The Tea Party Movement

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June 17, 2010 • David Vogel  
Filed under Opinion

I’m sure we’ve all heard of the Tea Party Movement by now, and if you haven’t, let me sum it up.  They are a bunch of crazy Republicans who hate Obama are protesting his policies.  Supposedly, they have now joined the ranks of George Bush, Glenn Beck, and the Republican Party as a whole as yet another ignorant and pointless group who cannot seem to get their facts right because they are a bunch of uneducated Texans.  While they are only raising questions, we have to ask ourselves a few:  what are their real intentions?  Are they a legitimate movement?  Are they even part of the Republican Party?

The first question, about their intentions, is easy to answer.  One visit to the official home page of the Tea Party Movement (teapartypatriots.ning.com) reveals that they feel they are “a community committed to standing together, shoulder to shoulder, to protect our country and the Constitution upon which we were founded.”  Alright, it makes sense that they’re a community who feels they need to stand up to protect their country; that’s honorable.  But, as great St. Andrew’s history students should know, the Constitution is open to interpretation, so we need to dig deeper.  Explore the website a little more, and you will find that the Tea Party Movement is a mission to stop “excessive government spending and taxation.”  While some may disagree with the necessity of this (or that Obama’s health care/stimulus plans, while costly, are helpful), we cannot successfully argue with the fact that they’re protesting a legitimate cause.

But, just because they have a legitimate cause, doesn’t necessarily make them a legitimate movement.  One of the most used, and most accepted, argument against their illegitimacy is that some of the Tea Party members have been caught using racial slurs, demonstrating a level of intolerance through their language which is provocative and disrespectful.  While Conservative Activist Andrew Breitbart has stated publicly that he feels there have been no uses of racial slurs, and has called out Representative John Lewis to produce evidence that the instance occurred, the issue of the existence of the action should not the main focus.  What should be the main focus is the fact that a minority of people within a group is being used to represent the entire movement.  For example, if someone was found to have been doing drugs at St. Andrew’s, it certainly would not be fair to say that everyone at the school must be a pothead.  However, if 90% of students were caught doing drugs, there would be much more reason to make and support that claim.

Even if the controversy of racial slurs had not existed, there’s really no way to define if the movement is legitimate except by using membership and public reaction to determine it.  While their website reports 141,000 signatures on their petition to repeal the health care bill, one has to assume that not every single person has gone online and signed up on their site, and then affirmed the petition.  Using the amount of people who attend the rallies, along with the amount who might not have been online to their site yet, one could estimate at the very least 500,000 people support the movement.  At the same time, not everyone who supports a movement for lower taxes and lower government spending is going to agree with a repeal of the health care bill, so let’s call the new number of supporters 1 million.  That’s a fair amount of people.  Considering the fact that at the time of the American Revolution there were only 2 million Americans living in the colonies, and that at the same time, some of those were people who were against the Revolution; one can easily claim that the Tea Party is legitimate considering population.

However, considering reaction is completely different. Considering human nature, we have to assume there are people who vehemently object to the Tea Parties just because they don’t like Republicans; not everyone who objects has gone to their site, watched or listened to an advocate of the movement, or even read a Wikipedia entry about it.  CrashTheTeaParty.org, a website which was dedicated to stopping the Tea Party, was one of the ways people objected to the movement (interestingly, it’s not up anymore).  The creator of the site, Jason Levin, told the Associated Press that he “had over 65 leaders in major cities across the country trying to recruit members to infiltrate tea party events for April 15.”  His mission was to “infiltrate and dismantle” the movement by “impersonating tea party supporters and portraying them as right-wing extremists in front of the news cameras in order to discredit the cause.”  He also accused the majority of Tea Party supporters are racist, homophobic, and just plain stupid.  If someone has a movement at your school to outlaw flip-flops, and they have no support and no power to change anything, you wouldn’t waste your time trying to discredit them.  However, going this far out of your way means that you feel the movement might actually go somewhere and accomplish something, which means that it’s technically legitimate.  The words of Jason Levin also bring to light some of the accusations made against the movement.

Finally, to analyze the legitimacy of tying the movement to the Republican party, we solely have to listen to reason.  While many of the supporters of the movement are Republicans, and many Republican leaders are supporters, that doesn’t mean all of the supporters are Republicans and vice versa.  We have to assume there must be one registered Democrat who advocates for the movement, as well as one Republican representative who disagrees with the movement and its policies.  At the same time, I’m not so sure you can actually say a movement is a part of a party, even if the party does adopt it. A movement is a free-standing interaction of people who advocate a cause because they believe in the cause, and not because they are tied to a party’s obligations. For example, even though the majority of supporters of the Civil Rights Movement were liberal-leaning Democrats, the movement was never adopted as an official part of the Democratic party. Therefore, I believe that the movement is not a part of the Republican party.

In all honesty, it really comes down to opinion. No one can make you believe the Tea Party is legitimate or illegitimate if you disagree or agree with the policies, respectively. However, considering the facts presented, I’d have to believe that it’s a legitimate movement with some people who are racist, but also one which has people making false accusations toward it. I feel that it’s hard to argue that the movement is a legitimate part of the Republican party, especially considering that the leaders of the party haven’t adopted it as such.

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