Kate Zernike: Boiling Mad

Prologue (pp. 2-3):

There were two books every person int he room should read, Steinhauser said, repeating the titles twice, because most everyone was taking avid notes: Dedication and Leadership by Douglas Hyde and The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. The first, he explained, outlined how the Communist Party recruited in Great Britain, the second would help them understand the marketing of social phenomena -- sneakers, but also ideas. "If you read those two books and apply the lessons and tactics learned in those," Steinhauser said, "I think you're really going to help yourself and really become a true community organizer."

"Uh-oh," someone said loudly. Others groaned.

"Don't reject that label! Embrace that label!" Steinhauser insisted. "True community organizers are what this movement is all made of. We don't like that term because now we have a Community Organizer-in-Chief who got his lessons from Saul Alinsky. I say, let's read Saul Alinsky, let's read Rules for Radicals, and let's use it against them!"

(pp. 4-5):

Its critics dismissed the Tea Party as "Astroturf," looking like a grassroots movement but actually fake and manufactured by big interest groups. Puppets of the Republican Party, they said. [ . . . ]

Certainly the Tea Party had been fertilized by well-connected Washington groups like FreedomWorks, where Steinhauser worked, and also by Glenn Beck, the newest star at the Fox News Channel, who created his own brand of Tea Party by calling for his fans to join "9/12 groups," which were to return the country to the unity of purpose it felt in the days after the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. But even aside from these well-connected supporters, the Tea Party was an authentic popular movement, brought on by anger over the economy and distrust of government -- at all levels, and in both parties.

It certainly had its fringe elements: the birthers insisting that President Obama was a Kenyan-born Muslim infiltrator, the people carrying posters of Obama as a witch doctor, those who insisted the federal government was going to sequester its citizens in reeducation camps. As some Tea Partiers clamored for states' rights, it was impossible to ignore the echo of the southern segregationists from the 1950s and 1960s [ . . . ] Still, this fringe did not define the Tea Party.

(p. 10):

Tea Partiers tended to believe that they had done all the right things in life: they had gotten married and had children, they went to church once a month or more, they paid their taxes (and most said they thought what they paid was fair, according to the Times poll). They had earned their place in the middle class, and they were out to protect what they saw as theirs. They distrusted people they regarded as elites, most notably the Obama administration, which they believed was embracing policies that favored the poor. They believed that too much had been made of the problems facing blacks. And above all, they had a visceral belief that government had taken control of their lives -- and they wanted it back. Like many Americans, they had a strong faith in the autonomous individual. In the Pew survey, the public expressed its highest regard for small businesses and technology companies, the realm of the independent entrepreneur.

1. "This Is America!": Starts with Rick Santelli's rant offered as a creation story, then backs up for Keli Carender's prior protest movement in Seattle (pp. 23-24):

While Santelli's rant recalled the "I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore" scene from the 1976 film Network, it was Fox's new star, Glenn Beck, who would soon assume the mantle of the film's rogue anchorman, Howard Beale. He railed against the Obama administration's "czars" and "Marxists." And on March 13, two weeks after the first nationwide protests, he dedicated an hour-long special to the birth of what he called "The 9/12 Project," encouraging people in advance to gather their friends at viewing parties.

The show opened with Beck narrating a round-the-world tour of global horrors: Islamic extremism, kidnappings on the Mexican border, soaring unemployment, high corporate taxes, Somali pirates. Then he harked back to September 12, 2001, the day after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, when "for a short time we really promised ourselves that we would focus on the things that were important. Friends, family, the eternal principles that allowed America to become the beacon for the world." The country, he said, needed to get back to that sense of purpose and unity.

He urged people to start 9/12 groups, based on "nine founding principles and twelve eternal values and principles," he said. The principles had a churchy overlay; "America is good," the first, was followed by "God is good, and he is the center of my life." The values were hard to disagree with: honesty, moderation, personal responsibility.

Beck promoted what would soon become Tea Party themes: that Democrats and Republicans alike were to blame. That free markets just needed room to work. And that it was the American people, not the elites in Washington, who knew how to confront the crisis.

(pp. 27-28):

In Lansdale, Pennsylvania, sixty-six-year-old Diana Reimer and her husband, Don, had been trying to sell their house so they could pay off some debt and move back to south Philadelphia, where they had grown up and could be close to their son. But they soon discovered that they owed more than their house was worth. [ . . . ] Rick Santelli might have called the Reimers "losers"; they were the people Obama's mortgage assistance plan would have helped. But Diana had not seen the rant. It was not until several weeks later that she saw something about the Tea Parties on Fox.

"I said, 'That's it,'" she recalled. To her, joining up wasn't a political statement. "It was a point of frustration," she said. "How can you get this frustration out and have your voice heard? They were doing something to be visible, rather than sitting at home and looking at the TV." She went online and signed up to become the Philadelphia coordinator for Tax Day Tea Party.

"It all started with the TARP, then Mr. Obama gets in and he's 'fundamentally changing this country,' and he's changing it, all right," she said. "The bailouts, the banks, AIG, and you see all the money these people are making and then all their bonuses, I mean, that's kind of ridiculous, who needs that much money? I just want to be able to pay our bills and stay afloat."

She and Don were on Social Security and Medicare, and received health benefits through the military's Tricare, because he had been in the Navy. She feared President Obama's health care plan would cut their benefits. "Where is he going to get this money?" she asked. "If the government wants to take away that privilege of Tricare for life, they can do that. If they want to take away my husband's retirement, they can do that. But people don't realize those things."

2. "Hard work beats Daddy's money" (pp. 33-34):

FreedomWorks had been waiting for just this moment.

Since its founding in 1984, it had been trying to grow a grassroots movement that would make it more than just the well-connected Washington advocacy group it was, one that would produce a groundswell behind economic theories that rested lonely in academia. [ . . . ] It had even proposed the idea of a modern-day Boston Tea Party -- more than once. In 2002 it launched a website for the U.S. Tea Party: "Do you think our taxes are too high and our tax code too complicated? We do!" the site proclaimed, as "The Star-Spangled Banner" piped in the background. [ . . . ]

In 2003, the organization tried to raise its profile by bringing in Dick Armey as chairman. Armey, a former congressman from Texas and House majority leader, had been one of the leaders of the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994, and was a powerful voice in Washington in favor of lower taxes. But even he could not breathe life into the Tea Party metaphor. In 2007, he and the group's president, Matt Kibbe, wrote an op-ed article proposing the Boston Tea Party as a model of grassroots pressure on an overbearing central government.

(p. 35):

The group [FreedomWorks] had been founded under the name Citizens for a Sound Economy, which was underwritten by the Koch family, the owners of a Kansas-based manufacturing and investment conglomerate that had supported many libertarian causes and think tanks like the Cato Institute. Citizens for a Sound Economy advocated a flat tax, and fought against ideas it considered big-government sins, like the Clinton administration's health care proposals in the 1990s and various proposals for a carbon tax to address global warming.

(pp. 38-39):

Fleshing out the FreedomWorks philosophy was the reading list Kibbe assigned every employee. Some of the books might be common at any corporate retreat: Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point and The Starfish and the Spider by Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom, which describes the power of organizations that are built around an idea rather than a leader. Others were more political: Frederic Bastiat's The Law, a slim volume arguing against government spending on welfare, infrastructure, or public education ("eighty-eight pages of brilliance," Brendan Steinhauser, the group's director of campaigns, hailed it), and Douglas Hyde's Dedication and Leadership, lessons from the Communist Party on the power of indoctrination. And the reading list included three bibles of social activism: Rules for Radicals and Reveille for Radicals by Saul Alinsky, the founder of modern community organizing and a hero of the left, and A Force More Powerful by Peter Ackerman and Jack Duvall, about the history of nonviolent social movements in the twentieth century.

Staff members dropped references from these books into casual conversation. And they quoted any number of Armey's axioms: "Freedom works," of course, was a favorite, but they liked others, too: "Hard work beats Daddy's money" or "Government goes to those who show up."

3. "Get off our backs, damn it!" (pp. 53-54):

Some observers compared the Tea Partiers to the supporters of Ross Perot and his Reform Party in the 1990s; like the Tea Partiers, they were relatively well-off yet pessimistic about the country, and they had a devotion to their cause that at the margins could follow a conspiracy over a cliff. But the Tea Partiers had little interest in forming a third political party. And while Perot and his followers aimed to get special interests out of government, the Tea Partiers didn't care much about reform -- they just wanted government out of their hair.

Though the Tea Partiers were often called populists, they were not populists in the traditional sense -- that is, those who promoted social reforms and directed their anger at big banks and railroads. However much it might have made sense to blame Wall Street for the financial meltdown in 2008, the Tea Partiers were more inclined to blame Congress. Still, as the historian Michael Kazin argued in his 1995 book, The Populist Persuasion, all populist movements,left and right, throughout American history, have shared a basic grammar and common themes. They championed "Americanism," the sense that the country is an ideology more than just a place on the map, one that treasures above all the will of the people. "This was the creed for which independence had been won and that all genuine patriots would fight to preserve," Kazin wrote. They valued a producer ethic, a belief that the people who did the real work -- fought the wars, paid the taxes -- were the true Americans. They believed that this justified them in being scornful of the undisciplined beneath them and the elites above them. And they viewed themselves as being on a crusade -- saving the nation, restoring the "real" America.

(p. 61):

In an essay in the New York Review of Books published in May 2010, Mark Lilla, a Columbia University historian of intellectual movements, argued that the plummeting of trust in government and other institutions had coincided with a rise in the belief that individuals could do things better themselves. People didn't so much have a political grievance; they were simply tired of being told what to do. While historically, populist movements had seized political power for the people, the Tea Party movement wanted simply to neutralize government power. [ . . . ] He [Lilla] called it "the libertarian mob," or the antipolitical Jacobins, drawing on the name of the French revolutionaries of the 1790s.

"The new Jacobins," Lilla wrote, "have two classic American traits that have grown much more pronounced in recent decades: blanket distrust of institutions and an astonishing -- and unwarranted -- confidence in the self. They are apocalyptic pessimists about public life and childlike optimists swaddled in self-esteem when it comes to their own powers.

4. "We look at the original, primary source" (pp. 68-69):

For more than two centuries, activists on either side of any number of issues have held up the Constitution to prove the righteousness of their cause. Civil rights demonstrators appealed to its provisions on equal protection; opponents pointed to its provisions on states' rights. But while conservatives and originalist legal scholars tended to argue against judges "legislating from the bench," the Tea Partiers were more focused on what they saw as abused by Congress. [ . . . ]

Nowhere in the Constitution, they argued, had Congress been given power to establish the Federal Reserve or any kind of central bank. It had no business establishing Social Security, or federal policy on education, energy, housing, labor -- the list could go on, but they definitely believed that Congress had no role in regulating or mandating health care. Some resurrected decades-old arguments that the Sixteenth Amendment, which in 1913 allowed a progressive income tax, should not have been ratified because it violated the original Constitution -- in the original, Congress could not levy a tax on the several states unless it was strictly "in proportion to the census or enumeration."

(p. 72):

This kind of purist wanted to refight the two most important judicial wars in constitutional history, which had combined to move the country away from its founding-era view of the federal government. The first began with the Civil War and Reconstruction, when the states had become the tyrannical threat to individual liberty, and extended through the civil rights era of the 1960s. The Civil War and the three amendments passed in its aftermath -- the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth -- established that when push came to shove, it was up to the federal government to protect the rights of citizens by imposing national values on dissenting states. It was through this revolution that the Constitution would come to acknowledge and protect the rights of blacks in the Jim Crow South. The second great constitutional revolution was instigated by the New Deal, when the Supreme Court's ultimate settlement gave the federal government expansive power over the national economy, which was broadly construed over time to encompass the environment, crime, education, and more.

These wars had been fought and won, and most people had moved on. To talk about states' rights in the way some Tea Partiers did was to pretend that the twentieth century and the latter half of the nineteenth century had never happened, that the country had not rejected this doctrine over and over. It was little wonder that people heard this echo of the slave era and decided that the movement had to be motivated by racism.

A section here on W. Cleon Skousen's 1981 book, The 5000 Year Leap, promoted by Glenn Beck; follows with Beck's books, and Mark Levin; Tom Grimes studied these books (pp. 78-79):

Grimes had lost his job as a stockbroker in January 2009, and he complained that Obama's economic policies had aggravated the recession. "Keynesian economics was proven not to work well in the '30s," he said. "The only reason we pulled out of the Great Depression was the war. All the other countries in Europe had depressions around the same time, but theirs was called a depression, ours was called the Great Depression because FDR tried to spend his way out of the problem and it just doesn't work. You can't spend your way out of a recession. You have to cut taxes, cut expenses in the government and let the market go free and wild."

He had been on Medicare and Social Security since he was laid off. But he said he could do without those government programs. "If you quit giving people that stuff, they would figure out how to do it on their own," he said. "People would overcome it. It's the economic engine."

5. "Huzzah!" (p. 82):

Everything worked for the Tea Party in Scott Brown's victory on January 19, 2010. It was a symbolic win, filling the seat long held by the Senate's liberal lion, Ted Kennedy, with a Republican who declared it "the people's seat." Brown's election seemed certain to block the health care reform legislation the Tea Partiers so fervently opposed. It convinced people who had dismissed the Tea Party as a passing political fad that the grassroots rebellion would have real force in the midterm elections the following fall. And it convinced the Tea Partiers themselves that with enough determination, they could win any seat they sought. Hard work beats Daddy's money.

(p. 84):

In seething confrontations, Tea Partiers accused lawmakers of promoting socialism, trampling on the Constitution, and trying to kill elderly people. "One day," a man in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, told Senator Arlen Specter, a moderate Republican who had switched to the Democratic Party that spring to avoid a conservative primary challenger, "God is going to stand before you, and he's going to judge you!"

6. "We've kind of changed the rules": on Jennifer Stefano, campaigning to take over the Republican Party in Pennsylvania (pp. 104-105):

But under the radar, the Tea Partiers had figured out that if they wanted to stop the Republican Party from backing candidates like Dede Scozzafava or Charlie Crist, the long-term solution was to install true conservatives in party offices. So across the country they were doing the same thing Jennifer Stefano was doing in Bucks County, recruiting Tea Party people to fill the lowest-level posts in the hope that they could take over the party from the ground up.

(p. 107):

But in places like Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where Jennifer Stefanop was trying to engineer a takeover, the committee positions tended to be occupied, so it was more of a fight. Some establishment Republicans did not want to relinquish control. Others worried about letting conservatives pull the party to the right when the conventional wisdom about winning elections is that candidates have to appeal to the middle.

Tea Partiers argued instead that the Republicans had to stand for something.

"We're not just against something, the men and women I speak to, it's not just 'Obama, yuck,'" Stefano said. "We're not gun-toting religious nut-job racists. We're well informed, well educated. We just want to set the course. We want to go back to the fundamentals of what the Republicans stand for: small government, strong national defense, and strong foreign policy."

Katy Suntato (p. 85):

She had been a Democrat for thirty years, then an independent, and she had registered as a Republican just before the cutoff date to run for the committee position, having heard about it at a Thomas Jefferson Club event. "I'm all about government having no debt," she said. "It doesn't matter whether they call themselves a Tea Party. What is a Tea Party, really? Anyone that's mad."

7. "It's a mission" (p. 124):

To its activists, the Tea Party movement quickly became something more than protest. It was more like a religion. It had given them a community, and it had given them a cause, which they embraced like a crusade.

The language and the symbols of the movement helped encourage that sense of mission, the feeling that they were the true patriots. But for many people, there was enough appeal in simply having that community, a place to get out their frustrations. Outsiders who underestimated the movement failed to appreciate how much it had come to mean to those involved.

When the Sam Adams Alliance, a Chicago group supportive of the Tea Parties, conducted interviews with fifty leaders of Tea Party groups to determine their motivation, their respondents cited the most rewarding aspects of the Tea Party work as the "friendship" and the "fellowship." One woman said she got "addicted to the emotional high"; another said participating made her feel "less lonely" and that her voice was heard. A man explained that it was "one aspect of my life I can control."

(pp. 125-126):

These were troops with a keen nose for the enemy. They believed that if anyone was guilty of Astroturf organizing, it was their opponents on the left, with the labor unions busing in protesters to rally for health care legislation, and they insisted that the most outrageous Tea Party signs were actually sent in by the left to make the Tea Party look bad. [ . . . ]

They believed unquestioningly that they were the nation's true silent majority: in the New York Times/CBS News poll, 84 percent of Tea Party supporters said that the movement reflected the views of most Americans, while only 25 percent of the general public said the same. Most of them said they were more likely to trust information from fellow supporters than they were what they heard on television of read in newspapers.

In that echo chamber, the Tea Partiers quickly went from feeling ignored to feeling persecuted.

FreedomWorks distributed packets with tips for lobbying against the health care reform bill, including "always be polite" (p. 138):

Given the emotions that had been building, it was inevitable that this last admonition would be ignored. Glenn Beck was comparing the health care legislation to Pearl Harbor or the Civil War. John Boehner, the House Republican minority leader, warned of "Armageddon" if the bill passed. After the vote was announced, Representative Steve King rallied Tea Partiers outside the Capitol. "Let's beat the other side to a pulp!" he shouted. "Let's chase them down! There's going to be a reckoning!"

8. "We've been a little bit too nice": on the campaign trail in Nevada (Sharon Angle) and Kentucky (Rand Paul)

9. "I have a message, a message from the Tea Party": the Rand Paul senate campaign in Kentucky (p. 167):

Ron Paul supporters had already invoked the memory of the Boston Tea Party in December 2007, organizing a "moneybomb" for his campaign on the anniversary of the original 1773 uprising. The idea was to solicit small donations that would accumulate and explode into one big donation that day. It worked: the campaign took in nearly $6 million. But in the actual race for delgates in 2008, Paul's campaign never took off, and he returned to Capitol Hill, where he remained a quirky presence in Congress, voting against appropriations that he believed were not authorized by the Constitution: Medicare and Medicaid, relief for Hurricane Katrina victims, a congressional gold medal for Ronald Reagan.

(pp. 177-178):

Rand Paul had won [the Republican senate primary in Kentucky] by twenty four percentage points. [ . . . ] Sarah Palin called Paul as soon as the results were in, followed by Mitt Romney. Finally, Paul came out to the booming sounds of the Rush lyric and the cheers of the crowd. He paid tribute to his wife, his sons, his siblings, his parents, his staff, and mostly, the movement that had propelled him.

"I have a message, a message from the Tea Party," he proclaimed. "We have come to take our government back. . . . We are encountering a day of reckoning and this movement, this Tea Party movement is a message to Washington that we're unhappy and that we want things done differently. The Tea Party movement is huge. The mandate of our victory tonight is huge. What you have done and what we are doing can transform America."

As Rand Paul departed the stage, supporters and reporters mobbed Ron Paul. Supporters asked for autographs, and congratulated him as the one truly responsible for the victory that night. "What you did for Rand is what Barry Goldwater did for Ronald Reagan," one gushed.

The success of the son's campaign, the elder Paul told reporters, showed that Americans were finally catching on to Austrian economics. He had noticed it in 2007, that college students started nodding their heads when he mentioned von Mises and Hayek -- ideas he had been talking about for forty years. Now, he said, the word was spreading, and politicians would have to pay attention. "And get rid of the power people," he said, "the people who runt he show, the people who think they're above everybody else. That's what the people are sick and tired of, that's the message."

Epilogue (pp. 183-185):

On May 18, as the Republican establishment was turning on a dime to congratulate Rand Paul on his win in Kentucky, the Republican Party in Pennsylvania was threatening to have Jennifer Stefano arrested. [ . . . ]

When they arrived, the ten Tea Party candidates for the state committee found constables there to seize the sample ballots and instruct them to leave. "They're going to pull me out of here in shackles seven months pregnant!" Stefano reported from her polling place. "I feel like Abbie Hoffman!"

For all that the Tea Party movement had borrowed from the left, the notion of this blonde suburban wife as the long-haired sixties radical was comical. Stefano, however, was not laughing. [ . . . ]

"I mean, I expected to get thugged up and intimidated at the polls by the Democrats, but by the Republicans?" Stefano said later. "Unconscionable. I think the GOP is happy to pat us on the head and say 'What good little protesters you are! Go out and cause problems for the Democrats.' But when we finally want to have a say about the direction of the party, the GOP did not and does not want us involved."

Pat Poprik, the chairwoman of the Bucks County Republican Party, said she found it unseemly for the Tea Partiers to try to buck the endorsed candidates. "This is a party office. This is not a public office. This is our election," she told the local paper. "It is highly unusual for people who have never done a thing for the party to run for state committee."

Appendix: New York Times/CBS News Poll of Tea Party Supporters: from April, 2010; this sets the percentage of Tea Party supporters at 18%, and shows how that 18% differs wildly from the overall population. Some views are evenly distributed, but the more personally an issue is identified with Obama, the more extreme the Tea Partiers. Tea Partiers are almost all white, more evangelical, more gun crazy, less unemployed but much more likely to be retired (32 to 18%); they have more education (leading college graduates/post-graduate work 37% to 25%); they make more money, although their edge over $250k is only 12% to 11%; big edge in males too (59% to 49%).

posted 2012-08-12