The Tea Party movement is even now preparing for its first big electoral test. Banners are being printed, bumper stickers peeled, computerised push-pollers tested.
They are a frightening prospect for European liberals. Perhaps any foreign radical movement looks bizarre to outsiders, but the combination of Sarah Palin, red-neck fundamentalists and the shadowy Koch brothers with their billions is a fearsome prospect.
Yet the Tea Party has lessons for us, even if it doesn’t make its way over here – which in some form or another it seems likely to do.
Because it may not be quite what it seems. I spent the first few months of this year in the USA trying to categorise the phenomenon, and what seems obvious now was not at all obvious then.
In fact, as recently as January, one New York Times columnist was arguing that the Tea Party was actually a potentially progressive movement of revolt against corporate power.
I heard Professor Gar Alperovitz, one of the most articulate prophets of local economics, saying something similar a month later.
Not only did the movement emerge in disgust at the bank bailout and the other state support for corporate failure, it also borrowed its name from the incident in 1773 when revolutionaries threw monopolistic East India Company tea into the harbour.
As late as the summer, one researcher found that the registered republicans in Tea Party groups were outnumbered two to one by independents and Democrats.
It doesn’t look like that now. But the Tea Party would not be unusual in making a journey from progressive to intolerant populism. The Social Credit movement went anti-semitic; the Populist Party became white supremacists. It has just happened much faster this time.
The progressive roots of the Tea Party may be a clue to its power. It is also a clue to what we should do in Europe to tackle that kind of movement at birth.
Particularly if the Tea Party really had a chance to go in a different, more radical direction, in its early stages as a revolt against corporatism.
There is a particularly important lesson for Liberal Democrats here, because we sometimes wrap ourselves too easily in the cloak of the political establishment.
This is not a criticism of the coalition. It is a criticism of the way we borrow the language of the status quo. Despite our own history, we are sometimes too fearful of people power when it threatens one of our favoured bureaucracies – local education authorities, the European Commission.
We forget sometimes that it is the ideal we are committed to. Public service broadcasting, European peace, local democratic control over education, not necessarily the flawed institutions designed generations ago to deliver them.
We need, in short, to sharpen our own radical edge, so that we are instinctively on the side of individuals against the big bureaucracies – especially those who want to use their energy to house or educate themselves.
So we stand up for small business against monopolists. For neighbourhoods against the big corporates (Tesco’s sponsorship of our annual candidates shindig is hardly going to keep the Tea Party at bay).
We also need a policy overhaul that recognises the days of trickle down economics is truly over. You don’t have to be a Tea Party apparachik to be sceptical of handing over wads of cash to bankers, grocery and road-builders while the rest of us get repossessed.
Unless we allow ourselves some of the power of populism, then we offer that power on a plate to our political opponents.
Jean-Marie Le Pen famously claimed to represent the only anti-technocratic political force in Europe. It is entirely our own fault if it he is right.
David Boyle is the co-author of Eminent Corporations: The Rise and Fall of the Great British Brands.
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10 Comments
If Le Pen is the only anti-technocratic force, perhaps that should make us question anti-technocracy as a philosophy. Ultimately, we get to the Gandhian extreme, at which we reject such products of large bureaucracies as railways, hospitals, and the rule of law.
To allow yourselves the power of populism, you should join Liberals in thinking about property for all through the REDISTRIBUTION OF THE PRIVATE OWNERSHIP OF WEALTH in the UK in each new generation and also in taking a more sceptical view of the EU.
Speak up for Liberal Popular Capitalism in place of Conservative Dynastic Capitalism! Support British or UK Universal Inheritance for all young UK-born young citizens at 25 of £10,000 (less than 10 per cent of average wealth in the UK), to be more than financed by reformed taxation on the transfer of wealth from each generation to the next. See http://www.liberal.org and http://www.universal-inheritance.org.
PS. Correction. See http://www.liberal.org.uk.
There’s a very good Britain Votes Guest post at Who Rules Where on the subject here:
http://whoruleswhere.com/2010/10/26/guest-post-united-states-mid-terms-%E2%80%93-congress/
The tea party ‘movement’ (I use quotes because movement implies some sort of grassroots groundswell, rather than the artificial creation of a deep-pocketed right-wing media empire) was never progressive in any sense. It began immediately after Barack Obama’s 2008 election, and prior to his inauguration. Its roots are in the sense of shock that comfortable right-wing Americans found on waking up to find that Obama had won the election; it violated their assumptions that the Republican party had a lock on the White House, and even more importantly, their assumption that no black man could every succeed in American politics. Behind the tea party is a combination of elite entitlement and raw racism. The wealthy elites provide the money and the organization; the racists provide the foot soldiers. There is nothing even slightly ‘populist’ about the tea party agenda either; their program of greater tax cuts (this in a country with remarkably low tax rates) and removal of business regulations is simply a copy of the Republican Party platform of the last thirty years.
@David Boyle “Unless we allow ourselves some of the power of populism, then we offer that power on a plate to our political opponents”
Thanks for a thought provoking article.
I think there is a tension here.
On the one hand, populism can often simplify issues to a point where the policies proposed are completely unworkable. If a politician adopts populist policies, which they know will not work, they deserve contempt.
On the other, when in power, it’s all too easy to become cocooned amongst experts, and expert lobbyists. Often, behind unrealistic policies, populist movements have very genuine concerns, which politicians would be wrong to dismiss, and which they ignore at their peril.
This is doubly difficult for our ministers, bound by collective responsibility to support policies they may disagree with.
They need to find a way to maintain the coherence of the government, whilst remaining open to the concerns of the wider public, and the party rank and file.
This is going to be even more difficult as the cuts begin to bite. Opposition to the coalition will come, not just from the hyperbole of ideological opponents of the coalition, but from ordinary people who are hurting, due to cuts to services and to jobs.
It’s very important that our leadership, and the party as a whole, doesn’t just hunker down, but continues to listen, and to fight for the concerns of ordinary people.
” European liberals” are generally considered to be an anti-state, low-tax kinda’ group. That’s why liberalism has such a bad name in socialist-leaning countries such as France. I don’t think that the Germans or Greeks would currently associate liberalism with the Democrats in America. They’d be more likely to see liberalism as embodied in the FDP.
Also, you need to be a bit careful about characaturing the Tea Party as “the combination of Sarah Palin, red-neck fundamentalists and the shadowy Koch brothers with their billions is a fearsome prospect”. It was a grassroots movement first-and-foremost, consisting of low- and middle-income earners who were sick of being mulct by Washington insiders who thought that every problem could be solved by throwing money at it – including the problem of a lack of money.
“caricaturing”, even!
“Tea Party would not be unusual in making a journey from progressive to intolerant populism”
Not to mention the Labour Party! Actually, the problem with the Tea Party is that it isn’t ideological enough. Thus, a liberal distrust of state-socialist solutions is combined with a thoroughly Conservative line on immigration.
“Liberal Democrats … we sometimes wrap ourselves too easily in the cloak of the political establishment”
Sometimes? I’d be inclined to say all-too-often. I agree with your list of examples but it just scratches the surface. But we need to be careful as well: “neighbourhoods against the big corporates” sounds great, but remember that it is individuals that lie at the heart of liberalism, and it is individuals who choose to shop in the Tesco Local (with its wider choice, higher quality and lower prices) than in the local shop that cries “unfair” when competition drives it to the wall. We should be championing consumers, not producers. That doesn’t mean protecting Tesco, but it doesn’t mean protecting it’s (inferior) competitors either.
There is no doubt in my mind that ordinary Americans have reason to be very angry with their government in ways that simply haven’t yet penetrated our collective awareness on this side of the Atlantic.
Consider for instance the abusive practices of the health insurers. Tens of millions have no cover and many more find that their cover is illusory if/when they get an expensive-to-treat condition. Consider also the way that almost all the wealth over the last generation has been hoovered up by a tiny minority while most have gone sideways at best. Now the house price bust has financially gutted this large group. Also it turns out that the TBTF banks are indulging in a systematic looting exercise riding roughshod over the law while affidavits forged to cover their errors are dimisssed merely as ‘shoddy paperwork’. No-one in a position of responsibility has gone to jail for the financial crisis except for Madoff.
I see the Tea Party as an inchoate but deeply felt response to such abuses. Who would not want to return to the certainties of the Constitution faced with such troubles? The problem is that a being enraged is not the same as a coherent programme of action. It puts a grass roots movement at great risk of being hijecked and that is what has befallen the Tea Party. The corporate manipulators are after all very good at, well, manipulating.
The best analysis of the state of US politics I have come across is by Chris Hedges whose new book I discuss in my latest post.
http://liberaleye.wordpress.com/2010/10/29/the-death-of-the-liberal-class/
If the Tea Party is an expression of rage against the pain of the downturn, there is, indeed, a warning for us.
The bankers are partly to blame, but George W Bush carries a great deal of the responsibility for the mess the USA is in. He threw away the hard won budget surplus of the Clinton years in tax cuts, while increasing government spending.
Obama’s big political challenge in his first year was to keep the blame firmly on his predecessor. It seems that, for now, he hasn’t succeeded.
The situation in the UK is more complex, but it has similarities. For Clinton, read the combination of Ken Clarke and Gordon Brown the First (the one who continued to follow Ken Clarke’s spending plans). For George W Bush, read Gordon Brown the Second (the one who threw prudence out of the window). For US tax cuts, read massive increases in state spending.
The political challenge for us is similar to that of Obama. And maybe we’ll find it just as hard as he has. Maybe, in a year, the voters will have forgotten Brown, and looking for someone to punish, they will give Labour protest votes in order to hurt the government.
But it’s early days yet for Obama. And even earlier days for us.