Freedom can be confusing.<\/p>\n
We’ll come back to that.<\/p>\n
I’ve told this story many, many times.\u00a0 I think it’s still illustrative.\u00a0 Back in the nineties and early naughties, you could predict a few things about GOP gatherings.<\/p>\n
And pro-lifers weren’t the only single-issue voters.\u00a0 During the nineties, after the nadir of the Clinton crime bill and Alan Spears’ various attempts to ratchet up gun control in Minnesota, the shooters came out.\u00a0 And it could lead to comical results; pro-lifers would occasionally express revulsion at rolling back gun controls, while some of the shooters were visibly bored at the pro-life talk.\u00a0 They came for their issues, and their issues alone.<\/p>\n
That was then.<\/p>\n
Now, we have the Tea Parties.\u00a0 And while the left and media (pardon, as always, the redundancy) likes to try to portray the Tea Parties like Nick Coleman once referred to “peasants beating on the observatory door” with pitchforks and torches, they are actually a whole lot more complex – John Kerry’s word was “nuanced” than that.\u00a0 You see a lot of people at these rallies who, two years ago, didn’t care about politics, who a year into the Obama administration have taken it upon themselves to educate themselves.<\/p>\n
And there are many roads to education; there are as many stories at the Tea Parties are there are participants.\u00a0 Some reacquainted themselves with Reagan.\u00a0 Many others in Minnesota arrived via (Minnesota-based syndicated talk show host) Jason Lewis’ long-running Tax Rallies, and Lewis’ heady introduction to the Federalists and Limited Government; Lewis, with his MA in Political Science, gives a pretty compete education in Federalist history.\u00a0 Others come via other media figures – Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Hugh Hewitt – to a new appreciation iof what limited government means, and how far off from that ideal we currently are.\u00a0 Another contingent were brought to politics by the Ron Paul campaign.\u00a0 And you can find others who filtered into the movement from immigration reform, pro-life and other groups, including a few from groups that we can tactfully call “the fringe”.<\/p>\n
All of them – the good, the weird and the rhetorically ugly – come together for one reason; they want to put government back in its place.<\/p>\n
Which, compared with the anything-goes, single-issue-bound GOP of 2000 and 2004, is pretty exciting stuff.<\/p>\n
And as with anything that excites conservatives, the left and media (pardon, as always, the redundancy) must spin it as some sort of potential depravity or another.<\/p>\n
Commenter “Master Of None” drew my attention to NYTimes piece on the Tea\u00a0Party movement yesterday<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0 I read it.<\/p>\n At first read, it was almost encouraging; it seemed at first blush to pay some service to the most important facet of the Tea Parties; that represents a wave of self-education, an “awakening” if you will, on the part of an awful lot of people.\u00a0\u00a0 It almost seemed like the NYTimes might start portraying Tea Partiers as people<\/em>; actual individuals with their own motivations, each as unique as they are.<\/p>\n I said almost<\/em>.<\/p>\n The Tea Party movement has become a platform for conservative populist discontent, a force in Republican politics for revival, as it was in the Massachusetts Senate election, or for division. But it is also about the profound private transformation of people like Mrs. Stout, people who not long ago were not especially interested in politics, yet now say they are bracing for tyranny.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I chewed on that last clause for a bit.\u00a0 A phrase like “bracing for tyranny” has two different meanings in our society.\u00a0 To a big chunk of “Red” America, it means “being aware that unlimited government can not end well”, with a twist of “so let’s not let it get out of control” on top.<\/p>\n But to an NPR-listening, Times<\/em>-reading, down-the-nose-at-the-hoi-polloi<\/em>-looking putative “elite”, it’s a code phrase, for something the “fearful, Jebus-clinging, John Birch-reading\u00a0gun freaks” do.<\/p>\n In other words, it’s something foreign.\u00a0 Un-American.\u00a0 Worthy of fear and, inevitably, fear’s eldest child, hatred.<\/p>\n These people are part of a significant undercurrent within the Tea Party movement that has less in common with the Republican Party<\/span><\/a> than with the Patriot movement, a brand of politics historically associated with libertarians, militia groups, anti-immigration<\/span><\/a> advocates and those who argue for the abolition of the Federal Reserve.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n “Militia groups”.\u00a0 It’s another media code word; the unwashed, insane, depraved, usually racist undercurrent that Blue America sees hiding under every rock between the Hudson and the Sierra Madre.<\/p>\n Urged on by conservative commentators, waves of newly minted activists are turning to once-obscure books and Web sites and discovering a set of ideas long dismissed as the preserve of conspiracy theorists, interviews conducted across the country over several months show. In this view, Mr. Obama and many of his predecessors (including George W. Bush<\/span><\/a>) have deliberately undermined the Constitution and free enterprise for the benefit of a shadowy international network of wealthy elites.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n “Shadowy international networks”.<\/p>\n You see some of that at the Tea Parties.\u00a0 Again, it’s the fringe; the people with the beards and camouflage and the huge potbellies and the pamphlets that gather around the fringe of\u00a0 the Tea Party rallies, mixing uneasily with the vast majority; the people in dockers and polos, or work boots and embroidered shop jackets, who make up the vast majority of people at the Parties.\u00a0 People like you and me and, someone tell the Times, your typical Times reader as well.<\/p>\n Oh, the Times gets parts right – enough to make the whole thing worth a read:<\/p>\n The Tea Party movement defies easy definition, largely because there is no single Tea Party.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Defiance of easy definition notwithstanding, the Times wants you to accept their facile definition anyway.<\/p>\n And those facile definitions are always based on fear of the great unwashed unknown:<\/p>\n At the grass-roots level, it consists of hundreds of autonomous Tea Party groups, widely varying in size and priorities, each influenced by the peculiarities of local history.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n “Ah”, I thought.\u00a0 “This could be good!”.\u00a0\u00a0 The rural west is a fascinating sociological hodgepodge; my own hometown in North Dakota jumbled college professors with their urbane, sometimes far-left beliefs, together with engineers (from a few local manufacturers) and business people (mostly fiscal conservatives) and agribusiness types (conservatives who loved farm subsidies)\u00a0 to a few drastically-misplaced hippies, and always, always the farmers – including a few who’d been driven to radical populism <\/a>by the hard times.<\/p>\n Who do you suppose the Times would be focusing on today?<\/p>\n