Why I Loathe The Tea Party GOP Brigands and How Sadly, Sometimes "Regular People" Do in Fact Make History

What democracy has brought us. Is this the face of excellence in responsible leadership and politics?

I had a moment of clarity while sitting in an airplane, reading, somewhere over flyover America the other day. As I have written about here and elsewhere, I find the Tea Party to be one of the most pernicious, dangerous, and disturbing elements in American political and social life. A few of us were sounding the alarm about their mischief when the tea baggers first emerged as a movement several years ago.

Some suggested that they were a flash in the pan, and should best be ignored. I hate being correct on such matters, but I rightly argued that the New Right is a symptom of a bigger malaise and a deep, existential crisis in American public and social life. The tea bagger's mischief making and brigand, economic terrorism during the debt ceiling fracas is their ejaculatory moment, one to be followed up by more blind groping and trouble making in the months to come.

Even while sounding the alarm, one should maintain perspective.

The bigotry and anti-intellectualism of the Tea Party GOP are centuries old. Bachmann Palin and crew are mere updates of the 19th century Know Nothings. Their evolution as 21st century John Birchers is old wine in a new bottle: the Tea Party GOP New Right alliance is just a festering boil on the ass of America, one that has long been there and occasionally needs to be lanced.

In reflection, I am also none too moved by their racism. Me and my tribe of Respectable Negroes are experts by necessity in the various flora and fauna of White Trash America. From the Southern redneck lynching tree Jim and Jane Crow variety of North Carolina, to the anti-busing, angry white ethnic rock throwing restrictive housing covenant signing PWT of Boston and Rhode Island, my kin folk have been fighting with and busting those skulls for generations. We give as good as we get.

Echoing James Baldwin's The Ways of White Folks, we have a gifted vision for seeing the Tea Party GOP for what they are, and thus can deal with them accordingly.

In all, it is the out sized influence and emergence of the Tea Party GOP at this key moment in the decline of American Empire which ultimately gives me pause. The use and abuse of the language of "patriotism" and a dishonest, although not new, manipulation of the icons and imagery of the Founding and American Exceptionalism are other signals that something is very and deeply wrong in this country.

Moreover, how the Tea Party GOP so casually rapes The Constitution is chilling. The Tea Party GOP's belief in their own radically democratic possibilities (where facts are inconvenient as the tea baggers are a top down organization and funded by the Koch brothers) and the reinforcement of this meme by the Right-wing propaganda machine is head-shaking in its effectiveness.

In sum, it is the synergy of these variables where the risk for all Americans of good conscience and the Common Good lies.

Don't get it twisted: I am all for the little guy. In fact, the politics of the subaltern and how regular folks find ways to fight Power has long animated my interest in race, popular culture, and American politics. Regular people can and do make history all of the time. Herein lies the danger of Right-wing populism: regular folks are often manipulated and tricked; false consciousness is real; and we do not all have the equal capacity, ability, or expertise to lead well...or even govern beyond our own narrow and petty self-interest.

To point, why I call (and will continue to do so) the Tea Party GOP a faction. They are the very definition of the Federalists' worries. Nothing more and nothing less.

As a qualifier, I do not believe that every freedman or runaway slave was a perfect person, that the foot soldiers in the Civil Rights Movement were motivated by purely selfless ends, nor do I suggest that the suffragettes at Seneca Falls, or labor organizers at Matewan and elsewhere were gods and not men. But, collectively they were on the Right side of history. By contrast, the Tea Party GOP is on the wrong side of history as they fight to destroy the social safety net in the interest of the very political and economic forces that have gutted the American middle class and ushered in a new Gilded Age.

Here is the crux. Most folks want to make history, to be something more than an anonymous name, or one of the unknown masses. This want has been refined and polished by the dream merchants on Madison Avenue and nurtured by the Facebook reality TV show culture of (very) late capitalism in 21st century America. In this world we can all be famous, even if we are in fact utterly mediocre.

The sale of products are secondary to the sale of lifestyles, emotions, sentimentality, and feelings. These frameworks have been skillfully applied to politics. Obama's "hope and change" was one side of that coin. The Tea Party GOP and their rage machine is the other. The lie of false equivalence cultivated by a 24 hour news cycle which elevates all opinions and beliefs to the level of reasonable discourse is the ether that the Right-wing echo chamber both lives in and is ultimately dependent upon for sustenance and circulation.

But, what if the little guy is not fit, nor prepared or trained to be more than that anonymous soul in the back of the crowd, finger raised, testing the winds to see which way he or she will go? What if he or she is working in the interest of Power as opposed to against it? What if this person, moved by the language of "democracy," "take our country back!" or some half digested treatise written in another time, by a man or woman long dead and now recycled by Glenn Beck, does not even realize that they are being gamed by the System?

Writer Martin Booth has a great observation that rings so true in these matters. From his book A Very Private Gentlemen, where the protagonist anti-hero observes that:

These were people who could not make the tiniest mark on history, could not affect their world--the village, the parish--no matter how they tried. The best they could hope for was to share vicariously in others' petty achievements. Their ambition was to be able to say, 'Him? I knew him when he bought The Glebe,' or 'Her? I was with with her when it happened,' or 'I saw the car skid, you know. There's still a hole in the hedge: a nasty corner: someone should do something about.' Yet they never did and if I were a betting man, prone to taking a gamble, I should wager tyres still squeal on the bend, doors dent of a frosty morning.

The New Right Tea Party GOP are these folks elevated to prominence and given just enough power to believe that they have the right and privilege to alter destinies and make history. Normal politics and good sense be damned by their jihad and yearnings for ideological purity.

Participation for participation sake in a democracy has never appealed to me. The rabble of the Tea Party GOP have fulfilled the prophetic worries of The Framers regarding the perils of mass democracy and have gummed up an already broken system.

Because the Tea Party brigands play with concepts and ideologies they have little understanding of in either the macro-historical sense (e.g. a government's budget should be run like a household...or a pizza company), as a practical matter grounded in reality (there will be no real consequences for a debt default and this controversy is inconsequential political theater), or that can go beyond shallow talking points and Right-wing memes ("job creators" or "cut, cap, and balance"), no good can come of them, except as a barometer for the existential crisis the United States is experiencing as her position in the world is challenged and reevaluated.

The Tea Party GOP fancies themselves the heroes in the debt ceiling debate and free of responsibility for the financial storm their economic terrorism and hostage taking directly helped to unleash on the American people. In reality, they are villains. And like most villains, the Tea Party GOP imagines that they are good and noble, and maybe just a little understood. Sadly, we will all pay for the Tea Party GOP's little exercise in dysfunctional democracy, as they prove once more that the lumpen rabble are often best left to the footnotes, a sideshow in history.