Tea Party Movement - Research Paper Example

?Tea Party Movement On the wave of disappointment and dissatisfaction with the President and Government policy, a new protest movement is gaining momentum in the United States - the Tea Party Movement (TPM). It was baptized by fire in the midterm elections for Congress in 2010, having at least 139 party candidates for this legislature. So, who are these people? What do they stand for? What is their ideology? What kinds of policies are they promoting? This paper is to research the issues and give clear answers. It is quite easy to find analogues of the present phenomenon of Tea Party Movement in a recent American history - this is the relative success of Ross Perot in the Presidential Election in 1992 and the overall success of Ronald Reagan with his right-wing populist coalition which supported him in the election of 1980, and even Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign, who lost the elections, yet mobilized a significant public support in his favor (Harris, 2010, p. 33). Nevertheless, TPM gives the impression of something very new. Its name – Tea Party, was borrowed from American history, as it is associated with American olden times and patriotic spirit. Growing tension between the colonies and the metropolis after the Boston Tea Party eventually led to the War of Independence. There is a clear relationship between the Boston Tea Party and the present one: people in Boston were protesting against arbitrariness of British political and financial elite and now people protest against the arrogant financial elite and the federal government and presidential policies all over America. This conservative movement, disappointed with the policy of the U.S. President and excessive, in their view, liberalism of the Republican Party, has strengthened its political position. According to the recent survey, the percentage of Americans who support the military campaign in Afghanistan fell to its lowest level since 2001. The result is very unfavorable for Barack Obama, who actively plays the card of fighting global terrorism. The situation looks even gloomier on the domestic political front, where the Administration has to struggle fierce critics of the health reform. In other words, President Barack Obama has created the Tea Party Movement with his own hands, the movement, which expresses the most conservative views primarily of white middle- aged and middle class Americans and took its present shape probably in 2010. Moreover, it involved thousands of people who were totally indifferent to politics before. The nature of American politics has been dramatically revolutionized by the Tea Party’s ability to politicize people who were previously apolitical. Having never felt any deference for elite opinion makers in the first place, the newly politicized Tea Partiers find it easy to turn their backs on them. (Harris, 2010, p. 5) The initial impulse for its creation, apparently, was the adoption of the Paulson Plan by Congress in autumn of 2008, aimed at saving the largest U.S. banks at the expense of the state budget, that is, ultimately, taxpayers. The law was adopted against the clear disagreement of the majority of voters. Disturbance by the actions of the political establishment, which rushed to rescue the fat cats at the expense of ordinary Americans, was very strong. Around the same time another problem appeared at the center of public attention practically first – the state debt. It was a kind of reality breakthrough in the mass consciousness.  Our political system is dysfunctional, Congress is unrepresentative; government is out of control and the political parties are part of the system, both of them. (Hillyer, 2009, p. 47) February 19, 2009, about 7 o’clock in the morning, standing in the midst of stock gamblers and officials of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, the editor of business news of CNBC channel, Rick Santelli, attacked the Obama administration’s plan to refinance mortgages. It was he who sarcastically said about Chicago Tea Party in July, advising all the capitalists to throw securities away, like tea, in the waters of Lake Michigan. That statement was supported by brokers and viewers. Recent events obviously show that there was the quiet revolution in the U.S.: a two-party system was blown from the inside and sharply radicalized in one of its wings. Last Obama’s wins were almost equal to defeats. During the default bargaining, the demands of his opponents were, as they say, met in 98%. And it was not the Republican majority in Congress, which pushed through the demands, but a group of several dozen people from the informal Republican movement (TPM). Exaggerating a bit, we can say that the American political system is no longer Democrats and Republicans. Now we have the Democratic Party and the Tea Party. These 60 people in the Congress (about 20 are the most active now) replaced what America has always considered as Republicans. But their policies and rhetoric is very different from the usual Republican. Formation of this movement, in many ways, probably is a reflection of some very powerful global process, affecting all countries of the West. The Tea Party is not a single structured organization; frankly speaking, it looks like an Anti Party. TPM believes that the professional politicians in Washington, whether Republicans or Democrats, are far from aspirations of common American people, are corrupt and have become an arrogant elite - both in their beliefs and their way of life. Tea Party gatherings are full of people who say they would do away with the Federal Reserve, the federal income tax and countless agencies, not to mention bailouts and stimulus packages (The New York Times). Initially, the movement under the motto “No Taxation without Representation!” protested against the federal programs stimulating the economy and health care reform. Over time, the movement has generated several large organizations, although it is not limited or controlled by them - these are Tea Party Patriots, FreedomWorks and Tea Party Express. In July, a Republican member of the House of Representatives Michelle Bachmann has created the Tea Party Caucus, which gathered 50 legislators. Among the major political figures associated with TPM are: -Sarah Palin, former Alaska Senator, who is a symbolic leader of TPM, though, it seems, her leadership has been less certain in recent months. -Michele Bachmann, the U.S. House of Representatives member and coordinator of TPM supporters in this legislature. -Richard Armey, former Professor of Economics and former leader of Republicans in the House of Representatives. The movement is supported by such celebrities as Donald Trump, who spoke at a rally in Boca Raton, Florida and Glenn Beck, former Fox News host, who is involved in informational support. Activists of the movement will certainly join together around a future Republican presidential candidate, and some of the possible candidates can get their special support. The most acceptable presidential candidate, as many supporters of the Tea Party Movement state, can be Texan Republican Congressman Ron Paul – supporter of the radical ideas starting from the abolition of the federal income tax to complete withdrawal of all U.S. troops from abroad. He affirmed his adherence to “the fundamental principles of the Tea Party Movement: limited government, reduced spending, lower taxes, and personal liberty.” (Wolverton, 2010, p.18) Ron Paul supports strict limitation of the Federal Government role, low taxes, free market, foreign policy of nonintervention and stable currency. He was nicknamed in the Congress as Dr. No, because he voted against any bill that violates the Constitution. Also, comparison of TPM and OWS suggests itself but is, generally speaking, is unqualified. The first, since its start, has been actively sponsored by private capital, like Charles and David Koch. The latter has no such support. The Republican political strategists created a successful “program” of street politics, which started its work right from the Tea Party. They brought the masses into the street, because the masses were not supporters of the Republican Party in its original form, but representatives of a very broad conservative electorate. The same program is now used by the Republican spin doctors as part of mobilization of the liberal part of the population. TPM is considered by many as a herald of Occupy Wall Street (OWS). However, TPM was more effective because it had a specific enemy – Obama and specific problem – Obama’s social reforms. OWS is vaguer.  I also can’t mention the criticism of TPM. It reduces itself to representation of the TPM activists as radicals, extremists, racists and lunatics. In 2010, the pro-governmental movement, Coffee Party, was created to oppose TPM. They practiced “smuggling in” their people to TPM rallies with provocative slogans. Finally, they used cheap rhetoric to knock out the historical base from the Tea Party. In particular, they stated that Boston was fighting against the East India Company, which had tax privileges, that is, supposedly, for tax boost. In countries, where TPM is in its infancy, it has to overcome a wide range of criticisms and objections: starting from the failure to understand the fundamental economic and aesthetic principles of movement to a negative perception of the snake as a symbol of nonviolent self-defense. The American economy and society is going through the final stage of a grand social experiment to build a social welfare state, which was launched in the 30ies by Roosevelt’s New Deal. The current fiscal and debt problems show that the giant financial pyramid, which was the U.S. budget system for the past 80 years, came to its terminal stage. Its take-down (or collapse, under the most unfavorable circumstances) apparently is a matter of ten or fifteen years. The Tea Party Movement - the right -wing populist movement is the forerunner of the epoch of New Deal and welfare state collapse as such (Harris, 2010, p. 33). The Tea Party Movement and its public success makes us think which way the pendulum will go now, if it turns out that right-wing issues will be completely deblocked, like in the 1930ies. The world clearly will not be the way it was for the last two generations. And this change happens beneath our very eyes. Works cited Harris, L. (2010). The Tea Party vs. the Intellectuals. Policy Review, 161, 3+. Harris, L. (2010). The Next American Civil War: The Populist Revolt Against the Liberal Elite. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hillyer, Q. (2009). After the Tea Parties. The American Spectator, 42(5), 46+. The New York Times. (2010, February 16). Tea Party Lights Fuse for Rebellion on Right. Retrieved from:http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/16/us/politics/16teaparty.html?pagewanted=all Wolverton, I. J. (2010). Choosing Choice Candidates: In the Absence of a Firm Hierarchy and Party Leaders, the Tea Party Does Not Endorse Specific Candidates, but Tea Parties Do Expect Candidates to Hold Certain Positions. The New American, 26(8), 17+. http://ezproxy.greenriver.edu:2048/login?url=http://library.cqpress.com/cqresearcher/getpdf.php?file=cqr20100319C.pdf – I do not have access for this Database The Tea Party vs. the Intellectuals. by Lee Harris INTELLECTUAL CRITICS OF the Tea Party movement most attack it for its lack of ideas, especially new ideas--and these critics have a point. But the point they are making reveals as much about them as it does about the Tea Party. Behind the criticism lies the implicit assumption that comes quite naturally to American intellectuals: Namely, that a political movement ought be motivated by ideas and that a new political movement should provide new ideas. But the Tea Party movement is not about ideas. It is all about attitude, like the attitude expressed by the popular poster seen at all Tea Party rallies. Over the head of a hissing rattlesnake threatening to strike is inscribed the defiant slogan so popular among our revolutionary ancestors: "Don't tread on me!" The old defiant motto is certainly not a new idea. In fact, it is not an idea at all. It is a warning. If you are an intellectual, you can debate an idea, but how do you debate a warning? No evidence can be adduced to refute it. No logic can be introduced to poke holes in it. All you can do with a warning is to heed it or disregard it. "Don't tread on me!" is not the deliberate articulation of a well-thought-out political ideology, but rather the expression of an attitude--the attitude of pugnacious and even truculent defiance. But take away this attitude, and what is left of the Tea Party? Not much that respectable intellectuals can respect. First of all, there appears to be no consistent ideology or coherent set of policies behind the movement. Second, when intellectuals turn to examine some of the more radical proposals championed in Tea Party circles, such as the abolition of Social Security or the return to the gold standard, they can only shake their heads in dismay. These crank nostrums are well past their historical expiration date. They may elicit fanatic support from the politically naive and unsophisticated, but no one who knows how the political world operates will pay them a moment's notice. Reviving the gold standard in order to solve our economic problems is akin to reviving the horse-and-buggy to reduce our level of carbon emissions. It ain't gonna happen, and those who put their energies into pursuing these quack solutions are at best engaged in the politics of make-believe. It is little wonder that so many sober intellectuals find it difficult to take the Tea Party seriously, except to see it as a threat to the future of American politics. But anti-Tea Party intellectuals who are liberal have a luxury that their conservative brethren don't have. Liberals can attack and deride the Tea Party without fear of alienating their traditional allies among ordinary voters. Indeed, their mockery of the TeaParty makes good sense to them politically. It is throwing red meat to their base. But conservative intellectuals are in a wholly different position. As the Tea Party gains in momentum, conservative intellectuals are faced with a dilemma: to join the party or denounce it. If they join, they risk losing their status as respectable public intellectuals. If they denounce the party, they risk losing influence over the traditional Republican base. An alienation of affections THERE IS SOMETHING puzzling about the dilemma confronting conservative intellectuals. The Tea Partiers, after all, are emphatic in their insistence that they are true-blue conservatives. Shouldn't conservative intellectuals be delighted at the rise of populist movement made up of conservatives like themselves? But that is just the problem: The Tea Partiers are not conservatives like themselves. Eminent conservatives, such as David Frum and David Brooks, have made this point by their serial putdowns of the Tea Party movement, largely on the grounds that it lacks intellectual respectability. A few conservative intellectuals, and an even smaller number of liberal intellectuals, have expressed sympathies with the anger and frustration expressed by the Tea Partiers, but, by and large, they have decidedly mixed feelings about the populist conservative movement. They believe it merits close attention, but not serious endorsement. For example, shortly after the Tea Party's Nashville convention, Arianna Huffington warned that too much emphasis on the "ugly" aspect of the Tea Party movement should not blind us to "the fact that some of what's fueling the movement is based on a completely legitimate anger directed at Washington and the political establishment of both parties. Think of the Tea Party movement as a boil alerting us to the infection lurking under the skin of the body politic." Though Arianna Huffington is usually put in the liberal camp, she is here expressing the sentiments of many leading conservatives more sympathetic to the Tea Party movement than Brooks or Frum. According to this point of view, the anger and frustration expressed by the Tea Party movement is understandable. They are the ugly symptoms of a serious problem. But the remedies proposed by the Tea Party to deal with these problems are simplistic and often downright wacko. If this is the closest that our public intellectuals can get to empathizing with the Tea Party--by looking upon it as a "boil" on the body politic--then perhaps we should consider the possibility that America's intellectual elite has become radically out of touch with the visceral sensibility of a large chunk of their nation's population. This might not be a serious problem for liberal intellectuals, who, by and large, have long since ceased to have any interest in influencing the many Americans who have expressed sympathy with the Tea Party movement (according to various polls, as much as 40 percent of the population). But it poses a very grave problem for conservative intellectuals loyal to the Republican Party. Since the election of Nixon in 1968, the Republicans' political successes have been predicated on winning over the bulk of those Americans who have come to look on "liberal" as a dirty word. Nixon called them "the silent majority." Pundits after the 2000 election observed that they tended to live in the red states. Alienated by the causes championed by liberal intellectuals, they have reliably voted the Republican ticket, often simply because Republicans were not liberals. They may still vote Republican in the future, but only for those Republican candidates who are willing to join the party--the Tea Party, that is. This puts conservative intellectuals in a terrible bind. If they hope to retain their influence on the Republican Party, they must either join the Tea Party, too, or else battle it out to the bitter end. The bitter end strategy is fraught with peril, however. When conservative intellectuals like Brooks and Frum attack the Tea Party, they win accolades from liberal intellectuals, but they make no dent on the Tea Partiers themselves. Instead, the Tea Partiers simply look on them with the same contempt they have long felt towards liberal intellectuals. The alienation of affection between intellectual conservatives and the Republican base is like any marriage that has fallen on hard times--it is not easy to determine who first started alienating whom or where blame should be assigned, or even if there should be any blame at all. Conservative intellectuals, appalled by the Tea Party, will of course blame those who started the movement, while the Tea Partiers themselves can return the charge by claiming that they have been betrayed by those conservative intellectuals who in their hearts gone over to the other side. They have become "polite company conservatives," as Tunku Varadarajan has called them in an attack that singled out both Frum and Brooks. The PCC (short for polite company conservative) is defined by Varadarajan as   a conservative who yearns for the goodwill of the liberal elite in the media and in the Beltway--who wishes, always, to have their ear, to be at their dinner parties, to be comforted by a sense that liberal interlocutors believe that they are not like other conservatives, with their intolerance and boorishness, their shrillness and their talk radio. The PCC, in fact, distinguishes himself from other conservatives not so much ideologically--though there is an element of that--as aesthetically.   Logic 101 points out that ad hominem attacks are invalid. But Varadarajan is really not trying to rebut Frum and Brooks. Instead, he is making an observation about the social psychology of polite company conservatives--a point we need to examine at greater length. (1) The company we keep THE FIELD OF social psychology deals with how individuals are influenced by the circles in which they move. When the people we are around think a certain way about a particular issue, their judgment will invariably influence our own. Because most of us do not like to be in open conflict with the company we keep, there is natural tendency to align our opinions with those of our companions, especially when it is important to us to be looked upon favorably by them. A socialite moving up the social ladder will adopt the opinions favored by those on a higher rung, often without even noticing it. But under virtually all circumstances, there will be an unconscious movement towards a cognitive harmony with our friends and associates, a process by which our individual minds are fused imperceptibly into a group mind. This process will be familiar to anyone who must frequently pass between opposing camps. An individual who is in polite company one day but in "rude company" the next will easily appreciate the pressure exerted by the group mind. To be accepted and respected by one group he must repudiate the values and ideals of the other, a problem that most of us avoid by limiting our company to a single group that shares the same values and tastes. But this solution comes at a price. Those who limit their company to a single circle of like-minded friends and acquaintances will inevitably become victims of an irresistible illusion. They will be completely unaware of the immense influence their specific social circle exercises over their own ideas and attitudes. If asked why they hold certain views and opinions, these people will sincerely argue that these are the views and opinions to which they have chosen to subscribe based entirely on their own deliberations and reflections. If asked why he supports gay marriage, for example, a liberal will not say, "Because I have been influenced by elite opinion." He will argue that he supports it because it is morally right. Needless to say, conservatives who limit their company to others of like mind will suffer from the same illusions. If asked why he thinks Obama is a Marxist, a conservative will not respond by saying, "Because I have been influenced by my favorite right-wing blog." Instead, he will tell you that it is obvious--anyone can see that Obama is a Marxist. In the eyes of polite company conservatives, the Tea Partiers clearly represent "rude company" conservatism. David Brooks has strongly implied this by calling the Tea Partiers "the Wal-Mart hippies." Wal-Mart, after all, is not the place where the polite company does its shopping. On the contrary, Wal-Mart is usually chock full of country bumpkins and blue collar types. But while Brooks's put-down of the average Wal-Mart shopper might delight the sophisticated set that regularly reads the New York Times, it has close to zero effect on Wal-Mart's customers. They are not bothered in the least that polite company conservatives like Brooks look down their noses at them. This is not because they fail to show adequate respect for David Brooks--it is because they have never heard of David Brooks. There are advantages to everything, including ignorance. If you are too ignorant to know who the elite opinion makers are, you will be entirely indifferent to the opinions they hold. Since the people who shop at Wal-Mart do not normally attend the same dinner parties as David Brooks, they will be completely indifferent to the scornful comments made about them by those who do. Because they never read the New York Times, and certainly wouldn't take it seriously if they did, they could care less about what its oped writers say about them. As a result of their ignorance of such matters, they do not judge ideas by whether they come up to the standards of intellectual respectability accepted by the elite. They judge them with their own common sense, caring little whether their conclusions will be shocking and scandalous to polite company. By doing so, they remain outside the influence of elite opinion makers. Of course there is nothing new in the fact that plenty of ordinary working-class Americans are ignorant of, and indifferent to, the elite opinion makers. This has always been the case. But for most of our nation's past, this approach to elite opinion had a negligible effect our way of politics. The reason for this was simple. Those who weren't influenced by elite opinion usually had no political opinions of their own and so had nothing that could be influenced. They were apathetic and apolitical. They did not interest themselves in public affairs, usually because they didn't find public affairs very interesting. They had better things to think about--their jobs, their families, their homes, their cars, their favorite sports team. If other people were willing to tackle the complicated and tedious problems associated with governing the nation and defending it against foreign foes more power to them. So long as the managerial elite was taking care of business, and ruffling no one's feathers, ordinary Americans were content to stay on the sidelines. The silent majority would remain contentedly silent, provided that the elite in charge of things did nothing to offend or outrage them. This is no longer the case. The shock of September 11, the protracted wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the debacle following hurricane Katrina, the inability to control illegal immigration, the financial crisis, the massive bailout, the election of Barack Obama--all these events catastrophically undermined the implicit trust that the silent majority once placed in the competency of our national leadership. For many it has become an article of faith that something has gone terribly wrong with our country. Meanwhile people who previously never bothered to take the trouble to form a strong opinion on political questions began to rally together, staging conventions, endorsing candidates, issuing platforms. Overnight, the apolitical have been transformed into the politically committed. Zeal has replaced apathy. Those who a generation earlier might have expected their leaders to do the right thing have now become convinced that their leaders will inevitably do the wrong thing. Suspicion and paranoia have replaced confidence and trust. The attitude of citizens towards those handling the nation is no longer more power to them, but rather, take away the powers they have stolen from us. The nature of American politics has been dramatically revolutionized by the Tea Party's ability to politicize people who were previously apolitical. Having never felt any deference for elite opinion makers in the first place, the newly politicized Tea Partiers find it easy to turn their backs on them. Having never been in the mainstream, they have no qualms getting out of it. Having never spent any time in polite company, they are indifferent to the opinions that circulate there. Instead of relying on elite pundits, the Tea Partiers prefer to get their opinions from flagrantly non-elite sources, such as right-wing blogs and talk radio, both of which are held in disdain by respectable mainstream intellectuals. Tea Partiers enthusiastically embrace what polite company regards as intolerance, boorishness, and shrillness. They wholeheartedly identify with the hissing rattlesnake on their posters and they feel no qualms in warning off intruders with their defiant "Don't tread on me!" That is why any attempt to discredit the Tea Party movement by attacking its lack of intellectual respectability is certain to backfire. Such a strategy will simply confirm what the Tea Parties already know: that America is governed by an out of touch elite that is openly and relentlessly hostile to the values of ordinary men and women like themselves. What sparked the Tea Party revolt is mounting dissatisfaction at living in a society in which a small group has increasingly solidified its monopoly over the manufacture and distribution of opinion, deciding which ideas and policies should be looked upon favorably and which political candidates will be sympathetically reported. Even more, the Tea Party rebels bitterly resent the rigid censorship exercised by this elite over the limits of acceptable public discourse. Those who have the power to rule an opinion "out of order" do not need to take the trouble to refute it, or even examine it. They can simply make it go away. The goal of such censorship is to create a population that has been so well trained and disciplined by the political elite that it will be incapable of even thinking forbidden thoughts. When the forbidden thoughts are deeply repugnant to us personally, it is easy to sympathize with the goal of the censors. The elimination of racist thinking, along with all the other forms that bigoted intolerance can assume, would surely be a national blessing. But this blessing would come at a steep price. If the censors have the power to eliminate thoughts they find objectionable, what will prevent them from abusing their formidable capacity by imposing their own narrow agenda on the rest of society, and for their own selfish purposes? Indeed, what is to keep them from establishing a totalitarian regime that does not need to rely on terror or brute force simply because it has developed far more effective methods of obtaining the consent of the masses--namely, cultural indoctrination? Challenging cultural hegemony IN HIS MOST famous novel, 1984, George Orwell envisioned a society in which the ruling elite has successfully mastered the politics of mind control by altering what was formerly known as the English language into a vehicle of subtle propaganda known as Newspeak. For Orwell, the first and most important step to political totalitarianism was the consolidation of elite control over mass culture. The more thorough and pervasive this control, the harder it would become for anyone to think outside the box of approved ideas. Imperceptibly and over time, the elite would shrink the dimensions of this box until people had very little choice but to toe the party line--not because they thought it to be correct, but because they could no longer imagine an alternative to it. The party line becomes their common sense. A generation before Orwell devised the idea of Newspeak, the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci had developed a concept that in many ways foreshadowed it, but with one major and considerable difference. Before Gramsci discovered Marx, he had been a student of languages. Gramsci was especially fascinated by what happened when two languages collided. Throughout European history, conquerors had routinely moved into new territories where the inhabitants spoke a different language. In some cases, such as the Normans in France, it was the conquerors who picked up the language of the conquered, but more frequently, it was the other way around. What explained this fact? Why did a conquered people so often abandon their own language in order to learn the language of their conquerors? Gramsci argued that what led people to discard their native language was the greater prestige of the conqueror's language. The idea of prestige, which had never played a role in classical Marxism, became the key to Gramsci's most famous concept, cultural hegemony. For Orwell, the cultural hegemony sought by the totalitarian state had to be imposed on the masses through diabolically cunning devices such as the telescreen, a reverse television system that permitted the Thought Police to watch and monitor the activities of citizens in the privacy of their own homes. People did not watch the telescreen. Instead they were watched by it, fully cognizant that if they did anything to displease Big Brother they could face the most ghastly consequences imaginable. For Orwell the basis of cultural hegemony was terror. For Gramsci, on the other hand, it was prestige. Cultural hegemony, according to Gramsci, did not have to be imposed on the people through threats and intimidation. It didn't need to be imposed at all. Conquered subjects sought to emulate the prestigious language of their conquerors, while they simultaneously came to look down on their own native tongue as gross, defective, and inferior. In modern liberal societies the same principle has been at work, but with different players. As education became the ticket to worldly success, it naturally became a source of prestige. Prestige no longer came from conquest by arms, but from earning a Ph.D. In modern secular societies, the eminence of the intellectual elite allowed it to unilaterally allocate prestige to select ideas, thinkers, and institutions. Objects imbued with the magical glow of prestige did not need to be pushed on people--on the contrary, people eagerly vied with each other to obtain these objects, often at great personal sacrifice. That is why prestigious institutions, such as major universities, well-endowed foundations, and posh clubs invariably have far more candidates for admission than can possibly be accommodated--a selectivity that makes them even more desirable and prestigious. That is the beauty of prestige: It doesn't need to lift a finger. It can just sit back and relax, confident that people will flock to its feet, begging for the crumbs from its luxuriant table. A governing elite that has a monopoly over the allocation of prestige has immense power over a culture. It can decide what ideas, thinkers, and movements merit attention, while it can also determine what ideas, thinkers, and movements should be dismissed with scorn and contempt--assuming that the elite even condescends to notice their existence. Needless to say, such a setup will lead to a high degree of intellectual cronyism, in which members of the "in" group mutually endorse and reinforce each others' prestige; but like crony capitalism, this is standard operating procedure of all elites and should come as no surprise. Relying on the natural human desire to gravitate towards prestige, the intellectual elite has no need to resort to the ham-fisted methods of Orwell's Big Brother. Despite the fact that Gramsci regarded himself as a Marxist, the central role that he gave to prestige led far from Marxist orthodoxy. In Marxism the ruling class can be easily identified: it has a monopoly on the production and distribution of things. For Gramsci, there is a new ruling class, which has a monopoly on the production and distribution of opinions. Capitalists only trade in products and services. Intellectuals shape and mold people's perceptions and ideas. In earlier societies, in which intellectuals could only influence people by books and pamphlets, their reach was limited. But with the advent of the modern technology have come new means of reaching out to even the most illiterate masses, influencing them in new and subtle ways, while ingenious methods of psychological manipulation and subliminal persuasion have made it quite simple to mask propaganda under the guise of entertainment. The intellectual elite, simply by achieving cultural hegemony over the masses, could obtain a power of influencing the popular mind that tyrants and despots of a previous era only dreamt about. Because of their immense prestige with the general public, the intellectual elite can frequently win people over to their cause. Those who wish to be regarded as intelligent and current in their ideas will quickly move to adopt those ideas that happen to carry the greatest intellectual prestige at any given time, just as the fashion-conscious will quickly start dressing themselves in the latest clothes concocted by the most prestigious designers. The spell cast by prestige gives those who possess it an immense power to influence society. For Gramsci, the prestige of the dominant elite was sufficient to make people discard their native language in order to acquire a language that ranked higher in prestige. And if people are willing to change languages because of prestige, they will certainly be willing to change their ideas, their values, their customs, and their traditions for the same reason. Defying the iron law of oligarchy FOR BETTER OR for worse, the profound cultural changes in American life during the past half century are testament to the enormous influence exercised by our cultural guardians. Ideas, customs, and traditions that no longer find favor in the eyes of the cultural elite have been stigmatized as out-of-date and old-fashioned, while an array of progressive policies have received the imprimatur of elite prestige. In fact, about the only segment of the population that has remained resistant to these progressive policies are the crowds that assemble atTea Party rallies, holding up their handmade posters. It is the Tea Partiers' indifference to the whole idea of intellectual respectability that renders them immune to the prestige pressure that molds and shapes the ideas and opinions of those who do care about being intellectually respectable. To put it another way, the Tea Partiers can escape the otherwise all-pervasive influence of our cultural elite because they are the people who Gramsci called marginalized outsiders. When referring to marginalized outsiders, Gramsci had in mind the kind of people who inhabited his native island of Sardinia. Tough and hardy, ferociously independent, stubborn in their ways, and pugnaciously proud of their own cultural identity, Sardinians embodied the "Don't tread on me!" attitude and were prepared to back it up with action, often quite violent action. Italians born on the mainland looked down on the islanders, regarding them as crude and uncouth, which by sophisticated standards they certainly were. They also spoke a dialect of Italian that was considered barbarous by those who spoke the preferred Tuscan dialect of the educated and cultured classes. Yet Gramsci, far from feeling shame about his native Sardinia, remained intensely proud of it all his life. Indeed, it was thanks to his native Sardinia that Gramsci came to recognize that snobbery is a powerful form of oppression. Those who establish a monopoly of prestige are no more willing to share their cosa nostra with others than those who have created commercial monopolies. The only defense that the marginalized outsider has against this onslaught is to not give a damn. And the fact that the Tea Partymovement does not give a damn about the current standards of intellectual respectability makes it problematic for the intellectual, who cannot take the same attitude. But it is also the characteristic that justifies the Tea Party's claim to be revolutionary. To be sure, this is not the revolution envisioned by Marx, in which the working class overthrows the capitalist class. It is rather the revolt of common sense against privileged opinion makers, and, by its very nature, it can only be carried out by men and women who are not constrained by the standards of intellectual respectability current in polite company. Again, it is precisely their status as marginalized outsiders that allows them to defy the monopoly of prestige possessed by the cultural insiders. This fact may put them beyond the pale as far as the conservative intellectuals are concerned, but it is precisely what makes them a force capable of resisting the liberal elite's efforts to achieve cultural hegemony--a resistance that conservative intellectuals had hoped to mount but which they have not mounted, which explains why the Tea Party movement has so little use for them as a whole. As the Tea Partiers see it, what is most needed right now are not new ideas--we have already had far too many of those. What is needed is the revitalization of a very old attitude--the attitude shared by all people who have been able to maintain their liberty and independence against those who would take it away from them: "We do not need an elite to govern us. We can govern ourselves." A strong argument can be made that this attitude is based on a delusion. A government of the people, by the people, and for the people cannot perish from the earth, because none has ever existed on the earth. Orwell's Animal Farm famously tells us that some animals (humans included) will always be more equal than others, which means that every society that has claimed to be a democracy has in fact been managed by an elite, or juggled among a competing group of elites. Sometimes the elite has governed openly, sometimes covertly. Even in ancient Greece, critics argued that the veneer of popular democracy was merely a mask for the cynical manipulation of plutocrats. Twentieth century thinkers such as Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto, and Robert Michels have argued that every functioning society will inevitably be governed by a ruling class, just as every business enterprise will be governed by its executives--it is what Michels has dubbed "the iron law of oligarchy." All this may be perfectly true. Elite rule may be unavoidable. But this conclusion does not mean that the delusion of pure democracy should be tossed into the trash bin of history. On the contrary, the iron law of oligarchy is itself the best reason for keeping the democratic delusion alive and well. The American philosophy of pragmatism has long recognized that an idea can be an illusion and yet still play a vital and wholly positive role by motivating people to act on it. In particular, the illusion that the people can govern themselves, without the need of an elite, has proven to be immensely useful in restraining elites in their incessant quest for greater and greater power. The only truly effective check on elite rule is the fear that the people will become fed up with it. When the people decide to try to rule themselves, their first step toward self-government will be to toss out the old elite. True, the people may simply end up by bringing in a new elite, but this is little consolation to the elite that has been replaced. Hence, any ruling elite that wishes to maintain its hold on power will learn to exercise its power within prudent limits, not overreaching and creating dangerous resentment and backlash among the people. This formidable check on elite power does not arise from flimsy constitutional safeguards, which can always be circumvented, but from the suspicious, even paranoid attitude of defiance displayed by ordinary citizens, which is much harder to get around. The lesson of history is stark and simple. People who are easy to govern lose their freedom. People who are difficult to govern retain theirs. What makes the difference is not an ideology, but an attitude. Those people who embody the "Don't tread on me!" attitude have kept their liberties simply because they are prepared to stand up against those who threaten to tread on them. To the pragmatist, it makes little difference what ideas free people use to justify and rationalize their rebellious attitude. The most important thing is simply to preserve this attitude among a sufficiently large number of people to make it a genuine deterrent against the power hungry. If the TeaParty can succeed in this all-important mission, then the pragmatist can forgive the movement for a host of silly ideas and absurd policy suggestions, because he knows what is really at stake. Once the "Don't tread on me!" attitude has vanished from a people, it never returns. It is lost and gone forever--along with the liberty and freedom for which, ultimately, it is the only effective defense. The second one is a book by the same author. It has 178 pages. Want to have it all??? After the Tea Parties by Quin Hillyer What do conservatives do after the Tea Parties? What do you do when the protests are over? How do you harness all that energy? How do you turn it into a permanent force? When hundreds of thousands of peopleby some counts, well over half a million- protested nationwide against big-government-gone-wild on April 15, the near-spontaneous passion of the "Tea Party" demonstrators gave a major boost to the spirits of more seasoned conservative activists. And even bigger, more organized Tea Parties are reportedly on tap for July 4. But it's one thing to get people to voice their frustrations; it's a much more difficult thing to channel those frustrations into something longlastingly positive. The good news is that even before anybody dreamed of the Tea Parties, a number of conservative grassroots organizations, almost completely divorced from Washington/New York direction, were mobilizing in the far-flung towns and cyberspace wikis of this great nation. Candidate recruitment and training, media and Internet entrepreneurial efforts, intellectual stimulation and policy innovation- all are getting jolts of energy and talent from new organizations. Even better, many of those organizations were well positioned to build directly on the Tea Party momentum while working to create the next generation of conservative political infrastructure. Indeed, one such organization, American Majority, almost immediately posted a new website called, yes, AfterTheTeaParty.com. "Run for local office," says one sub-link at the site. "Be an activist!" says another. "Support freedom!" says a third. American Majority's main objective is to recruit and train candidates for local and state offices such as town councils, school boards, county commissions, and state legislators- or, if people don't want to run for office, to at least train them to be effective activists. "You have to move from protesting to becoming 'implementers,'" said American Majority president Ned Ryun. "We are saying to people: We will empower you. If you want to be involved, we will give you the tools." Ryun continued, "We're trying to stay very much on the cutting edge, to teach things like: How do you use Twitter, how do you use Facebook, Plurk, and Ning? How do you use social networking tools in campaigns or in building coalitions or in building communities of like-minded citizens? We're really trying to stay on the cutting edge- and trying to professionalize as much as possible." Other organizations, of course, offer candidate training among their options- including the venerable Leadership Institute, which in its training of potential candidates, campaign managers, youth leaders, student journalists, campus organizers, and others remains one of conservatism's greatest resources. But American Majority focuses specincally at the grass roots, at the local level, and locates fulltime staff in those areas to build relationships, actively search for political talent, and convince activists that they may have a calling in local public office. In short, rather than waiting for potential leaders to self-select, American Majority goes out into the local communities and finds those leaders, and then teaches them not only how to run and win campaigns, but how to navigate the politics and policies of their new offices after they win. "We're trying to create that broad deep bench of future leaders who have a good perspective on the proper role of government and then give them the tools to implement those policy ideas," Ryun said. To do that, American Majority unofficially partners with state-level conservative think tanks to create site-specific manuals about how to serve in office: what the jobs entail, what policies are at issue, how the system works. And its local staff stays in touch after their training sessions and serves as a sounding board and knowledge resource, as well as providing continued encouragement and "moral support." American Majority has chapters in six states so far- Kansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Minnesota, Arkansas, and Texas- and expects to expand into two or three more by year's end. On April 7, its training was put to the test in both Oklahoma and Kansas, with city council races in the former and school board and city council races in the latter. In Kansas, candidates trained by the American Majority won 23 of 54 races, and in Oklahoma the record was even better: 17 of 27. Of those 17, 16 were first-time candidates. "What the American Majority people helped me to do was to define how I can give back by showing me that my unique perspective will matter and does matter," said one of those winning candidates, new school board member Todd Biggs of Pittsburg, Kansas. "The American Majority let me know that I wasn't alone and that my opinion counts." Not only that, he said, but when he faced a lastminute choice about whether to run for the four-year term he had intended, or to switch and run for an open two-year term against "a bigwig from the local university," as he called him, it was to American Majority's local chief, Dennis Wilson, that he turned for unofficial advice. Biggs ran for the two-year term, and endured his opponent bragging at a key public forum about how many people he could call in Washington to get things done for the local schools. Biggs, who runs a landscaping business and "gets [his] hands dirty every day," said his American Majority training helped him keep his wits when he would otherwise have felt outclassed. "Folks," he told the audience, "I can't call a single person in Washington, D.C., for you, but the people of Pittsburg, Kansas, have my phone number and when you call, I'll listen, and that's what's really important here." Biggs won with 55 percent of the vote. NED RYUN AND HIS IDENTICAL TWIN, Drew, age 36, are both long time conservative activists. Drew just left a top job at the conservative American Center for Law and Justice to oversee the American Majority efforts in Oklahoma and Texas; Ned was a co-founder of the Generation Joshua program that provides character and civic education for youths aged 11-19. (The Ryuns are the sons of former international track world record holder and later five-term U.S. Rep. Jim Ryun.) American Majority originally was conceived (but is organizationally independent from) the Sam Adams Alliance, which is another key, fairly new player on the grassroots conservative scene. Sam Adams, founded in December 2006, is particularly focused on training people how to use new media tools, especially "wikis" (as in Wikipedia), and how to employ them to "advance economic and individual liberty." "Our political system is dysfunctional," said Eric O'Keefe, chairman of the Chicago-based Sam Adams Alliance. "Congress is unrepresentative; government is out of control and the political parties are part of the system, both of them. So I am working on supporting independent infrastructure so that citizens can be heard and be effective and support mission-based, principled organizations." Perhaps the best known of the Alliance's projects is Ballotpedia, a wiki that keeps tabs on ballot initiatives across the country. In the four days immediately before last year's elections, Ballotpedia received some five million page views as people tried to follow the progress of initiatives on gay marriage, crime, tax hikes, and other subjects. Newer and less well known- but already with more than a million page views each- are Sunshine Review, a wiki hotline for government accountability and transparency, and Judgepedia, which already features articles on each of the nation's 338 state supreme court justices and that by the end of the year will feature every state appeals court judge in the country. (By early May it already contained more than 12,000 total entries.) By the end of the summer, Judgepedia expects to feature an article on every federal judge from the time of George Washington up to the present. In short, it's a great way for voters to keep tabs on these officials whose jobs are all too often a bit mysterious to the general public. O'Keefe says that, like American Majority, the Sam Adams Alliance is "close allies" with yet another group key players in grassroots conservative revival, the conservative state policy think tanks that now exist in all 50 states. (Think of state-level Heritage Foundations or American Enterprise Institutes.) These will surely play a key role in helping Tea Partiers focus and direct their complaints about excessive, invasive government. A LOT OF PEOPLE AT these Tea Parties are not your usual suspects," said Kevin Kane, president of Louisiana's Pelican Institute, founded in March 2008. "We were at the parties building up our e-mail lists- lists of people who need more information to give voice to what they are feeling." Kane returned to New Orleans- where he had lived for 12 years- after five years in New York, because he had experienced a "long-term frustration with the stagnant economy and lack of opportunities" in a state and city he had grown to love. "PostKatrina and with Bobby Jindal being elected," he said, "I felt there really was an opportunity to do some good." After a lengthy conversation with syndicated libertarian conservative columnist Deroy Murdock, also a New Orleans lover and a fellow proponent of a Crescent City think tank, Kane and his wife decided to try to make a go of it. As in so many of the other grassroots conservative efforts, Pelican was not created by some top-down edict but originally through individual initiative. Such was also the case with one of the oldest of the state conservative think tanks, the Alabama Policy Institute, which will celebrate its 20th birthday on September 1. API founder Gary Palmer still runs the organization and also was a founding board member and one time president of the national State Policy Network, which now serves as an information-sharing link for all the groups. Again, the idea is solid communication rather than command-andcontrol coordination- a network of like-minded individuals and groups far from the tightly controlled "Conspiracy" imagined by Hillary Clinton and the lefty blogosphere. "We take the intellectual or academic information and make it retail," Palmer said. "We give people like the Tea Party activists the ability to articulate what they know instinctively." Palmer said the Tea Party movement also has provided "a renewed opportunity to link the economic conservatives and social conservatives together...a reunion of the coalition" that had been begun to show strain until the Obama administration reminded both groups that Leviathan threatens all conservatives. Still, Palmer said that the bigger problem the think tanks can address is not just the lack of information among activists and protesters, but among elected officials as well. "The real crisis is a crisis of leadership," he said. "It's a lack of understanding [by officeholders] of what things constitute the basis of government by a free people." Toward that end, he said he is particularly encouraged that an Alabama group led mostly by conservative women launched the Alabama Legislative Leadership Initiative in May, with a goal, like that of American Majority, of identifying and electing leaders well grounded in conservative philosophy. The group intends to find 15,000 people to commit $2 each per week to a political action committee so that, every four years, some $6 million will be available for conservative candidates in a state whose legislature heretofore has remained controlled by old-line liberal machine politics. ALABAMA AND LOUISIANA provide just two examples of the sorts of things going on in all 50 states. "It's natural to take the Tea Party concerns about the national government and apply those concerns to taxing and spending policies at the state levels, too," Kane said. "And we can have an immediate impact at the state and local levels." Meanwhile, with more than 800 local organizers having driven the original Tea Party movement, another group, called Tea PartyPatriots, was founded to try to serve as an "umbrella" organization that one of its founders, Mark Meckler, says will "facilitate communication between local Tea Party organizers and activists, and...act as a clearinghouse for information, resources, and services." Whether through a loose umbrella organization or through grassroots efforts like American Majority, activists on the ground intend to keep the Tea Party energy from dissipating. "We need at least 10 percent [of the hundreds of thousands] of Tea Party participants nationwide," said Ned Ryun, "to at least think about running for office or at least become serious activists at the local level. We have to make that the starting point of something good, not just a one-day event." Choosing Choice Candidates: In the Absence of a Firm Hierarchy and Party Leaders, the Tea Party Does Not Endorse Specific Candidates, but Tea Parties Do Expect Candidates to Hold Certain Positions. by II Joe Wolverton Arecent poll conducted by Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio indicated that 41 percent of Americans have a favorable opinion of the Tea Party Movement. This support is manifest in the influential role played by Tea Party activists in the defeat of Governor Jon Corzine in New Jersey, the landslide election of Governor Bob McDonnell in Virginia, and most recently and visibly, Scott Brown's historic victory in the special election in Massachusetts to fill the seat left vacant by the passing of Senator Edward Kennedy. To varying degrees, all of these men owe their success to the skill, spirit, and stamina of the men and women of the Tea Party Movement. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In the spirit of full disclosure, however, the Tea Party has suffered a few notable electoral defeats. Illinois was the site of two Tea Party failures: that of Patrick Hughes in the GOP senatorial primary and Adam Andrzejewski in the corresponding gubernatorial race. Most recently (and heartbreaking to constitutionalists nationwide) there was the story of the hard-fought gubernatorial race in Texas where Debra Medina finished a distant third (18 percent) in the Republican primary to a couple of establishment mainstays despite a promising start and strong homestretch polling numbers. These electoral setbacks should not weaken the resolve of the Tea Party faithful or of like-minded constitutionalists. Within seven months, elections will be held throughout the country and the names of many Tea Party-friendly candidates will appear on many of those ballots. For the first time in many years, there is a respectable slate of viable constitutionally minded candidates seeking office in nearly every state. Given the mercurial nature of politics and the ebb and flow of campaigns, it would be impracticable and perhaps even impossible to publish a list of all the candidates claiming some degree of simpatico with the Tea Party Movement or adherence to its platform of small government, lower taxes, and greater responsibility. With that hindrance in mind, on the next page is a roster of candidates who have affirmed their adherence to the fundamental principles of the Tea Party Movement: limited government, reduced spending, lower taxes, and personal liberty. While experience has taught constitutionalists that the promises of constraint sworn to by those seeking public office are often forgotten after the assumption of power, the strength of these candidates' commitment must be measured individually and voters must evaluate the claims for themselves. As explained in the previous article, the Tea Party Movement does not endorse candidates for office principally because there is no leadership or central authority that can speak for the collage of conservative activists that comprise the Tea Party membership. There are, however, unwritten articles of faith to which those seeking the tacit endorsement of the constitutionally minded Tea Party faithful must pledge their allegiance. First, the national government must be chased back inside the corral built by our Founding Fathers as set forth in the Constitution. The Constitution established a government of enumerated and limited powers and those limits must be adhered to. Second, the states were never intended to be mere minions of the federal government. Our Founding Fathers recognized and held inviolable the sovereignty of the various states and confined the national government to a separate sphere of influence. The rights of states to govern must be defended, and the boundaries between the state governments and the national government as defined by the Ninth and 10th Amendments to the Constitution must be rehabilitated and secured against the trespasses of Congress, the President, and the Supreme Court. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Next taxes must be reduced. Were the government to confine its spending within the narrow constraints of the Constitution, there would be no need to siphon more and more of the hard-earned money out of the pockets of Americans and into the coffers of the national treasury. Foreign aid, undeclared foreign wars, and federal "entitlement" programs have sapped the strength and the patience of the American public. Such unconstitutional outlays must end and the burden of financing them must be removed from the backs of the ever-shrinking American middle class. Finally, there must be a return to the eternal principles of Judeo-Christian virtue upon which our Republic was founded. There is a plethora of quotes from our Founding Fathers exhorting their countrymen to live honorable lives and the necessity of such devotion to the preservation of liberty. Candidates are human and as such must be afforded the same latitude for folly as all men, but they should be nonetheless examples of person al integrity in both their public and private lives. A genuine commitment to abide by the common code of decency should be the sine qua non of a candidate seeking the support of constitutionalists. As discussed above and in the cover story, there is an undeniable energy and force propelling the Tea Party Movement. It is exciting and hopeful and augurs well for a renewal of those timeless tenets of good Republican government. The message of the movement, as well as that of the candidates mentioned above, is resonating with voters who feel they have been constructively disenfranchised by the two major political parties and the profligate elected representatives who flagrantly disregard constitutional tethers and have taxed and spent the United States into a deep recession. The responsibility of those rallying around the Tea Party flag (or any other constitutional banner) is to identify those candidates and causes consistent with their values and promote them, propel them, and praise them in the ears of all those who will listen. by Joe Wolverton II, J.D Read More