Ron Paulians Had Nothing to Do with the Tea Party. Move Along.
Michelle Malkin writes a purportedly comprehensive cheat sheet on the Tea Party movement called “How it All Started”, and begins in February with a blogger friendly to her as a grassroots Republican movement spontaneously combusted and then nurtured and fanned by Michelle Malkin and Glenn Reynolds and the like.
Apparently beyond mention is the first (well, you know what I mean) Tea Party last December, when Ron Paul supporters did it in support of their candidate for the Republican nomination and his anti-government agenda that precisely nobody on Malkin’s list of progenitors wanted anything to do with and which, in fact, Malkin demanded be excluded from the Republican debate and party and whose supporters she called “hysterical minions” when they, you know, gathered in groups outside to protest the growth of government and investing absolute faith in the state. That was totally different though. Just a bunch of kooks then. Plus, it was, you know, during an election, when it mattered.
What particularly bugs me is I have a hunch that all the righteous anti-government activists whose commitment she’s so impressed with and whose pictures she’s proudly displaying now includes a massively disproportionate share of Ron Paul supporters. And I have an equal hunch that the yahoos that people like Andrew Sullivan, David Wiegel, and Dailykos are taking as representative and laughing at are probably more Malkin people.
Hey Michelle, if you have a chance to cover Tea Party after parties, find the people whose commitment, enthusiasm, and creativity most impressed you during the day’s rallies, the people who really seemed to live and breath the message, the most unpretentious and salt of the earth activists you can find, the people whose pictures you’re taking, and ask them who they voted for in the Republican primary.
I dare you.
My slightly more thoughtful (and less negative) take on the Tea Parties here.
Let’s say you are right. Let’s say that these tea party protests have been, at least in part, co-opted by right-wing radio types and so on. Ok, if we ignore their contributions what is left? What am I to learn from these protests? What message should I take to heart?
Comment by tessellated — 4/15/2009 @ 6:54 pm
I’m not sure I get the question. What message should you take to heart with their contributions?
What I suppose you should take to heart is there still exists in this country a strong passion for individualism broadly defined (a very American trait) and a deep distrust of a strong, federal, centralized authority. I don’t mean that in a paranoid or negativist sense, I mean that in the sense that there remains a very strong undercurrent of American culture and political thinking that believes that rights are invested in the individual first and foremost, that it’s the individual, not that state, that’s sovereign. And that the government, where it exists above and beyond where it absolutely must, threatens the individual-centric rights, or is at the very least in constant tension with them, and not always productive tension at that. Those activists have always been out there, and even after many many years of seeing America backslide in all those respects, remain out there still. That impresses and to some extent nourishes me. Would that the “right-wing radio types” as you put it weren’t so invested in smothering it in its cradle every time that same impulse which they find laudable in pursuit of partisan ends winds up being turned against those same partisan ends when its those partisan ends that are the threat.
Now, you keep broadening that circle, and I do believe that a large extent of at least the Michelle Malkin / Fox News sort of Tea Partyism is just Obama Derangement Syndrome, which ironically invests everything in a cult of personality (which is exactly what some anti-Obama folks claim to hate about Obama supporters). It’s all personal. It’s Obama, he is the single-handed threat, and if only we could vanquish him things would return to their natural, pristine state. Which is, of course, absolute hogwash. But I give Malkin/Reynolds some more credit than that: with her it’s not just lazy delusion but a more calculated pure partisanship. If a Democrat does something it is wrong because a Democrat is doing it. If a Republican, at least one appropriately highly placed or acceptable along some other lines (Christianist, war-mongering, whatever), is doing that same thing, it is right because it is a Republican doing it. The “thing” in question is, from a Malkin perspective, almost entirely, wholly incidental.
In December of 2007, when this exact event was going on, it was a gathering of hysterics and conspiracy theorists which polite society should ignore and everybody else should revile, mock, or outright banish from mainstream politics. In April 2008, it is one of the most inspiring events she’s ever witnessed, a restoration of her faith in Americans, and which she bends over backwards to put her personal stamp of approval on. The only difference is context: the tactics, style, and even to a large extent the ideas, even the very people, are in many cases exactly the same.
So yeah, don’t look to me to be supportive of this tea party thing. As you can tell I’m pretty bearish about it at the moment. I suppose I should be more happy; I expected the Paul influence on the party to take years and years to develop, and here we are barely a year and a half later and already it’s like they’ve thrown out their playbook and taken ours. I just wish they hadn’t torn out the preamble and wiped their asses with it first.
However, I will say that in those crowds today there were a helluva lot of committed Americans fighting what I believe to be a good fight, which is why I’ll keep pulling my punches to some extent.
Comment by Brad — 4/15/2009 @ 7:05 pm
Thanks for the response, that helps.
From The League of Ordinary Gentleman (a quite good blog I just now discovered):
Comment by tessellated — 4/15/2009 @ 11:02 pm
That’s an interesting take.
If the last two years have created a new surge in civil activism on the left (Obama) and right (Paulite/Tea Party); and if a huge, formerly apathetic portion of the public has become actively interested in and engaged in politics…well, then, good for America.
Comment by Rojas — 4/15/2009 @ 11:30 pm
To Brad:
Irony is dish best served microwaved…
The Ron Paul movement, which really launched as a result of the Giuliani exchange in that infamous Fox News debate, has more or less had it’s leftovers subsumed and expropriated by, well, umm…Fox
With respect to that League of Ordinary Gentleman Marxist False Class Consciousness alienation babble, please…
Comment by Kaligula — 4/16/2009 @ 3:42 am
There’s nothing particularly unusual about a failed political campaign having its bones picked for the stuff that worked, it seems to me. Credit to Howard Dean has been rather less forthcoming from mainstream Democrats, particularly those associated with the core party, than might be justified by the guy’s actual importance, both as a fundraising/internet campaigning pioneer, which is most directly relevant here, then also for his 50-state strategy as head of the DNC.
What works well at the grassroots gets co-opted and sanitised of its genesis (although not, in general, of its loonies, but such is American politics).
Comment by Adam — 4/16/2009 @ 7:08 am
I read Malkin, skipping over her anti-Islam rants and knowing full well she’s going to let me down hard come next election season. But she is not a pure partisan hack – she is very much a fiscal conservative. She has criticized the GOP consistently over the years over their spending. Even though I have a love-hate relationship with hter, I find that I do get good news from her site.
When she was live-blogging the TARP debate, she even wrote “12:20pm Eastern. Ron Paul is on the floor blasting more debt, more appropriations, more spending, more credit in the market. That is what caused the problem. Ron Paul is right. There I said it.” http://tinyurl.com/3nfok4
But the problem with her is the same problem we’re going to have with the rest of the GOP, best exemplified by the tea party sign that read “Don’t blame me – I voted for Sarah.” As much as they say they want change, they won’t actually change a darned thing.
Comment by angelatc — 4/16/2009 @ 7:39 am
I thought this post was most insightful:
Until the Republican party gets off the war bandwagon they will continue to be losers.
Comment by daveg — 4/16/2009 @ 4:40 pm
To do that you will need to decouple the concepts of a strong national defense from american exceptionalism and imperialism. To be fair, I think that unwinding is underway already. It helps to have a figure in the White House that is mistrusted plus the recent, abject failure of Bush to constantly point to on these very ideas. Still, that undercurrent is very, very strong and all it would take to re-ignite it, I think, is a candidate who could plausibly play the role of Reagan II.
Comment by tessellated — 4/16/2009 @ 5:01 pm
Eh, truth is Reagan was somewhat reasonable when it came to foreign policy. He was willing to change direction and/or admit he was wrong. And the cold war presented a completely different (and more real) threat.
I don’t think it will be too hard to decouple exceptionalism from foreign military adventures, and I don’t think that coupling was always present.
Comment by daveg — 4/16/2009 @ 7:07 pm
I’ll agree that the actual record of Reagan doesn’t always match his mythologizing and it is his now mythic image in the GOP to which I refer. Hard-core republicans — the kind who like to toss around words like ‘appeasement’ or disparage the UN or incessantly dron on about being on the wrong side of history — these people just want someone whose first impulse is always to fight. To them that means strength, and on a national or international stage, that sort of strength is what they mean by strong national defense.
I agree that these things weren’t always so tightly bound together, certainly they weren’t prior to WWII, but times have changed.
Comment by tessellated — 4/16/2009 @ 7:17 pm
Well, even up to Bush II there was a very significant and most times dominant strand of Republicanism that was if not anti-war than at least isolationist enough to resist foreign adventurism. Vietnam was a Democratic war, more or less, and Clinton was fairly on par with Reagan in terms of actual shooting action. Prior to 911, a case could be made that hard-nosed Kissinger/Skowcroft sort of “pragmatism” was the dominant Republican thinking, with a big undercurrent of Pat Buchanan style withdraw from the world.
What’s interesting to me is if you listen to the Republican party these days, there are signs that they have dropped the whole neocon thing like a hot potato. It is no longer an issue which anybody seems much interesting in grinding, which is both understandable but also a marked, marked difference. I think Obama will go a long way to diffuse this among the GOP base—his foreign policy is a pretty decent mix of elements that combine to effectively neutralize most criticisms of him from the right (though he may get some from the left). And I think Bush also certainly has.
In that sense, back to the post at hand, I find it interesting that the GOP, at this point, seems more interesting in throwing in with libertarians on economic points than in throwing them under the bus on foreign policy ones. Taking a step back, that’s a pretty giant leap from where we were even a few years ago.
Comment by Brad — 4/16/2009 @ 7:50 pm
I’m not saying the GOP is monolithic in its attitude to the use of military power. I am saying that very recently one style was in ascendancy, and furthermore that it could happen again. Bush STILL enjoys some 30% approval rating or so. His supporters are not likely to ammend their views — ever — and I could imagine a strong, charismatic candidate reigniting that part of the party all over again. That scenario is considerably less likely for the reasons I already stated but the potential will always be there so long as that philosophy enjoys refuge inside the Republican tent.
Comment by tessellated — 4/17/2009 @ 10:55 am
I don’t necessarily disagree, though I’m not really sure how many of that 30% are actual neocons. My hunch is that most of them are just pure partisan tribalists who, if our next Republican president were a Buchanan-esque isolationist, would suddenly spin round to that position as if they’d held it the whole time.
Comment by Brad — 4/17/2009 @ 12:19 pm
I think you are right in that the vast majority of partisans in any party do not do any real political navel-gazing. I think it’s by and large true that they certainly would rally around a republican President who represented a significant break with Bush II on military power and its application. I’m not calling these “thirty-percenters” neocons either. They are simply hyper-loyal brand consumers. It’s the meme itself not the hosts that must be dismantled. It’s certainly under assault, but I don’t think it’s going to disappear. I don’t know if that’s even possible let alone likely, and every time I turn on right-wing radio or similar sources in other media those doubts are reinforced.
Comment by tessellated — 4/17/2009 @ 12:49 pm
I still remember the Republicans being against intervention in Haiti and Bosnia.
George W Bush even railed against it during his campaign.
The Republicans were not always this war crazy, and I do agree that for 30% it is just unthinking partisanship.
Comment by daveg — 4/18/2009 @ 1:07 pm