Tea Party: Silent No More

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Despite the best efforts of the Democratic Party and the national media, it seems the Tea Partiers will not don the racist-militia-angry-white clown suits their betters have made for them. The latest obstacle to the Democrat's pr machinations? A survey by Gallup placing the TP'ers solidly in the demographic mainstream of America. That's right; on income, education, sex, race, et al., these people mirror the broad middle of America itself.

Only on party affiliation do the results skew towards Republicans, but this is by no means a wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican Party. Independents are just as likely to be Tea Partiers, and are represented in this movement in about the same proportion as they are in the general population.

So, Tea Partiers are not the fringe of American society; they are Everyman. But that something is everything tells you exactly nothing about what it is. Who are these people, really? And what does this movement mean for the politics of America?

Continue......

We can say preliminarily that whatever these Tea Party groups are, they are important. This major inflection of politics in America is barely a year old, having begun at a few small rallies in February of last year.  Its explosive growth over this mere moment in political history is phenomenal, to say the least, and reminds me of another explosion in contemporary politics that was as little noticed and more misunderstood than this one. I am talking about the rise of the religious right in the 1970's.

The religious right, or Christian Right, or whatever you want to call it, has become such a powerful factor in American politics that it is all but forgotten that, until the 1970's, this group was largely apolitical; so much so, that it was not even a blip on the radar screen.  These were generally middle to lower class Americans who lived and worked in their communities, took care of their families, and demanded nothing from the larger world except to be left alone.

So what happened? The world would not leave them alone. First was the outlawing of school prayer. In the 1960's, public schools were an organic part of every local community, unlike today where small religious and secular private schools dot the landscapes. Banning school prayer was thus a direct attack on these peoples culture, faith, and values where it mattered most: the raising of their own children in the manner they chose.

Then came forced busing and integration. The reaction of the Christian Right was largely interpreted as racist reactionism, and there was certainly some of that. But not all. At a deeper level, busing and integration was viewed as ideological social engineering by national elites, and as another direct attack on the culture and life of small town Americans. The reaction of the Christian Right stemmed more from a deeply felt sense of violation of their Constitutional rights to live, work, and raise their children as they saw fit, than anything else.

Such attacks on the very culture and freedom of these people multiplied as the 1970's wore on, whether in the popular media with the loud trumpeting for sexual freedom and the then embryonic Gay Rights movement, or the halls of Government with the Supreme Court's abortion rulings.

The result was a massive political earthquake as Christian evangelicals nationwide broke from the privacy of their homes and churches, and surged into public confrontation on some of the most deeply divisive issues of the day. And they made a difference; brother, how they made a difference. Within a decade, they put their man, Ronald Reagan, in office, in a counter-revolution against the prevailing Liberal-Progressive consensus that is still with us today.

But we are getting ahead of our story. Let's return to the 1960's, when Richard Nixon famously courted what he called America's Silent Majority.

To Be Continued.