Paul Street - Crashing the Tea Party: Mass Media and the Campaign to Remake American Politics

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Crashing the Tea Party

Mass Media and the Campaign to Remake American Politics

Paul Street and Anthony Dimaggio

First published 2011 by Paradigm Publishers

Published 2016 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright 2011, Taylor & Francis.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Street, Paul Louis.
Crashing the Tea Party: mass media and the campaign to remake American politics / Paul Street and Anthony DiMaggio.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-59451-944-4 (hardcover: alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-59451-945-1 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Tea Party movement. 2. Mass mediaPolitical aspectsUnited States. I. Dimaggio, Anthony R., 1980 II. Title.
JK2391.T43S77 2011
320.520973dc22

2011009209

Designed and Typeset by Patricia Wilkinson.

ISBN 13: 978-1-59451-944-4 (hbk)
ISBN 13: 978-1-59451-945-1 (pbk)

Contents

and the Deeply Conservative Essence of U.S. Political Culture

From the Original Tea Party to the Current Masquerade

American Politics Authoritarianism and Hyperignorance in Tea Party Nation

The Democrats Midterm Disaster, the Tea Party, and the Challenge to Progressives

The Tea Party mythology that it is a grassroots, ".insurgent" movement bent on overthrowing the "establishment" has taken root in the corporate and even independent liberal media... which [advanced] this conservative manufactured, myth, that the Tea Party is separate from the Washington establishment, that it is fighting" the beltway... that Tea Party candidates are outside of the political establishment. In simply reporting the Tea Party as a separate entity from the Republican Party, many media sources have helped perpetuate the false notion that its leaders represent a new political movement. In even using the brand "Tea Party " we perpetuate the idea that it is not the same old. Republican Party.

Adam Bessie, September 20, 2010

Push Republican principles; just don't ever actually concede to anyone you talk to that this is all about returning Republicans to office.

Chicago Tea Party organizer to a handful of local chapter members, April 2010

The other party's candidate is not simply depicted as unworthy of public office, but is connected, to alien forces within the society that threaten to overwhelm decent-folk libertine sexual behavior, communists, criminals, people of color demanding more than they deserve. The Republican Party, thoroughly modern itself poses as the bulwark against unsettling modernity.

William Greider, 1992

The timidity of a Democratic Party mesmerized by centrist precepts points to the crucial fact that, for the poor, minorities, the working-class, anticorporatists, pro-environmentalists, and anti-imperialists, there is no opposition party working actively on their behalf. And this despite the fact that these elements are recognized as the loyal base of the party. By ignoring dissent and assuming the dissenters have no alternative, the party ... marginalizes any possible threat to the corporate allies of the Republicans. Unlike the Democrats, however, the Republicans, with their combination of reactionary and innovative elements, are a cohesive, if not a coherent, opposition force.... The character of the Republican Party reflects a profound change: radicalism has shifted its location and. meaning. Formerly it was associated, with the heft and the use of political power to lift the standard, of living and. life prospects of the lower classes, of those who were disadvantaged, under current distributive principles. Radicalism is now the property of those who, quaintly, call themselves " conservatives " and are called, such by media commentators.

Sheldon Wolin, 2008

With economic pain at the highest level ever seen by most Americans, and with minorities especially hard hit, we're seeing a revolt not by people of color, nor the unemployed, nor the foreclosed upon. Instead, we're seeing a revolt by the white middle class. It's a revolt against the very notion of a positive role for government in helping people. It's a revolt against Latin American immigrants. It's a revolt against Muslim Americans. And it's a revolt against our black president.... Opportunistic and rightwing Republican politicians, business front groups, and media outlets like Fox have ginned, up the hatred.

Matthew Rothschild, October 2010

1. Adam Bessie, "Media Spreads Tea Party Leaders as 'Anti-Establishment' Myth," Media-Ocracy.

2. William Greider, Who Will Tell the People? The Betrayal of American Democracy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 274275.

3. Sheldon Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 206.

4. Matthew Rothschild, "Rampant Xenophobia," The Progressive, October 16, 2010, 8.

Making Tea from the Top Down

As during the Boston Massacre and the mass protests that followed it in the late winter of 1770, "the laboring classes ... formed the bulk of actors ... at the [Boston] Tea Party" of December 16, 1773. The working, or "laboring," class aspect of the historic event was evident not just in the social composition of the cadres who moved from "Old South" (the Boston meetinghouse where the patriots approved and planned their soon-to-be-famous assault on British tea) to British cargo ships that fateful evening. It was clear also in how the actionremembered in official public memory as "the destruction of the tea" (not "the tea party") until the early 1830ssent up the refined tea-making rituals of the British elite and its colonial representatives. What came later to be called the Tea Party was, historian Alfred F. Young notes, "a mock enactment of the making of tea. The cry in Old South, 'Boston harbor a teapot tonight,' set the tone. The spirit of the day and night, after two weeks of suspense, was one of festive euphoria." Furthermore,

to "make tea" in Boston harbor mocked the genteel tea ritual. Tea, as Mercy Otis Warren wrote, was "an article used by all ranks in America," but among the better sort the conduct of brewing, pouring, and serving tea was an elaborate, mannered class ritual managed by women. Among the well-to-do, it required the elegant silver teapots, creamers, and sugar bowls crafted by silversmiths like [Boston's Paul] Revere, the tea caddies, serving trays, and tea tables made by skilled woodworkers, and the porcelain cups, saucers, and

Young's reflection on the real Boston Tea Party provides an interesting backdrop for the analysis of the elite 2009-2010 Tea Party phenomenon presented in this volume. The latest and most important right-wing effort to date to appropriate the legacy of the American Revolution and Tea Party for Republican electoral purposes, the current cardboard cutout incarnation depicted in the chapters that follow is a fake-populist aristocratic operation. It can make no legitimate claim to the egalitarian historical mantle handed down by the rugged, predominantly artisan- and laborer-based movement that conducted a genuinely popular and radical, quasi-revolutionary action in Boston Harbor in December of 1773. It is, as liberal New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote early on, in April 2009, "AstroTurf (fake grass roots)," largely "manufactured by the usual suspects"by right-wing Republican operatives (for example, Richard Armey, director of the reactionary advocacy group FreedomWorks). It is "supported," Krugman noted, "by the usual group of right-wing billionaires" (e.g., the superopulent, archreactionary capitalists and polluters Charles and David Koch).

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