Part 2 (1/2)

”This is America!” exclaimed CNBC commentator Rick Santelli in his famous February 2009 call for ”Tea Party” resistance to the Obama Administration's mortgage-a.s.sistance measures. Reporting from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Santelli demanded of the traders working around him: ”How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor's mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can't pay their bills?” His harsh words and dramatic gestures mingled with lofty patriotic rhetoric. ”If you read our Founding Fathers, people like Benjamin Franklin and Jefferson, what we're doing in this country now is making them roll over in their graves.”1 When John Patterson of Lynchburg, Virginia, heard Santelli's rant replayed, ”I related to him,” he says. ”He went off ... saying what a lot of people think.” In his fifties, John is a technical writer now working sporadically as a consultant since being laid off by his former company. After Obama's election, John, a longtime Republican, had wondered what could be done. His son served in Iraq and it filled him with ”seething rage” to hear Obama say the war could not be won. In Iraq, the ”wrong people cheered” the night Obama beat McCain, the ”same people trying to kill my son.” John is ”not calling Obama a Muslim,” but he was glad when conservative-minded people who ”love the same things” about this country started organizing Tea Party rallies and he could join the cause. John is determined to fight against ”government meddling in the free market” and ”big government folks” who are ”taking the struggle out of normal life issues,” by handing out benefits to people who have not earned them.

Stella Fisher of Surprise, Arizona, age 67, explains why she and her 69-year-old husband Larry gravitated to the Tea Party. ”We always voted, but being busy people, we just didn't keep as involved as maybe we should have. And now we're to the point where we're really worried about our country. I feel like we came out of retirement. We do Tea Party stuff to take the country back to where we think it should be.” In April 2009, they attended a Tax Day rally at the state capitol and visited several Tea Party groups before helping set up a local Tea Party in their neighborhood. States' rights is the number one issue for the Fishers: ”We think the federal government is overstepping their authority. Take health care, take the education. All those things.... The EPA, they've shut down I forget how many timber plants in Arizona because of the spotted owl.”

For Bonnie Sims of southeastern Virginia, in her sixties, ”it's so sad the way the country is now.” She points to the disturbing changes that prompted her and her husband to join the Tea Party. ”We worked for everything we got,” never used credit cards, and never got ”in trouble with the law” or ”lived a day in our life off welfare.” ”We had to earn our rights.” But such ”values are not taught anymore.” You ”have to select English” for daily transactions, and the streets in nearby Newport News are not safe to walk. She always voted, Bonnie explains, but her husband was ”never political” until Obama ”got in.” Then ”all of a sudden” his eyes went ”wide open.” They heard about the Tea Party and decided to go to a meeting in August 2009. The ”young generation” is all ”Obama, Obama, Obama,” says Bonnie, but she dreads where he is leading the nation. ”I am not a racist,” she a.s.sures us, but Obama is ”a socialist” who ”got a lot of it from his father.” Debt will burden our children and grandchildren. ”Where will the money come from?” Bonnie wonders.

Fear punctuated by hope is a potent brew in politics. No one can listen to John, Stella, and Bonnie talk about what brought them to the Tea Party without hearing their sense of dread about where America could be headed, along with the jolt of optimism and energy they felt upon learning about the Tea Party. Issues and policies matter to Tea Party members, of course, as do their conceptions about American government. We will carefully consider the substance of these views. But we would be remiss not to underline, from the start, the feelings that came across so vividly when people spoke to us.

In mostly liberal academia, more and more scholars are crunching numbers or parsing texts to figure out the Tea Party. But nothing can replace hearing from people directly and trying to make an empathetic leap into their frame of reference. ”Tell us a little about yourself and how you came to the Tea Party,” was the simple question we used to open all of our interviews. We have challenged ourselves to hear the aspirations evident in Tea Partiers' reverence for the U.S. Const.i.tution, to grasp the vision of society that underlies their comments about government regulations and spending, and to understand the worries that reverberate in their a.s.sessments of President Obama.

In their emotional response to politics, Tea Partiers are not so different from other Americans. Democratic politics, indeed all politics, deals with morally vital, emotionally charged matters such as what government can legitimately do, and what claims different groups can make on political power. Politics is about who we are-often in contradistinction to ”them,” to types of people that are not fully part of our imagined community. ”We” want our representatives in government to speak for ”us,” not cater inappropriately to ”them.”

When George W. Bush claimed the presidency in 2001, aided by a startling Supreme Court decision, many Americans of liberal persuasions were shocked and disheartened. Citizens in more culturally secular parts of the country often felt alienated by the arrival in the White House of an evangelical Christian conservative, a Texas Republican, backed by GOP majorities in both houses of Congress. Things got worse for liberals when Republicans, despite razor-thin margins, moved with boldness and alacrity to push through long-sought contentious legislative priorities. But left-leaning Americans turned despair into anger, activism, and landslide electoral victories in 2006 and 2008.

In early 2009, conservative Americans also felt disheartened-and in many cases downright frightened-when a Democratic president arrived in Was.h.i.+ngton DC, greeted by 2 million cheering supporters on the Was.h.i.+ngton Mall, backed by big majorities in both houses of Congress, and bolstered by an apparently sweeping mandate to respond to the economic crisis. And there was also an element of shock at the personal history of Obama himself. Truth be told, most Americans of all races, backgrounds, and political persuasions were a bit surprised that a black man named Barack Hussein Obama could win the presidency. For most citizens, the surprise was thrilling, or at least comforting, if only because of the good things it seemed to say about our country's capacity to surmount its tragic racial past. But for very conservative Republicans, and others even further to the right, the Obama presidency was, and is, scary.

No wonder widely advertised calls for ”Tea Party” protests felt like a G.o.dsend to U.S. conservatives-a very welcome opportunity for hope and joint action amidst a winter of Republican despair. Even if you disagree with them politically, it is not so hard to understand the stories told by John and Stella and Bonnie. As we move on to explore the political beliefs of Tea Partiers more fully, we should keep in mind the visceral fears and hopes that have spurred individuals and groups to action, feelings that run through their governing philosophies and public policy preferences.

REVERENCE FOR THE CONSt.i.tUTION.

A tour of Tea Party websites around the country quickly reveals widespread determination to restore twenty-first century U.S. government to the Const.i.tutional principles articulated by the eighteenth-century Founding Fathers. The Lynchburg Tea Party of Virginia, for example, sums up the ”principles that we adhere to” as ”Const.i.tutionally Limited Government”; ”Freedom to Pursue Prosperity through unhindered Markets”; and ”Liberty tempered by Virtue.” Far to the north, the ”About Us” page of the Maine Tea Party/Maine ReFounders website features ”Pete the Carpenter” explaining that ”We are fighting to preserve our Const.i.tution, Country and hold true to the visions of our founding fathers.”2 Likewise, thousands of miles into the U.S. heartland, meeting on the third Thursday of each month at the Eagles Club in a small town in the northwestern corner of Nebraska, the Crawford Tea Party describes itself simply as ”a group of concerned citizens ... who desire to see a restoration of Const.i.tutional government.”3 Just as Rick Santelli invoked Founding Fathers to excoriate an Obama mortgage-a.s.sistance measure, so do Tea Party groups across America link their present-day activities to a constantly restated reverence for the country's founding doc.u.ments: the Const.i.tution, the Bill of Rights, and the Declaration of Independence.

Const.i.tutionalism in Practice.

Const.i.tutional reverence is not just in cybers.p.a.ce. The U.S. founding doc.u.ments are woven into the warp and woof of Tea Party routines. Pocket-sized versions of the Const.i.tution appear on merchandise tables at Tea Party meetings, arrayed alongside bejeweled necklaces and teapot pins (made in China), ”Don't Tread on Me” T-s.h.i.+rts, ”TEA Party: Taxed Enough Already!” b.u.mper stickers, and biographies of conservative celebrities such as Sarah Palin. Video tutorials are available to explain the Const.i.tution and Declaration in a few easy lessons. And for Tea Partiers willing to sit still and pay good money, there are regular seminars, day-long workshops, even multiday courses, where right-wing professors or advocacy group experts go through the founding doc.u.ments line by line, explaining how they apply to today's political battles. Elaborating the meaning of the U.S. Const.i.tution, the Declaration, and the Bill of Rights is a lucrative business for many a roving lecturer looking to make a profit off the gra.s.s roots. Yet Tea Partiers also use the revered doc.u.ments as gifts. In Arizona, one of the authors (Vanessa) was given a pocket copy of the Const.i.tution as a ”thank you” for her interest in the Tea Party. And when New Hamps.h.i.+re Tea Party leader Jerry DeLemus arrived to give a talk in neighboring Maine, he greeted one of the two women who lead the York County Const.i.tutionalists with a warm hug and a special gift: a pocket Const.i.tution autographed by Michele Bachmann, the Minnesota Republican who leads the House Tea Party Caucus.

”Const.i.tution talk” bubbles through discussions in Tea Party gatherings, and is used to bolster a wide range of beliefs. Sandra Asimov explained that ”smaller government, the Const.i.tution, and personal responsibility” are the Tea Party's core principles, while fellow Virginia activist Ben Jones summarized Tea Party values as ”honesty, transparency, adherence to the Const.i.tution.” References to the Const.i.tution are often used to justify stands on particular issues; indeed, the invocation of Const.i.tutional authority seems intended to render particular views incontestable. As Harvard historian Jill Lepore points out, Tea Partiers are ”historical fundamentalists” who project directly accessible and unchangeable meanings onto past events and doc.u.ments.4 In Arizona, Tea Party members invoked the Const.i.tution to reinforce state sovereignty and highlight the sanct.i.ty of any and all gun rights, while in Virginia, the emphasis was on the state's capacity to opt out of health care reform. Of course, whatever any Tea Partier wants to do with his or her private property is everywhere justified in exalted Const.i.tutional terms.

Even the current priorities of religious conservatives in the Tea Party are attributed to America's founding doc.u.ments. Although the Southwest Metro Tea Party in suburban Chanha.s.san, Minnesota, highlights apparently libertarian and fiscally conservative principles on its homepage, just one click on ”Principles” reveals the group's firm refutation of ”the secularist demand for separation of church and state.” ”Sanct.i.ty of Life” and ”Traditional Marriage” are given billing equal to ”Individual Liberty” and ”Religious Freedom” in the full list of group principles, all in the name of authentic Const.i.tutionalism.

Despite their fondness for the Founding Fathers, Tea Party members we met did not make any reference to the intellectual battles and political compromises out of which the Const.i.tution and its subsequent amendments were forged, let alone to the fact that key Founders were Deists, far from any brand of evangelical fundamentalism. Nor did they realize the extent to which some of the positions Tea Partiers now espouse bear a close resemblance to those of the Anti-Federalists-the folks the Founders were countering in their effort to establish sufficient federal authority to ensure a truly United States. The Tea Partiers we met did not show any awareness that they are echoing arguments made by the Nullifiers and Secessionists before and during the U.S. Civil War, or that their stress on ”states' rights” is eerily reminiscent of dead-ender white opposition to Civil Rights laws in the 1960s.

For Tea Partiers, as for most people engaged in politics, history is a tool for battle, not a subject for university seminar musings. Political actors regularly invoke the past for reasons other than intellectual debate or verisimilitude. Invocations of the past are didactic and metaphorical. At the gra.s.s roots, the Tea Party is an effort at restoration, and we will need to figure out exactly what people are trying to save and ”refound”-to use the telling phrase of the Maine ReFounders. But we can be sure that today's Tea Partiers are fighting about the here and now-using references to the ”true meaning” of the Const.i.tution in their struggle to shape the nation's future-rather than actually trying to return to any given moment in America's past. They are doing what every political endeavor does: using history as a source of inspiration and social ident.i.ty.

Just like other political actors, past and present, Tea Partiers stretch the limits of the Const.i.tution, use it selectively, and push for amendments. Tea Partiers have argued for measures such as restrictions on birthright citizens.h.i.+p, abridgements of freedom of religion for Muslim-Americans, and suspension of protections in the Bill of Rights for suspected terrorists. Some parts of the Const.i.tution are lauded over others. In a telling aside during a question and answer period with members of the York County Const.i.tutionalists, Jerry DeLemus mentioned that he might prefer to limit the amendments to the Const.i.tution to the first ten, those in the Bill of Rights, omitting the rest altogether.5 In practice, Tea Partiers are in the thick of ongoing arguments over how the Const.i.tution is to be interpreted and how it might be amended.

Tea Partiers do not see their use of history as interpretive, however, and they are resistant to notions that historians or lawyers might be needed to make sense of the Const.i.tution and apply it to ongoing disputes. For regular Tea Party partic.i.p.ants, the Const.i.tution is a clear-cut doc.u.ment readily applicable to modern political issues. They evince the democratic conviction that they themselves, as average Americans, can read and interpret the Const.i.tution. ”It's amazing how quickly the Const.i.tution became a second language,” marvels Sandra Asimov. At most, they might need to study the doc.u.ment and learn its full meaning. But Tea Party members do not doubt that they can do this.

A belief that foundational written doc.u.ments are immediately accessible and obviously clear, that they can be understood by each person without the aid of expertise or intermediaries is a long-standing conviction in populist movements. The English Levellers felt that way, as did the Jacksonian Democrats in nineteenth-century America. Most fundamentally in Western history, the Protestant reformation against the Catholic Church was based on the tenet that each Believer could read and interpret the Bible, to attain a direct understanding of the Word of G.o.d unmediated by priests-let alone by ecclesiastical or secular lawyers.

Many Tea Party members are Protestant evangelical Christians who have transferred the skills and approaches of Bible study directly to the Const.i.tution. Tea Parties across the country partic.i.p.ate in ”Const.i.tution Study Groups,” and in such groups they tackle commentaries as well as the original texts themselves. At suppertime, Jerry DeLemus requires his children to read from the Bible and the Const.i.tution, the two holy texts in his household.6 In a more public ritual setting, readings from the Const.i.tution are performed at the start of each monthly Tea Party meeting in Lynchburg, Virginia.

The Five Thousand Year Leap is a book popular with many Tea Partiers for its elucidation of ties between the Bible and the Const.i.tution. Written in 1981 by ultra-right ideologue Cleon Skousen, this book explains the U.S. Const.i.tution and the founding of the United States in Biblical terms.7 All but forgotten for many years, the book found new life after then-Fox News anchor Glenn Beck dubbed it ”divinely inspired.” Arizonan Tea Party regular Gloria Ames, for instance, calls the book ”one of our Bibles.” Tea Party websites often refer to the book's conclusions in their discussion of America's religious heritage. In South Carolina, the Greenville Tea Party's website claims that the Founding Fathers used ”28 fundamental beliefs to create a society based on morality, faith, and ethics,” and that ”more progress was achieved in the last 200 years than in the previous 5,000 years of every civilization combined”8-two claims drawn directly from Skousen's book. For these Tea Party members, Skousen provides proof that America is a ”Republic with Christian-Judeo influences.”9 A splendid depiction of the fundamentally religious understanding of the U.S. Const.i.tution prevalent in many Tea Party circles appears in a painting by Utah artist Jon McNaughton, ent.i.tled ”One Nation, Under G.o.d.” In the painting, Jesus Christ is shown holding up a copy of the United States Const.i.tution, while American historical figures from Abigail Adams to Ronald Reagan stand admiringly behind him. The crowd in the foreground is divided into two groups. On Christ's right, people including a Marine, a farmer, and the mother of a disabled child look admiringly towards the Const.i.tution and Savior. A college student is shown holding a copy of Five Thousand Year Leap. On the left of Jesus, however, one finds a less pious crowd, with faces turned away from Jesus and the Const.i.tution. These figures include a liberal news reporter, a politician talking on his cellphone, a smug professor carrying The Origin of Species, and, dimly visible in the background, Satan.10 Though McNaughton himself is not a Tea Party activist, his work has inspired widespread praise among Tea Party members, with videos explaining the symbolism of his painting appearing on Tea Party blogs from Michigan to Florida. As Newsweek reporter Andrew Romano puts it, the Const.i.tution is for Tea Partiers a ”sacred text” and a comforting ”authoritarian scripture.”11

Skepticism about Expertise.

A persistent refrain in Tea Party circles is the scorn for politicians who fail to show suitable reverence for, and detailed mastery of, America's founding doc.u.ments. Catering to Tea Party supporters, the GOP-led House of Representatives launched the 112th Congress by staging a public reading of the Const.i.tution (though omitting touchy pa.s.sages about slaves). Tea Partiers told us that they appreciated this ritual gesture. They are even more enthusiastic about a newly adopted rule that each piece of legislation debated in Congress must cite how it follows from specific pa.s.sages in the Const.i.tution.

Although he served for twelve years as a law professor at the University of Chicago, President Obama comes in for particular criticism from Tea Partiers for alleged irreverence toward the Const.i.tution. In Virginia, several Tea Party members confidently told us that President Obama had misquoted the Const.i.tution and the Declaration of Independence. In one case people found telling, Obama paraphrased one of the most famous lines of the Declaration of Independence and omitted the reference to ”the Creator” as the source of man's inalienable rights.12 Virginia Tea Party activists were very aware of this incident, and made repeated reference to it in interviews. For them, it revealed that Obama does not hold the Const.i.tution sacred, and no doubt the incident heightens suspicions about his religious beliefs, as well.

Obama's former employment as a university professor hardly impresses Tea Party people, anyway. They do not defer to experts, and we heard many expressions of scorn about educated people who try to devise plans for regular citizens, or tell them what to do. Again and again, we heard Tea Partiers express derision about legislators who vote without reading every page and word in proposed legislation, as well as about federal officials who discuss measures they had not read. Ben Jones noted that Attorney General Eric Holder threatened to file suit against Arizona's 2010 immigration law without having read the law himself. When we asked if it was reasonable for a busy public figure to entrust the reading of a legal doc.u.ment to lawyers on his staff, we were told in no uncertain terms that this approach is inadequate. After all, Ben noted, the entire bill was ”only ten pages.” The clear implication was that the Attorney General was derelict in his responsibilities. Without having read a doc.u.ment personally, Tea Partiers feel that a citizen or official cannot be sure of what it contains.

Tea Party skepticism about experts is part and parcel of their direct approach to democracy, their belief in citizen activism. To guard against possible bamboozlement-and to demonstrate their own virtue and skill as informed democratic citizens-Tea Party members arm themselves for confrontations with their legislative representatives by reading particular bills themselves (and, impressively to us, many groups have formed subcommittees to track legislation, and refer to bills by their official numbers, as in ”H.R. 1”). Jenny Beth Martin, national coordinator of the Tea Party Patriots, bragged that at the August 2009 town hall meetings where right-wing protestors confronted Congressional Democrats, the Tea Party partic.i.p.ants frequently ”knew the bills better” than the Representative who convened the events. With a chortle, Tea Party interviewees repeatedly offered their own stories of seeing an elected representative caught in a misstatement by a Tea Party activist.

The importance of first-hand reading dominates Tea Party discussions of health care reform. In point of fact, Tea Party members we interviewed were deeply misinformed about the Affordable Care Act of 2010.13 One Virginia Tea Partier regaled us at length with (a completely factually untrue) account of the strong public option supposedly contained in the law, a measure she said would kill the private insurance companies. In a voice shaking with fear more than anger, another Virginia Tea Party member told us that the Affordable Care law includes ”death panels” and would abolish Medicare-prospects which, she said, terrify the 92-year-old woman in her nursing care. The Affordable Care Act contains no such provisions, of course. But no matter if Tea Partiers themselves are misinformed. They are certain that the politicians who voted for what they derisively call ObamaCare were ignorant of its dangerous provisions. The Senate health reform bill, several interviewees noted, had been pa.s.sed late at night on Christmas Eve 2009, when the politicians themselves could not possibly have read the thousands of pages of the final legislation.

For Tea Party activists, in short, any hint that a legislator or expert has not personally read every line of a bill is a ”gotcha” moment, and a d.a.m.ning indictment. It is symbolic evidence of a larger truth that public officials are either out to ”put one over” on average Americans, or are being tricked themselves. The constant reference to the Founding Fathers harkens back to an imagined time when politicians were seeking a higher good.

DO THEY REALLY HATE GOVERNMENT?.

Americans have ambivalent, even contradictory reactions to government. Asked about it in the abstract, most unhesitatingly prefer ”the free market” or ”individual responsibility.” But reactions to concrete public programs are quite different. Large majorities of Americans approve of public education, subsidized health care, veterans' benefits, and Social Security-and they appreciate many other specific government activities, too. Even programs to aid disabled or low-income people win broad approval, as long as the beneficiaries are seen as deserving of community support. That Americans are, simultaneously, ”ideological conservatives” and ”operational liberals” has been doc.u.mented for as long as social scientists have been able to probe and measure public opinion.14 Tea Partiers are said to be different. Observers from all over the map portray them as firm and consistent in pure opposition to taxes, big government, handouts to business, and expensive social programs and intrusive regulations-suggesting that today's gra.s.sroots partic.i.p.ants in the Tea Party are different from regular, middle-of-the-road Americans who hold mixed ideas about government.

A lazy conflation of elite and popular strands of Tea Partyism is at work in such claims. Professional ultra-free-market advocates like d.i.c.k Armey are all over the television-spouting their views about cutting taxes, privatizing Social Security, and sweeping away regulations-and claiming to speak for gra.s.sroots Tea Party members. So it is easy for observers to presume that local Tea Party members have signed on to the FreedomWorks program, when in fact they have not. Wishful thinking is also rampant, as every elite faction in and around the GOP imputes its preferences to gra.s.sroots Tea Partiers. Influential establishment GOP commentator Peggy Noonan, for example, praises the Tea Party as a supposedly new kind of Republican ma.s.s force-a consistently principled popular movement that will force the party to return to a (putative) golden age when, above all, it pursued fiscal responsibility.15 Reality on the ground does not fit these portrayals. In our individual interviews, and in the group discussions we heard, regular Tea Party people, like all Americans, can be quite inconsistent about government. At the abstract level, all of them, to be sure, decry big government, out-of-control public spending, and ballooning deficits. ”The nation is broke. It is bankrupt,” Virginian James Rand insisted in a typical declaration.16 Rand expects that foreign borrowers will soon cease to accept the dollar as a reserve currency. He sees the United States as headed for a catastrophic default in the very near future-a prophesy of financial and societal Armageddon we heard quite often, interspersed with everyday chit-chat. At the abstract level, Tea Partiers claim that the United States is headed for ruin unless many trillions are instantly cut from the federal budget.