Frank Rich, one of the New York Times's more liberal pundits, devoted his Sunday opinion piece to--well, let me specify. I read it because the headline was "The Great Tea Party Rip-Off." In actuality, the piece was mainly about Michael Steele's recent tirade against Harry Reid's ill-chosen words about President Obama's race as a factor in the last election. The Tea Party gets mentioned a bit at the end.
Rich, predictably, uses the Tea Party as a platform from which to launch further attacks on Steele and other conservatives. More interesting, though, was his link to this post by Erick Erickson of RedState.com, "I'm Afraid Sarah Palin Might Be Ruining Herself Unintentionally." Erickson writes specifically the upcoming "National Tea Party Convention" in Nashville, which charges $500 (that's just the registration fee). Like many commentators right and left, Erickson notes a bit of a tension between the idea of an organization ostensibly dedicated to advocating for not-so-rich folk to charge such exorbitant prices. But Erickson takes a harsher tone, admitting that he thinks the convention (and not, as Frank Rich intimated, the tea party movement in general) "smells scammy":
"Let me be blunt: charging people $500.00 plus the costs of travel and lodging to go to a 'National Tea Party Convention' run by a for profit group no one has ever heard of sounds as credible as an email from Nigeria promising me a million bucks if I fork over my bank account number."
I'm a little vague on just who exactly organized this convention. As far as I can tell from the Convention web page, it's a group called Tea Party Nation, which seems to restrict access to info beyond its home page (even stuff like FAQs or Resources) to members only. I guess the only way to find out if you agree enough with the group to join it is to join it to see if you agree with it. Not exactly a scam in itself, but frustrating and fishy all the same.
Erickson's larger point, though, concerns his cooling passions for the tea party movement in general. He touches on one of the features of the movement--its "leaderless" quality--that continues to fascinate me.
The progressive left has for some time been playing around with less top-down models of activism that might be called "leaderless." The more sophisticated cases for such tactics tend to invoke an idea like Barbara Epstein's "prefigurative community," in which groups adopt a guiding principle that their activist tactics--planning, organizing, implementation--all mirror the features of the "better society" they wish to create. They seek, in other words, to make the means and ends resemble each other.
For many of these progressive activists (most visibly in the world-wide anti-globalization movement), the "better society" looks like a voluntary, anti-capitalist, and non-violent anarchism in which small groups make decisions via consensus, share property, resist individual profit at the expense of others, etc. Activism built on this model tends to involve a number of otherwise distinct groups who join together around a common cause on a contingent basis, pooling resources to mobilize peaceful protest against a visit of the World Trade Organization meeting, for example. It's a "movement of movements" that highlight the spectacle of mass, non-violent direct action over more long-term, single-focus movements whose work often calls for working within the extant system (e.g., lobbying, electing candidates, fund-raising, letter-writing).
In my scholarly work, I've argued that the "movement of movements" trend offers a novel way of intervening in/resisting globalized capitalist oppression as well as presenting a productive challenge and critique to more "traditional" forms of social change organization. I question, however, how effective the movement of movements can beyond producing a singular event (i.e., a protest). Grounding myself in more old-school political theorists like Antonio Gramsci, I am incredulous toward the tactic of opting out of traditional politics entirely. A dream of utopia, of a better world, may be necessary for social change, but the dream alone isn't sufficient to realize that change.
Tea Party advocates, always eager to tout their leaderless, grassroots qualifications, are thus in my view latecomers to this tactic. They are also, from what I've seen and heard, less interested in the kind of meta-awareness of their movement that lets them see the plusses and minuses of quasi-anarchist structures.
The Convention offers an intriguing case in point here. On the one hand, tea partiers want to be leaderless--the better to criticize the elected leaders (politicians) in Washington. Yet in order to make any political gains, they must by necessity offer up, rally behind, and elect leaders themselves. Yet elected leaders eventually have to define themselves on the basis of any number of political decisions; a senator or representative is obliged to be a great deal more specific about her beliefs than "less spending and fewer taxes and more rights!" Inevitably, these specifics will reveal internal divisions: "You mean you're for X program and against Y legislation? What about Z issue? You've betrayed us!"
Indeed, you can see such divisions already, as "leaders" struggle to explain this or that frightening or racist or otherwise wackadoo stance or sign or slogan that appears at a tea party rally. The numerous references to violent action (e.g., openly displaying firearms, calling for a second American revolution) are particularly striking. I do not suggest that everyone or even that most people at a tea party gathering say such things. But enough do at enough tea parties that I think partiers disingenuous when they simply deny the existence of such sentiments. "Well, we're a leaderless movement," stammer the leaders (odd how tea partiers at once identify as and disavow the existence of leaders and spokespeople), "so we can't control who comes to our rallies. I can assure you, though, that the sentiment there doesn't represent us."
But there's the rub, no? A leaderless, totally grassroots organization has no "us" to speak of. It's a mass of people--powerful in its destructive force but less effective at getting anything productive done (Jose Ortega y Gasset famously compared masses to lava--powerful, destructive, directionless). I side with Gramsci here, who argues that masses eventually have to become parties, obliged to play the game of politics, where definitions of in and out have to be devised and where appeals to the base have to balance with concessions to other groups.
Complicating all of this consideration, for me, is the question of where evangelical or otherwise Christian-identified motivations and groups figure in the tea party setup.
More tomorrow,
JF
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