The Tea Party movement: just non-evolutionary whackoism

"At a recent meeting of the Sandpoint Tea Party, Mrs. Stout presided with brisk efficiency until a member interrupted with urgent news. Because of the stimulus bill, he insisted, private medical records were being shipped to federal bureaucrats. A woman said her doctor had told her the same thing. There were gasps of rage. Everyone already viewed health reform as a ruse to control their medical choices and drive them into the grip of insurance conglomerates. Debate erupted. Could state medical authorities intervene? Should they call Congress?"

That passage is from the NY Times' 4,500-word look at the Tea Party movement, and I still can't decide if its overall drift -- one reflecting the movement's severe intellectual debility and even deeper mental disorders -- was intended as vastly unsettling or merely amusing.

But I found it, above all, to be an immense relief. The Tea Party types observed and interviewed by the Times' David Barstow, in "Tea Party Lights Fuse for Rebellion on Right," were revealed as the fringe's fringe; so utterly unschooled in this nation's history, so ravaged by political paranoia, and so characteristic of extreme marginality -- well, there's little to worry about.

These people couldn't organize a bedroom closet, let alone a sweeping rebellion.

At one point Barstow demotes "movement" to mere "ferment" -- "an amorphous, factionalized uprising with no clear leadership and no centralized structure" -- while going to great lengths in delineating, as best he can, its metastasizing amorphousness: a tentacled collection of "gun rights activists, anti-tax crusaders, libertarians, militia organizers, the 'birthers' who doubt President Obama’s citizenship, Lyndon LaRouche supporters and proponents of the sovereign states movement," as well as ...

John Birchers, Oath Keepers ("military and law enforcement officials who are asked to disobey orders the group deems unconstitutional"), and Patriots, who believe that "governments and economies are controlled by networks of elites who wield power through exclusive entities like the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations."

Good grief, their message-miasma is even worse than Democrats'.

Only one meager thread holds them all together: a narrative of impending tyranny. But this (non-uniquely) American thread has colored the outmost fringes for centuries, on both left and right, although the far right has historically surpassed the left in both inventiveness and intensity (in the contemporary 9/11 Truth Movement, left and right meet as equals).

I won't extensively rehash here the whole Richard Hofstadter-paranoid-style thing, since that, although accurately, has been thematically overworked of late. I will, however, make brief note of another historiographical theory of Hofstadter's era: "status anxiety," which was used to explain -- that was the attempt, anyway, soon abandoned -- the roots of McCarthyism.

As one Tea Partying-type leader informed the Times' Barstow, "he has found audiences everywhere struggling to make sense of why they were wiped out last year." And not only have some slipped from socioeconomic middle-class eminence; they also realize, as a demographic group, that their days of cultural authority and political control are behind them.

Hence "these audiences," the leader continued, "are far more receptive to critiques once dismissed as paranoia."

Why insert "hence"? What's the logical connection, the paranoid B flowing from anxious A?

As London Times columnist David Aaronovitch writes in his new book, Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History (which by more than happenstance, I'm sure, was reviewed by the NY Times on the same day that Barstow's piece appeared): "If it can be proved that there has been a conspiracy, which has transformed politics and society, then their defeat is not the product of their own inherent weakness or unpopularity, let alone their mistakes; it is due to the almost demonic ruthlessness of their enemy."

Thus we're back to Hofstadter, who wrote of the far right's (McCarthyite-Goldwaterite) perception of "a kind of amoral superman" at the nation's malevolent helm -- "sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving" -- while emphasizing the inherent weakness of the politically paranoid. (Perhaps Hofstadter's keenest insight into the conspiracy-minded community was that the weaker its argument, the higher its mountains of "convincing" evidence and documentation.)

The Tea Party's numbers may seem vast, but it's their volume that deceives. Their thinking is as mangled as their message -- just take your pick; in the coming months or years some will blend into the GOP, some will drift back into non-aligned obscurity or compact outrage, and some will simply forget that they ever even contemplated "rebellion."

In short, don't panic. They are but another fringe generation of non-evolutionary whackoism.