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Newsflash: the Tea Party is racist!

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A totally not racist comparison of Obama to a monkey made at a Denver Tea Party rally, April 15, 2009, the day the mass protests started. From here.

On April 9, one of the founders of the US Tea Party movement, Phil Russo, wrote a lengthy explanation about how the Tea Party is just too (obviously) racist and otherwise bigoted for him to continue participating within it. But, of course, Russo can only comprehend this as a new development that the Tea Party “turned” racist, so that his past involvement is justified.

In his own words, “what began as a genuine opportunity to make this country more free” in which he played a central role, “deteriorated [in]to racist name calling, fear of anyone with brown skin, and an irrational focus on Sharia law.” The underlying principles of the Tea Party are getting a pass in exchange for admitting that the current movement is flawed.

There’s some notable problems with Russo’s defense of the early movement’s socially liberal bona fides. He asserts that the Tea Party wasn’t an exclusively Republican movement, since while “there were lots of Republicans and some even more conservative members of the Whig Party and Conservative Party”, there were also “also lots of Libertarians, independents, and Constitution Party members”. Yes, the Constitution Party is supposed to be a signal, like the presence of some self-described libertarians and independents, of general social liberalism.

In their 2008 platform, the Constitution Party made it quite clear that they believe that a “pre-born child, whose life begins at fertilization, is a human being created in God’s image” and therefore, abortion should not “be declared lawful by any institution of state or local government – [by] legislative, judicial, or executive [authorities]“. Just to clear up any confusion, they also opposed “the distribution and use of all abortifacients”, made no mention of the pregnant person’s health, and explicitly denied exemptions for these standards in cases of sexual assault. The new state-level restrictions on abortion that we here at Velociriot have been talking about over the past few weeks pretty clearly come from a similar place and are often advanced by Republicans friendly to or affiliated with the Tea Party movement. Yet the participation of many representatives of the Constitution Party in Tea Party organizations and rallies supposedly shows their socially moderate roots?

But this extends beyond the long-standing support of many Tea Party protesters for governmental restrictions on reproductive freedom. The same 2008 platform calls for US jurisprudence to be based on Biblical principles. When it comes to race, there’s a variety of interesting policies it supports – from explicit opposition to statehood for the District of Columbia or Puerto Rico to a call for “a moratorium on immigration to these United States”. It’s these United States by the way, since they believe in something they call “state sovereignty”. I think we all know how that goes.

This sort of open acceptance of racially-charged politics seems indicative of their broader radical approach. The same platform discusses how to go about “phasing out the entire Social Security program” and is concerned about how “globalists are using the global warming threat to gain more control via worldwide sustainable development”. While those are issues more commonly seen in the US as being economic in nature, there’s a social element to both of them. The ways we value and support the elderly is as much a social as economic question. The issue of international cooperation to address climate change is as much about whether the US should coordinate with the rest of the world as whether economically how we should regulate polluting industries. On those issues, this supposedly moderate force was profoundly hostile to socially liberal ideals, with opposing their economic ramifications often seeming more like an added bonus than the actual issue at stake.

Another totally not bigoted sign from an April 2009 Tea Party protest, from here.

Almost precisely the same language can be seen in the various state-level platforms that the Constitution Party published in 2010, during the Tea Party’s heyday. There’s the same desire to marginalize immigrant communities and the same concerns for the rights of the “pre-born”. This apparently core constituency of the Tea Party didn’t moderate itself much if at all while participating in the early movement.

More recently, while the founders and original members of the Tea Party began a protracted national discussion about whether racists or the Republican Party or both ruined their movement, the Constitution Party put out the same sort of platform and ran a presidential candidate who espoused the same sort of hostile rhetoric about (at least temporarily) ending immigration to the US as we know it. They were extremists before the Tea Party came along, while they were involved in it, and since that initial organizing period.

The fact that Russo either can’t or won’t perceive this problem is indicative of an underlying issue – whether he’s actually all that moderate himself on the same issues. He expresses his own socially liberal outlook in the article primarily through opposition to indefensibly racist statements, support for discontinuing the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), and assorted complaints about bans on food or drugs perceived to be unhealthy. Those are apparently our standards for being socially moderate? Contrary to popular belief, there’s more to racism than epithets, more to queer liberation than same-sex marriage, and more to consumer rights than the right to buy whatever product you want.

Of course, if you’re comparatively sheltered it’s easier to think that preventing racism and heterosexism is mostly about making mean words unacceptable to say or ending blatant governmental discrimination, without considering whether stigmatized groups might need proactive governmental assistance or protections. If you’ve never had to assess whether a product is safe for you to consume, it’s easier to call for less government oversight and for the government to stop restricting what you can purchase. It’s harder to examine how the system we use to monitor food safety is honestly being dismantled. If this is a “real” libertarianism that doesn’t merely aspire to give free market economics ideological cover, it’s a very carefully constructed one. It seems determined to avoid the conclusions a lot of marginalized groups have reached: that the government’s attempts to protect us should be constantly evaluated and questioned, but that the concept of the government helping people isn’t in and of itself invalid.

It seems like many “moderate” conservatives or libertarians like Russo don’t want to be affiliated with the openly racist and bigoted attitude that permeates the Tea Party movement, but they aren’t willing to evaluate whether it was actually there all along. After all, it’s much easier if they don’t think about that, because that might lead to them seeing the same hostility in their own politics even after their break from the now discredited Tea Party. Their real problem isn’t with being racist, it’s with being known to be racist.



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