The tea party - flash in the pan...or a wide-appeal movement?

David Aikman - OneNewsNow Columnist
9/28/2010 10:00:00 AM

We will have to wait until November to see whether the tea party movement can translate success in Republican primary races into congressional victories for the GOP. Midterm elections are traditionally the way that American voters "punish" the party controlling the White House if they are unhappy with the leader who occupies it.

By and large, the momentum of the tea party has derived from widespread public dissatisfaction with the Obama administration’s handling of economic policy. First, it is widely believed that the Obama economic stimulus package has failed overall to reduce joblessness, now hovering about 9.5 percent. Second, many Americans feel that the massive public indebtedness needed to fund the Obama economic programs, including healthcare, has imposed on the U.S. a degree of financial of indebtedness that the country will be unable to sustain.

Tea party spokesmen have publicly focused on economic issues, and in cultural issues have tended to appear libertarian. But while few people in the tea party have defined their political revolt as part of America's larger "culture wars," opponents of the tea party have shown no such restraint in viciously attacking tea party figures in cultural terms.

For example, anti-religion TV commentator Bill Maher has been busy digging up years-old videos of Delaware GOP candidate Christine O'Donnell and ridiculing her opposition to the doctrine of evolution and to her having admitted to a high-school flirtation with witchcraft. O'Donnell's earlier identification as a campaigner against pornography has been held up to scorn. After all, says the elite and largely anti-Christian cultural elite, what's wrong with pornography and unlimited sexual license?

But in portraying the tea party movement as one of "wackos" and "nuts," opponents of it may have unwittingly put their finger on an important point. In addition to representing a broad American mistrust of congressional incumbents in 2010, the tea party clearly represents a widespread American disgust with the intellectual snobbery and arrogance of the American elite which controls -- or appears to want to control -- American cultural life. In a sense, the tea party movement is in part a "cultural revolution" against the social trends that seem to have emerged as dominant in U.S. society over the past three decades.

Take, for example, Delaware's successful GOP primary candidate Christian O'Donnell -- the eighth tea party-backed political insurgent to unseat a GOP-backed candidate. To be sure, she has had her share of financial woes during her career, including arguments with the IRS, allegations of misuse of campaign funds for personal living expenses, and a dispute over unpaid college fees with Fairleigh Dickinson University. Former George W. Bush political advisor Karl Rove criticized her on TV for some of these problems. But the wrath of the American cultural elite, particularly represented by Bill Maher, has focused not on her alleged financial mismanagement but on earlier statements criticizing masturbation, pornography, and sexual impurity, and her expressed criticism of Darwinian evolution. The interesting thing about O'Donnell is that, though raised a Roman Catholic, she has essentially sided with American evangelicals on a large array of cultural issues.

In this respect, American cultural elites are seriously out of touch with American popular opinion. For example, polls have consistently shown that more than 90 percent of the American public supports the idea that human life was in some way or other created, and that a majority of Americans don't believe human life was the product of accidental evolution. Large majorities of Americans express a belief that the Bible is the "Word of God," and that the biblical story of creation is basically valid.

Similarly, significant numbers of Americans, while not advocating legal restrictions on private human behavior, nevertheless subscribe to the biblical idea that sexual abstinence before marriage is a good thing. Interestingly, in a famous poll of 238 journalists from elite news organizations taken by the sociologists Lichter and Rothman in the 1980s, a majority of the journalists representing elite media organizations did not believe that adultery was morally wrong. That poll was shocking to many Americans at the time precisely because it showed how out of touch with popular opinion the media elite had become. There is little indication that the general attitudes of the "media elite" have changed much since then.

The nature of the disconnect between the American media establishment and ordinary Americans has been strikingly demonstrated in the media coverage of issues like the "Ground Zero" mosque. While significant majorities of the American people have expressed opposition to the location of a mosque close to the spot where 3,000 people were murdered by Muslim radicals, elite news commentary has persisted in portraying opposition to the mosque as anti-Muslim bias or even "Islamophobia" -- a term that is intended to bludgeon criticism by associating it with the original sin in the eyes of all liberals, namely "racism." It is entirely possible there are racists among the supporters of the tea party, but it certainly seems an extreme position to tar with "racism" all critics of Obama's economic policies.

It will be interesting to see whether the tea party movement will survive as a coherent political and cultural force beyond the midterm elections. If not, the phenomenon will be judged as a flash in the pan. But if that movement does survive and prosper, the American elites will have more to worry about than whether Christine O'Donnell toyed with witchcraft in her high school years.

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