The Tea Party movement, holding its first convention this weekend, angles to be the most revolutionary force in American politics in name and deed, since at least the 1960s Counter Culture.
Only this time the political insurgents command a party of Flour Power, not flower power.
The boiling movement is the whitest phenomenon on the national scene, evident not just in the millions of Caucasians committed to its cause, but in the bedrock beliefs stirring its anti-government contempt.
How fitting, therefore, that Sarah Palin keynote the movement's first organized confab.
Neglected in all the fevered conversation around the movement's meteoric rise, and Palin's selection, is any useful reflection on what the cause and this figurehead stand for: white racial resentment. Packed under her beehive, and that fit 5'5" frame, is a spitfire brew of optimistic, yet aggrieved, whiteness. Palin embodies a bizarre, sometimes luring, combination of triumph and complaint that many Caucasian tea partiers identify with through and through.
Deciphering the racial codes on the movement's ubiquitous placards does not require a doctorate in Semiotics. One popular sign shows the president's face and a caption: "Undocumented worker." Another features his image and a complaint: "The Zoo Has an African Lion and the White House Has a Lyin' African!"
Beyond the festive, ad hominem attacks against President Obama, the Tea Party's leaders and its rank-and-file rarely mention race in debate, but tuck it just under the surface of "nonracial" issues: health care reform, public spending, immigration, and pointedly, taxes.
Palin voices the right-wing drumbeat warning Americans that "government is on your back" and "you should keep your own money." Alongside other avid Tea Party supporters like Tom Tancredo and Glenn Beck, Palin gins-up conservative whites' existing resentment over race, carping over the "high taxes" for public services assumed to go wasted on "illegals" and minorities.
Denouncing government assistance and free school lunches at a town hall meeting in late January, South Carolina Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer, a Tea Party supporter, mused:
"My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed. You're facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don't think too much further than that."
And at a Tea Party rally in Boone County, Kentucky (roughly 92 percent non-Hispanic white), Congressman Geoff Davis (R) called cap-and-trade legislation
"economic colonization of the hardworking states that produce the energy, the food, and the manufactured goods of the heartland, to take that and pay for social programs in the large coastal states."
In Tea Party Speak, "heartland" often means "white," what Palin calls, "the real America," while "coastal state" means the urbanized communities that teem with racial minorities, doubling as "gateway states" for Latino immigrants.
"Immigrants are 21 percent of the uninsured, but only 7 percent of the population. This means white folks on Medicare will see their benefits curtailed, while new arrivals from the Third World, whence almost all immigrants come, get taxpayer-subsidized health insurance," gripes Patrick Buchanan on his blog. "Any wonder why all those Tea Party and town-hall protests seem to be made up of angry white folks?"
The Tea Party movement ventures a nasty turn from classic economic liberalism to white-hot anger.
The bar-stool version of the Tea-Party canard goes like this: Why should we, self-sufficient small-town whites, pay taxes to support all those welfare queens, food stamp cheats, and Medicaid layabouts in the big cities and coastal states?
Well, not so fast. A disproportionately high share of our federal government's tax income comes from racially diverse, immigrant-rich, urbanized states, including California, Illinois, New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, not from extremely homogeneous, conservative, anti-tax strongholds like Idaho, Montana, Utah, the Dakotas, and Wyoming.
All of this is not to say that any given rank-and-file member of the movement personally despises racial minorities. Rather, the Tea Party ethos is a direct descendant of the anti-tax, segregationist politics that swept the South in the 1950s and 60s.
Before the Tea Party's debut, a whole generation of powerful southern Republicans propelled their careers through a conservative tax-cutting, privatizing, "free-enterprise" politics which remains wildly popular in America's white outer suburbs and exurbs: Lee Atwater (GA), Newt Gingrich (GA), Dick Armey (GA), Tom DeLay (TX), Karl Rove (AL, TX), and George W. Bush. These suburban and exurban Republicans intimately understood their constituents' disdain for court-ordered desegregation. They fueled the rising mania for "individual freedom," "privatization," "states' rights," and social homogeneity that once defined their southern home turf and that now defines the Tea Party.
To pernicious effect, white tea partiers cloak themselves in the anachronistic rights-based outlook fine-tuned by 60s-era women and minorities. What's the difference between Palin and Al Sharpton? Lipstick. Pay closer attention: Palin is quite like the Baptist preacher from Harlem, only sexier and paler. Sharpton's comely, exurb-lovin, carpoolin, straight-talkin doppleganger has her hands tied fightin for an aggrieved "silent majority" - or is it a vocal soon-to-be racial minority?
"Tea Party Nation is a user-driven group of like-minded people who desire our God given Individual Freedoms which were written out by the Founding Fathers," reads the convention's website. The Tea Partiers' white rights-based outlook champions individual and neighborhood "freedoms," withdrawn from the common nation. Tea partiers contrive the right to live, make money, own property, zone neighborhoods, or protest taxes at will, without regard to the common good, a troublesome offshoot of rights-based agitprop.
Race is the subtext of now-potent populist appeals to whites, who feel battered from a tsunami of economic and cultural change. The Tea Party Counter Culture is waging a proxy war over race during America's rapidly shifting economy and demographic makeup.
The Tea Party is sounding a siren call of aspiration and a primal scream of resentment - a whoop to Flour Power.
