The Tea Party is Special -- Just Not in the Way It Thinks

[n2doc]

By Michael Kazin

As proudly patriotic as it is, the Tea Party is not exceptional -- or at least not in the ways it likes to think. The angry conservative group, which accuses U.S. President Barack Obama of betraying the constitution and driving the United States toward “European-style” socialism, epitomizes a libertarian strain of thought and action with deep roots in its country’s past. The same alarm -- that the United States needs protecting from a leviathan state supposedly alien to the cherished values handed down by the Founding Fathers -- has been raised by the Liberty League in the 1930s, by the John Birch Society in the 1950s and 1960s, and by the Christian right from the 1970s to the present. Grassroots activists who embraced that credo propelled Barry Goldwater to the Republican presidential nomination in 1964 and Ronald Reagan into the White House in 1980.

But subtract the colonial-period costumes and the “Don’t Tread on Me” flags, and Tea Party events are not easily distinguishable from the political rallies organized by parties across the Atlantic. Antagonism to taxes, corporate regulation, a strong central government, expensive welfare systems, and recent immigrants (particularly Muslim ones) are central to the platforms of the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, the Independence Party in the United Kingdom, and the Lega Nord in Italy, among others. Until recently, the National Front in France embraced the free-market agenda too, and it certainly shares the anti-immigrant fervor of its counterparts. All these parties demand a return to the supposed traditional cultural values -- and racial demography -- of their native lands. They view the European Union the same way that the Tea Party views the federal government: as a tyrannical bureaucracy that robs ordinary men and women of their liberties.

Most of the right-wing parties in Europe predate the Tea Party, but they are motivated by the same big fear: that a state run by cosmopolitan elites is taxing native-born citizens with middling incomes to help a lazy, immoral rabble that has no love for the nation that coddles it. As the platform of the Independence Party puts it, “the rescue of the British people depends on withdrawal from the EU to regain our self-governing democracy, so allowing the relief of business from crushing regulation and the less well off from the burden of taxes, shutting off the flood of immigrants and freeing enterprise.”

In reality, what distinguishes the Tea Party from its European brethren isn’t its platform but the degree of influence it has managed to acquire. Unlike populist parties in Europe, the Tea Party has the structure of its country’s political system on its side. In the United States, there are only two parties that matter, and a well-organized faction of fervent ideologues can gain great influence by affiliating itself with just one of them.

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http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/140182/michael-kazin/american-unexceptionalism?cid=rss-rss_xml-american_unexceptionalism-000000

[Laelth]

1. Interesting. k&r n/t

-Laelth

[Cirque du So-What]

2. I would like to expound upon their 'specialness'

As the author points out, the teabaggers did achieve some degree of power - but it wasn't due to any grass-roots effort as they like to claim. Their power was bought & paid for by corporate interests, and that - IMO - is what makes the teabaggers EXTRA-special in the realm of RW politics. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that it's the most blatant example of fascism in modern US history. These corporate entities, however, have made a strategic retreat, so the financial spigot is running dry for the teabaggers. Look for some new angle in the near future; you can count on it.

[haikugal]

3. +++1