According to the American Conservative Values blog , “Sarah Heath Palin is the defacto Shadow President of the United States right now. We hope very much she runs for President in 2012. She could change the world. She can save this country. We listen to her and are awed.” Last weekend’s Nashville meeting of the Tea Party under the aura of Palin is a prime example of these poujadist, little man against big, nasty government which sully the reputation of the democratic story.
The movement is in favour of personal liberty above all else and appears to be awakening the apolitical into a form of tyranny. The Boston Tea Party from which the movement takes its name may have been an act in defiance of free trade but that appears meaningless now in the eyes of this new approach which has an approval rating of 41%, against 35 for the Democrats and 28 for the Republicans.
For us Europeans, American conservatives are a scary bunch, as they appear content not to hide their bigotry and racism within the realm of political jargon but are unsettlingly open and upfront about their beliefs. The Tea Party convention last weekend was rife with talk of the ‘subversive threat’ of the green movement along with a frankly worrying amount of casual and cultural racism. 2008 presidential candidate Tom Tancredo concentrated his opening speech on illegal immigration, claiming the fabric of US society had been diminished by the “cult of multiculturalism”, before going to claim that “people who cannot even spell the word ‘vote’ or say it in English put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House. Name is Barack Hussein Obama.”
The convention itself was dogged by controversy – with some denouncing the extortionate $549 ticket price and castigating it as an attempt to get in on a bottom-up phenomenon for commercial gain. Similarly, for the princely sum of $89.99, delegates could buy pendants of tea bags made from semi-precious stones and silver, and there were innumberable T-shirts on sale with slogans such as “I’ll keep my freedom, my guns and my money” and “Annoy a liberal – use facts and logic”. The sheer openness of the latter baffles me – I could honestly never imagine any European conservative movement (not even France’s Le Pen) operating with such shamefaced braggadocio.
Those behind the Tea Party movement are unquestionably the same people who backed Ronald Reagan - the man who was single handedly responsible for the largest deficits in US, history turning the nation from the world’s biggest creditor to its biggest debtor, alternately slashing and raising taxes more than any president before him, enlarging civilian government and massively enlarged the military while also being responsible for the Iran-Contra affair, the most serious constitutional scandal since Watergate (and lied about it), which resulted in a greater number of senior officials being indicted, forced to resign or accused of illegal or unethical conduct than any administration in the 20th century.
The Tea Party movement, at present, is a mishmash of half-baked ideas, paranoia and rabble rousing. But any movement that has Sarah Palin as their figurehead and harks back to America’s segregationist past surely cannot last? Hopefully every Tea Party-backed Republican who gets elected will immediately find themselves voting for pork barrel projects, defence uplifts, federal subsidies and tax breaks. The most revealing aspect to come out of last weekend’s convention is that The Tea Party is ultimately a nebulous movement, defined more by what it’s against than what it’s for, motivated by anger and hijacked by ideologues and populists, and projecting their fears upon the ‘establishment’.
