The Tea Party Revisited

Ten years ago, the Tea Party was big news. The Tea Party announced itself just as I began writing political op-eds in 2009. I found them deeply disturbing. They proclaimed their allegiance to freedom as loudly as they threatened mine. I didn’t agree with their economic claims that the deficit was America’s biggest problem, and I suspected their pose as the best protectors of the Constitution was a front for less reasonable beliefs about race, gender, and religion.

Founded in 2009 as a reaction to the election of Barack Obama as President, the federal bailouts of banks and other institutions in the wake of the great recession of 2008, and, later, the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, the Tea Party entered conservative politics with a splash in the 2010 elections. NBC identified 130 candidates for the House and 10 for the Senate, all Republicans, as having strong Tea Party support. Among them, 5 Senate candidates and 40 House candidates won election. Those numbers are very high, because many Tea Party candidates defeated established politicians. Pat Toomey in Pennsylvania, Rand Paul in Kentucky, Marco Rubio in Florida, Ron Johnson in Wisconsin, and Mike Lee in Utah defeated more established politicians, including some incumbents, in both parties. They are all still Senators. Among the 5 Senate candidates who lost, Christine O’Donnell in Delaware, Sharron Angle in Nevada, and John Raese in West Virginia took extreme and sometimes laughable positions; Ken Buck in Colorado and Joe Miller in Alaska lost by tiny margins.

The Tea Party claimed to follow an ambitious agenda. One list on teaparty.org of “Non-negotiable Core Beliefs” included many economic items: “national budget must be balanced”; “deficit spending will end”; “reduce personal income taxes a must”; “reduce business taxes is mandatory”. A slightly different list called the “Contract from America” was also heavy with economic priorities: a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget; a single-rate tax system; “end runaway government spending”; “stop the pork”. The Contract included no social issues at all. The Core Beliefs began with “Illegal Aliens Are Here Illegally”, and included “Gun Ownership is Sacred”, “Traditional Family Values Are Encouraged”, and “English As Core Language Is Required”. Tea Partiers claimed complete allegiance to the Constitution as originally written.

Recently many commentators have asserted that the Tea Party was a failure and is dead. A NY Times article said “the ideas that animated the Tea Party movement have been largely abandoned by Republicans under President Trump”, because deficit spending has ballooned since he took office. Senator Rand Paul said “The Tea Party is no more.” A New Yorker article noted “the movement’s failure”, because they did not achieve a repeal of Obamacare. Jeff Jacoby, the conservative columnist for the Boston Globe, “mourned its demise in February 2018 under the title, “The Tea Party is dead and buried, and the GOP just danced on its grave”. He focused on the Tea Party’s inability to get Republicans to rein in spending.

Most of the successful Tea Party candidates from 2010 are no longer in Washington. Aside from the 5 successful Senators, only 16 of the 40 Tea Party House members are left. Justin Amash recently left the Republican Party after indicating support for impeachment. But those figures are not a surprise. The average tenure in office of a member of the House is just under 10 years, so about half should have left by now. Two moved up in the political world. Mick Mulvaney is now head of the Office of Management and Budget. Tim Scott won election as a Senator.

The whole narrative of Tea Party failure is wrong, in my opinion. While Tea Party organizations proclaimed high-minded principles of fiscal restraint, I don’t think that complex budgetary issues or particular readings of the Constitution motivate masses of voters. Today’s Republican Party is entirely in the hands of Trump, he completely ignores adherence to the Constitution and maintaining a balanced budget, and Tea Partiers are delirious with joy. The enthusiasts who scream at Trump rallies are the same people who signed on to the Contract from America in 2010. Trump embodies their real core beliefs: white supremacy; opposition to abortion rights, gay marriage, transgender people and anything that appears to deviate from their mythology of the “traditional family”; opposition to government regulation of private business, but support for government intrusion into private life; opposition to gender equality.

The social scientist Theda Skocpol, who studied Tea Party grassroots at the beginning, dismissed their economic policies as window dressing. She argued in 2011 that these white older conservative Americans “concentrated on resentment of perceived federal government “handouts” to “undeserving” groups, the definition of which seems heavily influenced by racial and ethnic stereotypes.” She noted that “the opposition between working and nonworking people is fundamental to Tea Party ideology”, and that “nonworking” was assumed to refer to non-white. In a recent interview, Skocpol identifies Tea Party advocates as Christian conservatives, not libertarians. Today the Christian right shouts its joy about Donald Trump from every pulpit.

I was right and wrong about the Tea Party in 2010. I recognized that “The Tea Partiers are wrong. The people they support will increase government intrusion into our private lives, under the guise of protecting us from enemies all around, and will help big business exploit our private resources.”

I also wrote, “They won’t change American politics. Despite putting pretty faces like Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin on their posters, they’re way too unattractive. Like the guy who strolls into Starbucks with his gun, they might get a lot of attention, but they’ll make no friends.” How wrong that was. Their disdain for the views of other Americans, their distorted understanding of the Constitution, their blindness to facts which do not support their ideology, their racism and sexism, are now in control of the White House. The Republicans they called RINOs are gone.

They only supported limited government when a black man was President. Now they shout for the arrest of anyone they don’t like. The Tea Party no longer needs to attack the Republican Party from the right. They are the Republican Party, and their desire to recreate our country in their image is non-negotiable.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

December 31, 2019

Profiles in Courage and Cowardice

The votes in the House and soon in the Senate about impeaching Trump are mostly seen as foregone conclusions. It was clear that he would be impeached on both articles in the House, and that two-thirds of Senators will not vote to convict. Hidden in these outcomes are many individual dramas for the few members of Congress who position themselves near the middle, who represent districts where elections are in doubt. Their votes represent more than partisan loyalty – they display courage or its absence.

Democrat Elissa Slotkin represents a House district in Michigan that had long been in Republican hands and was won by Trump in 2016 by 7 points. She beat the incumbent in 2018, winning just 50.6% of the vote. Like all the Democratic House members who won in districts that had gone for Trump, she worried about how her vote would affect her chances of re-election. She read our founding documents at the National Archives and spent a weekend at her family farm reading the hearing transcripts. As she appeared at a town hall meeting in her district last week, she was jeered by Trump supporters before she said a word. When she announced that she would vote for impeachment, she got a standing ovation and shouted insults.

She explained herself in an op-ed in the Detroit Free Press:  “I have done what I was trained to do as a CIA officer who worked for both Republicans and Democrats: I took a step back, looked at the full body of available information, and tried to make an objective decision on my vote.” She also faced the consequences squarely: “I’ve been told more times that I can count that the vote I’ll be casting this week will mark the end of my short political career. That may be. . . . There are some decisions in life that have to be made based on what you know in your bones is right. And this is one of those times.”

Of the 31 House Democrats who won in districts that Trump carried in 2016, 29 voted to impeach him. Collin Peterson of Minnesota, from a district that Trump won by 31 points, voted against. And then there’s Jeff Van Drew, first-term House member from New Jersey, who won in a district that has flipped back and forth between parties, and was won by Trump by 5 points. His 2018 victory was aided by considerable financing from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. In November, he said in a teleconference that he was against impeachment, but vowed to remain a Democrat, which he had been his whole life: “I am absolutely not changing.” Then he saw a poll of Democratic primary voters, in which 70% said they would be less likely to vote for him if he opposed impeachment. Meanwhile, he was meeting with White House Republicans, who promised him Trump’s support. So he voted against impeachment and became a Republican. The next day, Trump asked his supporters to donate to Van Drew’s campaign. Van Drew’s Congressional staff resigned en masse. He told Trump in a televised Oval Office meeting, “You have my undying support.”

Somewhere in the middle between political courage and its absence lies the case of Jared Golden of Maine, whose successful 2018 campaign to unseat a Republican incumbent I supported. His district went for Trump by 10 points in 2016, and Golden won only because the new Maine system of ranked-choice voting gave him enough second-place votes to overcome his rival’s lead. His re-election certainly qualifies as endangered.

Golden took a unique approach to impeachment, voting for the first article on abuse of power, but against the second on obstruction of Congress. He said that Trump’s obstruction of Congress “has not yet, in my view, reached the threshold of 'high crime or misdemeanor' that the Constitution demands.” Golden wrote a long statement explaining his actions, arguing that House Democrats had not yet tried hard enough to get the courts to force Trump’s aides to testify.

I cannot judge Golden’s motives. He said, “I voted my heart without fear about politics at all.” Perhaps his heart feared the end of his political career.

But it is worth considering how Trump has defied Congress since he was elected. When Congress refused to appropriate as much money as he wanted to build his Wall, Trump decided to spend it anyway by declaring a “national emergency”. According to the Constitution, only Congress has the authority to decide how to spend taxpayer funds. Federal courts then blocked Trump’s use of other funds. Trump’s lawyers argued that no entity has the authority to challenge in court Trump’s extension of his powers. In July, the Supreme Court sided with Trump and allowed spending for the Wall to proceed.

Trump’s defiance of Congressional oversight began long before the impeachment crisis. In February, the administration refused to send Congress a legally required report about the murder of Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi operatives. A Trump official said, “The President maintains his discretion to decline to act on congressional committee requests when appropriate.” In April, he told a former personnel security official not to appear before the House Oversight Committee, which was investigating White House security clearance practices. That month, the Justice Department defied a bipartisan subpoena from the Oversight Committee investigating the addition of a citizenship question to the 2020 Census.

Robert Mueller found many instances of Trump’s obstruction of justice in the Russia investigation. Mueller declined to conclude that Trump had committed a crime, only because of a Justice Department memo that claims temporary immunity of a sitting president from prosecution. He clearly pointed toward impeachment as a remedy, and the House impeachment committees considered putting those actions into an article of impeachment. They decided not to, in order to simplify the process.

There are many other examples. Jared Golden’s idea that the House should wait and pursue their requests through the courts ignores the unprecedented nature of Trump’s refusal to do anything that the Democratic House requests or demands. It makes no sense to treat each instance of obstruction as a separate judicial case, which makes it impossible for Congress to do its job. Jeffrey Toobin of the New Yorker wrote, “Trump will create a new constitutional norm—in which the executive can defy the legislature without consequence.”

When John Kennedy wrote (or just put his name on?) Profiles in Courage, he quoted a column from Walter Lippmann, who had despaired of any courage among elected politicians: “They advance politically only as they placate, appease, bribe, seduce, bamboozle, or otherwise manage to manipulate the demanding and threatening elements in their constituencies. The decisive consideration is not whether the proposition is good but whether it is popular.” Yet historian Jon Meacham and political science PhD candidate Michael E. Shepherd write that many Congresspeople who took unpopular votes survived.

The great majority of young House Democrats who face difficult re-election campaigns in Trump districts acted courageously. Elissa Slotkin explained what courage looks like: “Look, I want to get reelected. The greatest honor of my life is to represent this district. But if I’m not, at least I can look at myself in the mirror when I leave office.”

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

December 24, 2019

The Future is Unpredictable

Every day we can read predictions of the future. Unending polls tell us who might win future elections. Dire predictions about the more distant future speculate about how climate change will alter life on earth. Everybody pays attention to weather forecasts and nobody believes them.

But we don’t know what the future holds. That is both exciting and scary.

It is easy to see that Trump will be impeached with no Republican votes in the House and that he’ll skate by in the Senate. What that means for the 2020 election or his place in history is impossible to say. There is no way to tell which Democrat will oppose him, or how that candidate’s personality and policies will play out in a general election campaign. In the meantime, it is clear from this past year that over the next 11 months Trump will surprise everyone, perhaps many times, with unprecedented statements and behaviors. It is doubtful that any of those shocks will be pleasant.

Over the long-term, basic trends shift or reverse themselves. For about 70 years since the end of World War II, international integration was the obvious course of global economics and politics. Obvious until a few years ago, when nationalist populist movements began to gather steam in Europe, Asia, and the US. Now the nations of the world are drifting apart: Trump’s go-it-alone foreign policy; Brexit; right-wing populism in Eastern Europe, India, Brazil, and many other places. Is this a temporary backlash or the wave of our future?

The unpredictability of the future is demonstrated by the innovations which now shape our lives. It was possible to imagine that one day people could talk on wireless phones and watch each other do it, but who could have known how much cell phones would change our whole lives? Certainly we’ll have driverless cars in a few years, but we don’t know what this will mean for commuting times, energy consumption, and traffic patterns. Maybe commuting itself will gradually disappear as everyone works remotely. The internet, which had little impact before the 1990s, has altered everything.

Every day is unpredictable. No matter how detailed a schedule is written into your day planner, each day will hold many surprises: chance meetings, people doing unexpected things, travel delays.

Sometimes we seek situations for which we don’t know the outcome: sports contests, Christmas presents, surprise parties. Other times we fervently hope that everything turns out as planned: meal preparation, business meetings, airplane travel. Parents try to guess what their babies’ coos and gurgles mean about language development and where they will go to college.

Change is nothing new. During my 70+ years, everything has changed. But most of those changes have been incremental and for the better. American standards of living have risen, technology has created more convenience and power, cars are safer, airplanes are faster, light bulbs last longer. Now we are often told that the future will be worse, that coming generations should expect lower living standards.

We are in the midst of unprecedented climate change, but have no idea how our lives will be changed. Will fires make much of the West uninhabitable? Will millions of people in our coastal cities have to retreat inland? How will American agriculture adapt to higher temperatures and new patterns of rainfall? The hardest consequences to foresee are the ways our daily lives will shift, adapt, conform to or resist these changes.

The unpredictability of the future means that both optimists and pessimists are right – things could go well or poorly. Will our politics be dominated by the willful ignorance of FOX viewers, the narrow-minded zealousness of evangelical preachers, and the hypocrisy of Republican politicians? Or by the idealism of youthful activists trying to save the planet from climate disaster and gun violence? Will misinformation and disinformation propagated by professional liars and foreign enemies swamp the logic and facts carefully assembled by professional journalists?

We can exert some control over the future by taking action to promote the best future. Here are many possible types of protest against the global warming delinquents. But we can’t make other people do the right thing, assuming that we are doing the right thing ourselves. In fact, the unpredictable behavior of people close to us are among the greatest stress producers.

Insurance companies cannot smooth out all the bumps the future will bring. I don’t recommend either optimism or pessimism, but rather openness to the unplanned, willingness to deal with the accidental, readiness to adapt or abandon well-formulated plans to new information.

We ourselves are unpredictable. Why should the world be any different?

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

December 17, 2019