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October 6, 2010
In her Thirsting for a sip of the amazing American brew in The Australian Janet Albrechtsen says that Australia could do with a sip of the imported American tea party brew.
 Albrechtsen understands the Tea Party to be a genuinely grassroots movement committed to simple ideas about smaller government and personal freedom.
On her account this Tea Party anger in Australia means fuelling a return to commonsense ideas (ie libertarian) about cutting spending and reducing the size of government.
She adds that if the Liberals had finessed their message along similar lines before the August election, they may have picked up seats they should have won to take government.
Should have won? Really? Who is kidding who? There was a swing to the left-of-centre parties.
Albrechtson is dreaming about the Tea Party. The on-the-ground reality political reality of the Tea Party movement is that the Tea party events were organized and financed by the conservative wing of the Republican Party, which was quietly working to co-opt the new movement and deploy it to the GOP's advantage.
We can see this on-the-ground reality political reality from Matt Taibbi's Tea & Crackers in Rolling Stone. He says that beneath the surface, the Tea Party is little more than a weird and disorderly mob, a federation of distinct and often competing strains of conservatism that have been unable to coalesce around a leader of their own choosing. Its rallies include not only hardcore libertarians left over from the original Ron Paul "Tea Parties," but gun-rights advocates, fundamentalist Christians, pseudomilitia types like the Oath Keepers (a group of law- enforcement and military professionals who have vowed to disobey "unconstitutional" orders) and mainstream Republicans who have simply lost faith in their party.
Taibbi describes a Sarah Palin rally thus:
Scanning the thousands of hopped-up faces in the crowd, I am immediately struck by two things. One is that there isn't a single black person here. The other is the truly awesome quantity of medical hardware: Seemingly every third person in the place is sucking oxygen from a tank or propping their giant atrophied glutes on motorized wheelchair-scooters...A hall full of elderly white people in Medicare-paid scooters, railing against government spending and imagining themselves revolutionaries as they cheer on the vice-presidential puppet hand-picked by the GOP establishment. If there exists a better snapshot of everything the Tea Party represents, I can't imagine it.
In the Tea Party narrative, victory at the polls means a new American revolution, one that will "take our country back" from everyone they disapprove of. Everyone who disagrees with them is a radical leftist who hates America. Taibbi adds:
At the voter level, the Tea Party is a movement that purports to be furious about government spending — only the reality is that the vast majority of its members are former Bush supporters who yawned through two terms of record deficits and spent the past two electoral cycles frothing not about spending but about John Kerry's medals and Barack Obama's Sixties associations. The average Tea Partier is sincerely against government spending — with the exception of the money spent on them. In fact, their lack of embarrassment when it comes to collecting government largesse is key to understanding what this movement is all about
A loose definition of the Tea Party might be millions of pissed-off white people sent chasing after Mexicans on Medicaid by the handful of banks and investment firms who advertise on Fox and CNBC.
So Albrechtson's understanding of the Tea Party movement is highly selective.
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Gary, the Loon Pond has a great take on this rant by Janet.