Posted on 05/22/2014 3:33:40 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
The myth that the movement was all about economic issues -- not social ones -- is finally laid bare. Here's how.
Jim Newell hit the nail on the head about the alleged “revenge of the GOP establishment” in this week’s primary elections. Yes, they are all Tea Partyers now. Who needs the label when they are getting everything they want from the establishment?
In fact, the Tea Party has always been populated by the rank and file far right of the party. Yes, they expressed hostility to their elected officials in Washington. They were angry that the Democrats won a majority and they blamed their leadership for letting that happen. But as John Boehner explained just yesterday:
"You get in these primary elections – they are hard-fought battles and sometimes – listen, there is not that much, not that big a difference between what you call the tea party and your average conservative Republican."
Indeed. Nonetheless, it is interesting that so far in these primaries the major victory claimed by the Tea Partyers doesn’t feature a standard libertarian-ish right-wing Republican railing against Big Government and babbling about Benghazi!™. It features a hardcore member of the Christian right, which is hardly the image of the Tea Party in the political press. That would be Ben Sasse of Nebraska, the Yale-educated history professor who had the backing of Tea Party groups like Freedomworks, the Senate Conservatives Fund and Club for Growth, and Tea Party icons Sarah Palin and Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas. He won the primary against establishment-backed State Treasurer Scott Osborne. Yes, he hates Big Government as much as any right-wing Republican, that goes without saying. But Sasse is motivated by his belief that the U.S. is a Christian nation under siege from that Big Government, not by his belief in free markets and low taxes.
Sarah Posner at Religion Dispatches unearthed his doctoral thesis from 2004 and it’s a fascinating treatise on the origins of the modern religious right in America. Unlike most historians, he believes that the conservative movement grew up in the 1960s not out of rebellion against the civil rights stances of the Democratic Party but rather the “secularization” of the culture in the wake of the Supreme Court rulings banning school prayer and Bible reading. He even goes so far as to claim that rather than a cynical decision to stoke the flames of Southern racism with the Southern strategy, it was Richard Nixon’s deep understanding of the Christian culture that led him to persuade evangelicals and conservative Catholics to join the GOP and usher in the era of conservatism in the last decades of the 20th century. It’s a novel understanding of that history, to say the least. Most historians cite Nixon’s pursuit of blue-collar Catholics as part of the strategy to peel off working-class votes with racial resentment. But Sasse’s dissertation is evidently persuasive in at least some respects.
But regardless of his level of accomplishment as a scholar, Ben Sasse clearly sees the world through the lens of a conservative Christian crusader. According to his website, he is a proponent of the most radical interpretation of religious freedom that’s in circulation today on the far right:
Ben Sasse believes that our right to the free exercise of religion is co-equal to our right to life. This is not a negotiable issue. Government cannot force citizens to violate their religious beliefs under any circumstances. He will fight for the right of all Americans to act in accordance with their conscience.
One wonders if he believes the child molestation at Warren Jeffs’ polygamous compound or Shariah Law honor killings are also non-negotiable religious beliefs that the government cannot force those people to violate under any circumstances. In any case, he is certainly a proponent of the Christian right manifesto, the Manhattan Declaration, which aims to change the strategy of the religious right from a purely moral argument to a legal doctrine that exempts religious adherents from following the law of the land.
One might wonder why the so-called libertarian Tea Partyers would back such a fellow even if he were right on all their economic issues. But one of the major misapprehensions about the Tea Party has always been the idea that it was not socially conservative, as if all those tricorner hat-wearing patriots were solely concerned with tax rates and regulations. The Pew Poll showed otherwise years ago:
Tea Party supporters tend to have conservative opinions not just about economic matters, but also about social issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage. In addition, they are much more likely than registered voters as a whole to say that their religion is the most important factor in determining their opinions on these social issues. And they draw disproportionate support from the ranks of white evangelical Protestants.
A Tea Party by any other name would smell as socially conservative. Just ask Ted Cruz, another Ivy League Tea Partyer who recently made a pilgrimage to Liberty University and declared, “These are troubled times, and religious liberty, the very first liberty in the Bill of Rights, the very first protection we have, has never been more in peril than it is right now.” Or Sarah Palin, another Tea Party favorite who wears her social conservatism on her sleeve.
The point is that whether it’s the establishment winning as they ostensibly did in this week’s primaries or the Tea Party upsetting the conventional wisdom as they did last week in nominating Ben Sasse, it makes no difference. The three-legged stool of the GOP — family values, small government and national security — is as solid as it’s ever been, whatever they choose to call themselves. Sure, they may have a few Rand Paul fans ineffectually batting at one of those legs, but the Tea Party is right there with the establishment holding it steady.
*******
Digby is the pseudonym of liberal political blogger Heather Parton from Santa Monica, California who founded the blog Hullabaloo. She has been called one of the "leading and most admired commentators" of the progressive blogosphere.[1]
Digby began as a commenter on the blogs of Bartcop and Atrios and launched her own blog on January 1, 2003,[2] calling it Hullabaloo "because one function of blogs is to cause a ruckus"[3] and decorating it with a picture of a screaming Howard Beale from the film Network. She has been joined by other bloggers on Hullabaloo, including composer Richard Einhorn, who blogs under the name "Tristero".
Digby was a Navy brat who graduated from Lathrop High School in Fairbanks, Alaska. She studied theater at San Jose State University (then known as San Jose State College) and worked on the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System and for a number of film companies, including Island Pictures, Polygram, and Artisan Entertainment.[2]
She won the 2005 Koufax award for blog writing and accepted the Paul Wellstone Award on behalf of the progressive blogosphere from the Campaign for America's Future at their "Take Back America" conference.[4] Digby had initially kept her identity secret and it was widely assumed that Digby was male until she made an appearance at the 2007 CAF conference to accept the award.[4] Digby has since started writing regularly at Salon.[5] She also won the 2014 Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism.
Right, the quote you posted was from a libertarian organization, I think we were to assume that it was what you wanted to serve as your claim about the tea party, in an attempt to portray it as not made up of social conservatives.
Zyloptic idiots
Really? Then explain LBJ and the Great Society and while you
are at it explain Ann Richards. If those two could rise to the
pinnacle of power in Texas then don’t even try to tell us that
a swelling population can’t sweep the libs back to power in
Texas. And, if you think I am trying to take pot shots at Texas
then think again.
California ALWAYS leaned rino/libertarian? Oh, puleeeeze!
Even when we elected and re-elected that noted rino RW Reagan
as Governor?
It started as Libertarian and there is still a huge segment that is Libertarian. I’m not, by the way.
Yes California has always been known as a liberal state, even when voting republican.
Texas has always been known as a conservative state, even when it voted democrat.
Sorry, but the tea party is mostly made up, and always was, of social conservatives.
Did you really think it was a movement of social liberals, weak on national defense?
Your blanket statements about the historic politics of California
are wrong. Because you make your claims with conviction does
not make them any more true. That also goes for your claims
about the Tea Party which STARTED as a protest against government
over spending and taxes. Although many people who identify
with the TP are socially conservative, it was economic issues that
spawned the movement,
Even in the time of Reagan, when I lived in both Texas and California, largely as a drifter and hitchhiker, California was know as the promise land for social liberals, while people were terrified to hitchhike through Texas because it was tough, and didn’t take guff from lefties.
Texas was thought of during the 60s and 70s just as it is thought of today, even harsher actually, with Austin being seen as an oasis in the middle of a bunch of right wingers, and Christians.
California has always been seen as the place to flee to if you were a liberal and especially a social liberal, to escape the right wingers and Christians, regardless of which right wing state you lived in, it was known as a rino/libertarian type state, regardless of who the governor was.
People largely came to California, because it was famously liberal, and never more than moderate.
My history of California is not inaccurate and I never said anything about the focus of the tea party.
I was around when it was formed out of the libertarians, so I saw it happen. I’ve been to many different meetings over the years and they make their presence known. The fact that there are others who have joined in doesn’t change how it started or the fact that there is a large segment of them there.
Perhaps you’re not aware of it, but I sure am from seeing it firsthand, and their influence is there, too.
But, like I said, that isn’t me, so I don’t get in on some of their stuff, but keep to my mine.
So your vote is that libertarians formed the tea party, and new comers started out numbering them.
Libertarians do make that argument and credit Ron Paul and his followers as being the tea party.
Have a degree in history, do you? When you say ‘always’ you
betray your ignorance. In the 1930s they came to California
for agricultural and oil field jobs, not liberalism. When they
came in the 1940s they came for military and war industry jobs,
not liberalism. They did not come for anything remotely
related to liberalism until welfare benefits requirements were
loosened.
I don’t vote Libertarian ... :-) ...
Here’s another quote ...
For decades, faith and family have been at the center of the conservative movement. But as the Tea Party infuses conservatism with new energy, its leaders deliberately avoid discussion of issues like gay marriage or abortion.
God, life and family get little if any mention in statements or manifestos. The motto of the Tea Party Patriots, a large coalition of groups, is “fiscal responsibility, limited government, and free markets.” The Independence Caucus questionnaire, which many Tea Party groups use to evaluate candidates, poses 80 questions, most on the proper role of government, tax policy and the federal budgeting process, and virtually none on social issues.
The Contract From America, which is being created Wiki-style by Internet contributors as a manifesto of what “the people” want government to do, also mentions little in the way of social issues, beyond a declaration that parents should be given choice in how to educate their children. By contrast, the document it aims to improve upon — the Contract With America, which Republicans used to market their successful campaign to win a majority in Congress in 1994 — was prefaced with the promise that the party would lead a Congress that “respects the values and shares the faith of the American family.”
Tea Party leaders argue that the country can ill afford the discussion about social issues when it is passing on enormous debts to future generations. But the focus is also strategic: leaders think they can attract independent voters if they stay away from divisive issues.
“We should be creating the biggest tent possible around the economic conservative issue,” said Ryan Hecker, the organizer behind the Contract From America. “I think social issues may matter to particular individuals, but at the end of the day, the movement should be agnostic about it. This is a movement that rose largely because of the Republican Party failing to deliver on being representative of the economic conservative ideology. To include social issues would be beside the point.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/13/us/politics/13tea.html
Yet we know the makeup of the tea party, we know what the current focus for those social conservatives who make up the tea party is, but it doesn’t change anything about the facts of who they are.
The tea party is made up of social conservatives.
When you see the tea parties turn AGAINST social conservatism and start pushing the libertarian/rino agenda, then tell me.
No it isn’t ignorance.
We were talking about modern times and the 60s, Reagan’s era.
We weren’t talking about the 1930s when my mother’s family arrived in California because of agriculture, or after the war, when my mother married my father, and they came to California to take over 3 businesses, a garage and filling station, and a diner.
If you think that California used to be seen as the home of the right wingers, and Texas as home of the liberals, then you don’t know your history.
Those particular Tea Party activists don’t have to be “against” some of those social conservative issues, pertaining to gay marriage or abortion - or even military and monetary support for Israel (for example) ... they just have a “no comment” or “hands off” position and don’t fight for it - in order just to concentrate on those original issues put forth by Libertarians and bring in a wider audience. They sacrifice those issues ... not “fight against them”.
The first time I ever met people moving to California, or anywhere, for the welfare, was during the 1960s, they were driving form back east or Chicago or somewhere.
What I’m telling you is who the tea party is, so far you want to argue what the tea party is focused on, which no one disagrees about.
“”The tea party is made up of the more conservative, which also means the more religious, and more social conservative, only idiots thought that the tea party was made up of libertarians.””
It doesn’t matter to me “who they are” if they ignore those issues some of them say they believe in ... if they do that “ignoring” ... “as a group”.
No, your California history knowledge is just about nil. And when
I cite electoral evidence that Texas has not been exclusively
conservative (LBJ, Richards) you offer denials, not explanations.
I’m not sitting in your living room....the “because I said so” argument
doesn’t work here. Your personal experience does not a
comprehensive history make.
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