Rebuild the Dream (17 page)

Not only did the Koch brothers benefit from the subsidies and tax breaks of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, they also have reportedly received almost $100 million in government contracts since 2000. As one of the top-ten air polluters in the United States, Koch Industries has fought regulation at every turn; it even beat Exxon-Mobil in donations to fight climate change legislation (between 2005 and 2008). “Indeed, the brothers have funded opposition campaigns against so many Obama administration policies—from health-care reform to the economic-stimulus program—that, in political circles, their ideological network is known as the Kochtopus,” journalist Jane Mayer reported in the
New Yorker
.

The agenda of the Koch brothers over the past several decades sounds like the agenda of the Tea Party—because it is. The Kochsupported group Americans for Prosperity is one of the major support centers of the Tea Party movement; it helps educate activists on protest tactics and media, provides them with talking points, and gives them “next-step training” after the rallies, to shift the energy into electoral power. Dick Armey runs another major support group behind the movement, called Freedom-Works. It is supported by billionaire Steve Forbes and possibly enjoys Koch brothers largesse, as well.

Many people have come out of the woodwork of their own volition to join the ranks of the movement. According to a 2010
New York Times/CBS
poll, Tea Party supporters tend to be white, over the age of fifty, and more likely to be male than female. The majority is highly skeptical of climate change with only 14 percent believing global warming is a current problem (in comparison to 49 percent of the general public).

The members, writes Matt Taibbi
of Rolling Stone
, “include not only hardcore libertarians left over from the original Ron Paul ‘tea parties,' but gun-rights advocates, fundamentalist Christians, pseudo militia types like the Oath Keepers [a group of law-enforcement and military professionals who have vowed to disobey ‘unconstitutional' orders], and mainstream Republicans who have simply lost faith in their party.”

Taibbi summed them up: “A loose definition of the Tea Party might be millions of pissed-off white people sent chasing after Mexicans on Medicaid by the handful of banks and investment firms who advertise on Fox and CNBC.”

Above all, Tea Partiers are outraged, conservative, free-market populists who protested the stimulus bill, the budget, and the financial bailout. As we discussed in the last chapter, Tea Partiers organized noisy protests at town halls around healthcare reform; they also held at least eighty events targeting cap-and-trade legislation, falsely claiming that backyard barbeques and kitchen stoves would be taxed under the plan. The media took notice. Who were these people in these tricorne hats? Why were they so angry? Should they be taken seriously? In time, anything and everything the Tea Party did, the media broadcasted. They got especially loyal coverage from
Fox News
and the right-wing bloggers.

The Tea Party movement accomplished what at first seemed to be impossible. When the backlashers got rolling in 2009, the Democrats had Obama in the White House, sixty votes in the Senate, and Nancy Pelosi as the Speaker of the House. Republicans had been routed coast to coast and were a minority in both houses. The GOP had not exactly been dealt a winning hand.

Yet the people with the hats upended the national discourse, put Democrats on the defensive across the country, increased GOP seats in the U.S. Senate, and helped the Republicans take over the U.S. House of Representatives.

How did they do it? Why was the Tea Party movement so successful? There were a handful of features that were vital: there was no serious competition from any populist-left forces; Tea Partiers were media savvy and found support with the media; they focused on scaring the bejeebers out of elected officials; they had the ability to pivot from protest to electoral politics; they capitalized on the racial anxiety surrounding the election of the first African
American president; and they had the ability to work horizontally and collaboratively.

A major reason the Tea Party movement was so successful was that it faced effectively zero competition from elsewhere along the political spectrum. In a period of economic agony, there was only one form of militant economic populism that was visible: the right-wing, libertarian variety that was on offer from the Tea Parties. Progressives also could have been demanding redress, marching for jobs, barking at the banks, and thereby attracting millions of supporters, but most were peaceably getting to know the new administration, muting their criticisms of Wall Street, and hoping the stimulus bill would work. For two years, progressives let angry right-wingers own the streets, unchallenged. If an American was “mad as hell” about the economy, there was only one place to go.

The Tea Party followed the old Hollywood maxim:
show, don't tell.
People demonstrated and marched in public, which is something that right-wingers almost never do. They took to the streets to protest against a “big government takeover,” taxation, and more specifically, President Obama. They took unexpected action, wearing unusual garb. It was conspicuous, sticky, and designed to capture media attention.

The public thought, “Here's some big, new force.” In fact, the Tea Partiers were not particularly big or new, but they were newly presented and newly branded. They punk'd the world, Ashton Kutcher-style. It was a genius strategy.

The Tea Party changed America by changing the Republican Party; it changed the Republican Party by scaring the pants off the GOP establishment. Initially, the Republican Party didn't give the Tea Party any more credit than progressives did. The GOP was happy to ignore the Tea Partiers—until they focused populist anger on Republicans and proved themselves willing to take casualties in the short run for their long-term goals. Tea Party groups ran candidates against “soft” Republicans (so-called RINOs or Republicans In Name Only). They were willing to lose winnable Senate races, indeed perhaps the Senate majority, by supporting Tea Party candidates in primaries who couldn't win the general elections. What they accomplished by such kamikaze attacks was to convince the Republican leadership that the GOP could not succeed without the Tea Party. To get the Tea Party on board, Republicans had to shift radically to the right to meet the Tea Party agenda.

To duplicate the Tea Party's feat, left-wing activists would have to stop going easy on weak Democrats, stop buying into the “lesser of two evils” argument, and be willing to take short-term losses to obtain long-term gains. The payoff could be worth it. Elected officials paid close attention to the Tea Partiers and very quickly developed a fear of crossing them. For her
New Yorker
piece on the Tea Party, Jane Mayer interviewed Grover Norquist about the Tea Party's impact on Congress. Protests, he said, “discouraged dealmakers”—Republicans who might otherwise have worked constructively with Obama. Moreover, the appearance of growing public opposition to Obama affected corporate donors on K Street. “K Street is a three-billion-dollar weathervane,” Norquist said. “When Obama was strong, the chamber of commerce said, ‘We can work with the Obama administration.' But that changed when
thousands of people went into the street and ‘terrorized' congressmen. August [2009] is what changed it.”

Like bees to honey, right-wing candidates began to flock to the Tea Party and adopt the protesters' platform as their own. As they entered 2010, the Tea Partiers turned their attention from making waves at town hall meetings to making an impact in electoral races. When Ted Kennedy's seat opened in solidly Democratic Massachusetts, the special election in January went to Republican Scott Brown—with Tea Party support. The movement propelled extreme right-wingers into national office and began taking over governor's mansions across the country. Rand Paul in Kentucky and Nikki Haley in South Carolina became national figures.

Everyone who had not taken the movement seriously before that point wound up with egg on her or his face. As office holders, the newly elected Tea Party candidates have not been afraid to take risks, nor have they been shy about acting on their extremist ideology. They immediately began an all-out assault on public workers and women's rights, while doling out tax breaks for millionaires and corporations.

The movement actively used Barack Obama as a foil, promoting wild and outlandish fears about his character, origins, and aims. Of course, whenever a mostly white group directs such venom at a black man such as Obama, concerns arise about racist motivations.

The majority of Tea Party members say they oppose racism and deeply resent the tendency of the media to paint them all with the same brush of bigotry.

But serious observers continue to have doubts. In October 2010, the NAACP released a report entitled “Tea Party Nationalism,” which linked six major, national Tea Party networks to racist, anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant hate groups and militias. For example, the direct descendant of the nefarious White Citizens' Council, known as the Council of Conservative Citizens, used its website and periodical to promote Tea Party events.

The six groups listed were the Tea Party Express; 1776 Tea Party, led by people who were the leaders of the Minuteman vigilante group; ResistNet/Patriot Action Network, home to many of the nativists and anti-immigrant xenophobes; Tea Party Nation; Tea Party Patriots; and FreedomWorks Tea Party, which is the only group without explicit “birthers” among its leaders.

The report cited the explicitly, and covertly, racist signs carried at rallies, as well as the events of March 20, 2010. On that day, as a small group of congressmen walked to the Capitol to vote on healthcare reform, Tea Party protestors verbally assaulted them. They called Representative Barney Frank (D-MA) a “faggot” and civil rights legend John Lewis (D-GA) a “n——r.” At an earlier rally in July 2009, entertainment was provided by Poker Face, whose lead singer has publicly called the Holocaust a hoax.

Another racially tinged issue animates Tea Party members. Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson, authors of
The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism
, wrote in a December 2011 opinion piece for the
New York Times
,

Immigration was always a central, and sometimes the central, concern expressed by Tea Party activists, usually as a symbol of a broader national decline. Asked why she was a member of the movement, a woman from Virginia asked rhetorically, “What is going on in this country? What is going on with immigration?” A Tea Party leader in Massachusetts expressed her desire to stand
on the border “with a gun” while an activist in Arizona jokingly referred to an immigration plan in the form of a “12 million passenger bus” to send unauthorized immigrants out of the United States.

In a survey of Tea Party members in Massachusetts we conducted, immigration was second only to deficits on the list of issues the party should address. Another man, after we interviewed him in the afternoon, took us aside at a meeting that evening to say specifically that he wished he had said more about immigration because that was really his top issue.

For those who worry that antipathy for immigration is fueled by racial animus against Latinos, such obsessions are very disturbing.

“Theirs is an American nationalism,” the NAACP report concluded, “that excludes those deemed not to be ‘real Americans'; including the native-born children of undocumented immigrants (often despised as ‘anchor babies'), socialists, Moslems, and those not deemed to fit within a ‘Christian nation.'”

The vast majority of Tea Party members reject overt anti-black racism, and they claim to see all Americans as equal. But the movement has never acted forcefully to expel the haters in its midst. So at a minimum, the Tea Party movement has continued to benefit from a bigotry it claims to abhor.

Perhaps the greatest source of the Tea Party movement's strength has been its ability to function horizontally and collaboratively.

The Tea Party is an open-source brand, which means nobody owns it. Nobody can trademark or copyright the term “Tea Party”; after all, it is a part of American history. So there are
many groupings and associations, for example, Tea Party Patriots, Tea Party Express, and Tea Party Nation. At least 3,528 affiliates have agreed to use “Tea Party Patriots.” But nobody owns the core brand.

The Tea Party movement is not a formal organization with a president and headquarters in Washington, DC. It functions more like a network, marked by a set of principles and values. Because the Tea Party movement operates more like an informal association than a traditional, hierarchical organization, it has great resilience. The Tea Party understood that a smart movement does not have just one charismatic leader but acts as a charismatic network. It does not rise or fall based on the fate of any single individual or personality. Of course, it uses a few well-known, charismatic figures very well, such as Ron Paul, Rand Paul, Sarah Palin, Dick Armey, Glenn Beck, and Michele Bachmann—all people who stand out within the movement. But for the most part, the movement used its values—not individuals—as its bedrock. This has been another aspect of its genius. People make mistakes and disappoint. But principles and values are enduring. Glenn Beck lost his TV show, and Sarah Palin fell down the stairway of public opinion, but these events did not hurt the Tea Party one bit.