Tea party politics

One of the most fascinating recent phenomena in merican politics has been the rise to national prominence of the right-wing conservative force known as the Tea Party. Observers have categorized this group in a variety of different ways, from principled opponents of enlarged government to racist reactionaries who refuse to accept the legitimacy of an African-American president. This heated debate about the nature of the movement came to a head last week when conservative commentator Glenn Beck led a Tea Party rally at the Lincoln Memorial, the site where Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his famous “I Have a Dream Speech” on the same day in 1963. As racially and politically provocative as its event may have been, however, the Tea Party insists that it welcomes diversity and has the interests of all Americans at heart when it protests liberal governance and progressive social change. Before accepting such a claim, however, it is worth looking objectively at the demographic make-up the Tea Party and what sorts of policies those people are actually advocating. Upon doing so, it becomes strikingly evident that while the members of the Tea Party may harbor no explicit animus toward minorities and the poor, they nonetheless promote a political agenda that would have many of the same effects on those groups as would policies of explicit discrimination.

To understand why the Tea Party supports such a narrow-minded platform, it is first necessary to consider the group’s demographic makeup. The best source for such information is a comprehensive poll that was published by The New York Times and CBS News last April. This survey found that contrary to its members’ claims of diversity, the Tea Party is whiter and wealthier than the American populace as a whole. A full 89 percent of those who classified themselves as members of the Tea Party also self-identified as white, while only eight percent considered themselves non-white. In comparison, 77 percent of the survey’s full sample was white and 21 percent was non-white. Furthermore, while 56 percent of Tea Party respondents earn over $50,000 in annual income, only 44 percent of the entire sample fit this criterion.

Thus, it should not come as a surprise that the Tea Party agenda is oriented toward primarily advancing the interests of wealthy white citizens. The group often obscures this fact by couching its rhetoric in terms of the federal budget deficit and the Constitution, but one can see past this fairly easily by comparing its positions on matters related to its own interests with those pertaining to the interests of citizens at the other end of the socioeconomic spectrum. For example, the Tea Party often criticizes government spending on programs such as unemployment benefits and the health insurance subsidies that were included in the recently passed health care reform law. These policies primarily assist low- to middle-income Americans, many of whom are minorities and are struggling due to pressures brought upon them by the state of the American economy. Yet the Tea Party largely ignores farm subsidies that have cost the federal government over $245 billion since 1995, according to the Environmental Working Group, because they mostly benefit major agricultural businesses that are part of the corporate upper class. Similarly, homeownership tax breaks that the president’s latest budget projects will cost more than $131 billion in 2012 alone are glossed over because eliminating them would raise taxes on a much larger proportion of wealthy whites than of lower-income minorities.

Additionally, members of the Tea Party have expressed concern over increased government regulations and mandates that they claim are unconstitutional abrogations of individual freedom. In particular, they have pointed to the requirement in the health care reform law that all Americans obtain a health insurance plan as well as to tighter restrictions on lending and trading that were included in the financial regulation law. The Tea Party views these as examples of overzealous government that could adversely impact the economic livelihoods of healthy, stably employed citizens and well-to-do bankers working at major financial institutions. Yet at the same time, the Tea Party has actively supported the Arizona immigration law known as S.B. 1070 that allows state police to detain individuals who they suspect are in the country illegally. The latter imposes an undue burden upon Hispanics and Latinos who, if it comes into full force, will have to carry legal documentation of their citizenship at all times in order to avoid potential harassment. However, because most Tea Party members are white and would not have their immigration status questioned, the principle of individual liberty matters little to them in this case.

Of course, there is little evidence to suggest that the Tea Party is composed of individuals with the same malevolent hatred for minorities that inspired earlier far-right conservative movements. Nevertheless, the set of policies that its members support would perpetuate unequal outcomes between races in America and would bring the country no closer to solving the problems which still exist as a result of the bigotry of previous generations.