Earlier today, buhdydharma posted a diary which stirred me from my dogmatic slumber. The diary asked, in reference to the Tea Party movement:
A group of (misguided and woefully ignorant of the real problem) American Citizens just propelled one Party into a record breaking electoral victory.
hmmmmmm..................
How did they do that?
This is my answer. It only represents my thoughts on the question, but I've been thinking about these things for a while and I'd appreciate substantive discussion. I want to say at the outset that I'm not interested in anything ad hominem--not in this venue--and I'm not going to engage in that kind of thing.
The Republicans have capitalized with remarkable success on popular resentment of elites and of a Democratic Party which has been widely perceived--rightly for some politicians, wrongly for others--as supporting the interests of those elites over the interests of regular people. One of the most important tools they used to do that was, of course, the Tea Party, and if we want to fight back we need to learn from their successes. We are engaged in a semiotic civil war right now, and it is vitally important that the good guys (that's us liberals) win. Below are my thoughts about how we can remain competitive in the political arms race.
Now, to begin with, we all know that the Tea Party was basically the Republican base all along. Nevertheless, in its early days it was able to present itself as an independent movement, a movement of independents, and that allowed it to avoid the tarnish the Republican brand name had acquired under President W. Bush. By taking an openly antagonistic stance towards an ill-defined Republican establishment (among many, many other targets), the Tea Party movement has enabled radical elements in the Republican Party to seize greater power within that party while at the same time allowing some members of that same establishment to wrap themselves in the mantle of populism in order to keep and enhance their own power. In a nutshell, they have co-opted much of the Republican establishment in a way we progressives have never been able to do with the Democratic establishment.
Second, the Tea Party took advantage of economic stress and the failure of the Washington-Wall Street oligarchy to address most Americans' financial woes in a timely manner. It did not matter that those same economic problems had been caused by Republican policies. It did not matter that anyone who bothered to do any research would quickly conclude that Republican solutions would only make things worse. What mattered was that they outflanked us on the advertising front. They acknowledged people's economic suffering, and they offered simple-sounding solutions: lower taxes so regular folks can keep more of their money, slash regulations so that businesses will want to hire Americans again, and kick out all those illegal immigrants who are stealing our jobs. None of these proposals are grounded in reality, and that doesn't matter because they still form a coherent picture of the world.
Third, the Tea Party aggressively defined and villainized its enemies. Its adherents didn't worry about civility, decency, or whether or not their claims were remotely plausible or even mutually consistent. I don't need to recite their lunacy here; you know what I'm talking about. The main lesson to take away here, I think, is that terms like "socialist" are not propositions in the mouths of right-wingers. They are epithets. They don't mean anything more than than "scary," "other," "un-American." They cannot be refuted because they're not based on premises from which it is possible to draw conclusions. A Tea Partier can call President Obama a Communist Muslim Nazi; you can point out that he's done Wall Street's bidding at pretty much every turn, is most likely an agnostic under a veneer of socially acceptable liberal Christianity, and is African-American for God's sake, besides which Communism and Nazism ... oh, forget it! And it flat out will not matter because he is, to the Tea Party, Bad, and Bad is what all those words mean.
Finally, as alluded to above, the Tea Party offers a simple, easily understandable model of how the world works. That model is, for all intents and purposes, a conspiracy theory: there is some kind of unholy alliance among socialists, Muslims, liberals (i.e., socialists), and people with a lot of melanin in their skin to oppress white Protestants throughout America, take their guns and money, and impose Shari'a law across the land. It's complete fantasy, it's not coherent, and it's neither logically parsimonious nor grounded in any kind of historical evidence, even if Woodrow Wilson was at one time the President. But as with any conspiracy theory, the details aren't important. If you point out that the theorist is outright wrong about something, it's because you've been deceived, or because you're one of the deceivers. If you point out a logical inconsistency, that just means the conspiracy is more fiendish than the theorist had realized. But all this complexity is ultimately illusory because the core of conspiratorial models of the world, what makes them so damned appealing, is this simple idea: "Your life has not turned out the way you wanted it to because, somewhere, powerful people are up to no good. If they could only be exposed, if they could only be removed from power, you would have the happiness and autonomy you deserve."
The following suggestions assume that we liberals want to fight back and that we're willing to do things we might not be comfortable with in order to win. They assume that we're not going to insist that the entire American people should have some kind of detailed understanding of history or Congressional deal-making or economic theory before they deserve a say in running the country. In other words, they assume that it's appropriate to want to build a coalition of high- and low-information voters, to fight dirty when it's necessary, and, yes, to impose a certain degree of purity on the Democratic Party--not when it comes to what we believe about the world, but when it comes to what we do in the world.
I would like to suggest that a progressive answer to the Tea Party is called for in America's present state. Such a movement should have as its goal the defeat of right-wing ideas and their adherents wherever they may be found, whether in the Republican or the Democratic Parties. Here is how I think that could be done.
First, it would need a new brand name. That name should suggest independence from the Democratic establishment, should refer to long-standing motifs in American political discourse, and should imply an attitude of resentment and rebelliousness towards the powers that be. It should appeal to many of the same kinds of people who might otherwise be attracted to the Tea Party for lack of a saner alternative. I think it would be a good idea to have "Party" as part of the name because it would indicate a response to the Tea Party movement and because it would imply a willingness to run candidates for office as a third party, an issue I address below. I'll toss a few ideas out there--the "Progressive Party," the "Populist Party," the "American Party," the "Main Street Party." I'm going to use "Populist Party" throughout the rest of this diary just to have something to call this hypothetical thing I'm writing about.
Second, it should aim at taking over the Democratic Party, not at breaking away to start a third party. It should use the language of a third party to appropriate the outsider status attributed to independent voters and relatively successful third parties (e.g., the Reform Party), but God knows we don't need another Green Party here. The goal is to make the Populist Party synonymous with the Democratic Party.
Third, the Populist Party, like the Tea Party, should be acephalous--"leaderless resistence." Instead of having a national organization, it would be better for it to be made up of local, grassroots groups. That way, it would be more flexible, better able to adapt to setbacks, and less tied to any one personality. Such an organizational structure could, I think, contribute to better message discipline. The Tea Party has been nothing if not disciplined in its message, insane as that message is, and I suspect that a major factor has been that advancement in that movement comes more through adherence to the "party line" than through who you know.
Fourth, it should keep its messaging simple, both in the sense that it should focus on one problem and in that it should offer simple solutions to that problem. As far as I'm concerned, the economy is that problem, and that's where our emphasis should be. As many commenters here have been saying since the election, we need to hammer the Republicans on the issue of jobs. Broadly speaking, it looks to me like economic nationalism is a winning message right now, because people are fed up with the globalist technocracy and worried about making ends meet. The question is, what kind of economic nationalism? As kos pointed out in a front-page diary earlier today, Latinos are more than ever a vital component of any Democratic strategy for victory; bashing migrant workers is just plain ugly and wrong; and there is never any point in trying to move farther right than the Republicans on any issue--so I think we can rule out blaming illegal immigrants for "stealing our jobs." But unemployment remains a problem, and a problem like that needs a scapegoat. What luck for us, then, that there is a scapegoat ready to hand with the added qualification of actually being to blame for the problem in question! The Populist Party's answer to the Scary Illegal Immigrant should be the CEO Who Outsourced Your Job. Instead of "Brown people are crossing our borders and taking your jobs," the Populist narrative should be, "Wall Street sent your job overseas." It should be, "American manufacturing has been replaced by slave labor." It should be, "Outsourcing is economic treason." The Chamber of Commerce? Traitors. Foreclosure for the middle class, tax cuts for the rich? Economic sabotage. Attacking the social safety net? Treason. I think we're going to have to get used to saying this: "[X] is treason."
Treason. That brings me to my fifth point. A Populist Party should not hesitate, not even flinch, at calling its opponents traitors and any other vile name there is that signifies perfidy and anti-Americanism. Does it matter that the Constitution specifies that treason against the United States shall consist only of levying war against them or giving aid and comfort to their enemies? You know the answer. It didn't stop the Republicans from calling President Clinton a traitor, nor from calling President Obama the same thing, as near as I can tell for no other reason than because they were not Republicans. What's more, it hasn't stopped those attacks from working to a dismaying extent. So a Populist Party should talk at every opportunity about "the traitors on Wall Street," about "Republican fascists," about how "the right wing is a fifth column" that wants to "sell America to foreign corporations." It should insist that, instead, we need to "put America first," "rebuild our nation," and even "take our country back," because there's no reason a line that catchy should be Tea Party fascist property. It should lay claim to the symbols of American patriotism and the discourse of an American independence movement.
Now, this sixth idea is pretty extreme, and I'm probably going to lose some people here, but a Populist Party might do well to practice a certain level of intimidation against its adversaries. I do not mean that its supporters should threaten anyone's life, or mail packets of white powder to anyone's offices, but I do mean that it shouldn't shy away from a purely symbolic theatre alluding to violence. It woudn't hurt, for example, for people to bring placards or replicas of guillotines to protests at their Congressional representatives' offices or to fulminate about "Second Amendment remedies" to the problem of our elites' selling us out to foreign corporations, and the like. I want to stress that I do not believe anyone on the left should actually commit any act of politically motivated violence. Furthermore, I want to suggest that liberals are much less likely to do so than right-wingers are, because we actually care about other people, because we value our own lives in this world, and because, in the end, we really do believe in governance by mutual consent and deliberation. But intimidation doesn't have to have anything to do with the actual practice of or even a hinting at violence. Disruption, harrassment, and a relentless refusal to leave one's target alone go a long way, as we saw from the teabaggers' disruption of town hall meetings during the summer of 2008. By putting Democratic legislators off their guard in public venues, on their own turf, the Tea Partiers were able in many cases to intimidate them quite effectively, drawing attention to themselves and denying them a chance to put forward their own version of the health care reform narrative. This kind of dramatic demonstration of strength versus weakness and unpreparedness is one of the most convincing forms of propaganda there is, even though it may be repugnant to those of us who prefer to think about issues and who have a visceral reaction against bullying of any kind. That's why, to be really effective, I think local Populist Parties would need to stalk Republican and centrist Democratic legislators from one public appearance to the next, blockade their offices, bombard them with phone calls (which are much harder to ignore than e-mails), and otherwise make their lives hell--and they would need to publicize the fact that they're doing so and that their targets don't know what to do about it.
This issue of publicity is the major problem I see with the whole idea of a Populist Party movement. The fact is that the Tea Party was and continues to be actively promoted by its own cable news channel and radio shows, and nothing like that kind of propaganda infrastructure is available to progressives. I don't have any ready answers here, but it might be possible to get liberal media personalities (Keith Olbermann?) to gin up public interest. Funding, obviously, would hardly be likely to come from wealthy donors. The mainstream media would actively ignore the movement until the Populist Party made it impossible for them to continue doing so. Should their acknowledgement ever come, I can guarantee you it would take the form of disapproval for the Populists' "incivility," and it would surely feed into the ever-popular "Democrats in disarray" narrative. To which I say, so what? Better a disunited Democratic Party with one anti-establishment faction than a party united in active or tacit support of an anemic, right-wing "centrism."
I'll tell you right now I don't know where to go with these ideas. I'm in graduate school and I make $18,500 a year: no Koch brother I. My research takes me out of the country every summer, so I can't be a full-time agitator. I've been reading posts here since the last Presidential primaries and I'd like to think that I have some understanding of how American political discourse works, but I've been wrong before about how things would turn out. I do know that I'm tired of ceding the tactical high ground to a bunch of lunatics--a bunch of fascist traitors--in order to keep my spot on the moral high ground. I underestimated the appeal the Tea Party's message would have to a public turned off by a degree of incompetence and cravenness on the part of the Obama administration and "moderate" Democrats that I also underestimated. I have recently moved to Massachusetts from Rhode Island and am ready to stick to Scott Brown like a "Traitor!"-shouting burr.