Timothy Rutton of the Los Angeles Times makes an astute observation.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s epoch-changing New Deal coalition survived only so long as its constituent groups agreed not to discuss the one difference between them they could not reconcile — race. When the civil rights movement made that silent, and shabby, accommodation impossible, the coalition shattered.
The tea party’s internal contradictions are so numerous, it’s difficult to see its coalition of discontent surviving a single Congress.
However, Rutton makes one important mistake. He notes the libertarian streak of the Tea Party movement, including their calls to shut down whole departments of government and to repeal amendments to the Constitution. But he takes that as a sign that social issues aren’t important to them.
The tea party has been the big beneficiary of this year’s stealth funding, and the movement’s unique character has helped push social issues off the table. Essentially, the tea party is a populist expression of deep anger at what is regarded as both the regular political parties’ mismanagement of the economy and anxiety over the consequences of that failure.
Social issues may not be what the Tea Party candidates are emphasizing in their campaigns, but Joe Miller, Sharron Angle, Ken Buck, and Christine O’Donnell all oppose abortion even in cases of rape and incest. They all oppose gay marriage or even civil unions. The first three on that list could very well be senators next year and serve for six years before they face the electorate again. They have counterparts running for House seats. And this is where the the GOP has the beginnings of an accommodation between the social conservatives and the libertarians. If they can agree to oppose reproductive choice, then their differences are small enough that they can get along.
Some libertarians might sneak in who question our foreign policies or the War on Drugs, and that could lead to some interesting cooperation with progressives. But the poisonous atmosphere created by a caucus with the following beliefs is going to make any kind of cooperation unlikely.
If you simply go down the list of tea party candidates for the House and Senate, you can find four who want to repeal either or both the 16th and 17th Amendments, which provide for a progressive income tax and popular election of U.S. senators. Eight want to abolish whole federal departments and agencies, including Energy, Education, the Internal Revenue Service, Commerce and Homeland Security. One wants an end to everything except the departments of State, Justice and the Treasury. Many of these tea-party-backed office-seekers urge privatization of Social Security and Medicare. In the Bay Area’s 11th Congressional District, the front-running Republican candidate has argued for the abolition of public education because it’s “socialistic.” At least three candidates are such programmatic libertarians that they’d really be more at home in that party.
On Friday, the New York Times reported that its pre-election analysis has 33 tea party-backed candidates running in congressional districts that are either leaning Republican or too close to call. Eight “stand a good or better chance of winning Senate seats,” the paper says.
While Rutten says that such a large caucus “may bring social issue tensions back to the fore,” he doesn’t examine that angle. The truth is that the Tea Party candidates’ positions on social issues are every bit as radical as their positions on the economy, the environment, immigration, race, and the federal government. The internal contradictions are less than they appear to be. But there is one problem that will put extreme tension on the GOP caucuses.
The Tea Party agenda is not popular. People want the federal government to do certain things, like provide funding for public education, and administer Social Security and Medicare, and enforce our civil rights laws, and protect our our environment and our food and medicine quality. When these folks get into office, they are going to knock heads with the Republicans who don’t want to eliminate the departments under their jurisdiction, and who don’t want to commit political suicide, and who don’t want to repeat the fiasco of the 1995 Government Shutdown. And then some time will go by, and these Tea Partiers will realize that they won’t get reelected if they privatize Social Security or they continue to oppose abortion in all cases. So, the problem isn’t really about keeping a coalition together. The problem is that you can’t run an institution (the federal government) that you don’t believe should do anything when that is a politically untenable position. They are going to think ‘the people sent us here to trash the place,” but they’ll be wrong. The people just got apathetic and didn’t take care to really think about the consequences of putting nutjobs in Congress.
