The Tea Party in Historical Perspective

A Conservative Response to a Crisis of Political Economy

CHARLES POSTEL

On February 19, 2009, Rick Santelli, an entertainer and financial commentator on CNBC cable news unleashed his now famous scream against the Obama administration's economic policies. In the months leading up to this episode, presidents Bush and Obama had provided hundreds of billions of dollars under the Troubled Asset Relief Program to the Bank of America, Citibank, and other giants of American finance. But what pushed Santelli over the edge was word that the Obama administration might provide mortgage relief to distressed homeowners. Fox News proceeded to explain what had happened: The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) had conned the American taxpayers into subsidizing mortgages for people that Santelli defined as "losers," that is, mainly new homeowners that managed their money badly and did not deserve to own a home in the first place. ACORN, with the aid of its liberal supporters in Congress, had brought the American economy to its knees. Fox News and its viewers had had enough. The Tea Party movement burst onto the national stage on Tax Day 2009.

In the midst of the most severe financial and economic crisis in over seventy years, the Tea Party has been able to tap deep veins of resentment and anger over potential shifts in the post-World War II political economy. Since the Second World War, mainly white homeowners—beneficiaries of federal subsidies for mortgages and suburban development—had counted on rising home values to anchor their economic security. As home values tumbled in 2008 and 2009, the federal government contemplated coming to the aid of distressed homeowners, including African Americans, Latinos, and other minorities historically excluded from the web of federal support. Although such aid was never forthcoming, the mere suggestion provoked a storm of opposition. The ensuing debates about health care reform poured gasoline on the fire. At a time of declining retirement portfolios, rising health care costs, and fears about the viability of Social Security and Medicare, the administration's efforts to extend a health safety net to the forty million Americans without protection appeared as a bitter betrayal of those who already had such protections.

Santelli's scream also provides clues as to the historical context of the Tea Party. It sounded an alarm with deep resonance in conservative politics in America, and especially with the far right that has been locked in a trial of strength for the control of the Republican Party since the 1940s. The Tea Party has tapped into fear and anger over potential shifts in political economy to form a grassroots movement following in the historical traditions of the anti–New Deal American Liberty League, Joseph McCarthy and the witch hunts, Robert Welch and the John Birch Society, and Barry Goldwater and the right-wing Republicans of the early Cold War.

"POPULIST RAGE"?

Since the Tea Party emerged on the national scene, its members have made great efforts to maintain the public appearance of being a movement without leaders, without a defined ideology, and without history. Much of this effort has an instrumental value in terms of Republican Party politics. And much of it has been facilitated by the media's treating the Tea Party phenomenon as an enigma best explained by the term populism. Indeed, much of the print, online, and televised media has discovered that the country has entered a season of "populist" discontent, where angry folk wielding sharpened pitchforks threaten to storm the gates of power. A striking example of this commentary is the cover of Newsweek from March 2009. Under the title, "The Thinking Man's Guide to Populist Rage," the cover is a photo of an angry mob brandishing torches. The photo, of course, is not of populists, but comes from the 1931 movie Frankenstein.

In reality, the depiction of populism as an out-of-control or Frankenstein mob is a crude caricature of the original Populists. According to today's pundits, the Populists represented the reactive, unthinking politics of blind rage, the politics of the gut instead of the head. But this has no connection to the historical Populism of the 1890s, a vast movement of rural education; nor to the process whereby millions of Populist men and women, as C. Vann Woodward put it, started to "think as well as to throb"; nor to the central Populist premise that if ordinary citizens gained knowledge of the workings of political economy, they could shape a more equitable and just society.

Numerous commentators have presented the Tea Party as the latest incarnation or twist in the evolution of American populism. The key idea here is taken from the work of Richard Hofstadter. Over fifty years ago in his extraordinarily influential work, The Age of Reform, Hofstadter suggested that the right-wing and intolerant followers of Joseph McCarthy were the historical heirs of the farmer and labor Populists of the 1890s. Presumably, Populism represented an irrational and highly malleable ideology that had gone sour and turned into bitter and paranoid right-wing extremism.

The problem in Hofstadter's analysis is that it did not happen. The political scientist Michael Rogin tested Hofstadter's theory in his 1967 work The Intellectuals and McCarthy. What Rogin confirmed was that, yes, there were Populists in Wisconsin in the 1890s. And, yes, there were followers of Joseph McCarthy in Wisconsin in the 1950s. But beyond the fact that they were both in Wisconsin, there were few ideological, political, sociological, or demographic connections between Populism and McCarthyism. Walter Nugent, C. Vann Woodward, and other scholars confirmed much the same thing. Nonetheless, the notion stuck, and Hofstadter's thesis continues to cast a shadow over the national discussion about the Tea Party and its...