Those of us who might have expected Paul's purist followers to
abandon him in droves have been disappointed; Paul is now the clear
favorite to win in November.
That's because the Tea Party doesn't really care about issues — it's
about something deep down and psychological, something that can't be
answered by political compromise or fundamental changes in policy. At
root, the Tea Party is nothing more than a them-versus-us thing. They
know who they are, and they know who we are ("radical leftists" is the
term they prefer), and they're coming for us on Election Day, no matter
what we do — and, it would seem, no matter what their own leaders like
Rand Paul do.
In the Tea Party narrative, victory at the polls means a new American
revolution, one that will "take our country back" from everyone they
disapprove of. But what they don't realize is, there's a catch: This is
America, and we have an entrenched oligarchical system in place that
insulates us all from any meaningful political change. The Tea Party
today is being pitched in the media as this great threat to the GOP; in
reality, the Tea Party
the GOP. What few elements of the
movement aren't yet under the control of the Republican Party soon will
be, and even if a few genuine Tea Party candidates sneak through, it's
only a matter of time before the uprising as a whole gets castrated,
just like every grass-roots movement does in this country. Its leaders
will be bought off and sucked into the two-party bureaucracy, where its
platform will be whittled down until the only things left are those that
the GOP's campaign contributors want anyway: top-bracket tax breaks,
free trade and financial deregulation.
The rest of it — the sweeping cuts to federal spending, the clampdown on bailouts, the rollback of
— will die on the vine as one Tea Party leader after another gets
seduced by the Republican Party and retrained for the revolutionary
cause of voting down taxes for Goldman Sachs executives. It's all on
display here in Kentucky, the unofficial capital of the Tea Party
movement, where, ha, ha, the joke turns out to be on them: Rand Paul,
their hero, is a fake.
he original Tea Party
was launched by a real opponent of the political establishment — Rand
Paul's father, Ron, whose grass-roots rallies for his 2008 presidential
run were called by that name. The elder Paul will object to this
characterization, but what he represents is something of a sacred role
in American culture: the principled crackpot. He's a libertarian, but he
means it. Sure, he takes typical, if exaggerated, Republican stances
against taxes and regulation, but he also opposes federal drug laws
("The War on Drugs is totally out of control" and "All drugs should be
decriminalized"), Bush's interventionist wars in the Middle East ("We
cannot spread our greatness and our goodness through the barrel of a
gun") and the Patriot Act; he even called for legalized prostitution and
online gambling.
Paul had a surprisingly good showing as a fringe candidate in 2008,
and he may run again, but he'll never get any further than the million
primary votes he got last time for one simple reason, which happens to
be the same reason many campaign-trail reporters like me liked him: He's
honest. An anti- war, pro-legalization Republican won't ever play in
Peoria, which is why in 2008 Paul's supporters were literally outside
the tent at most GOP events, their candidate pissed on by a party
hierarchy that preferred Wall Street-friendly phonies like Mitt Romney
and John McCain. Paul returned the favor, blasting both parties as
indistinguishable "Republicrats" in his presciently titled book,
.
The pre-Obama "Tea Parties" were therefore peopled by young anti-war
types and libertarian intellectuals who were as turned off by George W.
Bush and Karl Rove as they were by liberals and Democrats.
The failure of the Republican Party to invite the elder Paul into the
tent of power did not mean, however, that it didn't see the utility of
borrowing his insurgent rhetoric and parts of his platform for Tea Party
2.0. This second-generation Tea Party came into being a month after
Barack Obama moved into the Oval Office, when CNBC windbag Rick Santelli
went on the air to denounce one of Obama's bailout programs and called
for "tea parties" to protest. The impetus for Santelli's rant wasn't the
billions in taxpayer money being spent to prop up the bad mortgage
debts and unsecured derivatives losses of irresponsible investors like
Goldman Sachs and AIG — massive government bailouts supported,
incidentally, by Sarah Palin and many other prominent Republicans. No,
what had Santelli all worked up was Obama's "Homeowner Affordability and
Stability Plan," a $75 billion program less than a hundredth the size
of all the bank bailouts. This was one of the few bailout programs
designed to directly benefit individual victims of the financial crisis;
the money went to homeowners, many of whom were minorities, who were
close to foreclosure. While the big bank bailouts may have been
incomprehensible to ordinary voters, here was something that Middle
America had no problem grasping: The financial crisis was caused by
those lazy minorities next door who bought houses they couldn't afford —
and now the government was going to bail them out.
"How many of you people want to pay your neighbor's mortgage that has
an extra bathroom and can't pay their bills? Raise your hand!" Santelli
roared in a broadcast from the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade.
Why, he later asked, doesn't America reward people who "carry the water
instead of drink the water?"
Suddenly, tens of thousands of Republicans who had been conspicuously
silent during George Bush's gargantuan spending on behalf of defense
contractors and hedge-fund gazillionaires showed up at Tea Party rallies
across the nation, declaring themselves fed up with wasteful government
spending. From the outset, the events were organized and financed by
the conservative wing of the Republican Party, which was quietly working
to co-opt the new movement and deploy it to the GOP's advantage. Taking
the lead was former House majority leader Dick Armey, who as chair of a
group called FreedomWorks helped coordinate Tea Party rallies across
the country. A succession of Republican Party insiders and money guys
make up the guts of FreedomWorks: Its key members include billionaire
turd Steve Forbes and former Republican National Committee senior
economist Matt Kibbe.
Prior to the Tea Party phenomenon, FreedomWorks was basically just an
AstroTurfing-lobbying outfit whose earlier work included taking money
from Verizon to oppose telecommunications regulation. Now the
organization's sights were set much higher: In the wake of a monstrous
economic crash caused by grotesque abuses in unregulated areas of the
financial-services industry, FreedomWorks — which took money from
companies like mortgage lender MetLife — had the opportunity to persuade
millions of ordinary Americans to take up arms against, among other
things, Wall Street reform.
Joining them in the fight was another group, Americans for
Prosperity, which was funded in part by the billionaire David Koch,
whose Koch Industries is the second-largest privately held company in
America. In addition to dealing in plastics, chemicals and petroleum,
Koch has direct interests in commodities trading and financial services.
He also has a major stake in pushing for deregulation, as his companies
have been fined multiple times by the government, including a 1999 case
in which Koch Industries was held to have stolen oil from federal
lands, lying about oil purchases some 24,000 times.
So how does a group of billionaire businessmen and corporations get a
bunch of broke Middle American white people to lobby for lower taxes
for the rich and deregulation of Wall Street? That turns out to be easy.
Beneath the surface, the Tea Party is little more than a weird and
disorderly mob, a federation of distinct and often competing strains of
conservatism that have been unable to coalesce around a leader of their
own choosing. Its rallies include not only hardcore libertarians left
over from the original Ron Paul "Tea Parties," but gun-rights advocates,
fundamentalist Christians, pseudomilitia types like the Oath Keepers (a
group of law- enforcement and military professionals who have vowed to
disobey "unconstitutional" orders) and mainstream Republicans who have
simply lost faith in their party. It's a mistake to cast the Tea Party
as anything like a unified, cohesive movement — which makes them easy
prey for the very people they should be aiming their pitchforks at. A
loose definition of the Tea Party might be millions of pissed-off white
people sent chasing after Mexicans on Medicaid by the handful of banks
and investment firms who advertise on Fox and CNBC.
The individuals in the Tea Party may come from very different walks
of life, but most of them have a few things in common. After nearly a
year of talking with Tea Party members from Nevada to New Jersey, I can
count on one hand the key elements I expect to hear in nearly every
interview. One: Every single one of them was that exceptional Republican
who
protest the spending in the Bush years, and not one of
them is the hypocrite who only took to the streets when a black
Democratic president launched an emergency stimulus program. ("Not me — I
was protesting!" is a common exclamation.) Two: Each and every one of
them is the only person in America who has ever read the Constitution or
watched
. (Here they have guidance from Armey,
who explains that the problem with "people who do not cherish America
the way we do" is that "they did not read the Federalist Papers.")
Three: They are all furious at the implication that race is a factor in
their political views — despite the fact that they blame the financial
crisis on poor black homeowners, spend months on end engrossed by
reports about how the New Black Panthers want to kill "cracker babies,"
support politicians who think the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was an
overreach of government power, tried to enact South African-style
immigration laws in Arizona and obsess over Charlie Rangel, ACORN and
Barack Obama's birth certificate. Four: In fact, some of their best
friends are black! (Reporters in Kentucky invented a game called "White
Male Liberty Patriot Bingo," checking off a box every time a Tea Partier
mentions a black friend.) And five: Everyone who disagrees with them is
a radical leftist who hates America.
It would be inaccurate to say the Tea Partiers are racists. What they
are, in truth, are narcissists. They're completely blind to how
offensive the very nature of their rhetoric is to the rest of the
country. I'm an ordinary middle-aged guy who pays taxes and lives in the
suburbs with his wife and dog — and I'm a radical communist? I don't
love my country? I'm a redcoat? Fuck you! These are the kinds of
thoughts that go through your head as you listen to Tea Partiers expound
at awesome length upon their cultural victimhood, surrounded as they
are by America-haters like you and me or, in the case of foreign-born
president Barack Obama, people who are literally not Americans in the
way they are.
It's not like the Tea Partiers hate black people. It's just that
they're shockingly willing to believe the appalling horseshit fantasy
about how white people in the age of Obama are some kind of oppressed
minority. That may not be racism, but it is incredibly,
earth-shatteringly stupid. I hear this theme over and over — as I do on a
recent trip to northern Kentucky, where I decide to stick on a Rand
Paul button and sit in on a Tea Party event at a local amusement park.
Before long, a group of about a half-dozen Tea Partiers begin
speculating about how Obamacare will force emergency-room doctors to
consult "death panels" that will evaluate your worth as a human being
before deciding to treat you.
"They're going to look at your age,
your vocation in life, your health, your income. . . ." says a guy
active in the Northern Kentucky Tea Party.
"Your race?" I ask.
"Probably," he says.
"White males need not apply," says another Tea Partier.
"Like everything else, the best thing you can do is be an illegal alien," says a third. "Then they won't ask you any questions."
An amazing number of Tea Partiers actually believe this stuff, and in
the past year or so a host of little-known politicians have scored
electoral upsets riding this kind of yahoo paranoia. Some are career
Republican politicians like Sharron Angle, the former Nevada
assemblywoman who seized on the Tea Party to win the GOP nomination to
challenge Harry Reid this fall. Others are opportunistic incumbents like
Jan Brewer, the Arizona governor who reversed a dip in the polls by
greenlighting laws to allow police to stop anyone in a Cypress Hill
T-shirt. And a few are newcomers like Joe Miller, the Alaska lawyer and
Sarah Palin favorite who whipped Republican lifer Lisa Murkowski in the
state's Senate primary. But the champion of champions has always been
Rand Paul, who as the son of the movement's would-be ideological founder
was poised to become the George W. Bush figure in the Tea Party
narrative, the inheritor of the divine calling.
Since Paul won the GOP
Primary in Kentucky, the Tea Party has entered a whole new phase of
self-deception. Now that a few of these so-called "outsider" politicians
have ridden voter anger to victories over entrenched incumbents, they
are being courted and turned by the very party insiders they once
campaigned against. It hasn't happened everywhere yet, and in some
states it may not happen at all; a few rogue politicians, like Christine
O'Donnell in Delaware, might still squeak into office over the protests
of the Republican establishment. But in Kentucky, home of the Chosen
One, the sellout came fast and hard.
Paul was transformed from insurgent outsider to establishment stooge
in the space of almost exactly one year, making a journey that with
eerie cinematic precision began and ended in the same place:
The Rachel Maddow Show.
When he first appeared on the air with the MSNBC leading lady and noted
Bible Belt Antichrist to announce his Senate candidacy in May 2009,
Paul came out blazing with an inclusive narrative that seemingly offered
a realistic alternative for political malcontents on both sides of the
aisle. He talked with pride about how his father's anti-war stance
attracted young voters (mentioning one Paul supporter in New Hampshire
who had "long hair and a lip ring"). Even the choice of Maddow as a
forum was clearly intended to signal that his campaign was an
anti-establishment, crossover effort. "Bringing our message to those who
do not yet align themselves as Republicans is precisely how we grow as a
party," Paul said, explaining the choice.
In the early days of his campaign, by virtually all accounts, Paul
was the real thing — expansive, willing to talk openly to anyone and
everyone, and totally unapologetic about his political views, which
ranged from bold and nuanced to flat-out batshit crazy. But he wasn't
going to change for anyone: For young Dr. Paul, as for his father, this
was more about message than victory; actually winning wasn't even on his
radar. "He used to talk about how he'd be lucky if he got 10 percent,"
recalls Josh Koch, a former campaign volunteer for Paul who has broken
with the candidate.
Before he entered the campaign, Paul had an extensive record of loony
comments, often made at his father's rallies, which, to put it
generously, were a haven for people gifted at the art of mining the
Internet for alternate theories of reality. In a faint echo of the
racially charged anti-immigrant paranoia that has become a trademark of
the Tea Party, both Paul and his father preached about the apocalyptic
arrival of a "10-lane colossus" NAFTA superhighway between the U.S. and
Mexico, which the elder Paul said would be the width of several football
fields and come complete with fiber-optic cable, railroads, and oil and
gas pipelines, all with the goal of forging a single American-Mexican
state. Young Paul stood with Dad on that one — after all, he had seen
Mexico's former president on YouTube talking about the Amero, a proposed
North American currency. "I guarantee you," he warned, "it's one of
their long-term goals to have one sort of borderless, mass continent."
And Paul's anti-interventionist, anti-war stance was so far out, it made
MoveOn look like a detachment of the Third Marines. "Our national
security," he declared in 2007, "is not threatened by Iran having one
nuclear weapon."
With views like these, Paul spent the early days of his campaign
looking for publicity anywhere he could get it. One of his early
appearances was on the online talk show of noted 9/11 Truth buffoon and
conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. The two men spent the broadcast
exchanging lunatic fantasies about shadowy government forces, with Paul
at one point insisting that should Obama's climate bill pass, "we will
have an army of armed EPA agents — thousands of them" who would raid
private homes to enforce energy-efficiency standards. Paul presented
himself as an ally to Jones in the fringe crusade against establishment
forces at the top of society, saying the leaders of the two parties
"don't believe in anything" and "get pushed around by the New World
Order types."
Unsurprisingly, the GOP froze Paul out, attempting to exclude him
from key party gatherings in Kentucky like the Fayette County Republican
Party Picnic and the Boone County Republican Party Christmas Gala. "We
had the entire Republican establishment of the state and the nation
against us," says David Adams, who mobilized the first Tea Party
meetings in Kentucky before serving as Paul's campaign manager during
the primaries.
The state's Republican establishment, it must be said, is among the
most odious in the nation. Its two senators — party kingmaker and Senate
minority leader Mitch McConnell and mentally disappearing ex-jock Jim
Bunning — collectively represent everything that most sane people
despise about the modern GOP. McConnell is the ultimate D.C. insider,
the kind of Republican even Republicans should wonder about, a man who
ranks among the top 10 senators when it comes to loading up on pork
spending. With his needle nose, pursed lips and prim reading glasses,
he's a proud wearer of the "I'm an intellectual, but I'm
also a
narrow-minded prick" look made famous by George Will; politically his
great passion is whoring for Wall Street, his most recent triumph coming
when he convinced Republican voters that a proposed $50 billion fund to
be collected from big banks was actually a
bailout of those
same banks. Bunning, meanwhile, goes with the "dumb and unashamed"
style; in more than a decade of service, his sole newsworthy
accomplishment came when he said his Italian-American opponent looked
like one of Saddam's sons.
Paul's animus toward the state's Republican overlords never seemed
greater than in August 2009, when McConnell decided to throw a fancy
fundraiser in Washington for the national GOP's preferred candidate,
Trey Grayson. Attended by 17 Republican senators who voted for the TARP
bailout, the event was dubbed the "Bailout Ball" by Paul's people. Paul
went a step further, pledging not to accept contributions from any
senator who voted to hand taxpayer money over to Wall Street. "A primary
focus of my campaign is that we need Republicans in office who will
have the courage to say no to federal bailouts of big business," he
declared.
The anti-establishment rhetoric was a big hit. Excluded from local
campaign events by the GOP, Paul took his act to the airwaves, doing
national TV appearances that sent his campaign soaring with Tea Party
voters. "We were being shut out of a lot of opportunities in the state,
so you go with what is available to you," says Adams. "And what was
available was television."
In the primary almost a year later, Paul stomped Grayson, sending
shock waves through the national party. The Republican candidate backed
by the party's Senate minority leader had just received an ass-whipping
by a Tea Party kook, a man who tried to excuse BP's greed-crazed fuck-up
in the Gulf on the grounds that "sometimes accidents happen." Paul
celebrated his big win by going back to where he'd begun his campaign,
The Rachel Maddow Show,
where he made a big show of joyously tearing off his pseudolibertarian
underpants for the whole world to see — and that's where everything
changed for him.
In their first interview, Maddow had softballed Paul
and played nice, treating him like what he was at the time — an
interesting fringe candidate with the potential to put a burr in Mitch
McConnell's ass. But now, Paul was a real threat to seize a seat in the
U.S. Senate, so Maddow took the gloves off and forced him to explain
some of his nuttier positions. Most memorably, she hounded him about his
belief that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was an overreach of government
power. The money exchange:
Maddow: Do you think that a private business has the right to say we don't serve black people?
Paul: Yeah. I'm not in favor of any discrimination
of any form. But what about freedom of speech? Should we limit speech
from people we find abhorrent? Should we limit racists from speaking?
Paul was pilloried as a racist in the national press. Within a day he
was completely reversing himself, telling CNN, "I think that there was
an overriding problem in the South so big that it did require federal
intervention in the Sixties." Meanwhile, he was sticking his foot in his
mouth on other issues, blasting the Americans With Disabilities Act and
denouncing Barack Obama's criticism of British disaster merchant BP as
"un-American."
Paul's libertarian coming-out party was such a catastrophe — the
three gaffes came within days of each other — that he immediately jumped
into the protective arms of Mitch McConnell and the Republican Party.
"I think he's said quite enough for the time being in terms of national
press coverage," McConnell said, explaining why Paul had been prevailed
upon by the party to cancel an appearance on
Meet the Press.
Some news outlets reported that Paul canceled the appearance after a
call from Karl Rove to Adams, who concedes that he did speak with Rove
around that time.
Soon after, McConnell threw yet another "Bailout Ball" fundraiser in Washington — only this time it was
for
Rand Paul. The candidate who just a year before had pledged not to
accept money from TARP supporters was now romping in bed with those same
politicians. When pressed for an explanation of Paul's about-face on
the bailouts, Adams offers an incredibly frank admission. "When he said
he would not take money from people who voted for the bank bailout, he
also said, in the same breath, that our first phone call after the
primary would be to Senator Mitch McConnell," says Adams. "Making fun of
the Bailout Ball was just for the primary."
With all the "just for the primary" stuff out of the way, Paul's
platform began to rapidly "evolve." Previously opposed to erecting a
fence on the Mexican border, Paul suddenly came out in favor of one. He
had been flatly opposed to all farm subsidies; faced with having to win a
general election in a state that receives more than $265 million a year
in subsidies, Paul reversed himself and explained that he was only
against subsidies to "dead farmers" and those earning more than
$2 million. Paul also went on the air with Fox News reptile Sean Hannity
and insisted that he differed significantly from the Libertarian Party,
now speaking more favorably about, among other things, judicious troop
deployments overseas.
Beyond that, Paul just flat-out stopped talking about his views —
particularly the ones that don't jibe with right-wing and Christian
crowds, like curtailing the federal prohibition on drugs. Who knows if
that had anything to do with hawkish Christian icon Sarah Palin agreeing
to headline fundraisers for Paul, but a huge chunk of the candidate's
libertarian ideals have taken a long vacation.
"When he was pulling no punches, when he was reciting his best stuff,
I felt like I knew him," says Koch, the former campaign volunteer who
now works with the Libertarian Party in Kentucky. "But now, with Mitch
McConnell and Karl Rove calling the shots, I feel like I don't know him
anymore."
Hardcore young libertarians like Koch — the kind of people who were
outside the tent during the elder Paul's presidential run in 2008 —
cared enough about the issues to jump off the younger Paul's bandwagon
when he cozied up to the Republican Party establishment. But it isn't
young intellectuals like Koch who will usher Paul into the U.S. Senate
in the general election; it's those huge crowds of pissed-off old people
who dig Sarah Palin and Fox News and call themselves Tea Partiers. And
those people really don't pay attention to specifics too much. Like
dogs, they listen to tone of voice and emotional attitude.Outside the Palin rally in September, I ask an elderly Rand supporter
named Blanche Phelps if she's concerned that her candidate is now
sucking up to the same Republican Party hacks he once campaigned
against. Is she bothered that he has changed his mind on bailouts and
abortion and American interventionism and a host of other issues?
Blanche shrugs. "Maybe," she suggests helpfully, "he got saved."
Buried deep in the anus of
the Bible Belt, in a little place called Petersburg, Kentucky, is one of
the world's most extraordinary tourist attractions: the Creation
Museum, a kind of natural-history museum for people who believe the
Earth is 6,000 years old. When you visit this impressively massive
monument to fundamentalist Christian thought, you get a mind-blowing
glimpse into the modern conservative worldview. One exhibit depicts a
half-naked Adam and Eve sitting in the bush, cheerfully keeping house
next to dinosaurs — which, according to creationist myth, not only lived
alongside humans but were peaceful vegetarians until Adam partook of
the forbidden fruit. It's hard to imagine a more telling demonstration
of this particular demographic's unmatched ability to believe just about
anything.
Even more disturbing is an exhibit designed to show how the world has
changed since the Scopes trial eradicated religion from popular
culture. Visitors to the museum enter a darkened urban scene full of
graffiti and garbage, and through a series of windows view video scenes
of families in a state of collapse. A teenager, rolling a giant doobie
as his God-fearing little brother looks on in horror, surfs porn on the
Web instead of reading the Bible. ("A Wide World of Women!" the older
brother chuckles.) A girl stares at her home pregnancy test and says
into the telephone, "My parents are not going to know!" As you go
farther into the exhibit, you find a wooden door, into which an eerie
inscription has been carved: "The World's Not Safe Anymore."
Staff members tell me Rand Paul recently visited the museum
after-hours. This means nothing in itself, of course, but it serves as
an interesting metaphor to explain Paul's success in Kentucky. The Tea
Party is many things at once, but one way or another, it almost always
comes back to a campaign against that unsafe urban hellscape of godless
liberalism we call our modern world. Paul's platform is ultimately about
turning back the clock, returning America to the moment of her
constitutional creation, when the federal bureaucracy was nonexistent
and men were free to roam the Midwestern plains strip-mining coal and
erecting office buildings without wheelchair access. Some people pick on
Paul for his humorously extreme back-to-Hobbesian-nature platform (a
Louisville teachers' union worker named Bill Allison follows Paul around
in a "NeanderPaul" cave-man costume shouting things like "Abolish all
laws!" and "BP just made mistakes!"), but it's clear when you talk to
Paul supporters that what they dig most is his implicit promise to turn
back time, an idea that in Kentucky has some fairly obvious
implications.
At a Paul fundraiser in northern Kentucky, I strike up a conversation
with one Lloyd Rogers, a retired judge in his 70s who is introducing
the candidate at the event. The old man is dressed in a baseball cap and
shirtsleeves.
Personalitywise, he's what you might call a pistol; one
of the first things he says to me is that people are always telling him
to keep his mouth shut, but he just can't. I ask him what he thinks
about Paul's position on the Civil Rights Act.
"Well, hell, if it's your restaurant, you're putting up the money,
you should be able to do what you want," says Rogers. "I tell you, every
time he says something like that, in Kentucky he goes up 20 points in
the polls. With Kentucky voters, it's not a problem."
In Lexington, I pose the same question to Mica Sims, a local Tea
Party organizer. "You as a private-property owner have the right to
refuse service for whatever reason you feel will better your business,"
she says, comparing the Civil Rights Act to onerous anti-smoking laws.
"If you're for small government, you're for small government."
You look into the eyes of these people when you talk to them and they
genuinely don't see what the problem is. It's no use explaining that
while nobody likes the idea of having to get the government to tell
restaurant owners how to act, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the tool
Americans were forced to use to end a monstrous system of apartheid that
for 100 years was the shame of the entire Western world. But all that
history is not real to Tea Partiers; what's real to them is the
implication in your question that they're racists, and to them
that
is the outrage, and it's an outrage that binds them together. They want
desperately to believe in the one-size-fits-all, no-government theology
of Rand Paul because it's so easy to understand. At times, their desire
to withdraw from the brutally complex global economic system that is an
irrevocable fact of our modern life and get back to a simpler world
that no longer exists is so intense, it breaks your heart.
At a restaurant in Lexington, I sit down with a Tea Party activist
named Frank Harris, with the aim of asking him what he thinks of Wall
Street reform. Harris is a bit of an unusual Tea Partier; he's a
pro-hemp, anti-war activist who supported Dennis Kucinich. Though he
admits he doesn't know very much about the causes of the crash, he
insists that financial reform isn't necessary because people like him
can always choose not to use banks, take out mortgages, have pensions or
even consume everyday products like gas and oil, whose prices are set
by the market.
"Really?" I ask. "You can choose not to use gas and oil?" My
awesomely fattening cheese-and-turkey dish called a "Hot Brown" is
beginning to congeal.
"You can if you want to," Harris says. "And you don't have to take out loans. You can save money and pay for things in cash."
"So instead of regulating banks," I ask, "your solution is saving money in cash?"
He shrugs. "I'm trying to avoid banks at every turn."
My head is starting to hurt. Arguments with Tea Partiers always end
up like football games in the year 1900 — everything on the ground, one
yard at a time.
My problem, Frank explains, is that I think I can prevent crime by
making things illegal. "You want a policeman standing over here so
someone doesn't come in here and mug you?" he says. "Because you're
going to have to pay for that policeman!"
"But," I say, confused, "we do pay for police."
"You're trying to make every situation 100 percent safe!" he shouts.
This, then, is the future of the Republican Party: Angry white voters
hovering over their cash-stuffed mattresses with their kerosene
lanterns, peering through the blinds at the oncoming hordes of suburban
soccer moms they've mistaken for death-panel bureaucrats bent on
exterminating anyone who isn't an illegal alien or a Kenyan
anti-colonialist.
The world is changing all around the Tea Party. The country is
becoming more black and more Hispanic by the day. The economy is
becoming more and more complex, access to capital for ordinary
individuals more and more remote, the ability to live simply and own a
business without worrying about Chinese labor or the depreciating dollar
vanished more or less for good. They want to pick up their ball and go
home, but they can't; thus, the difficulties and the rancor with those
of us who are resigned to life on this planet.
Of course, the fact that we're even sitting here two years after Bush
talking about a GOP comeback is a profound testament to two things:
One, the American voter's unmatched ability to forget what happened to
him 10 seconds ago, and two, the Republican Party's incredible
recuperative skill and bureaucratic ingenuity. This is a party that in
2008 was not just beaten but obliterated, with nearly every one of its
recognizable leaders reduced to historical-footnote status and pinned
with blame for some ghastly political catastrophe. There were literally
no healthy bodies left on the bench, but the Republicans managed to get
back in the game anyway by plucking an assortment of nativist freaks,
village idiots and Internet Hitlers out of thin air and training them
into a giant ball of incoherent resentment just in time for the 2010
midterms. They returned to prominence by outdoing Barack Obama at his
own game: turning out masses of energized and disciplined supporters on
the streets and overwhelming the ballot box with sheer enthusiasm.
The bad news is that the Tea Party's political outrage is being
appropriated, with thanks, by the Goldmans and the BPs of the world. The
good news, if you want to look at it that way, is that those interests
mostly have us by the balls anyway, no matter who wins on Election Day.
That's the reality; the rest of this is just noise. It's just that it's a
lot of noise, and there's no telling when it's ever going to end.
Posted: 02/28/2013 6:07 pm EST
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The Tea Party Leadership Fund announced on Wednesday that it was mounting an effort to bring West back into the political fold by showing support for the Republican firebrand, according to U.S. News & World Report. The group, which has contributed money to a variety of fringe conservative efforts, reportedly sent out a fundraising email to supporters along with a "Draft Allen West" petition.
The effort has backing from another group, the Revive America super PAC, which told U.S. News that West might actually be better suited for a White House run.
West conceded his race against Democratic newcomer Patrick Murphy in November, after close vote counts and allegations of botched electoral oversight prolonged the contest for weeks. Shortly thereafter, West received an invitation from the Georgia GOP to explore a political career in the state where he was born. West declined, choosing instead to pursue a career in conservative radio.
In a recent interview with former GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain, however, West didn't entirely rule out the idea of making another political run.
"If God wants me back on Capitol Hill or wherever, that will happen," West said. "I will always be ready to serve my country in whatever capacity that my fellow Americans would have me serve."