Tea Party Conspiracies
Speaking of politics and petulance….
(Speaking of what? Of politics and petulance, as we were in the previous post on Monday; just scroll down. And pay attention to context. We may have to start springing a pop quiz now and then…)
To resume, the last opus broached the subject of other-than-rational influences on political opinion. In that case it was environmentalists and their opponents disagreeing as much because they just don’t like one another as because of any rational disagreement over the issues.
As recent events have illustrated, though, this phenomenon is hardly confined to the green-brown split. Most of these recent events have taken place outside of Vermont. But there has been enough spillover to warrant consideration here.
Some of those events have raised questions about whether certain political leaders have crossed the line from other-than-rational to downright wacky. The governor of Alaska decided she could not keep her job. The governor of South Carolina could not keep…oh, we won’t finish that sentence. Suffice to say that in both cases it was not what they did but how they explained themselves that raised doubts about their mental balance.
Granted, it borders on irresponsibility for a reporter with no license to practice psychiatry and no personal contact with the “patient” even to suggest such a diagnosis.
But perhaps it is more irresponsible to ignore the evidence at hand. Think of the pain the country might have been spared had just one of the journalists who covered Richard Nixon’s famous “last press conference” in 1962 openly speculated about the possibility that Nixon was bonkers. This would not have been irresponsible, because as we all learned later(and as the reporters at the event privately suspected), it was true.
As it happens, though, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s resignation announcement was not last weekend’s only manifestation of the connection between political activity and…well, and the non-rational if not the outright irrational. There were also the “tea party” protest demonstrations, a few of them in Vermont, and in many of them, the politics of dissent morphed into the politics of the weird.
Now, do not understand too quickly. First of all, there is no intent here to attack or demean the folks who attended those Tea Party demonstrations here or elsewhere. Being politically uninformed and personally overwrought is not a character flaw. As it happens, the only two Vermont Tea-Party activists the News Guy was able to contact were polite, helpful, and articulate.
Furthermore, there is nothing at all irrational about opposing President Barack Obama’s economic policies, his health care proposals, his cap-and-trade energy bill, or anything else he does. Nor is there anything irrational about Vermonters opposing the state budget or the same-sex marriage bill passed by the Democratic Legislature.
This is hardly debatable because Vermont has a prominent example of a rational opponent of both those state bills and most (if not quite all ) of those Obama policies. The example is Gov. Jim Douglas, who in clear and comprehensible terms has explained why he doesn’t like same sex marriage, some of the new state taxes, and a ‘public option’ health insurance alternative.
What he’s never said is that Barack Obama has no right to be president because he was born in Kenya.
That’s irrational.
But not only was it widely accepted at the Tea Parties, it was actually among the more moderate sentiments at many of them. Conspiracy theories about Obama’s birth certificate being fake are merely goofy. White supremacy, secession, and advocating a coup d’état are downright insane.
But all three were evident in some of the Tea Party demonstrations around the country. In Dallas, according to the Dallas Morning News, some in attendance had been alerted by the Texas Nationalist Movement, which wants Texas to secede from the U.S. In Boiling Springs, S.C., one demonstrator sported a flier that said “Zelaya today, Obama tomorrow,” implying his hope that Obama would be ousted in an armed coup as was Honduran President Manuel Zelaya.
And according to a report by the Anti-Defamation League, “white supremacists using the name “Whites Forward” created the Tea Party Americans Coalition (TPAC) as a working group for serious White racialist activists” to exploit the Tea Parties. The report said another white supremacist, anti-Semitic, organization, Stormfront, was also urging its followers to attend the demonstrations.
None of this proves that most, many, or even any of the Vermont Tea Partiers are sympathetic to those ideas. The organization that seems to have attracted Vermonters was Resistnet, which was not mentioned in the ADL report. In fact, the very mention of those white supremacist organizations might be considered “guilt by association.”
It is. But that’s OK. In politics “guilt by association” is acceptable because it isn’t guilt at all-no one goes to prison for his or her political associates — merely responsibility, and political activists should be held accountable for their associates.
Even without the extremist element, though, there is a non-rational (if not always irrational) aspect to the Tea Party appeal. As Candace Page put it in her insightful account in the Burlington Free Press (yes, sometimes it practices good journalism), “If there was a central sentiment…..it was that participants feel their ideas, their political convictions, their world view is ignored by the people elected to represent them.”
And, she might have added, by the political establishment and the mainstream media. The Tea Partiers don’t like the way the world is changing. Many of them are convinced – not entirely without foundation – that the mainstream establishment scorns and ridicules them. In reaction, they accept bizarre conspiracy theories and assume that catastrophe awaits.
“I believe there is a movement eventually to go door to door and kick your doors open and take your guns,” said Dominic Ladue of Georgia, who attended the St. Albans Tea Party and who wants to run as a Republican for the Legislature next year.
Ladue was one of those polite and articulate Tea Partiers who was more than willing to explain the sources of his anger. Polite, articulate, and candid. He readily acknowledge that he is the Dominic Ladue who was imprisoned for a hate crime after he and his brother beat up a gay man outside a Burlington bar in 1990.
“I was a hoodlum type barroom brawler,” he said, “and I’ve changed my life.”
Apparently he has. But he still bitterly opposes same sex marriage, and he is one of the many who is convinced that Obama was not born in Hawaii.
“Everybody and his brother knows he was born in Kenya.,” Ladue said. “He’s put his birth certificate under 24-hour armed guard. No other president in US history ever put their birth certificate under armed guard.”
And it seems to make no difference that no one has ever seen this armed guard. As Michael Shermer, the publisher of Skeptic magazine and a columnist for Scientific American, put it, “there’s no amount of evidence or data that will change somebody’s mind. The more data you present a person, the more they doubt it ”
Considering how conservative these conspiracy theorists are, there is something almost touching in their dismissal of the efficacy of market competition. Were there any valid questions about Obama’s qualifications, the highly skilled, highly energetic (and highly paid) Republican “oppo research” operatives would have been all over it last year like Vermont’s black flies in May.
The Tea Party movement is not strong in Vermont. The five events in the state seemed to have attracted only a few hundred demonstrators. Obama carried the state in a landslide last year, and would do so again were a new election held today.
But perhaps they should be taken seriously in spite of their political weakness and their sometimes bizarre analysis. In the words of Franklin County Republican Chair Linda Kirker (who is also not sure Obama’s birth certificate is legit), some people “are afraid.”
They may be afraid of phantoms. They may be impervious to reason. Some of them, no doubt, remain upset that the President of the United States is not a white guy. Still, they are, by and large, decent citizens, and if even a few hundred of them are upset enough to go to a political rally on the Fourth of July, their fellow citizens might be well advised to pay attention.
Tags: Barack Obama, Tea Parties
