So... anything happen while I was away?
Oh, right... tea parties. Or teabagging... or something.
I know it's a bit after the fact - though it was all the talk of the Sunday political shows - but I figured it was best to wait until they happened before weighing in. In general, I think the tea parties turned out to be just what they were likely to be: oversold, yet notable, exercises in gathering a lot of angry people to stand around... and then go home.
Whatever they were meant to accomplish - and just what that was, I think, was never established - the tea parties amounted to little more than the latest exercise in mass primal screams. The reason the tea parties can't have lasting impact - and they won't - is because, like so much of the rage that's about these days, there's nothing, really, to back it up. And really... I wish there were something to back it up, because we need that, desperately.
Perhaps the most amusing sideshow is how "teabagging" suddenly became the unfair description of the event. Despite the "Teabag Obama" signs and discussions online, conservative bloggers were shocked, shocked I tell ya, when the snarky use of teabagging got called out. Suddenly "we never said that" and "that's so offensive" became the prevailing view.
Well, nice try; but the "teabagging" rhetoric originated from conservatives and it underscored what passes for conservative rage - largely sarcastic, high schoolish namecalling, and little more. The "protests" were full of this kind of snark, and the failure to focus the protests - on an idea, a specific outrage... anything, really, will do - made them especially incoherent. And it made reacting them little more than, well, do you find the outrage bracing and perhaps amusing... or not. And really, the reactions - left and right - ran that gamut.
But how else could anyone respond? Various organizers and spokespeople - it's hard to be an organized movement when its leaders so assiduously insisted that, well, they weren't, you know, organized - offered explanations of the protests, but they were largely generic and vague. It was kind of about taxes, and the fear that Obama (oh wait - "Obama/Pelosi/Reid") would raise them. It was about excessive spending. It was about "sending a message" to the Republican Party, though the party itself seemed to want to protest... something, too.
Or you could follow Janeane Garofolo's tortured logic and insist, as some did, that all that was on display was Obama hatred, fueled by racism. Poor coverage and assessments of the protests abounded, really adding fuel to the outrage, as we yet again danced around the discussion of race we don't like to have. I'm not dismissing the reality that some people at the protests clearly don't like Obama, and his being black bothers them; but that kind of fringe element always shows up, and few protests tamp it down enough - which is why lefty protests at, say, the G20 also have issues - until someone declares the anarchists persona non grata, they'll have similar problems. The point, I think, is that a number of lefties, and news organizations, tried to hard to put their own interpretations onto the tea party events; and we'd have been better served listening to the outrage, and trying to sort it out, rather than leaping to instant, easy, opposite namecalling. Both sides could stand to raise the level of discourse.
Still, listening to the protests, agreeing to take them seriously, didn't yield much; the idea that the protests "sent a message to Republicans" didn't amount to much, unless the message was "please tell us what we want to hear, and don't challenge our carefully assembled assumptions." That, really, is how Rick Perry managed to perfectly make a fool of himself by suggesting "secession", while Michael Steele managed to humiliate himself some more by seeming desperate to latch the national party to the tea party rage. The "conservative movement" continues to lurch along, incoherently, unsure of how to proceed, and as long as they can make their contradictory impulses - angry, sarcastic versions of "hell no" joined to quixotic litmus tests of loyalty and true belief - into the driving impulses of the GOP, both will suffer.
No one, it seemed, could draw a line - almost any lefty longtime protest type can tell you that mass demonstrations will have the most impact when the goals are clear, the message specific and the requests for action concrete. Gay marriage protests have been effective for just this reason - we want a specific outcome, we know who we're trying to reach, and we know what we want done. Heck, even the Boston Tea Party - the presumed historic inspiration - was a specific protest (tea destruction) about a specific problem (a tax on tea) aimed at a specific audience (the government in England). This week's "Tea Parties" - with no clear message, no clear goals, and a poorly defined target - came off basically as scattershot and a little silly.
Making taxes and/or spending the "central" tea party issues just underlined that - with no budget or spending plan actually passed for this year, the protests were fighting shadows (and that's why "Pelosi/Obama/Reid" was little more than a wordy mouthful - the three individuals can't seem to say "same page" never mind find it) and arguing against things that haven't even happened yet. Tax policy questions were even worse - the protests gave Obama perfect cover to yet again push his own line about not raising any taxes, and with some serious economic conservatives suggesting that "tax fairness" would be reversing Bush policies that left most of us actually paying no taxes... all the internal tensions about taxes were really on the right.
It's not surprising, really, that conservatives are mistaking heat for light - in many ways, the right is following a learning curve the left worked through in the sixties and seventies, when protest movements went from serious, focused attempts at change to radical, incoherent cries for "revolution" and little more. A conservative movement actually engaging the issues of the day - economic policies aimed at the problems we actually have, taking on the hard questions about healthcare, and education and the environment - wouldn't need mass protests to get attention... and wouldn't mistake "attention" for serious debate.
The real "conservative revolution" - when and if it comes - will not be televised; it will be some serious thinkers, in a room, finally stepping up and getting serious, drawing some lines and saying "either you're in, or you're out," not to RINOs and "Dumbocrats", but to their own - the radio personalities and cheesy book authors and polemicists who make money off of feigned outrages, extremism and namecalling, taking their sarcastic snark all the way to the bank. And nowhere else. The people I feel sorriest for are the well intentioned ones who believe, in a sincere way, that there's a Tea Party movement and it can bring substantive change. Someone should tell them... honestly, someone should... that the real business of change is about hard, sustained work, incremental progress, and a willingness to accept that you may get some of what you want, but not all of it. That doesn't fit on a poster - or in a teabag... but at least it's more than a march down the Road to Nowhere.
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