On Tea Party Motives, A Play on Religious-Nationalism in Two Acts

We tend to have to account for breaks in the mundanity of affairs to our cohorts. It’s an attribute of curious animals who, in being finite, are forced to learn vicariously. Having attended the ‘Restoring Honor’ Rally on August 28th, the spectacle of hundreds of thousands of right-wing, self-styled revolutionaries marching onto the Lincoln Memorial, drew an inevitable abundance of questions from friends and family. Although masked in innuendo, the interests were clear: What were their attitudes like? What did they look like? Were they racists?

Quick meditation, the answers come: pretty nice (save the entitlement of a jerk in a wheelchair whose nipping at my ankles risked rendering me similarly abled; in spite of my looking-out-of-place/shoving-my way-to-the-front/camera/aurora-of-condescension); blue-collar, mawkish, pallid, statistically obese, aging, languid; probably not.

What’s striking has been not just the consistency of the questions but that they were raised. In having traveled a bit (overcoming my pallor and provincial roots), I don’t recalling being asked such questions before. One has the right to be awestruck then, when they come up in regard to individuals with whom we are suppose to have a common national bond.

Personally, it’s a precarious position. On the one hand, as a quasi-leftist, I concur with the sentiments of my co-attendee of not wanting to ‘perpetuate propaganda.’ Weighing equally as a North Dakotan, I know these people and I understand their thought processes. One can (through the cowardice of detachment) take refuge in the documentarian motive, to explain the what I think are short-comings of our understanding of a powerful subgroup in American politics, without indulging either side.

Act I

Certainly racial and sexual minority were bound to be underrepresented. After all, how strong can the appeal of a return to the social attitudes of the 1950s and a reverence for WWII veterans be to non-caucasian groups?

Since the margin of error in estimations of the crowd seems to be 2000%, I can assert with comparative confidence a minority demographic makeup of 3% Asian (the predilection for Southeast Asian women is apparent here), 2% African-American and negligible/non-existent Latino contingent. Within these baseless, made-up numbers lies the undeniable presence of black families and interracial marriages. Much more interesting, the unusually large number of what one would assume to have been mixed-race adoptions (an admirable willingness to act on pro-life beliefs). Moreover, neither minority nor majority group members seemed ill-at-ease with each other’s presence and the desire to be over polite was palpable. Were people spending thousands of dollars to attend the rally because they hate minorities, they would have been much more open with it.

I should pause to give those who doubt this some supercilious respite: there were a lot of brown people that made a lot of money selling accoutrements to underprepared attendees in their moments of patriotic rapture.

I continue to believe that there is an element of racism that exists in the culture of the Tea Party; however, it is important to make distinctions between the hatred promulgated by the Klan and the tacit fear revealed in the ‘white person on one side of the street and black person on the other’ scenario.

Tea Partiers don’t come from urban areas, they come from the rural interior and bring an inheritance of ethnocentrism and lack of experience/tact/diplomacy (take that Fanon!). Identity politics is variable and it often does not natively exist in the communities that these people come from. It’s difficult for someone that has grown up in a universally white community to understand how the political ecosystem of a place like Queens operates. Using North Dakota as an example, one only sees identity crop up in the case of college logos. Outside of this, the sizable Native American population exists hidden away from the political and cultural affairs of the state (to humorously note an exception: the synchronization of garage sales with the yearly tribal pow-wow). Using the language and action that the Sioux logo inspired, the actions of the Tea Party seem grounded in this principle.

I am reminded of a conversation I overheard in Jamestown, North Dakota, during the summer of last year.

“that nigger president of ours has some pretty good ideas”

How does somebody parse a statement whose regressive subject and progressive object are walled only by a lonely verb? Why did I come out of it hopeful?

Keep in mind that I am not dismissing the invidious implications of this mindset, just that it isn’t a departure from racial norms, and likely not a proactively regressive force.

Venues such as these hopefully have an edifying effect on the participants of the group. Whereas one would be inclined to believe that the Muslim Hajj would reify religious extremism, it turns out that pilgrims tend to come back with more liberal views on their faith. The journey has a tendency to be the only experience that many practitioners have leaving their countries, or even communities. There they come in close quarters with a wide diversity of Muslims, often with much more open views of religion — Indonesian Muslims intermingling with Pakistan Muslims, etc. If American liberals are truly concerned with the issues of race and class embedded in the Tea Party effort, they should hope for a visible contingent of minorities. While it’s easy to mock Beck’s rallies as an excuse for tourism, one should hope the experiences of the city are not just a lesson on patriotism through museums, but one of the pluralism and class issues that exists in Washington. After all, it’s easy for Beck to claim that America’s poor are opulent in comparison to the rest of the world when his audience hasn’t seen the poverty of the inner city.

Act II

If a photographer’s responsibility includes capturing the relationship between the individual and the event, contrast the concurrent rallies. The ‘March for Equality’ rally was summarily an ad hoc group of smaller, niche interests. The converse, the ‘Restoring Honor’ rally, posed an issue: how does one frame the rapacious consumption of the words of an individual hundreds of meters away?

The merit of the metaphor of the Hajj is not simply a facile introduction to the liberalizing effects of travel; within it lies the true nature of the Tea Party movement. There was for some time a battle between libertarians, conservative Christians and establishment Republicans for its hearts and minds (and souls). If what defines the Tea Party was what showed up to D.C., then the day was won by modern-day, pro-interventionist, ardently-capitalistic Charles Coughlins.

However grassroots the mobilization of the Tea Party is, in actuality it remains the children of a small group of ideologues whose mandate is as much spiritual as it programmatic. These leaders espouse that independence from the state, respect for the veterans and dependence on God is the sinew of American Triumphalism. Three hundred thousand constitutional scholars showed up to the Lincoln Memorial that Saturday.

Looking back at transcripts, I’m left asking:

• Where is the active campaign that veterans need to be defended against?
• If the Tea Party wants to be populists, why such opposition to repealing the Bush tax cuts?
• If the Tea Party wants to be fiscal conservatives, where is the demand to cut our largest entitlement — national defense spending?
• If the Tea Party wants to be strict constitutionalists, why do so many members want to fight a drug war?
• If the Tea Party wants to protect state’s rights, why does it want to enforce DOMA and ban abortion nationally?
• What remains of the ‘founding principles and values’ is a naked, unfettered religious nationalism.

While the Tea Party took great effort to parade in a diversity of religious figures near the climax of the rally, the version of religion espoused inevitably reflected the type of Evangelical Protestantism practiced in suburban and rural megachurches. The dearth of Jewish and Muslim members, fewer than the number of Rabbis or Imams on stage, was apparent. Neither Sarah Palin, nor Glenn Beck, spoke on issues of policy, just the reclamation of a nostalgic vision of America that probably never actually existed. After the glamor of the Howard Beale News Hour (Vox Populi with Sarah Palin) fades, the Tea Party is simply the political fallout of the Evangelical revival.

Somehow every journalist seems to have missed a clue: there were as many Christian flags as Gadsden ones. Across shirts and banners and literature, there was more mention of a wrathful God than there was country. Moreover, there exists to these people a true culture war against the decadence of the welfare state and secularism. The Lincoln Memorial, for four hours, was a debriefing and its progress and a reminder of its necessity.

I was struck by a moment in Beck’s speech where he recounted that he had nearly lost faith in God on a flight (not a secure time to tempt the reaction of the almighty) over a shortfall in contributions to the rally. Ignoring that the sum was equivalent to only a week and a half of Beck’s income, the news that the funds showed up the next day evoked genuine surprise and loud cheers of elation from those around me. My immediate reaction was ‘how could they not know the ending to the story?’ I almost missed the true moral– the sanction of God in the cultural irredentism of the group.

I was asked why all this mattered anyway, since the Tea Party would go away just like the neoconservatives did. A justifiable questions. There is a tendency to believe that everything we involve ourselves in is the precipice of a unique change. It justifies our time and labor, and grounds our existence in history. This indulgence is likely as much the sin of this writer as much as the subjects of this screed. The Tea Party, when stacked against groups like the Christian Coalition or Coughlin, is not unique to American history. However, Mr. Beck and company clearly have their attention on the attributes that will allow it to thrive and grow to an extent that its predecessors have not.

In bolder type than the prohibition on signs and guns was a simple prerogative, ‘bring your children’ — and they did. In so long as they continue to bring children and Mr. Beck brings the patriots and the country music stars, they will turn out and the Tea Party will create the cultural institutions that are required for something the United States has not seen in modernity, true religious nationalism.

… and this makes it worth our time.

Hope you enjoyed DC, Bill.