I recently met a very interesting personality, who gave an after dinner speech to a few of us explaining the birth and rise of the tea party in the US political scene. Leonard Zestkind is one of those rare self taught scholars who has been writing on racism, anti-Semitism and the white supremacist movement for more than thirty years. He was awarded the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation genius grant in 1988 and has written a book Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream. Blood and Politics is not only a brilliant account of the origins, modes of operation, collaborations, and internecine disputes of white supremacist, neo-Nazi, Holocaust-denier, and anti-Semitic groups in America, but alerts us to the fact that despite—or perhaps because of—significant improvements in race relations and changing demographic patterns, we are likely to witness a resurgence of their activities. And so it behoves us to learn a little bit more about them. And here Leonard is an invaluable guide.
"The Tea Parties are a little bit like a poison apple--with three layers" he began. "At their center is a hard-core group of over 220,000 enrolled members of five national factions, and hundreds of thousands more that we have not yet counted but are signed up only with their local Tea Parties. At the next level is a larger less defined group of a couple of million activists who go to meetings, buy the literature and attend the many local and national protests. And finally there are the Tea Party sympathizers. These are people who say they agree with what they believe are the Tea Parties' goal. These rank at about 16% to 18% of voters, depending on which organization is doing the polling. That would mean somewhere between 17 million and 19 million adult American voters count themselves as Tea Party supporters."
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, there were 926 hate groups active in the United States in 12002 -- a 4% increase from the previous year but representing a 50% increase since 2000. Demographically speaking, this involves a tiny slice of the populace: Zeskind estimates that 30,000 men and women constitute the white nationalist hard core, with an additional 250,000-plus forming a periphery of supporters. In a country of more than 300 million people, that is one-tenth of 1%.
"This is an overwhelmingly white and solidly middle class slice of the population, slightly older and less troubled financially than the rest of us. Please, remember this point when some political pundit or the other tells you these are economically strapped Americans hitting out at scapegoats. These are not populists of any stripe. These are ultra-nationalists (or super patriots) who are defending their special pale-skinned privileges and power."
There are six national Tea Party factions: FreedomWorks Tea Party, headed up by Dick Armey, a former head of the republican party. There is Tea Party Nation, which held the convention in Nashville last February where Sarah Palin of the "real Americans" spoke. There is 1776 Tea Party, the leadership of this group comes directly from the Minuteman Project, the anti-immigrant vigilante group. There is the Our Country Deserves Better PAC, responisble for organizing the cross-country Tea Party Express bus tours. There is also ResistNet which sponsors Tea Parties and Tea Party Patriots. ResistNet and Tea Party Patriots are the largest of the six national factions.
The Tea Parties are not just about taxes and budgets. They are against everything we progressives are for, beginning with President Barack Obama. From health care reform to immigration reform, from a jobs program to unemployment benefits to union check off. And, as Rand Paul the Republican candidate from Kentucky has shown us, they are also against federal civil rights legislation. Indeed, major sections of the Tea Party movement are opposed to the Fourteenth Amendment and equality before the law (because the oppose birth-right citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants). And some--the followers of Texas Cong. Ron Paul among them--are even opposed to the Seventeenth Amendment and the direct election of United States Senators.
The common thread in all of these groups, despite a difference in orientation, is a sense of cultural dispossession: the Christian right sees 1962, when the U.S. Supreme Court decided to ban prayer in public schools, as a prominent marker of that dispossession. White nationalists see the court's decision to desegregate public education, in Brown vs. Board of Education, to have "stolen their national birthright." For others, a hot point was the 1993 passage of the gun-control Brady Bill, just months after the incineration of the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas, following which, in Idaho, Montana, Michigan and the South, "militiamen popped up like cardboard targets on a rapid-fire shooting range," Zeskind says.The groups include skinheads, Christian Identity adherents and Ku Kluxers; individuals such as David Duke, Patrick Buchanan and Pat Robertson; many driven by racism, anti-Semitism, opposition to abortion, antipathy toward homosexuality, hatred of the federal government (and especially the Internal Revenue Service), gun-rights activism, millennial beliefs, anti-immigrant fervor and a taste for Holocaust denial.
So these are not a string of disconnected organizations sharing only a common set of hatreds. Rather, this is a single movement, with a common set of leaders and interlocking memberships that hold a complete and sometimes sophisticated ideology. The movement’s foremost aspect is its regard for white skin color as a badge of national identity. Many of the organizations and leaders look back to the Constitutional order prior to the Civil War, when the national-state was a whites-only republic. Others look forward to the creation of a new white nation-state carved out of the lands of North America. While these ideas were present in the movement from its re-inception in the mid-1970s, they only became dominant in the 1990s, after the end of the Cold War ushered in a new era. Across the globe, nationalism became a language of opposition to the New Global Order, and racial and ethnic nationalism became more salient than its liberal civic opposition. In the United States, racial nationalism meant white nationalism, and the old white supremacist movement was thus transformed into 21st-century white nationalism.
How did this movement grow so powerful? First, through the slow accretion of organizing week-in, week-out events: Klan rallies, Bible camps, survivalist and gun shows, white-power music concerts, etc. Second, when David Duke won a majority of white votes while running in two Louisiana statewide elections in 1990 and 1991, he uncovered a middle-American constituency that supported at least a portion of his national socialist ideas. Third, a group of respected (if not respectable) ultra-conservatives broke with the Bush 41-era Republican consensus during the first Persian Gulf War and headed in the white direction. These were the Buchananites [led by current television commentator and author Pat Buchanan] and they helped create a realignment of forces that continues to plague us today.
This movement shows itself primarily in the anti-immigrant movement—the lobbyists, Minuteman vigilantes, and racist think tanks that support them. It is here that the idea that the United States is or should be a “white” country takes on the form of a policy issue. If you follow the discussion among anti-immigrant groups, the dominant discourse is about how the United States is becoming a “Third World” country because of all the brown-skinned Spanish-speaking people crossing the Rio Grande—never mind the fact that these same people have been on this side of the border ever since 1845.
"With Obama in the White House, I think we can expect more of the same, plus some" he concluded. "Some white nationalists will focus on tending to their current base—which is not inconsiderable. They will continue to push for secessionist-style white enclaves and might engage in militia-style violence. Others will attempt to widen their base, and carve out a larger niche among conservative Republicans. Without an electoral vehicle of their own, they will suffer from the vicissitudes of the Republican leadership. Their natural base, however, will be the five percent of white voters who told pollsters last summer that they would never vote for a black person for president. More than Rush Limbaugh will get ugly. "
The Tea Party threat goes far beyond its supposed mantra of debt and taxes. It seeks to undermine the gains made by progressives over the last century, including eroding key pillars of civil rights and democracy. In fact it is not economic insecurity that animates Tea Party animus; rather it is the larger questions around race, culture, and national identity at the core. In short, in their efforts to "take America back" the Tea Party have taken up the question of who and what we are as a nation—defining America as a white Christian, heterosexual nation.
Unfortunately Tea Party support remains dangerously strong, no matter what level you're looking at. It has become a one-stop-shop for numerous forms of bigotry and threats to democracy. This poses a unique challenge for all of us today. As Dr. King once wrote, "We may have all gotten here on different ships, but we're in the same boat now." We can face the fear together, and stop allowing the Tea Party to control the narrative through intimidation and bullying. And we can remember to be bold—to share with the world our vision of what we think this country should be like and re-define who we are as a nation. We can't wait for a leader, or a party, or anyone else to do it for us. The Tea Parties say they want to "Take This Country Back." We have to ask, from whom do they want to take the country away? Who do they want to give it to?
Our response has to be to say: One Nation. One Dream.
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