By Alan Brinkley
Trying to describe the ideas of the Tea Party movement is a bit like a blind man trying to describe the elephant. The movement, like the elephant, exists. But no one, not even the Tea Partiers themselves, can seem to get hands around the whole of it. Jonathan Raban, who attended the first National Tea Party Convention and wrote about it in The New York Review of Books, was struck by how little agreement there was among “members” as they talked about their griev ances and aspirations. And yet the Tea Party uprising is the most visible and energized political phenomenon of the last year. Whether it will remain a viable movement remains to be seen, but it shows no sign yet of running out of steam.
What lies behind the Tea Party movement? Some of it is purely partisan. It has close ties to the Republican Party. It is opportunistically promoted by Fox News. One of its best-known leaders is Dick Armey, former Republican majority leader in the House of Representatives, who spent much of the last year or so promoting the new movement through FreedomWorks, an organization he helped to create. Its program is presented in “Give Us Liberty,” by Armey and the group’s president, Matt Kibbe. It is a simple set of goals, consistent with those professed by Republicans over the last 25 years: “lower taxes, less government, more freedom.” But if that were all there were to the Tea Partiers, they would be indistinguishable from the Republican Party itself.
Kate Zernike, a national correspondent for The New York Times, has interviewed a number of Tea Partiers in an effort to understand what they believe and what they want. Her book, “Boiling Mad: Inside Tea Party America,” is an anecdotal description of the movement, supplemented by an April 2010 New York Times/CBS News poll (already a generation away from the fast-moving character of the insurgents). Her interviews, too few to be of any statistical significance, are nevertheless illuminating as a picture of how different some Tea Partiers are from the Republican establishment’s view of the movement.
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Democracy is not something that happens, you know, just at election time, and it's not something that happens just with one event. It's an ongoing building process. But it also ought to be a part of our culture, a part of our lives. ~ Jim Hightower
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