The first thing the Tea Party did was all this birther nonsense. That in and of itself is based on racism: Obama looks different, so he must be from somewhere else. If that was not the logic, it would have applied to McCain.
The same can be said about the whole Muslim thing. So that’s two tactics that they used which are flat out racism.
There’s racism (he looks different from us and has a strange name, so he must be from somewhere else) and then there’s racism (those people shouldn’t be allowed to vote, those people are barbarians, those people should all be killed). For the first type, the term racism is interchangeable with tribalism (us vs. the outsiders). The second type doesn’t have an equivalent term. Calling the tea party racist is like calling pest control workers killers. Sure, the term could be literally true, but using it doesn’t serve any real purpose, except to piss off the subject of the label.
Not even tea partiers want to be called racists, because racism is universally agreed to be a BAD THING. The tea party is a tax protest movement first, a cultural conservative movement second, and a republican partisan movement third.
This does not appear to be accurate–at all.
The birthers were active even before the 2008 election.
The Tea Party was formed as a reaction against taxes and big government in early 2009. Saying that the “first thing” a group did was to have a few of its members, (hardly anything resembling a majority of either the leadership or the membership at large), join a separate movement of silliness is a real stretch.
This might make sense if there was a massive tax increase that sparked the movement. Obama has raised nobody’s taxes, so the notion that it’s a tax protest movement doesn’t make sense to me.
The Tea Party was a creation of the Koch Brothers designed to demonize the Obama presidency from Day One. A lot of people jumped in enthusiastically because they don’t like the notion of a black president. Others came in because they’re Republican partisans.
Are they a racist movement? At least partially. They certainly tolerate some pretty blatant racist behavior at their rallies. They’re just the lunatic fringe of the Republican Party. One doesn’t necessarily have to be a racist to be a right wing Republican, but one nearly has to be a right wing Republican to be racist.
By this definition, the Civil Rights movement of the early 1960s could not be called a protest movement because there were no new laws enacted suppressing civil rights at that time.
“Tax protest” is shorthand for a more complex set of issues, but since their own rallying cry was centered on the iconic tax protest of the Boston Tea Party, it generally works to identify the movement.
So they were protesting that there are any taxes? Tax rates are at historic lows. Why on earth would they be protesting taxes? And would they have been protesting taxes if say Biden had been elected? I think not.
Racism in 1960 was also at a historic low.
But the tea party had every right to protest just as loudly in the early 2000s but chose not to even when the country was lead by people going on the record as saying that deficits don’t matter. In fact there was orders of magnitude less protests of the sort during that time period.
Whereas the civil rights movement was constrained by safety rather than not caring about the subject, and the movement was more gradual in growth than simply popping up overnight in response to a partisan victory.
All that proves is that proto-Tea Partires were tolerant of Republican fiscal sloppiness, but when it was Democrats doing it, they evolved into full fledged TPers.
The racism of the 1960s, which Republicans would dearly love to return to, was still quite insidious. Blacks were kept from voting under the ruse of citizenship tests administered at polling sites, lunch counters and buses were segregated, interracial marriage was taboo in many areas and illegal in some, discrimination in housing and hiring was widespread. The 1960s movement was entirely justified. Contrast it to the Teabaggers who hate government spending when a Democrat is in office and who couldn’t tolerate the surplus left by Bill Clinton. They’re just a bunch of petulant whiners who want something for nothing, showing up to protest government healthcare while rolling up in their Medicare-furnished Rascals and hooked up to Medicare-furnished oxygen tanks. Bunch of hypocrites and racists.
Can’t argue with that.
Nope.
You’re just setting the bar so high that it can’t possibly be cleared. It seems that you want a signed affadavit from each and every person who’s ever been at a Tea Party rally stating that they are indeed racists and that is their primary motivation. As long as >0.0000001% of Tea Partiers cannot conclusively be shown to be racist, or there is at least one black present in any rally, then they are completely absolved of any responsibility for their inflammatory and racist rhetoric.
This, of course, assumes that the Tea Party membership is sufficently aware of reality to know that taxes were that low. For much of the rank-and-file, I doubt this is true.
This also ignores two other aspects of the situation:
There was a lot of resistance to where the money was being spent, regardless whether it was at curreently low rates. TARP, proposals to bail out GM, Chrysler, and numerous banks for being “too big to fail,” and other expenditures were protested in a less organized fashion even before the 2008 election. It was only after a Democrat was elected president with an increase in Democrat power in Congress that the Koch brothers decided to fund it as a movement. I have seen no evidence that they would have acted any differently if Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden or any other Democrat had been elected president.
The objections to spending on many issues had arisen on the far Right of the Republican Party as early as his first term. If one failed to notice that, then one was simply not paying attention. The rumblings that began over deficit spending increased in volume and expanded futher through the Republican Party throughout GWB’s second term.* When the power shifted to the Democrats, the people holding those views were able to recruit a lot more people from within their party to join them. (Remember, even now the Tea Party is a fringe on the Right of the Republicans. The number of Republican objectors, then, was small, (though loud), but the number of Tea Party people, now, is small, (though loud).)
None of that indicates that the movement, in general, is inspired by racism. Certainly, racists who hate Obama for his skin color are going to see the swelling publicity of the Tea Party and join it–and they did. But claims that no one on the Right cared about the deficits before Obama was elected are simply false.
Not at all. You’re making the leap from “they hate Democrats” to “they hate blacks”. I have no doubt that many TPers are racist. But the movement isn’t characterized by racism and racism isn’t a necessary part of its being.
That’s a good point
Of course there were. But like I said, it was orders of magnitude less.
I wasn’t trying to defend the claim that it’s inspired by racism, I was responding to the proposition that it was primarily a tax protest. The simplest explanation is that it is primarily partisan, with incidental racist and tax components to it.
Let’s not forget this seminal moment in the birth of the TP movement:
From wikipedia.
I remember that rant going viral. It was everywhere.
Shhh! It’s supposed to be a racist party. If people find out it’s a supply side party they may not join.
It didn’t stay a supply-side party very long, did it? That “Taxed Enough Already” slogan seems to have faded pretty fast, into a background of incoherent screams.
I think it was largely promoted and funded by traditional supply side neo-cons who wanted to see a disfunctional congress, and succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. They targeted the ignorant and naturally succeeded in attracting the people who would compose the overly ‘racist’ element. It is a coalition of the disaffected.
Congratulations, you’ve just proven the tea party is partisan!