The Tea Party, right-wing media, and the dog that didn't bark
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The Tea Party, right-wing media, and the dog that didn't bark
You could make the argument that the Tea Party movement is the most potent force in American politics today. After all, the evidence is everywhere -- especially in Washington, where Republican lawmakers pushed the previously-unheard-of, tea-flavored notion that disaster aid for hurricane victims can only be paid for by cutting social programs. That was advocated by the same Tea Party faction, swept into office last fall, that has scuttled any talk that higher taxes -- even on millionaires and billionaires who thrived in an era of working-class decimation -- could ever be part of the Beltway's obsession with debt reduction. From making support for generally accepted global warming science melt faster than an Arctic glacier, to folks cheering the death penalty and then booing a gay solider serving in Iraq at GOP presidential debates, the anti-government, anti-science, anti-knowledge 26 Percenters of the Tea Party Movement have been the angry tail wagging the confused dog of American politics for the last 30 months. Right?
Yes, you could make that argument.
But here's the weird thing -- if the Tea Party is really such a powerhouse of political influence...where has it been recently?
It wasn't in South Carolina, where a "smaller than expected" crowd came to see Michele Bachmann for a Tax Day Rally back in April (just as Sarah Palin and Donald Trump also drew small crowds on the same day), or at the "small" crowd of only 200 activists who showed up in March for a D.C. rally in favor of shutting down the government, or the less than 100 people who were rousted this summer to rally for the Tea Party's stance on the debt ceiling (pictured at top), even with supposed movement's superstars Sens. Rand Paul and Jim DeMint at the podium.
Where's the Tea Party? It's not in Las Vegas, where the swanky Venetian Hotel has been suing the Tes Party Nation for more than $600,000, for canceling a planned convention last fall when it couldn't deliver nearly enough people for the more than 1,800 hotel rooms it had once reserved. (By the way, Tea Party nation's founder just endorsed Newt Gingrich for president...you think that's a game changer?) You could also fairly ask what happened to the nearly 100,000 people who showed up at the National Mall just 13 months ago for a rally organized by and starring the then-king of all right-wing media, Glenn Beck, but a better question would be simply -- what happened to Glenn Beck? Little more than a year removed from the cover of Time and the New York Times Magazine, Beck has lost his main platform on the Fox News Channel, been booting from the airwaves in Philadelphia and New York, and taken his shtick to the narrowcasting world of Internet TV.
The 2010 election was supposed to be the warm-up for the Tea Party's ultimate goal, which was turning Barack Obama into a one-term president. But where is the Tea Party candidate for the White House? The self-declared members of the Tea Party who entered the race -- most notably Bachmann -- are sinking like stones. And then there's Rick Perry who studied at the right hand of Glenn Beck and turned himself into a master of extreme rhetoric, suggesting that Texas could secede from the Union and then calling Social Security a Ponzi scheme -- positions that seem to being doing more harm to his quick-rise-and-quick-fall candidacy than good.
Sure, there's no question that the so-called Tea Party philosophy is fueling the discussion in Washington and in the media these days -- where every conversation on spending begins and ends with "cutting," where every notion about government boils down to "how much less." But the bizarre thing is that this ongoing influence seems to be playing out against a broad canvass that seems to be missing the existence of an actual Tea Party.
Did the Tea Party become. in that famous Sherlock Holmesian expression, the dog that did not bark?
For the most part, yes. So what was all that barking that woke America up in the middle of the night?
It was the right-wing media, and its echoes, that you heard.
When historians look back on the surge and decline of the Tea Party Movement in America, and they will, I believe the focus will be how something that was real -- anger and fear among a segment of the middle class that has been decimated by the decline of the U.S. economy -- was hijacked by a band of high-def hucksters, starting with media stars and their bosses seeking ratings, attention and cash, not necessarily in that order. The behind-the-scene billionaires eager to save their oligarchy, and the craven politicians that they own, piled on later.
I've been thinking a lot about the Tea Party recently. It's been just over a year since my book on the birth of the movement -- The Backlash: Right-Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters, and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama -- was published (and it's just been released in more affordable paperback and e-book editions.) When I reported and wrote the book in 2009 and 2010, it was undoubtedly a current event, but now already it has the feel of history -- a moment in American politics that was both remarkable and alarming in nature.
How has the main premise of The Backlash-- that a cauldron of fear among the denizens of the American heartland over their grim economic fortunes and the rise of a non-white majority, punctuated by the election of a black president, was then stirred up by cynical manipulators like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin -- held up over a year's time?
So well that the president of Fox News, Roger Ailes, just essentially pleaded guilty to that central argument. This week, Ailes told Newsweek's Howard Kurtz, in a much discussed article, that his FNC has undergone....
....a “course correction,” quietly adopted at Fox over the last year. Glenn Beck’s inflammatory rhetoric—his ranting about Obama being a racist—“became a bit of a branding issue for us” before the hot-button host left in July, Ailes says. So too did Sarah Palin’s being widely promoted as the GOP’s potential savior—in large measure through her lucrative platform at Fox. Privately, Fox executives say the entire network took a hard right turn after Obama’s election, but, as the Tea Party’s popularity fades, is edging back toward the mainstream.
Fascinating, but there's also a part of the tale here that's more than a tad disingenuous. One reason that the Tea Party is fading is that Fox is no longer promoting it aggressively, especially not since Beck departed at the start of this summer. And more importantly, the Tea Party would not have burst onto the scene in the first place without Ailes' Rupert Murdoch-owned network playing such a large part in creating it.
Remember, the concept of the Tea Party itself came not from the masses but from a TV rant-- not on Fox, surprisingly, but by CNBC's Rick Santelli surrounded by affluent traders on the floor of the Chicago financial exchange. To be sure, there was genuine public rage about the 2008 economic crisis and the bailout of the big banks, but the right-wing media -- which has remarkable influence in the top-down, narrowcasted "Dittohead" world of American conservatives -- steered anger away from Wall Street before Jan. 20. 2009, and toward 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue after that date.
Credit that abovementioned "hard right turn" on Fox -- which incessantly promoted Tax Day rallies on April 15, 2009 to drive up turnout and then covered them as major news events, a self-fulfilling prophecy. Helping to pay for some of the events was the Americans for Prosperity, the front group for the Koch Brothers who had every incentive to tap the public's raw energies for its pet issues, including low taxes for billionaires and climate-change denial. Republican pols desperate for "the next new thing" in those early Obama days took their cue from Fox, instead of the other way around. None more so than a certain Sunbelt governor who attended three rallies that day and who said at one that secession from the Union wasn't such a bad idea. You see...Fox didn't just create the Tea Party, but the network -- with a huge hand from Glenn Beck -- also created Rick Perry.
Do you still doubt that the froth of the Tea Party was whipped up by the media? Think about this: The zenith for Glenn Beck (whose show launched on the day before Obama took the oath of office) came on Friday the 13th of March, 2009, when in an emotional rant ("I just love my country," he wept, "and I fear for it") he invoked the spirit of post-9/11 America and even announced a companion movement to the Tea Party called the 9/12 Project. Like magic, this 9/12 Project attracted thousands of enthusiastic joiners who posted anti-Obama rants online (in the post-9/11 spirit?). formed local chapters and turned out in decent numbers on the National Mall on Sept. 12, 2009, in an event that of course got considerable coverage on Fox.
Then Glenn Beck got bored with the 9/12 Project that he had created from thin airwaves. Then he went off the TV altogether. And the 9/12 Project also disappeared completely off the face of the American political map.
In The Backlash, I wrote about the fulfillment of the mid-1980s prophecies of the late media critic Neil Postman, who worried in his landmark book Amusing Ourselves to Death that entertainment values would subsume political discourse, that the powers-that-be would not resort to Orwellian censorship because we could be so easily and happily be manipulated instead. This is what exactly what we saw in the Glenn Beck and the Tea Party, which not uncoincidentally pretty much rose and fell the same time.
Even at its peak in 2009-10, the Tea Party Movement had the politicial juice to do one thing, which was turn out an energized army of Fox-watching zombies to win low-turnout primaries, as they did in Alaska with Joe Miller, in Nevada with Sharron Angle, and most famously in Delaware with Christine O'Donnell in Delaware. None of these extremists were able to win the general election, even in a throw-the-bums-out GOP tidal wave election.
And so suddenly it's 2011, and Roger Ailes and Fox News decide to pull a "course correction." And just like that, the Tea Party is barely anywhere to be found.
But here's the funny -- OK, actually not that funny -- thing. The chaos unleashed by Fox and friends on the American political system during those two years of the Obama backlash is going to be with us for a long, long time. Some of that is in the extremists like Kentucky's Rand Paul and Utah's Mike Lee who did zig-zag through the electoral maze of 2010 and we are now stuck with for the next six years, at least. But mainly it's in the fear that forces of nature like radio's LImbaugh and the brief surge of the Tea Party has created in the mainstream GOP, its members so afraid now of losing a primary like Delaware's Mike Castle did to O'Donnell at this time last year. That smell of fear moved once-compromise-minded Republicans like Arizona's John McCain to the extreme right, and scuttled what in 2008 had been bright hopes that Washington would take action on climate change and real immigration reform. It's what inspired so many GOPers to sign a no-tax-increase-ever pledge that will hamper America's efforts to dig from the current hole, even as the very real problem of unemployment is ignored.
And now comes Roger Ailes to essentially tell us that the whole thing was a politically motivated ratings gimmick. And yet the Beltway pundits and the politicians still can't realize or admit that the Tea Party was at its brief peak just a 26 percent tail wagging the American dog...or that the dog stopped barking months ago.
- click on any link about crime or anything happening in philly. they're the same people that are obviously sitting in their quiet suburban basement, afraid of the world ranting and whining about how society has decayed and black people are animals. pathetic scared shameful cowards most of them
— Ryan 
"Where's the Tea Party?" . . . . . . Locked away in the FEMA concentration camps, of course, facing death panels lest they repent to Allah. George Soros told me. Didn't you get the memo Will?- "From the liberal playbook: demonize people that disagree with your actions or views." Are you kidding? This is exactly what the extreme right does! All they have done for almost 2 years is disagree with whatever Obama has proposed. They have no ideas, just the word NO. BOTH sides do this partisan BS. It makes no sense to support one side while demonizing the other when both do the same thing. I guess that the Republican Party is, the party of NO SENSE! (the Democrats are the party of of NO CLUE).— James TL
- "You know that the Tea Party is the most potent force in American politics because Will writes long blog posts about it's demise." . . . . . Hmmmm, given how you wankers have been posting obsessively about Will's demise for years, methinks the lady doth protest too much. But you miss the point, naturally. Fear is always a potent force in politics, but you can only cry wolf so many times. Roger Ailes may have learned that lesson, but it may be too late for the Tea Party. It's not too late for the GOP itself. The yearning for a Christie-like moderate conservative is real, and there's still a chance for a dark horse like Huntsman if Romney begins to sputter, as I believe he will.
- "In other words, radical as it sounds, we need to counter the gridlock of our political institutions by making them a bit less democratic." . . . . Fisher, you can always stay home on election day and thereby make the process a bit less democratic. As for an automatic mechanism to end gridlock, let's abolish the filibuster by constitutional amendment and subject every bill in Congress to a national referendum of the People. Abolish the Senate altogether, and eliminate the President's power to veto legislation.
- That's right Will. Keep telling yourself the Tea party is ineffective, and Obama will be re-elected easily. I am sure the massive victory for the Republicans in November 2010 has nothing to do with them, nor the election of Scott Brown in 2009, nor the loss of the Dem held for 80+ years seat in NY. Obama is doing great!Harry Reid does not even want to vote on the must pass Obama's job bill. As far as Glenn Beck, he is still on the radio and now has his own TV network with 200K subscribers already. He is not a tea party person per se. Anyway, I think your party needs to double down on all the great policies they have come up with, and we will see what the American people do in November 2012.— Bush3
Comment removed.- Another insight post into the mind of the mindless. Keep goosestepping to the beat of your obomaship's drum beating.— junethe4th
- Please don't blame Obama for Harry Reid's inadequacies. But Will is certainly correct that the Tea Party, such as it was, now isn't. Anyone who pays attention (which rules out perhaps 90% of the commenters on this blog) would recall that Obama ran on a platform of reducing government spending. Furthermore, he has lived up to this as he has to most of his promises when not blocked by Congress. Government today has fewer employees than it did in the last Bush years and the deficit, adjusted for inflation, is lower than it was during Bush's last year. Taxes are the lowest they have been in 80 years. I am not sure that I approve of all this reduction in government, but Obama said he would do it, and he has done it. The Tea Party, meanwhile, has to the extent it has accomplished anything has simply thrown a spanner in the works. If the national Republican party had not locked onto Tea Party goals, mainly so that they could accomplish their main agenda of tossing Obama out, then we might a sailed on without all the distractions that are preventing Obama from doing the job.— Archimedes
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TeaParty, barbarians at the gate.— WDRussell - Enjoyed your article. Interesting take on events. But it raised the question for me: What made Roger Ailes decide to change course? Did he get an epiphany that extreme right-wing was destroying America? Is Rupert Murdoch making a strategic decision to rein in Fox now he's in the hot seat. Would like a reply from author. Thanks.— Jan Qu
- the tea party was never anything close to a "grass roots" movement. It was always exactly the opposite. the tea party was bankrolled and payed for by fortune 500 corporations and wealthy plutocrats who were using the tea party as useful idiots to promote their own corporate agenda.— Ryan
This guy still has a job at this paper? Why?— tiger
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