“The party of white people”: How the Tea Party took over the GOP..."
Saturday, May 23, 2015 12:01 PM EST
“The party of white people”: How the Tea Party took over the GOP, armed with all the wrong lessons from history
The Founders were a divided bunch. They believed in debate but also in solving problems. Someone tell the Tea Party
David Sehat
Excerpted from "The Jefferson Rule: How the Founding Fathers Became Infallible and Our Politics Inflexible"
There was an emerging disagreement among conservatives, one that grew out of differing dispositions, if not principle. The Tea Party movement possessed an almost centrifugal force in which ideas gravitated from the center to the margins. On the anti-intellectual fringe, the narrative about the Founders was taken up by absolutists and paranoids who supported citizen militias and the like. Yet even those not on the fringe supported the radical rhetoric. It was, in some sense, built into the movement. The logic of their argument—that conservatives were losing the country, that it had fatally departed from the Founders’ intentions, that the republican experiment required periodic revolutions to renew old values—suggested that extreme and uncompromising measures were necessary to restore the nation to the old ways.
The Republican leadership, by contrast, was made up of realists. Though establishment politicians had used similar revolutionary rhetoric often enough—since at least the time of Ronald Reagan—when it came to governing they recognized the limits of their power and the importance of incremental change. But with the Tea Party revolution, the rhetoric became harder to control. The conservative base had slipped its leash. The new Tea Party activists, who rejected incremental change as part of the same old pattern that slouched toward tyranny, had begun speaking of revolution in sometimes the most literal sense.
As early as August 2009, David Frum, a speechwriter for George W. Bush, warned that conservatives were playing with fire. “All this hysterical and provocative talk invites, incites, and prepares a prefabricated justification for violence,” he wrote during the angry summer recess. “It’s not enough for conservatives to repudiate violence, as some are belatedly beginning to do. We have to tone down the militant and accusatory rhetoric.”
His warning turned out to be tragically prescient two days after the 2011 legislative session began, when Representative Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head at a constituent event in Arizona. All told, nineteen people were shot. Six of them died, including a federal judge who was present. Reporters quickly discovered that Giffords had been on Sarah Palin’s target list. The police had been called when a man dropped a gun at one of her summer events in the infamous 2009 summer recess. And she had been one of the representatives to receive police protection after her affirmative vote on Obamacare. In retrospect, it was clear that she had been in danger for some time. Now she lay in a medically induced coma with the surgeons uncertain about the extent of her injuries.
Some commentators wondered if perhaps the Republicans had foolishly tried to ride the Tea Party tiger. It had been clear for some time that the Tea Party combined legitimate outrage over Democratic policies with more disreputable elements that tended toward extreme directions, a dialectic that the conservative columnist Matthew Continetti called “the two faces of the Tea Party.” One side sought to repair various “deformities” in American politics. The other, according to Continetti, was “ready to scrap the whole thing and restore a lost Eden.” One side was reformist. The other was revolutionary. One was responsible. The other was dangerous. It was really important, Continetti believed, to encourage the one side and suppress the other.
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http://www.salon.com/2015/05/23/the_party_of_white_people_how_the_tea_party_took_over_the_gop_armed_with_all_the_wrong_lessons_from_history/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=socialflow
