage focuses on the Tea Party’s obsession in 2009 and early 2010, the healthcare reform debate. DiMaggio finds that media reports on the issue overwhelmingly echoed right-wing propaganda themes—focusing on the alleged costs, debt, and budget deficits that would result from Democratic reform proposals—while failing to acknowledge the real reasons for right-wing opposition. The modest reform proposal of the “public option” received far less media attention, particularly after Congressional Democrats stopped advocating it. Discussion of single-payer or universal healthcare, meanwhile, was virtually absent from news coverage.

DiMaggio goes beyond most studies of media coverage by measuring the effects of propaganda and other forces on public attitudes. In Chapters 4 and 6 he uses poll results to analyze the importance of nine separate factors, both material and “intangible,” in shaping individuals’ attitudes toward the Tea Party and healthcare reform during the period under study. Material factors like race and income play a key role, with whites and the more affluent more likely to support the Tea Party and oppose healthcare reform. Yet DiMaggio concludes that intangible forces like exposure to corporate media and partisan affiliation are ultimately more important in determining people’s opinions. Republican voters, those who watched Fox News, and those who followed Washington-related news reports more closely were much more likely to support the Tea Party and oppose healthcare reform.

One of the most pressing questions regarding the Tea Party phenomenon is why many working-class people have expressed support for it. During 2010 the group grew in popularity among most sectors of the population, not just among the affluent. By August 2010 over half the US public expressed “sympathy” with the Tea Party. DiMaggio is careful to distinguish between the motives of the Tea Party’s elite leadership and those of the ordinary working people who have been attracted to it. The Tea Party may be “a false populist force,” but “the group would be nowhere near as successful if it were not for the legitimate grievances and anger of a general public” (p. 31). Falling real wages, rising inequality, and unresponsive government have all fueled the Tea Party’s popularity, even if its false solutions would intentionally exacerbate such problems. Moreover, many of the people who have expressed support for the Tea Party in fact hold progressive values. One explanation DiMaggio offers for this paradox is that factual ignorance (largely created by media coverage) results in disjunctions between people’s values and attitudes toward specific policies, on one hand, and their opinions of politicians, institutions, and abstract ideas like “healthcare reform,” on the other. For example, individuals may strongly support welfare programs like Medicare or Social Security—as most of the public does—but oppose “welfare” due to the racist and classist propaganda offensive mounted against the idea since the 1970s.

A similar pattern seems to apply to public opinion on a wide range of issues. Most of the public thinks workers should have more income and power, but is more ambivalent toward the idea of unions. The public supports a binding treaty to combat climate change, but over half of Bush voters in 2004 were under the erroneous impression that Bush supported the Kyoto Protocol. To take a recent example, the public overwhelmingly agrees with the Occupy Wall Street movement’s goals of reducing inequality, taxing the rich to fund social programs, and ending corporate domination of government, but stated support for the Occupy movement itself is lower (though still substantial). DiMaggio’s argument about how elites and media coverage “manufacture dissent” against policies that might otherwise enjoy widespread support helps to explain such paradoxes, although further research—particularly at the ethnographic level—will be necessary to more fully understand the reasons for working-class support for the Tea Party and other right-wing forces (working-class racism, sexism, and nationalism are surely important here).

At the same time, DiMaggio also cautions that the cooptation or “false consciousness” of workers and the poor is not as pervasive as analysts like Thomas Frank (the author of What’s the Matter with Kansas?) have implied. Support for Republicans among the white working class is far from universal, and ordinary people frequently see through elite propaganda. Yet the challenge to Frank’s argument is only partial: DiMaggio recognizes “that the less privileged are regularly manipulated into supporting policies that run directly counter to their material interests” (p. 179). Successful manipulation just isn’t as common as some liberals and leftists suggest.

My critiques of the book are few and minor. Though hardly the author’s fault, the book was written too early (November 2010) to take into account interesting recent developments like the Tea Party’s decline in popularity during 2011 or the resurgence of a progressive movement in the United States as embodied in the fall’s Occupy protests (the book’s conclusion, written in August 2011, does address the February union protests in Wisconsin).

A more important critique involves the relative lack of attention to the role of the Democrats in fueling the political discontent upon which the Tea Party has capitalized. For instance, I think the statement that “Republicans successfully took universal healthcare and the public option off the agenda” (p. 192) attributes too much power to the right; top-level Democrats also rejected the idea of universal healthcare and were at best half-hearted advocates of a robust public option. Even prior to late 2009, when Democratic proposals still included the public option, it was by no means clear that the progressive aspects of the legislation would outweigh the negative ones. Public opposition to Democratic healthcare reform seems to have derived not just from right-wing propaganda but also from the corporate-friendly nature of the reform proposals. In a January 2010 CBS News poll, 43 percent of respondents said that “the reforms do not do enough” to restrain private insurance companies (only 27 percent said they “go too far”). DiMaggio does note that Democratic proposals gave huge gifts to insurance companies and that Democrats’ right-wing policies have “contributed to the popularity of the Tea Party” by alienating the public (p. 126), but more attention to this dynamic might have further enriched the analysis. Additional research in the future could help illuminate the process by which right-wing populists appeal to workers disillusioned with Democrats’ unwillingness or inability to pursue meaningful reforms.

The Rise of the Tea Party is the most insightful study of the topic to date (alongside Street and DiMaggio’s Crashing the Tea Party), and usefully situates the Tea Party phenomenon within a broader analysis of public opinion, corporate media, and the US political system. It is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand recent US political history as well as the larger dynamics of domination and hegemony in the United States.

The Shady Right-Wingers Who Pull Glenn Beck's Strings Are Dangerous

Beck is being used to enforce the very political and economic structures that subjugate the people who worship him.

By Laurence Lewis, Daily Kos
Posted on September 5, 2010

Glenn Beck is a charlatan. A clown. A buffoon. He belongs on a second tier stage in Vegas, and he very well may end up there, some day. He is not dangerous, but his ability to exploit the legitimately angry dispossessed reveals something that is dangerous. Decades of right wing economic policies have undermined unions, the middle class, the social safety net, and the sense that we are all in this together, moving into a better future. Few believe their children or grandchildren will inherit a better world. People are afraid, and they don't understand why they are afraid. And while Glenn Greenwald is correct that by not seizing the mantle of populism, the Democrats have created a void that was ripe for exploitation, that inevitable exploitation has come to be personified by the likes of Glenn Beck. He disseminates lies and disinformation, preying on the vulnerable, distracting them from even beginning to be able to grasp the real reasons why their dreams seem more and more illusory, and their ability to maintain even a basic sense of security and comfort more and more tenuous.

Dana Milbank is about to publish a book on Beck, and the poor guy did his research. Presumably, afterward, he had to sterilize himself with turpentine and kerosene. In an article in the Washington Post, over the weekend, he provided a brief summary of what he has learned about Beck. And he began by recounting an anecdote from Beck's 2003 memoir. Beck admits to having been strongly influenced by Orson Welles, who used to travel around Manhattan in an ambulance. The sirens were screaming not because Welles was ill, but because it was a good way to beat traffic.

Milbank:

Most of us would regard this as dishonest, a ploy by the self-confessed charlatan that Welles was. Beck saw it as a model to be emulated. "Welles," he writes, "inspired me to believe that I can create anything that I can see or imagine."

But as Milbank points out, Welles was an admitted charlatan. First and foremost, he was a showman, one of the rare filmmakers about whom the word "genius" legitimately applied. Welles was the master of illusion, making magic of manipulation. For the most part, he used that genius and mastery to entertain and create art, although it famously got well out of hand with his War of the Worlds radio broadcast. But Beck casts himself as something genuine. He cries as if he's capable of genuine sympathy and empathy. But his manipulations and machinations are not merely for entertainment, and they're not even merely for self-aggrandizement. First and foremost, they are used to enforce and reinforce the very political and economic structures that subjugate the people whose alienation and disillusionment find false solace in the theatrical rantings of people like Beck.

Milbank:

I was reminded of Beck's affection for deception as he hyped his march on Washington -- an event scheduled for the same date (Aug. 28) and on the same spot (the Lincoln Memorial) as Martin Luther King Jr.'s iconic march 47 years ago. Beck claimed it was pure coincidence, but then he made every effort to appropriate the mantle of the great civil rights leader.

King, the peacemaker. The adherent to the principles of Gandhi. The man who wrote and lived "Strength To Love." And then, there's Beck, who says he chose the date of his rally without even knowing its historical significance, attributing the coincidence to "divine providence." And the most disturbing part is that some people apparently believe him.

As Beck attempts to turn the world inside out and upside down by claiming the mantle of a movement he probably would have opposed, and whose means he is too small even to begin to comprehend, Milbank lists some of Beck's greatest moments as a champion of civil rights.

• As a radio host, performed an on-air skit that mocked a stereotyped Asian accent, forcing his station to apologize.
• On CNN, while interviewing Rep. Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress, demanded proof that Ellison isn't working with "our" enemies.
• Called President Obama a "racist" who has a "deep-seated hatred for white people."
• Claims Obama was elected because he isn't white.
• Claims Obama is moving us into slavery.
• Asserted that the president's very name is Un-American.
• Claims Obama seeks reparations from white America, to "settle old racial scores."
• Has claimed Obama is tied to or influenced by "radical black nationalism" and "Marxist black liberation theology" and the New Black Panther Party, which Beck claims is part of Obama's "army of thugs."

It would almost be funny if so many didn't take it seriously. And if their taking it seriously wasn't part of a deeply disturbing hidden agenda. As Frank Rich explained, last Sunday:

There’s just one element missing from these snapshots of America’s ostensibly spontaneous and leaderless populist uprising: the sugar daddies who are bankrolling it, and have been doing so since well before the “death panel” warm-up acts of last summer. Three heavy hitters rule. You’ve heard of one of them, Rupert Murdoch. The other two, the brothers David and Charles Koch, are even richer, with a combined wealth exceeded only by that of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett among Americans. But even those carrying the Kochs’ banner may not know who these brothers are. 

Their self-interested and at times radical agendas, like Murdoch’s, go well beyond, and sometimes counter to, the interests of those who serve as spear carriers in the political pageants hawked on Fox News. The country will be in for quite a ride should these potentates gain power, and given the recession-battered electorate’s unchecked anger and the Obama White House’s unfocused political strategy, they might. 

All three tycoons are the latest incarnation of what the historian Kim Phillips-Fein labeled “Invisible Hands” in her prescient 2009 book of that title: those corporate players who have financed the far right ever since the du Pont brothers spawned the American Liberty League in 1934 to bring down F.D.R. You can draw a straight line from the Liberty League’s crusade against the New Deal “socialism” of Social Security, the Securities and Exchange Commission and child labor laws to the John Birch Society-Barry Goldwater assault on J.F.K. and Medicare to the Koch-Murdoch-backed juggernaut against our “socialist” president.

And Rich referred to the chillingly essential article on the Kochs, by Jane Mayer in The New Yorker.

As their fortunes grew, Charles and David Koch became the primary underwriters of hard-line libertarian politics in America. Charles’s goal, as Doherty described it, was to tear the government “out at the root.” The brothers’ first major public step came in 1979, when Charles persuaded David, then thirty-nine, to run for public office. They had become supporters of the Libertarian Party, and were backing its Presidential candidate, Ed Clark, who was running against Ronald Reagan from the right. Frustrated by the legal limits on campaign donations, they contrived to place David on the ticket, in the Vice-Presidential slot; upon becoming a candidate, he could lavish as much of his personal fortune as he wished on the campaign. The ticket’s slogan was “The Libertarian Party has only one source of funds: You.” In fact, its primary source of funds was David Koch, who spent more than two million dollars on the effort. 

Many of the ideas propounded in the 1980 campaign presaged the Tea Party movement. Ed Clark told The Nation that libertarians were getting ready to stage “a very big tea party,” because people were “sick to death” of taxes. The Libertarian Party platform called for the abolition of the F.B.I. and the C.I.A., as well as of federal regulatory agencies, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Energy. The Party wanted to end Social Security, minimum-wage laws, gun control, and all personal and corporate income taxes; it proposed the legalization of prostitution, recreational drugs, and suicide. Government should be reduced to only one function: the protection of individual rights. William F. Buckley, Jr., a more traditional conservative, called the movement “Anarcho-Totalitarianism.” 

That November, the Libertarian ticket received only one per cent of the vote. The brothers realized that their brand of politics didn’t sell at the ballot box. Charles Koch became openly scornful of conventional politics. “It tends to be a nasty, corrupting business,” he told a reporter at the time. “I’m interested in advancing libertarian ideas.” According to Doherty’s book, the Kochs came to regard elected politicians as merely “actors playing out a script.” A longtime confidant of the Kochs told Doherty that the brothers wanted to “supply the themes and words for the scripts.” In order to alter the direction of America, they had to “influence the areas where policy ideas percolate from: academia and think tanks.”

Of course, legalizing drugs and prostitution and opposing gun control appeals to many, across partisan and ideological bounds. But it's not a stretch to assume that the brothers aren't helping fund organizations such as NORML. They are, however, helping fundclimate denialism, which is what you would expect from oil industry billionaires. And while eliminating income taxes and campaign finance laws would greatly benefit billionaires, it would spell the end of the government's ability to check abuses by rapacious industries such as oil, health insurance, and banking, and it also would mean the end of even a semblance of a social contract. It also would mean the effective end of democracy, the new royalty and aristocracy being corporate plutocrats such as Rupert Murdoch and the Koch brothers.

Little wonder, then, that the brothers are helping fund phony movements now fronted by the likes of Glenn Beck. Because people like Beck wouldn't be capable of mobilizing masses of the manipulated, if not for the power of a propaganda shop disguised as a cable news network, and the financial backing of meticulously calculating billionaires whose real goals are mostly about coalescing their own wealth and power at the expense of the very people they are attempting to manipulate into serfdom. Beck is the front. The clown. The distraction. Behind Beck and his ilk lies the money trail. As Mayer concluded her article:

The Kochs have long depended on the public’s not knowing all the details about them. They have been content to operate what David Koch has called “the largest company that you’ve never heard of.” But with the growing prominence of the Tea Party, and with increased awareness of the Kochs’ ties to the movement, the brothers may find it harder to deflect scrutiny. Recently, President Obama took aim at the Kochs’ political network. Speaking at a Democratic National Committee fund-raiser, in Austin, he warned supporters that the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in the Citizens United case -- which struck down laws prohibiting direct corporate spending on campaigns -- had made it even easier for big companies to hide behind “groups with harmless-sounding names like Americans for Prosperity.” Obama said, “They don’t have to say who, exactly, Americans for Prosperity are. You don’t know if it’s a foreign-controlled corporation” -- or even, he added, “a big oil company.”

Don't worry about Glenn Beck. Popular history will forget him. He's not a significant political player, and he's not a memorable entertainer. But the people hiding behind Beck and his ilk must be raised to public consciousness. Because so many of the Tea Party faithful don't even know who is promoting what they have been duped into believing is their cause, and certainly don't know the real cause they are being duped into promoting. Most of them are being played for suckers. To the financial backers of Beck and his ilk, most Tea Partiers are but another demographic group to exploit. It would be good for them and for the nation and the world if they ever figured that out.