What is the Tea Party afraid of? They fear a world where they are marginalized. They fear a world where their lifelong works are dismissed and taken from them. They fear losing control over their lives. They fear change. These are common, justified, and understandable fears, and they should not be dismissed as quickly as many of us (including myself) have done.
We all fear change; as it has been said, the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t know. Many of us fear the same things the vociferous members of the Tea Party fear. The biggest problem of the Tea Party, aside from the inherent racism of a lot of its proponents, is that they have bought into a list of non-issues and straw dogs along with a twisted and unreal historical view. The Boston Tea Party wasn’t simply about a tax; it was about taxation without representation. The problem wasn’t being taxed; it was getting no value for the tax. But “tax” is a dirty word to the Tea Party, and easier to understand than the complexities of colonial politics and markets, let alone the 100 plus years of schism that followed the English Civil War and preceded the American Revolution. Mark Williams, a national Tea Party leader, recently said that the NAACP makes “more money off of race than any slave trader ever.” The ignorance and preposterous nature of this statement will probably not drive many people from the Tea Party; it will more than likely become a talking point treated as “fact” in fetid arguments on website comment boards across the Internet.
The Tea Party’s equally nasty sister is the nativist movement. What do nativists fear? Public Enemy summed it up; it is “Fear of a Black Planet.” Or a brown planet, but at any rate, nativists fear a predominantly NON-WHITE planet (and country). They rant and rave about crime rates and dangerous illegal immigrants but mostly, they just don’t want to experience what non-whites have experienced for hundreds of years, namely minority status.
Socialism is another bete noir of the “Fear Party,” as this amalgam of groups should be called. Most of these people and groups have no understanding of socialism or the differences between socialism and communism or that National Socialism is nothing like either, but as they take all their talking points from the same entertainment pseudo-news sources, they all “know” about socialism and its evils. Similarly, they all “know” about the wonders and charms of capitalism, even as BP manages to not clean up its destruction of the Gulf, even as corporate execs get bonuses and lavish lifestyles built on the bones of ordinary people.
“Big” government (which doesn’t include 2 massive military boondoggles, just social programs and FEMA internment camps) is another major culprit. In the Fear Party’s world view, “big” government is limousine liberals (“the elites”), faceless bureaucrats, black helicopters, political correctness, and a “war on Christmas.” The Fear Party doesn’t link the thousands of lobbyists with gold in their pockets and agendas NOT in the public’s best interests to “big” government, nor do they decry the ruling of a corrupt Supreme Court which eliminates barriers to corporations buying elections (or installs the loser in a general presidential election as “the winner”).
The Fear Party sees conspiracy everywhere. The Fear Party denies science. The Fear Party thinks repetition and volume win arguments.
Fear is an instinctual emotional mechanism for survival. But it is also corrupting and viral and in many ways the opposite of reason. Fear is powerful, and fear can win elections. But fear can’t stop time or change. Fear can’t cool the planet or make the oceans subside. Fear can’t make people get along with each other. Fear can’t make businesses work or supply people with homes and jobs. Fear can be helpful and lead you out of a tight spot sometimes, but eventually fear has to run its course, so that people can ask, now that the world has changed, what do we have to do to survive?
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