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Avenging Angel Wed Oct 05, 2011
Back in April 2009, Daily Show host Jon Stewart summed up the Tea Party movement, "I think you might be confusing tyranny with losing." His description, it turns out, was exactly right. Tea Partiers complained they were "Taxed Enough Already" despite virtually all receiving tax relief from President Obama and America seeing the total federal tax burden at its lowest level since 1950. They decried "Obamacare" for its nonexistent "death panels" and "government takeover of health care" even as the Affordable Care Act would cover 30 million more Americans and reduce the U.S. national debt. And after pocketing millions of dollars in funding from the usual right-wing sugar daddies, the Tea Party's Republicans in Republicans' clothing duly voted Republican in the 2010 midterm elections.
Which is why the leading lights of the Republican Party are so quick to denounce the Occupy Wall Street movement now spreading across the country. Its platform and ultimate political impact may not be clear. But unlike the Tea Party, its populism is authentic.
That goes a long way towards explaining the vitriol coming from Republican candidates and their amen corner. For his part, National Review editor Rich Lowry declared, "Occupy Wall Street is toxic and pathetic." Michelle Malkin, who in 2009 urged her readers to "Go Galt" in response to Barack Obama giving them the largest two-year tax cut in modern American history, chortled that the OWS rallies around the country are 99% white. And Herman Cain, the new GOP White House frontrunner of sorts, blamed the protesters themselves for their economic plight:
"I don't have facts to back this up, but I happen to believe that these demonstrations are planned and orchestrated to distract from the failed policies of the Obama administration. Don't blame Wall Street, don't blame the big banks, if you don't have a job and you're not rich, blame yourself! [...] It is not someone's fault if they succeeded, it is someone's fault if they failed."
Mitt Romney, the $250 million man who proclaimed himself "middle class" and joked with jobless voters that "I'm also unemployed," had another term for those demonstrating against the Wall Street banks that caused the national financial calamity they alone have recovered from.
"I think it's dangerous, this class warfare."
To that, a puzzled Donald Trump added, "Nobody knows why they're protesting."
Here's a clue. The 99%, as Ezra Klein described the protesters, "sense that the fundamental bargain of our economy -- work hard, play by the rules, get ahead -- has been broken, and they want to see it restored." Personally struggling with stubbornly high unemployment and endless home foreclosures, they see corporate America back to record profitability after Wall Street banks were bailed out by American taxpayers. While executive pay rose by 23% last year, since 2009 corporate profits "captured 88% of the growth in real national income while aggregate wages and salaries accounted for only slightly more than 1% of the growth in real national income." At with income inequality at its highest level in 80 years and the federal tax bill at its lowest in 60, proposals for even small increases in upper income tax rates are greeted with charges of "class war" from those who won it.
Perhaps more than anything, the Washington Post's Suzy Khimm explained Tuesday, the Occupy movement wants "less corporate money in politics." In contrast, as Politico documented just the day before, the Tea Party wants more:
The groups -- Americans for Prosperity, FreedomWorks, Club for Growth, Leadership Institute and Tea Party Express - raised $79 million last year. That's a 61 percent increase from their haul in 2009, when the tea party first started gaining traction, and an 88 percent increase over their tally in 2008, according to a POLITICO review of campaign reports and newly released tax filings.
And the two biggest groups -- Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks -- tell POLITICO they're planning to raise and spend a whopping $156 million combined this year and next, laying the groundwork for what could be a massive tea party organizing push against Democrats and the occasional moderate Republican in 2012.
From the beginning, those front groups for Dick Armey and the Koch brothers funded and coordinated the Astroturfed Tea Party movement, even distributing strategy memos on how to disrupt Democratic town hall meetings.
But largely lost in that seeming consensus about the triumph of right-wing populist anger in November was the inescapable truth about the Tea Partiers. That is, these older, whiter and more ideologically conservative voters are just Republicans by another name. And by the time the 2012 GOP presidential primaries roll around, they will be indistinguishable from the rest of the Republican hard line base.
To be sure, the 2010 exit polls confirmed that Tea Baggers are just Republicans who shout louder. The national House exit poll found that 40% of those surveyed supported the Tea Party. That's virtually identical to the 41% favorable opinion of the Republican Party. Unsurprisingly, their behavior in the voting booth was also identical, as the GOP captured 87% of the Tea Baggers' ballots.
If you had any lingering doubts that the Tea Party's righteous rage and town hall takeovers was just a continuation of the 2008 presidential campaign by others, just take a quick look back at any McCain-Palin rally from that fall. Or, you can turn to the growing mountain of studies of showing that Tea Party Republicans are nothing new under the sun.
In August, professors Robert Putnam and David Campbell published their findings from a sampling of 3,000 Americans. As their summed up what they learned about these ever more extreme - and unpopular - social conservatives:
Our analysis casts doubt on the Tea Party's 'origin story.' Early on, Tea Partiers were often described as nonpartisan political neophytes. Actually, the Tea Party's supporters today were highly partisan Republicans long before the Tea Party was born, and were more likely than others to have contacted government officials. In fact, past Republican affiliation is the single strongest predictor of Tea Party support today.
What's more, contrary to some accounts, the Tea Party is not a creature of the Great Recession. Many Americans have suffered in the last four years, but they are no more likely than anyone else to support the Tea Party. And while the public image of the Tea Party focuses on a desire to shrink government, concern over big government is hardly the only or even the most important predictor of Tea Party support among voters.
So what do Tea Partiers have in common? They are overwhelmingly white, but even compared to other white Republicans, they had a low regard for immigrants and blacks long before Barack Obama was president, and they still do.
Campbell and Putnam also exposed another aspect of the Tea Party ersatz populism. "Next to being a Republican, the strongest predictor of being a Tea Party supporter today," they wrote, "was a desire to see religion play a prominent role in politics."
The Tea Party's generals may say their overriding concern is a smaller government, but not their rank and file, who are more concerned about putting God in government.
As for the tens of thousands of Occupy demonstrators in New York and around the country, they simply want corporations out of government. And those nurses and students, unemployed technicians and supportive union members, want to see government to help put Americans back to work.
* Crossposted at Perrspectives *
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