The 2012 general election is now a matter of record. Of its winners and losers, we are now, for the most part, sufficiently certain. Few aught in either club—the winners or the losers—have got there in a fashion that was not anticipated by those most apt of our prognosticators—Nate Silver in particular—and weeks in advance of election day. And many a loser has been handed defeat to the astonishment and the unqualified dismay of one partisan failure Karl Rove. Now, being charged today with the task of descrying the future of one of the losers—a collective of losers in fact, viz. the Tea Party movement—I think it fitting to begin my remarks with the words of one Willie Nelson: words that, on many occasions, were paraphrased by the late Don Meredith...
Turn out the lights, the party’s over...
I refer, of course, to the less than subtle way in which Dandy Don used to denote the approach of garbage time on Monday Night Football. For the most part, it was gentle dig at a team subjected to a particularly ignominious beat-down. Ironic, mocking perhaps, it was the closest thing to the singing of Lacrimosa the beaten team would get that night. (Being drubbed in a nationally televised event was then, as it today, no easy thing for the professional athlete to handle. Among other virtues, it called upon one’s capacity to suffer the uneasy work of mourning.) And it has stuck with us, frankly, some 27 years after Don Meredith went off the air.
In the wake of Tuesday’s election, no-one, no thing better suits—and is more needing of—a genuine Meredithian, Monday Night Lacrimosa than the ill-born, ill-raised and savagely mishandled Tea Party movement.
The Tea Party movement is dead. Less than four years of age, it succumbed late Tuesday night to an acute case of social and political irrelevance, a pathosis which, in the case of this movement, was compounded by a defect of birth: a particularly debilitating condition known to the political scientist by the old Greek word agnoia. Of blame for its untimely demise there is certainly enough to vex the hearts of its immediate survivors: from its parents, Msgr. Rick Santelli of Chicago and the Rev. Dick Armey of Texas, to its estranged wife, the Republican Party, to a smattering of clueless and disgruntled grassroots organizations whose politically orphaned members have yet to grasp where the movement went wrong after the midterm elections of 2010. Etiologically, however, there is simply one credible reason for what happened to the deceased. To put it bluntly, it died of bad faith, the result of bad money.
It is clear that before it was even born—before Obama was inaugurated—the movement was willfully and grievously poisoned. The ultimate cause of its morbid condition was—medico-politically speaking—intrauterine exposure to tainted cash. (The teratogenic effects of dirty money on nascent community movements is well attested in political science.) The Tea Party movement—buon’anime—came to us virtually stillborn. That it survived as long as it did—and that so many today should tend to doubt the contention that it is now (literally) history—here is testament to the mettle and the skill of its soldiery. I will grant to the reader—as I will to the die-hard ‘Tea Party patriot’—the Tea Party movement has always been more than the sum of its idiots.
Christine O’Donnell, Sharron Angle... they never made the 2010 cut. (Remember that it was Ms. Angle who—Second Amendment solutions and all—had the distinction of being drubbed by an opponent of no more substance than pantywaist Senator Harry Reid.) Loud-mouthed jackasses Joe Walsh and Allen West did—but, kudos to both their Congressional districts, they have now been sent packing. (At the time of this writing, Col. West is still contesting his loss, and will certainly demand a recount... yet, barring some kind of miracle—or one Joyce Kaufman putting a ballot in someone—he will lose his seat to democrat Patrick Murphy.) As for the unbearably dense and profoundly self-deluding Sarah Palin—well, she never really was part of the program, notwithstanding the fact that SarahPAC has poured gasoline on so many Tea Party fires that, among teabaggers—at least the most daft in their ranks—Palin has garnered something like leadership status. As is the case with the would-be secessionist Governor of Texas—whose brain melted into a bottle of maple syrup on at least one occasion during his primary campaign—Sarah never really has grasped the meaning of teabagging. (David Vitter, on the other hand—though also a Tea Party patriot of dubious validity—simply by standing with the Tea Party Caucus, he has afforded us with a radically new understanding of what it means to ‘teabag’.) To the many regrettable acts, to the recrement of goofs and gaffes played out by the lot of the movement’s most noteworthy clowns, to these I would point not as the causa mortis, but as the symptom of an occult disorder. In themselves, they never did sink the ship... a credit, to be sure, not only to those who manned her—to the movement’s diligent rank and file—but to those prominent members of the Tea Party Caucus who, like Senator Marco Rubio, have—thus far—abstained from making fools of themselves during the 112th Session of Congress.
The Tea Party movement was never really the opera buffa of which so many of us have made it—what?—after Christy O’Donnell’s only too public witch trials, after Sharin’ Anger’s campaign of islamophobic-xenophobic-homophobic rage, after Rick Perry’s laughable Tax Day tantrum, after the absurdity and the recklessness of Glenn Beck’s televangelical disinformation campaign... after Beck’s thoroughly ridiculous MLK send-up on the National Mall in 2010, moreover... The movement suffered the slings and arrows of its parodic fortune to achieve something exceedingly rare in the history of American politics: legitimate third party status. Notwithstanding the fact that it was always a Republican entity—from its unlikely conception (at once, in the halls of Fox News and CNBC and on the ground, in the detritus of the Contract with America) to its untimely demise this past Tuesday—it has always eluded strict party control. In fact, more than simply an adjunct to the Republican Party, the Tea Party movement has, for some time now, established itself as a primary arbiter of Republican policy. (In this sense, it would seem the movement has both learned from and surpassed the efforts of that which is largely considered its nearest historical equivalent, the Dixiecrat movement of 1948.) Almost from birth it outgrew its station, that of an outlier in the Republican heartland, the evangelical south; so much so that, by the time of its Camelot—’bright and shining’—moment in 2011, it took on a gravitas and a validity which the Republican leadership, and even its stipulated mortal enemy, the Obama Administration, had to take it into account when making policy. The ‘Year of Doing Nothing’ in Congress, the year 2011—which Speaker Boehner and Senators Reid and McConnell have seen fit to extend into the election year—the Debt Ceiling Debacle of 2011, the Moody’s downgrade that was fruit of it... these are the signal achievements of the 112th Session of Congress, which achievements the Tea Party Caucus itself made possible. Absent said caucus—who knows?—Congress might well have passed a budget.
The Tea Party Movement is dead. Requiem æternam dona ei, dear reader. But, lest you succumb to the notion that to blame for its inglorious chute are simply its many weak links—whether in Congress (detestable cretins like Rep. Allen West; stolid know-nothings like Reps. Michele Bachmann and Virginia Foxx; general embarrassments like Rep. Joe Walsh), in the media (CNBC, Fox News, and he who is louder and more fraudulent than even these fetid institutions, the eternal-ridiculous himself, Glenn Beck), or, indeed, on the ground (for instance, the blithering hayseeds who ate up the hate-speech of wing-nuts like Sharron Angle and clamored for Oklahoma State Question 755)—consider the substantive reasons the movement has died. If the mid-term elections of 2010 did bring the movement hope—hope, specifically, that the Republican party’s base of white, male, largely southern evangelical voters could still carry national elections—hope, also, that the opening of the campaign finance flood-gates which Citizens United made possible might very well provide the path to overcoming what any movement might lack in broad-based support—this hope was dashed in 2012 on the rocks to which that white ship fled, for the most part, in fear of the women’s’ vote.
Tuesday night proved to the world—and to the Republican Party—that running on extreme and unpopular positions in national elections in the United States was not a viable option for any budding political movement, no matter the depth of one’s pockets or the dedication of one’s ideological base. It proved that throwing money—even oceans of it—into shaky campaigns based on unconvincing lies and bad propaganda could not, as it were, change political tides—that an organized ground game and an army of fact-checkers could counteract any golem of BS a ‘BSer’ could raise. It proved that Randian individualism and economic darwinism do not mix well ideologically with an anti-abortion crusade and a base bent on theocratic statism. It proved that dirty money spent on unscrupulous candidates remains, for the most part, money wasted—that even the distracted an a-political American voter can smell it on, let us say, a Scott Walker or Rick Snyder who might want to sell state assets to political sugar-daddies at bargain-basement rates, or a John Kasich who might want to bust troublesome unions, or a Rick Scott who might be willing to suppress voter turnout should it please benefactors. It proved that bought influence in government can turn out to be a quixotic investment for any political player who is not discerning with regard to who it is on whom he is willing to bet.
And it proved that the Republican circular firing squad was no more effective in the year 2012 than it was in 2008.
Exaudi orationem meam; ad te omnis caro veniet...
The Tea Party movement is dead. And it was not simply a ship of notable fools that put it in the ground. It was the slime that put that white ship to sea; it was the toxic adventurer... his money turned so much gold to shit.
Happy sailing, patriots!