As someone who drinks a rather excessive amount of tea, I was excited to hear about all the tea parties around the country yesterday. Finally something that conservative America and I could agree on…
Unfortunately, it turns out that rather than being celebrations of a delightful beverage, these were instead inchoate criticisms of…I’m not sure what exactly.
To be clear, I don’t mean to imply that protest is worthless or that they shouldn’t be welcome to express their political ideas through public engagement. Sure, there are a lot of jokes to be made about the apparent lack of awareness on the part of the organizers that tea-bagging means something other than what they intended.
And it’s a bit hard to take them seriously given the relative incoherence of the project. After all, protesting the high rate of taxes when the overwhelming majority of the country is set to receive a tax cut is a little odd. And protesting high rates of spending in this particular moment, after eight years of reckless spending from the Bush administration also feels a bit disingenuous. Add in the fact that the original tea party was about taxation WITHOUT REPRESENTATION and then ask yourself exactly what is the problem here.
Still, it’s not like there aren’t legitimate differences of opinion here. And I’m willing to accept that there is plenty of room for nuance. The position that government spending is out of control when it is high AND devoted to projects with which you disagree is certainly reasonable. And to the extent that such a position is meant to be reflected here, well that’s fine.
That said, I do have two niggling concerns. First, the whole dynamic of these events was explicitly designed to militate against that sort of nuance. While such a position would be consistent with the tea parties in the abstract, in the real world these events were all about trying to tap into populist rage. It’s not about making measured objections; it’s about lashing out wildly, trying to find someone to blame. I’m not saying that’s what all (or even most, perhaps) of the individuals involved were doing, but it was the general ethos of the entire day.
And as I’ve argued before, I’m deeply skeptical of that sort of fear-mongering as a basis for political organization. All in all, these events reminded me far too much of the McCain rallies that got so much coverage six months ago.
My second concern has nothing to do with the protests themselves, but rather is about the coverage of it. I’m not saying this is a fully representative example, but I happened to notice on 538 that my little home town of Oak Harbor had its own tea party. I clicked on the link and encountered this headline: “Patriotic crowd throws ‘tea party’ in Oak Harbor.” Now, I remember picking up a copy of the Whidbey News Times back in 2003, and I am pretty sure that the Iraq war protests were not referred to as patriotic.
What that says to me is that we’ve still got a long way to go in remembering that there’s a lot more to patriotism than an obsessive individualism and resistance to the government. For instance, paying taxes is patriotic. It’s a small thing, but patriotism is only meaningful insofar as it represents many small things. And in that context, there is nothing more patriotic than affirming the greatness of a country that cares for ALL of its citizens, a country which recognizes the existence of public goods in need of protection.
Long Walk Home – Bruce Springsteen
As is often the case, I return to The Boss:
My father said “Son, we’re lucky in this town
It’s a beautiful place to be born
It just wraps its arms around you
Nobody crowds you, nobody goes it alone.
You know flag flying over the courthouse
Means certain things are set in stone
Who we are, what we’ll do and what we won’t.”
The beauty of America is the balance we always try to find between letting people be who and what they want to be, and the insistence that there is something greater than merely a bunch of isolated individuals: a collective concern for each other that transcends our selfish interests. Taxes clearly aren’t always spent wisely, or for things that we personally want. But we pay them anyways because we believe in an America that means something more than that, one where nobody has to go it alone.