re: Eric Zorn's Memo to Tea Partiers
01/08/10
Clearly recognizing his capacity as a respected advisor to the broad-based, grassroots tea party movement, Chicago Tribune blogger Eric Zorn issued a much anticipated memo to all tea partiers:
1. Quit griping about the term "teabaggers" and reclaim it, the way the gay community did with "queer." It wasn't exactly a well-known term in its unwholesome sense -- admit it, most of you had to be told about the related slang term -- and rather than get all huffy every time someone uses it, just start using it yourself and roll your eyes when the Beavises and Buttheads snicker (heh heh, he said teabag!)
An interesting suggestion, though Mr. Zorn is hardly at the front of the line in offering this advice. Someone who probably views the tea party movement in a much less condescending and dismissive way has posed essentially the same idea. From Jay Nordlinger at National Review:
Some conservatives are happy to embrace “teabagger,” or are at least willing to do so. They are “owning the insult,” which is to say, taking what is intended as a slur and wearing it proudly. There are many words and names in our vocabulary that started out as slurs and became something else. Several of these words and names are found in religion — “Christian,” for example. According to a Bible dictionary, this was “the name given by the Greeks or Romans, probably in reproach, to the followers of Jesus.” Soon enough, it “was universally accepted.” “Jesuit” had a defamatory beginning. Same with “Methodist,” “Unitarian,” “Quaker,” and “Shaker.” (You can sort of tell with those last two, can’t you?)
Part of the reasonable gripe about the epithet "teabagger" stems from it's purely perverse, non sequitur nature. If the right had mostly-gay sex related joke to mock the left, they would be roundly denounced across the media spectrum for a visceral display of "whatever-phobia", another nail the coffin of bigotry. Yet not only has this slight been regularly slung at the everyday people who populate this movement, it has come with some significant wattage behind it:
Take Anderson Cooper, the acclaimed anchorman for CNN. He was interviewing David Gergen, the political pundit. And Gergen was saying that, after two very bad elections, conservatives and Republicans were “searching for their voice.” Cooper responded, “It’s hard to talk when you’re teabagging.” He said this with a smirk.
Rachel Maddow and a guest of hers, Ana Marie Cox, made teabag jokes to each other for minutes on end: having great, chortling fun at the conservatives’ expense. And here is the performance of another host, David Shuster:
“For most Americans, Wednesday, April 15, will be Tax Day, but . . . it’s going to be Teabagging Day for the right wing, and they’re going nuts for it. Thousands of them whipped out the festivities early this past weekend, and while the parties are officially toothless, the teabaggers are full-throated about their goals. They want to give President Obama a strong tongue-lashing and lick government spending.”
Shuster went on to say that Fox News personalities were “looking forward to an up-close-and-personal taste of teabagging.” Etc., etc., etc. All the while, MSNBC was picturing Republican figures, and the following words were on the screen: “TEABAG MOUTHPIECES.”
On ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos, E. J. Dionne, the liberal columnist, spoke of “a right-wing candidate supported by the teabaggers.” The host himself, Stephanopoulos, followed suit. On PBS’s NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, senior correspondent Gwen Ifill used “teabaggers” as well. At the New York Times, Paul Krugman used it in a column. Elsewhere, Roger Ebert used it in a movie review.
Recently, both President Obama and former president Bill Clinton spoke to congressional Democrats behind closed doors. They were giving pep talks on health-care legislation. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse reported Clinton as saying, “The reason the teabaggers are so inflamed is because we are winning.” Rep. Earl Blumenauer reported Obama as saying, “Does anybody think that the teabag, anti-government people are going to support them if they bring down health care?”
Underlying Mr. Zorn's — and Mr. Nordlinger's suggestion, which was roundly mocked by the aforementioned Rachel Maddow — is the idea that the tea partiers should indulge the left's immaturity in mocking American citizens with a linguistically similar but otherwise wholly unrelated sex joke. In Mr. Zorn's example, "queer", while certainly a derogatory descriptor of homosexuals, was none the less a descriptor of the demographic. The same goes for Blacks and the "n-word". It is exceedingly derogatory, but still singularly indicative of a race of people. "Owning" these epithets were a concerted efforts to strip away only the degrating conotation. It's why Richard Prior said he wanted to use the "n-word" so many times it would lose it's meaning.
The problem with "teabagger" is that it is utterly unrelated to movement and those active in it. It's a childish sex joke spun off a convenient word play. Prior to early 2008, it was never used in reference to people who desired lower taxes, less government spending and a little accountability in Washington. For the tea party movement to "own it" would be to codify as fitting and appropriate an alternative definition of the term, wholly different from the one it previously carried. There's no way to, as Mr. Zorn suggests, "reclaim" the word because it was never "claimed" in the first place.
But, whatever. That's fine. Let's just "own the insult", toss it around endlessly and be done with it. But only on the condition that the next time the left gets its panties in a bunch over something, we can snidely recommend that they "just own it".
Point 2, from Mr. Zorn:
2. If you seriously think you have a viable third party, persuade one of the tea-friendly GOP gubernatorial candidates lagging in the polls -- Dan Proft and Adam Andrzejewski come to mind-- to drop out now and start working toward a run in November.
This is a nifty little straw man that Mr. Zorn has constructed, because I don't recall the tea party movement putting forth the idea that they have a "viable third party", nor ever considering that an end goal.
But, I can gather from where Mr. Zorn is making this assumption. From, for instance, this recent poll from Rasmussen Reports:
In a three-way Generic Ballot test, the latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds Democrats attracting 36% of the vote. The Tea Party candidate picks up 23%, and Republicans finish third at 18%. Another 22% are undecided.
Among voters not affiliated with either major party, the Tea Party comes out on top. Thirty-three percent (33%) prefer the Tea Party candidate, and 30% are undecided. Twenty-five percent (25%) would vote for a Democrat, and just 12% prefer the GOP.
Among Republican voters, 39% say they’d vote for the GOP candidate, but 33% favor the Tea Party option.
And, this other recent poll from Rasmussen Reports:
Fifty-one percent (51%) of Americans have a favorable view of the “tea parties” held nationwide last week, including 32% who say their view of the events is Very favorable.
The even more telling part of this poll come later:
While half the nation has a favorable opinion of last Wednesday’s events, the nation’s Political Class has a much dimmer view—just 13% of the political elite offered even a somewhat favorable assessment while 81% said the opposite. Among the Political Class, not a single survey respondent said they had a Very Favorable opinion of the events while 60% shared a Very Unfavorable assessment.
This cuts much closer to the heart of the purpose and rationale for the movement. We have a political class, entrenched in Washington, existing only to serve its own needs and grow its power through growing the size and scope of government, while the will of the people be damned. We're seeing this right now in the push the pass the health care bill despite an average of 50% opposed to the legislation and only 38% in favor of it.
Washington isn't listening to us. This is underscored by a recent Gallup poll that found a full 40% of the country identifies itself as "conservative", as compared with 36% for "moderate" and 21% for "liberal". Americans oppose the government takeover of health care. They opposed the stimulus package. They opposed TARP and the bank bailouts and the bailouts of the dopey McDonald's employees who used a sub-prime mortgage to purchase a $2 million house that everyone knew they'd never be able to pay off.
But all of these things are being jammed down our throats anyway. And why? Because both Republicans and Democrats in Washington just know better than us peons. They're content to grow the size of government exponentially and usurp power from "We the People" and consolidate it among "they, the few elite".
The tea party movement is about a course correction in American political life. For the most part, the Democrats have been content to be honest about their intentions to increase the size and scope of government in every way. I give you Barney Frank:
...and Maxine Waters...
I could go on, but I think the point is, shall we say, self-evident.
For quite a while the Republican Party was — at least they claimed — the party of lower taxes and smaller, limited government. They lied to us. With few exceptions, the progression of Presidents over the 20th century has been a litany of one progressive after another, both Democrats and Republicans. The conservatives caterwauled about George W. Bush's reckless spending and government-growing initiatives such as No Child Left Behind and Medicare Part D. Most of the left was far too busy devolving into a frenzy of Bush Derangement Syndrome to notice.
The point of the tea party movement was never about starting a viable third party. It was about changing the course from centralizing power and control in the federal government and returning it to the people who have been taken for granted by Washington. It was about putting pressure on the Republicans AND the Democrats to slow down this train wreck of government growth and spending and exponential accumulation of power and listen to us.
The tea party movement is trying to save BOTH parties. It has not set out to breed a third party challenger, nor has it set out to destroy them.
But if both parties are unwilling to listen the will of the American people, they do so at their own peril. If they won't listen, then they should be destroyed.