The Tea Party and the Politics of Amnesia

By Colman McCarthy

It’s nothing personal, the Teabagger told his congressman: you’re an incumbent and it’s time for the whole bunch of you to go.

The exchange, cited to me by a liberal fifth term New England Democrat who had no opposition his last three elections, might not have been personal but it was painful. The congressman had spent a full half-hour one-on-one with his constituent, patiently explaining his positions. The voter agreed with all of them and was grateful for the congressman’s service. But come the next election, he would be backing someone else. He didn’t know who, only that it wouldn’t be the congressman who just gave 30 minutes of his uninterrupted attention.

As far as can be figured, amid the murky simplicities of Sarah Palin and the loopy duplicities of Rand Paul, we are moving into a season of oppositional politics promoted by the Tea Party movement and its bellows for limited government and lower taxes.

To start with limited government, the country has just been graced with a stunning display of it: the BP underwater gusher in the Gulf of Mexico. The limits of governmental power meant that BP was not only unrestrained in taking drilling risks but was plying federal inspectors with gifts that included hunting and fishing trips, football tickets meals. The government that was once an irksome Big Brother was now a chummy Big Daddy. Corporate-friendly policies begun under the 16 years of the Clinton and Bush presidencies continued into Barak Obama’s, leading him to admit the obvious a month after the Gulf blowout: “The oil industry’s cozy and sometimes corrupt relationship with government regulators meant little or no regulation at all.”

Nodding agreement was Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who ran for office demanding limited government but who now wants unlimited supplies of federal cash, services and equipment to rescue his state. His double-standard message to Washington: in good times, stay away. In bad times, y’all hurry down.

Tea Party bellyaching about taxes reveals a startling disconnection from reality. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development reports what is widely known: Americans work in one of the world’s tax-friendliest nations. Recent data show a tax rate of 11 percent for a couple with two children. In France, it’s 41 percent. Italy and Germany 35 percent, Canada 21 percent. Some 150 countries impose a national sales tax. The United States does not. The Palinized Right has mouthfuls to say about the tax policies of Big Government but not much about the tax avoidances of Big Business. The Government Accountability Office reported that from 1998 to 2005, two thirds of American corporations, with collective sales totaling $2.5 trillion, paid no taxes.

We want our country back, say the Partiers. But who took it? Those Socialists who’ve replaced Communists under every bed? Hollywood liberals? Scoffers of Joe the Plumber? The Tea Party label provides an answer. Those behind the original Tea Party of 1776 took up violence to create a country that gave no rights to racial minorities, women or the propertyless, no place for public education or collective bargaining and no status for exploited children.

Sarah and Rand, plus the disciples of Rush, Glenn and similar entertainers, want back an America that was transformed by troublemakers who labored for universal suffrage, the end of slavery, workers’ rights, public schools and public parklands, and who sided with Frederick Douglas, Eugene Debs, Norman Thomas, Jeannette Rankin, Jane Addams, Emma Goldman, Robert La Follette, Dorothy Day, Emily Balch, Martin Luther King, Jr., Harvey Milk, Howard Zinn and a long list of democratizers who stayed unbent or unbowed.

If the Tea Party wants its country back, it had a chance with Sarah Palin. Instead of quitting as the governor of Alaska and seeking self-enrichment from books sales and speeches, she could have stayed in office and worked to get her state to secede from the Union. After that, close the north country borders to blacks, feminists, pacifists, vegans, unions, the Greens, caribou and wolf lovers, and sightseers looking through binoculars at Russia and its Socialists.