In my state, New York, thanks to the Tea Party favorite, Carl Paladino, Andrew Cuomo’s election as Governor was never in doubt.   In Delaware, thanks to Christine O’Donnell, Chris Coons easily became Senator, when it seemed that he was likely to lose against a mainstream Republican.  In Nevada, the Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who started and finished with low approval ratings, managed to be reelected, thanks to the Tea Party candidate, Sharron Angle.  On the other hand, Marco Rubio in Florida, Ron Johnson in Wisconsin and Rand Paul in Kentucky each impressively were elected to the Senate, assuring that there will be a discernable taste of tea in that great deliberative body.

As Paul put it,

“They say that the U.S. Senate is the world’s most deliberative body. Well, I’m going to ask them, respectfully, to deliberate upon this. Eleven percent of the people approve of what’s going on in Congress. But tonight there is a Tea Party tidal wave and we’re sending a message to ’em.

It’s a message that I will carry with them on Day One. It’s a message of fiscal sanity It’s a message of limited, limited constitutional government and balanced budgets.” (link)

The language is ugly, but clear.  The political discourse of the Senate is about to be challenged, and this is the body where the Republicans are in the minority.  It will be even louder and clearer in the House, which I admit I find pretty depressing, both from the political and the aesthetic point of view.  It’s going to be harder to actually deal with our pressing problems, and it’s not going to be pretty.

Indeed, it is in spheres of aesthetics and discourse that the Tea Party has been most successful.  It’s not a matter actually of how many races Tea Party politicians won or lost.  They won some and lost some, but from the beginning the Tea Party’s great success has been how it changed the public discussion about the pressing issues of the day.  In my next post, I will discuss this more fully, comparing the Tea Party with the Solidarity Movement in Poland, on the one hand, and the anti-war movement, the Dean campaign and the Obama campaign, on the other.

Response to replies

But before I close today, I’ll add a few words on the responses to my posts on the elections.  To date, most of the people sending in replies appear to share sympathy for the Democrats and a critical attitude towards the Republicans, with one exception.  I welcome differences of opinion and thank all the repliers for their contribution to deliberate considerations.  I am not surprised by the general commitments of the people replying.  I actually think it is important to breakout of partisan ghettos, but know that they exist.  I need to take seriously someone who does breakout, so first a respectful, and I hope not overly defensive, response to Billy.

He criticized me for the title, “The Results Were Expected.”  I agree it wasn’t the best choice. I was writing very quickly on the night of the elections and the next morning, and also involved with my teaching.  The line was actually my first sentence and I didn’t have time to formulate a fresh title, so I just moved it up.  Billy construed the passive voice as an attempt on my part to deflect the responsibility of any one party for the results, in a sense discounting the voting on Election Day for having any meaning that needed to be confronted.  Somehow the word liar came into his formulation, but I didn’t understand that.  But he did pose a serious question: “Does that mean that there was no point in voting?”  Perhaps if he read only the title his would be a significant criticism, but given what I wrote in the post and in the one preceding and following it, clearly it is not what I mean, even if the title was unfortunate.

On great and small politics, Billy wonders why I think that the Republican Party’s small as opposed to great ends are in tension, and he seems to accuse me of crass partisanship in this regard.  But my point is simple, and not just about tax cuts.  In principle, the Tea Party, and its faction of the Republican Party, are for small government, going as far as to suggest that the Constitution does not permit health care reform.  But the Constitutional argument of limited government against health care should also be applied, in principle, to Social Security, Medicare, and, slightly off point, to the provisions controlling private business discrimination against African Americans in the civil rights legislation.  With such a commitment to private freedom, we could indeed responsibly have the sorts of tax cuts the Tea Party imagines, and there would be no tension between Republican Party politics, great and small.  But clearly this will not happen.  Short of doing such things, all the Republican talk about seriously balancing the budget is empty.  And Barack Obama, Abraham Lincoln and I all agree with Billy that people have a right to what they have earned, but that commitment doesn’t mean that we also don’t have a responsibility to contribute to the public well being, including the public’s health.

I agree with Scott: the idea that the wealthy are the only ones who contribute to the public good and economic growth is about as convincing as Marx’s  “labor theory of value.”  It is an ideological declaration, nothing more.  I am still looking for a responsible conservative, though.

As far as Boehner’s tears, mentioned by Eric, Alex and Iris, I don’t know what to make of them, particularly as a person who has delivered newspapers, swept sidewalks, waited on tables, cleaned public toilets and worked as a stock boy to pay for my studies.  I see that work as a simple fact of life, not something to get all sentimental about.  And on Iris’s point about independents, I too find them a puzzle, probably because I think a lot about general principles and not about small politics, more about that later.  As Michael Correy writes, the issue of how small and great politics are matched is a serious challenge and should have appeal beyond the partisan to the independent, involving very serious thought and practical action.  I am a Democrat and a strong supporter of Obama because I think he and the leadership of his party are the ones who are trying to do this.

I particularly appreciated Silke Steinhilber in her response to Congressman Boehner silly remarks about the health care law. Not only because I agree with her, but also because she draws the analogy to the German situation in a telling fashion.  We live in the world where mindless fiscal hawks have run wild.  They are not only taking public goods away from us and our children, but what they are doing makes no economic sense.  We have to control deficits in the long run, but public spending is a way of getting out of recessions.  And crucially such spending also contributes to private good, as Ms. Steinhilber and her daughter understand at their playground.

I am quite ambivalent about the Tea Party.  While I am appalled by some of the slogans and signs that have appeared in Tea Party rallies, I am convinced that this is a genuine social movement, a politically significant instance of the politics of small things, a political movement concerned with fundamental principles, engaged in a great debate about both the pressing issues of the day and the enduring problems of American political life.  As a registered Democrat and as a strong supporter of President Obama and his program, I am pleased that the actions of the movement may have made the Republican landslide in the upcoming elections less momentous, as the talking heads are now speculating, although I am still concerned that the movement may have given wind to the rightward shift of public opinion.  The emotional, irrational and often purposely ignorant political expression in Tea Party demonstrations is of deep concern, but I think the strong expression of fundamental political principles can and should be seriously considered and confronted.  I am unsure about what the Tea Party Movement’s impact on American public life in the very near term, i.e. the midterm elections, and in the long term, i.e. in the reinvention of American political culture will be.  As I have been trying to sort this all out, I am reminded of the insights of an old friend, Alberto Melucci, an Italian sociologist who presciently understood the meaning of social movements in the age of internet and mobile communications, before these new media were common.

The Theoretical Perspective of a Friend

Alberto Melucci

In series of important books, Nomads of the Present: Social Movements and Individual Needs in Contemporary Society, Challenging Codes: Collective Action in the Information Age, and Playing the Self: Person and Meaning in the Planetary Society, Alberto explored what it means to become involved in a social movement in our times.  He understood that the means of social movements may be even more important than their ends, and that they make possible a new sense of self and self purpose for their participants to emerge.  Further and most significant politically, they can change the basic social codes.  Alberto was mostly thinking about progressive new social movements, feminism, environmentalism, gay rights and the like.  But I think his approach illuminates the new conservatism of the Tea Party quite well.  He died prematurely on September 12, 2001, not observing the strange turn in global politics since that very day.  But he would have understood the Tea Party, as a social movement concerned with primary values, unconcerned with electoral priorities, forging new, in this case, reactionary, identities and values, a movement that is very much a product and a challenge of our times.

Challenging Codes

The Tea Party Movement makes its participants feel good about themselves and gives them a sense of purpose, as the participants frequently report on movement blogs and to reporters.  The Movement seeks to “take our country back,” supporting and attacking politicians of both parties.  They have specific ends against bail outs and the government handouts to the undeserving, from the poor to the mighty banks and corporations of Wall Street and Detroit.  They are for limited government and the constitution, as they understand it.  They imagine together a new future based on an idealized past and in their movement they enact their future.

The movement activists and candidates sometime seem to hurt Republicans more than Democrats, an outcome that seems to be irrational given their own voting records, but this is not as significant to them as one would expect.  They are concerned about a vision of America between its past and its future and their place in this America, and worry that this vision to which they are deeply committed is being lost, taken away politically by politicians they revile, and overlooked by too many of their fellow citizens.  When the fundamental concern with the American code is kept in mind, the Tea Party Activists are not as irrational as most outside commentators, of the left and the right, think.

September versus November

Karl Rove got caught up in this Primary Night last Tuesday.   In an interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News, they agreed on fundamental conservative issues.  Nothing in their discussion suggested a questioning of the principles and practices of the Tea Party.  But Rove dared to frankly criticize the candidate who won her primary in Delaware due to Tea Party activism and support, Christine O’Donnell.  She was the candidate of true conviction against a moderate, but her odd behavior despite her stated purity would lead to electoral defeat.  “It does conservatives little good to support candidates who at the end of the day while they may be conservative in their public statements do not [evince] the characteristics of rectitude, truthfulness and sincerity and character that the voters are looking for.”  Rove maintained, frankly concluding that “This is not a race we’re going to be able to win.” (link)   For this assessment he was severely attacked by Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, and the full staff of Fox News, forcing him to retreat from his initial assessment. (link)

Rove was caught between the calculation of a political analyst and of a political partisan.  Since he cares most about the politics of the day, he could not be content with pronounced conservative purity.   He, on the right, along with most objective and Democratic partisan observers, noted that the Tea Party victory in the Delaware primary greatly increased the Democrats chances of maintaining their Senate majority.

But those who seek to take their country back, those more interested in the long march of changing the political culture, changing the code of politics as Alberto Melucci would put it, would prefer resolute cultural battle (most prominently Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina, link).    Their movement is their message. For them the victory in September is more important than the increased chances of a defeat in November.