Why the Tea Party could never pose a threat to the US

[ilaughatrightwingers]

http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=20100917163539127

Friday, September 17 2010 @ 04:35 PM UTC
Contributed by: Anonymous
Views: 233
During the history of the state-form referred to as the United States, many citizens have participated in many protests, and not all of those protests have been perceived in the same light by the various administrative authorities within it’s borders. A vast majority of these protests throughout living memory have been what might be described as ‘left-leaning’.
Are Tea Party Protests Treated Differently Than Other Protests in the US? Could They Ever Pose a Challenge to the US?

During the history of the state-form referred to as the United States, many citizens have participated in many protests, and not all of those protests have been perceived in the same light by the various administrative authorities within it’s borders. A vast majority of these protests throughout living memory have been what might be described as ‘left-leaning’. By ‘left’ I mean to refer to political identifications that seek more social equality than currently exists in society, which is not only what the term has historically meant since the French Revolution, but is also how many whom I know use the term. The term ‘right’ usually refers to a political stance that values social order (in it’s historical sense), which usually implies either keeping the status quo or moving back towards a mythical ‘golden age’ imagined or exaggerated by it’s adherents.

Along these same lines, one can understand the political spectrum as held by four points along a continuum. The ‘right’ of the spectrum has two points, ‘reactionary’, or identification with a glorious golden age that one wishes to return to, and ‘conservative’, belief in holding the status quo (ie, conserving what we have). On the ‘left’ of the spectrum would be ‘liberal’, the belief that we can make things better within the parameters of the current system, and ‘radical’, the belief that the current system is too unbalanced and unworkable, and must be taken apart to rebuild anew. Obviously, life is not as simple as four positions, but it helps to picture things in order to get a sense of them. Liberal and conservative views are closer to each other than say liberal and reactionary, and radical and reactionary are closer to each other as well, as recreating imagined pasts would inevitably lead to building ‘new’ systems without acknowledging it, and building a new system would inevitably involve incorporating old traditions or techniques without noticing or acknowledging it. In contemporary political terms though, what is discussed by 'liberals' and 'conservatives' is fairly similar to each others terms, whereas what is advocated by those who would be understood as 'radical' and those who would be understood as 'reactionary' is usually quite far apart, beyond calling for a drastic change.

Recently, there has been an upswing in protests held by those who identify as conservatives, the many right-leaning people within the US. I would not have so much of a problem with this, as I enjoy seeing people participate in their society, but there is something imbalanced about their protests. I have been to many protests that leaned to the left of the continuum, and have encountered a great many police and police tactics along the way, and have yet to have noticed any of this treatment towards the newly protesting population in the US. Can I just not see it? Or are the police treating these new protesters differently?

When I say that there is an upswing in right leaning protests in the US, I am referring to the new explosion of ‘tea party’ protests, as well as the 9-12 movement, which both seem to have a lot of intermixing. The emergence of the new Tea Party movement can be traced back to the grassroots fundraising campaigns of Ron Paul in 2007, during his bid to be president . Ron Paul’s platform was construed as a return to ‘real American values’, as opposed to the ‘fake conservatives’ that had taken over the Republican Party. In the same light, the Tea Party rallies were, and continue to be, construed as representing the same rejections that the original tea party in the 1700’s represented. The Tea Party rallies were reborn as protests after the infamous bailouts were becoming a reality in the US, and much of the conservative population in the US appears to be at least supportive, if not participating.

According to Campbell and others, identity is constructed in relation to difference, as well as difference being constructed in relation to identity, leaving both in a constant state of flux . As societies, states, large bodies of people, or however it is to be described, the ‘self’ and the ‘other’ are constituted performatively through many processes. So what is this ‘real’ American identity that Ron Paul’s campaign, and the Tea Party movement that has emerged from it (and grew into something different), are harkening back to? And what is the ‘other’ that it is constructed as against? According to Campbell, since the imagined political community that constitutes the US is constructed wholly from immigrants (as the native population was and always has been construed as ‘other’) and has no ontological foundation, the US identity is even less stable and solid than other ‘states’, and therefor in need of more policing of boundaries between the ‘self’ and the ‘other’ . The American identity was established as a white Christian community, as opposed to the native ‘pagan’ ‘savages’, and later the African ‘negroes’ (a term which seems to inherently include the concept of ‘savage’ and ‘pagan’), and later other immigrants that were not British (‘Anglo-Saxon’ seems to have originally constituted much of the ‘civilized’ ‘white’ ‘Christian’ identity) . Though this does not mean that the ‘American identity’ can never be anything else, it is nonetheless the foundational image that all other images of the American ‘self’ must look to, or else rewrite history. Is this the identity that people at tea party protests are referring too?

While much of the rhetoric heard emanating from these gatherings is about liberty, and freedom from a tyrannical government, it is hard not to notice how much support for these gatherings can be found on Fox News. I mention this, because it was also very hard to notice, from the years 2000 up to 2008, how supportive this same news station was of almost every policy put forth by the Bush administration. Some (but by no means all) examples of these policies are actions such as the attempt to destroy what was left of the Posse Commitatus Act with the Turner Defense Bill in 2006, the revoking of Habeas Corpus for anyone suspected of the undefined crime of ‘terrorism’, the unencumbered spying on electronic information of individuals, the legalization of publicly acknowledged acts of torture, and engaging in several wars whose legality is questionable to say the least.

Campbell also shortly discusses how the American Revolution did not actually change who held power within the colonies; it only changed the fact that the colonies were under the control of a distant imperial power, namely England. Those who advocated for ‘revolution’ at the time, immediately advocated for ‘calm’ as soon as they had pushed the British out, and were very worried by incidents such as Shay’s Rebellion . In this light, it can be seen almost as a change in administrations, though the particular institutions of the ‘new’ administration were different from the old. I bring this up, because the situation in the US contains a few key similarities, though it also contains important differences. The tea party movement has fully emerged at a time when the Democratic Party had control over not only both legislative houses, but also the presidency. Republicans are well represented within the politicians putting themselves forward as ‘tea party candidates’ within elections, demonstrating that it is, at least partly, the identity of ‘Democrat’ and what it may represent to some people, that is being rejected. On top of that identity, observation of pretty much any photo or video of a tea party event will show that a large majority of those participating fall into what is thought of as ‘white’ in contemporary US culture (which has since been expanded beyond the original Anglo-Saxon identity to encompass other West Europeans). This knowledge, along with the symbols of the ‘founding fathers’ commonly found at tea party events, such as dressing up like it was the 1700’s, and along with how strong some of the language emerging from these events about the first US president to so unquestionably challenge the ‘white’ American identity by being ‘black’, brings the impression that the American identity that many tea party participants are longing for is, in reality, the original American identity, the foundational image. This would help explain why so many have leveled charges of racism at the tea party with only tangential evidence of a few signs and a few shouts, it is the identity that participants seem to call for that is inherently racist to outside observers, even if all the participants may not explicitly be so

While scanning through many blogs associated with the tea party will demonstrate a strong belief by those who identify with it that the main stream media (MSM in blogs) despises the tea party and constantly promotes an anti-tea party agenda, I find this hard to believe, considering how Fox News has extensively covered the tea party protests. A newscaster from Fox, Sean Hannity, almost taped one of his shows at a tea party rally which one could not enter without paying to participate, with the money going directly to the Cincinnati tea party, before he was forced to withdraw from the event after much criticism for lack of objectivity and supporting political organizations directly . Some have even gone so far as to say that the tea party was ‘created’ by Fox News, that the Tea Party Tax day protest on April 15, 2009, was “the first time a television network has actually moved from covering events to creating events” . I highly doubt that this was the first time that any media organization has actively 'created' news to cover, but I understand the sentiment. In the 10 days leading up to that protest in 2009, from April 6th through April 15th, Fox aired over 100 separate commercials advertising for the protest, or advertising for a fox newscaster who would be reporting from the protest . While it may be true that some news outlets may not be supportive, Fox News is one of the largest news channels in broadcast in the US, with many of the same corporate backers, and is therefor a member of the “MSM”.

Compared with the very constant message of ‘violent anarchists’ coming to ‘ruin your city’ that occurs for months ahead of time from all news outlets, be they papers, radio, or tv, before any large-scale ‘left-leaning’ protest, I would say that the tea party actually receives a lot of support from the main stream media outlets . When I went to the protest against the Democratic National Convention in Denver in 2008, I stayed at a friend’s aunt’s house. She told me that out of the 30 people she worked with, 20 of them had left the city for the week out of fear of being attacked by anarchists during the demonstrations. When I asked her what an anarchist was, she told me that what she could gather from the news was that they were violent thugs that protested everything and ruined any city they went to. She was shocked when I gave her a very different image of the anarchist identity.

In Fernandez’s Policing Dissent, which is a discussion of methods of policing anti-capitalist (read ‘left leaning’) protests, he elaborates on how focusing on repression of protests does not give a comprehensive picture of how protests are dealt with within the US (and elsewhere). He points to two overall methods, hard-line social control, which would be physical confrontation and repression, and soft-line social control, which would be legal regulations, negotiated management, and the promotion of self-monitoring . After dealing with the contentious protests of the post WWII era in the US, police departments adopted what has been called the negotiated management model to deal with protests. In this model, the protestors must apply for permits to protest, and the police begin ‘working’ with the protestors on the logistics of the protest, so-as to better ‘protect’ them, and also to maintain order on the street. This can easily be understood through Foucault’s discussions of regulation and governmentality, where the ‘at risk’ population is convinced to follow certain behaviors in order to regulate their interactions and not ‘infect’ the rest of the population. While the ‘regulating body’ of the police is ever present, the real power of regulation lies in convincing the population to police themselves, hence the anarchist slogan of ‘killing the cop in your head’.

Though Fernandez says far too much about policing techniques to be brought into such a short paper, his main points were that authorities of concern begin preparing for protests (left leaning in Fernandez’s case) months in advance, and that while the physical repression that is glimpsed in some pictures and videos that make it into national or international news is certainly ‘repression’, the ‘social control of dissent’ goes much, much farther than that. Through the negotiated management model, protestors participate in a performative role that creates a ‘good protestor’ and ‘bad protestor’ dichotomy, while leaving the police in the unquestioned role of ‘protector of social order and freedom of speech’. The police and city authorities have far more access to information resources than protestors, and those resources are used to portray the message that protestors are violent and dangerous and disruptive, and the sooner they are all gone the better . The permit process not only helps the police hammer in their message to protest organizers needing to keep out the ‘bad’ elements (a socially constructed ‘deviance’), but it also helps create a ‘protest’ that is totally incapable of even disrupting traffic or the daily routine, let alone whatever politics or are being protested against .

But this is not to say that there is no longer any hard-line social control present. On the contrary, left-leaning protests and activists face both on a constant basis. As egalitarians, many organizers hold open meetings in planning protests, so as to not create the reality or impression of a ‘vanguard’ or hierarchical leaders, and these methods are, in my opinion, one of anarchism’s greatest contributions to the content of contemporary protests. But because of this, much of what is discussed and planned is monitored by police and informants, and people who participate more than others are designated as ‘leaders’ to be arrested during the protests, as happened in the case of the 2008 RNC demonstrations, were the so called anarchist ‘leaders’ (an oxymoron) were arrested the day before the protest in an attempt to disrupt it, and were charged as terrorists under the Minnesota Patriot Act . In the days leading up to many protests (left leaning ones), police from other jurisdictions begin to show up as they are temporarily transferred in a show of force, and police regularly show up in large groups around wherever protestors are staying in order to make them feel unwelcome, occasionally arresting people for any small infractions the may see (or they may just make up something, which has been shown to have happened too many times to be just 'bad officers').

So, how do the tea party protests deal with this ‘social control of dissent’? Is there much of a need for them to? According to Fernandez, one of the primary aspects of a protest is it’s ability to disrupt . While I believe he was referring to physical disruptions (in the sense of stopping the WTO meetings in Seattle, for example), I think that the notion is correct. The purpose of a protest is to disrupt something that is occurring, whether it be physical, verbal, or performative. To say “I protest” is not to simply lodge a complaint, but to demand that something come to a halt so that it can be examined and judged. In the case of the anti-capitalist protests Fernandez is describing, it is the ‘neoliberal agenda’ in it’s various modes that participants wish to disrupt. What is it that the tea party protests seek to disrupt? The diverse and generalized answer seems to be “the direction that this country is going”, whether that be because of losing in Bill O’Reilly’s ‘culture wars’ with the democrats ‘in power’, the ‘excessive powers’ that the Obama administration has supposedly pooled for itself (though there didn’t seem to be any comments about that from conservatives when the Bush admin. actually wrote those laws), or excessive taxes (hence, the name tea party).

So, are the tea party protests physically disruptive? In short, no. According to a story by the Christian Science Monitor, Police have, on average, been far more gentle with tea party protestors than they have been with ‘other’ (read left leaning) protestors. Police in North Carolina have even repealed their ‘no flag-pole rule’ for tea party protests (flag-poles are supposedly used as weapons in left leaning protests, though personally I’ve only seen them used to hold back dangerous looking advancing lines of riot police) . Also, some members of various tea parties have shown up to protests with firearms in hand, a move that I personally doubt would be permitted in an anti-globalization protest or any other left leaning protest. Could you imagine someone dressed as a member of the black block holding a high-powered rifle near the IMF headquarters in DC? As I said, I highly doubt this behavior would be tolerated, especially considering how many snipers I have observed monitoring protests I have been a part of. In a video taken at the first stop of the ‘Tea Party Express’ tour, one can see that there are over 30 police officers guarding the ‘free-speech zone’, in which stood about 30 'counter-protestors' demanding health care for all in the US . The police are clearly far more interested in watching the 30 'counter-protestors' than they are in watching the several hundred tea party members. In the comments sections of right-wing blogs, one can find people claiming that in their conversations with police officers, the officers tell them that the few police who show up to events are there to ‘take care’ of any counter protestors that show up, as well as claims that people have seen the police hugging their families who go to the tea party rallies . When searching google for ‘tea party’ and ‘police’, the most common thing to show up is a variation of the only confrontation I can find between police and members of a tea party event. As the much repeated story goes, a swat team and snipers were unleashed on the tea party protestors by the secret service in Quincy Illinois, at an event where Obama was speaking. Many tea party sites list it as evidence of Obama’s building up of police powers against them. Video of the event shows a squad of about a dozen regular police officers dressed in riot gear clumsily marching down a street, edging their way to the sidewalk, in a successful attempt to get the protest onto the sidewalk and out of a road designated by the secret service as part of the security zone, at which point they got back in their van and left . The officers were so out of training that they could not even march in step.

As a comparison, while protesting Charlie Christ’s (the Governor of Florida) wedding in St. Petersburg Florida, I encountered a patrol boat with an M-60 machine gun on the deck pointed at us (St. Pete is a peninsula), several dozen well trained and well equipped police who stayed visible the whole time, and at least two visible snipers, all constantly there to remind us to ‘behave’ . All that was to protect a wedding. As another comparison, during the 2004 Presidential campaign, when Bush used my school’s soccer field as a landing pad to go to his fundraising dinner at the Don CeSar hotel, over a dozen students were arrested for holding signs and ‘disturbing the peace', which seems to have meant that they're chants annoyed the rich folk at the hotel. And as a last comparison, almost a billion dollars were spent on security alone at the last meeting of the G20 in Canada, where several hundred people were arrested (and as usual, most of the charges are expected to be dropped, since the arrests were for the most part illegal and only designed to remove dissenters from the streets) .

Both ‘Tea Party’ protests and ‘anti-globalization’ protests (called by many within that movement ‘alter-globalization’ or ‘globalization from below’) seek to disrupt ‘politics’ in the immediate sense. Many participants of alter-globalization protests seek disruption in an anarchistic sense, to physically participate in directly stopping injustices recognized by participants (referred to as ‘direct action’). As personal participants in movements that directly challenge many preconceptions about how and if states and massive, unaccountable international organizations of elites should work or exist, they are wildly unpopular in the eyes of those who run those states and organizations, and lack the massive framing resources found in those organizations. They essentially seek a total disruption of the status quo, and attempt to actualize this. ‘Tea Party’ protests, on the other hand, perform a specific role within the current system, of pushing a state that is seeing it’s place in the world-system decline towards a more conservative stance, in defense of that state. The disruption sought for in the tea party protests is to disrupt dialogue that would, in the minds of the participants, weaken the standing of the identity that they see as their own, the strong and powerful US. Essentially, while the alter-globalization protests seek to radically change and deconstruct various systems, the tea party protests seek to shift the dialogue within the particular system of the US to a more conservative (and in their minds more secure) position.

As I have attempted to demonstrate, tea party protests are not handled by authorities in the same way as protests that could be described as ‘left leaning’. This is, in part, because of the social conceptualizations of the 'identity' of the protestors in each group, as well as what they want to accomplish. While the negotiated management model for protests was designed to hinder 'left-leaning' protests, it poses no hindrance to the tea party 'protests', as the tea party events do not seek to challenge the state or it's gatekeepers, only the 'identity' of participants in state policies. Many who participate in ‘left leaning’ protests in the US are from minority backgrounds that are traditionally marginalized, and many more are young and seek drastic changes in society (as do many participants in left leaning protests), or started out young and never gave up. Most of the older people I have met at protests have been active participants in changing society in many ways for decades. They challenge ideas about who can change political life in the US (challenging identity roles), and they challenge what the US actually stands for, in contemporary politics as well as in history, which many participants think is something far more violent and dirty than the ‘freedoms’ Americans were taught to chant in elementary school.

The majority of those participating in tea party protests, as can be seen by many pictures online, fall under the American understanding of ‘white’, and many also conform to the identity of ‘Christian’. This is the original identity foundation of the US and of those who can participate in ‘performing’ US politics. They proclaim conservative values, and use some reactionary rhetoric. The US, which has a tendency to portray ‘itself’ as “the only superpower”, has a lot at stake in maintaining the present order of the world, and even at turning back the clock a little to when the US seemed to have more influence, hence, the US is technically conservative, and uses some reactionary rhetoric in downplaying other states that may ‘challenge’ US dominance in specific areas. What I am saying, is that US political culture itself is essentially conservative, as are the governments of a majority of states that have not recently emerged from a civil war or severe destabilization of the local powers that be, though the particular place of the US in contemporary political culture makes it more conservative than the average state. In a state like the US, founded in a conservative revolution, conservative movements do not challenge the foundational elements of the state in flux, they simply drive it towards more conservatism. The tea party rallies can serve no other purpose but to push the political dialogue farther right, and are therefor no threat to police, who’s job it is to maintain the current social order (the definition of conservatism).

Bibliography

‘Are ‘tea party’ rallies given preferential treatment by police?’ http://Csmonitor.com (http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics...by-police, 08 August 2010).

Campbell, D., 1998. Writing security: United States foreign policy and the politics of identity, Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota Press.

Fernandez, L.A., 2008. Policing dissent: social control and the anti-globalization movement, Rutgers University Press.

‘Framing the ‘RNC 8’ http://Inthesetimes.com (http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3962/, 09 August 2010).

‘Nationwide Tax Protests: Party Like it’s 2007’ http://Ronpaul.com (http://www.ronpaul.com/2009-04-15/nat...its-2007/, 09 August 2010).

‘On the house: Fox aired 107 ads for its coverage of tea party protests over 10 days’ http://Mediamatters.org (http://mediamatters.org/research/200904170011, 08 August 2010).

‘Police find TEA Parties more peaceful that anti-war protests’ http://Newsbusters.org (http://newsbusters.org/blogs/candance...war-prote, 07 August 2010).

‘Press: This ‘tea party’ brought to you by Fox News’ http://Metrowestdailynews.com (http://www.metrowestdailynews.com/opi...-Fox-News, 08 August 2010).

‘Summit Costs hit $1.1 B’ http://CBC.com (http://www.cbc.ca/politics/story/2010...oews.html, 07August 2010’

‘Tea Party Express II: Rise of the Tea Bags’ http://Bradblog.com (http://www.bradblog.com/?p=7487, 07 August 2010).

‘Quincy Tea Party Draws Police in Riot Gear During Obama Speech’ http://Huffingtonpost.com (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04...6367.html, 09 August 2010).

‘Under fire, "furious" Fox News execs yank Hannity from Tea Party event’ http://Mediamatters.org (http://mediamatters.org/research/201004150087, 08 August 2010).

Endnotes

‘Nationwide Tax Protests: Party Like it’s 2007’ http://Ronpaul.com (http://www.ronpaul.com/2009-04-15/nat...its-2007/, 09 August 2010).
David Campbell, Writing security: United States foreign policy and the politics of identity (Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota Press., 1998): 9.
David Campbell, Writing security: United States foreign policy and the politics of identity (Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota Press., 1998): 91.
David Campbell, Writing security: United States foreign policy and the politics of identity (Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota Press., 1998): 116-119.
David Campbell, Writing security: United States foreign policy and the politics of identity (Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota Press., 1998): 122.
‘Under fire, "furious" Fox News execs yank Hannity from Tea Party event’ http://Mediamatters.org (http://mediamatters.org/research/201004150087, 08 August 2010).
‘Press: This ‘tea party’ brought to you by Fox News’ http://Metrowestdailynews.com (http://www.metrowestdailynews.com/opi...-Fox-News, 08 August 2010).
‘On the house: Fox aired 107 ads for its coverage of tea party protests over 10 days’ http://Mediamatters.org (http://mediamatters.org/research/200904170011, 08 August 2010).
Luis Fernandez, Policing dissent: social control and the anti-globalization movement, (Rutgers University Press, 2008): 160.
Luis Fernandez, Policing dissent: social control and the anti-globalization movement, (Rutgers University Press, 2008): 9.
Luis Fernandez, Policing dissent: social control and the anti-globalization movement, (Rutgers University Press, 2008): 146.
Luis Fernandez, Policing dissent: social control and the anti-globalization movement, (Rutgers University Press, 2008):81-86
‘Framing the ‘RNC 8’ http://Inthesetimes.com (http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3962/, 09 August 2010).
Luis Fernandez, Policing dissent: social control and the anti-globalization movement, (Rutgers University Press, 2008): 85.
‘Are ‘tea party’ rallies given preferential treatment by police?’ http://Csmonitor.com (http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics...by-police, 08 August 2010).
‘Tea Party Express II: Rise of the Tea Bags’ http://Bradblog.com (http://www.bradblog.com/?p=7487, 07 August 2010).
‘Police find TEA Parties more peaceful that anti-war protests’ http://Newsbusters.org (http://newsbusters.org/blogs/candance...war-prote, 07 August 2010).
‘Quincy Tea Party Draws Police in Riot Gear During Obama Speech’ http://Huffingtonpost.com (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04...6367.html, 09 August 2010).
I should note here that Charlie has done much to work against legal gay marriage, and we did not feel he had a right to perform his own ceremony in an area that houses one of the larger gay/transgendered communities in Florida
‘Summit Costs hit $1.1 B’ http://CBC.com (http://www.cbc.ca/politics/story/2010...oews.html, 07August 2010’

[stray cat]

1. And Bush would never get elected president twice

[ilaughatrightwingers]

3. The "tea party" shows the failure of the left

More than anything, the right-wingers being able to raise up the disillusioned shows how cowardly us on the left were to have not tried to do such a thing.

[louis-t]

2. Riiight, and "violence will come from the 'left'."

Please.