Rebels Without a Cause

The Founding Fathers would have been in for a shock had they seen Boston Common on April 15. Over 500 protesters wielding teabags and standards decrying taxes, spending, socialism, and fascism congregated in one of the more than 750 “tea parties” the nation witnessed that day. National estimates for the number of participants range in the hundreds of thousands.

Tea-party enthusiasts claim that the tea parties were supposedly a spontaneous, nonpartisan, grassroots movement fashioned after the Boston Tea Party of Dec. 16, 1773, when disgruntled colonists tossed tea into Boston Harbor to protest taxation without representation. The only problem is that the tea parties of Tax Day 2009 were neither spontaneous nor, in fact, very much related to the original tea party.

If you were watching the media’s coverage of the tea parties, chances are that you were watching Fox News, as not only was Fox the only network providing full-day coverage of the events, but it was also spending the weeks prior actively promoting and advertising the tea parties under the label “FNC Tax Day Tea Parties.” Of course, it is difficult to claim to be reporting rather than participating when such Fox celebrity anchors as Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, and Neil Cavuto were hosting events that day—Hannity’s rally in Atlanta being the largest recorded draw in the country with a 15,000-member crowd.

Hannity, Beck, and Cavuto were not the only high-profile participants at the tea parties; speakers included such partisan figures as former Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner, Republican Louisiana Senator David Vitter, Republican Texas Governor Rick Perry, and former Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey. FreedomWorks, a group founded by Armey, was one of the largest sponsors of the day’s events.

However, the greater existential question for these spontaneous tea parties than the legitimacy of their spontaneity is the legitimacy of their claim to the title “tea party,” for it is not entirely clear what the protesters were protesting.

One candidate is taxes. Even if one were to ignore the fact that President Obama’s stimulus bill cut taxes for 95 percent of Americans in one of the largest tax cuts in American history, it is not apt to declare the current situation a throwback to the Hanoverians. Rather, what the protesters are experiencing might be called taxation “with” representation. However, to claim that one is not being represented because one does not approve of the actions of a government endorsed by the majority of the electorate is to protest democracy itself.

The other main candidate is spending. However, if the protesters were protesting Obama’s profligate spending, then what connection is there to the Boston Tea Party at all? Furthermore, according to Karl Rove, “If [the tea party movement] has a father it is CNBC’s Rick Santelli, who called for holding a tea party in Chicago on July 4.” Yet Santelli was condemning homeowner bailouts—neither direct taxes nor spending.

The protests’ muddled message diluted their efficacy and enhanced the perception that the movement was more a tantrum thrown by a disgruntled conservative base than a national uprising against federal excess. The confusion was further exacerbated by the ubiquity of hyperbole and innuendo.

As discordant as simultaneous accusations of communism and fascism are, both were featured in abundance with placards blaring “D.C.: District of Communism” and “Barack Hussein Obama: The New Face of Hitler.” In addition to denouncing the perceived threats of communism and fascism were warnings against one world government and Islamophobic innuendo reminiscent of the 2008 presidential election.

This breed of hysteria is in turn reminiscent of the “Bush is Hitler” excesses of the antiwar left that the right so decried when President Bush was in power. It further marginalizes an out-of-favor but legitimate political paradigm whose contributions to the political debate are necessary for the health of our public discourse. By engaging in such puerile antics, the tea partiers only perpetuate the perception of their intellectual bankruptcy.