At different points in its brief history, the Tea Party movement has been variously portrayed by the ruling class and its compliant tools in the mainstream media as (a) an astroturf rent-a-mob orchestrated by conservative special interest groups, (b) an ignorant rabble of rustics, cranks, gun lovers, spittoon users and Deliverance Creatures, (c) a racist reaction to the election of a black president, and, more recently, when a New York Times poll found Tea Partiers to be better educated and to have higher incomes than the general population, as (d) to quote Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne, Jr., “the populism of the privileged.”
Apologists for the status quo will never understand the movement because they cannot bring themselves to acknowledge the simple and obvious truth: that the Tea Party is a middle-class movement protesting its pillaging at the hands of politicians, lobbyists, fixers, pleaders and feeders at the trough of the federal government. But the paid prevaricators of the dominant media do understand that the Tea Party represents an existential threat to their power and privileges, thus they seek to de-legitimize it by any means.
Until this past weekend, I have observed the Tea Party from afar, largely sympathetic to it but, fed consistently negative images by a mainstream media that highlighted the most extreme statements and actions of a few, I was unwilling to publicly align myself with the movement. However, having had the opportunity to attend the Virginia Tea Party Patriots Convention in Richmond on Friday and Saturday, chat with dozens of attendees and soak up many of the speeches and presentations, I have no reservation whatsoever now to declare myself a Tea Party patriot.
Who are the Tea Partiers? I would love to take the mailing addresses of the 2,400-or-so attendees of the convention and conduct a geodemographic segmentation analysis, as my friend (and geodemographic segmentation analyst) Steve Toler suggested. Until such a thing is possible, I will have to rely upon my own anecdotal impressions.
Ethnically speaking, it is safe to say that the Tea Party is overwhelmingly white. Critics of the movement have pointed to that simple fact, along with its hostility to America’s first black president, as proof that the Tea Party is in some sense “racist.” Such is the intellectual bankruptcy of the critics. (I would argue that the critics’ profound ignorance is a good thing, for as long as they persist in totally misunderstanding the movement, the more impotent they will be in opposing it.)
The organizers of the Tea Party made every effort to be inclusive. At least two of the keynote speakers were African-Americans (and there may have been more — I did not have a chance to see everything), who delivered crowd-pleasing speeches in the great tradition of African-American church oratory. The Bishop E.W. Jackson, who leads a large congregation in Chesapeake, generated some of the strongest applause of the convention and practically had the predominantly white audience calling out, “A-men,” from the seats. (View the clip above.)
There was a smattering of African-Americans — I would guess several dozen — among the attendees. Given the widespread media smear of the movement as one step removed from the Ku Klux Klan, I consider that a remarkable accomplishment. Hopefully, black attendees will report back to their friends and family members that it is safe to attend Tea Party rallies, ensuring greater African-American participation in the future. Indeed, I think this is likely. I chatted with one black minister from the Richmond area who came to check out the proceedings. Like many African-Americans, he felt thoroughly alienated by the Republican Party, but he was deeply disappointed by President Obama and the Democrats as well. He wondered if the non-partisan Tea Party might prove to be a viable political alternative. There is a strong (though not dominant) social conservative element to the Tea Party movement that members of African-American churches may feel very at home with.
I also feel safe in saying that the Tea Partiers are overwhelmingly middle class. I have interacted with a broad cross-section of Richmond’s business and political elites over the years, and I saw very few familiar faces at the convention. The interests of politics and business are so tightly conjoined, even in a state capital like Richmond, that the better-off folks, even the political conservatives, prefer to work the system from the inside. The Tea Partiers consist of people who have no stake in the status quo. To the contrary, they feel over-taxed, over-regulated, hectored by those who seem themselves as their betters, and fear runaway deficits and the black hole of a national debt that threatens to swallow the country whole.
The Tea Party is a big tent. Members include both God-fearing social conservatives and atheist followers of Ayn Rand. Some support free trade; others are protectionist. Some support a strong military and assertive foreign policy; others are isolationists and abhor foreign wars. What unifies the audience is a reverence for the Constitution; a desire for smaller, less intrusive government; a faith in free markets; an unabashed love of the country; and a distrust of the elites of both political parties who have warped the founding Constitution, expanded the power of central government, usurped free markets and threaten in their overweening greed to bankrupt the country.
I did encounter a few conspiratorially minded people who see sinister and secretive forces at work. A handful of others had highly idiocyncratic views. Such is to be expected of any collection of 2,400 people. But the outliers do not define the movement. The vast majority of people I met are reasonably well informed; some are very well informed. Many are new to politics, frightened by the direction they see the country heading, but they are eagerly seeking more knowledge. They don’t always see the world as I do. (I doubt many would share my views regarding the critical importance of human settlement patterns.) But I do feel comfortable in their company.
