The Times took a different approach on Sunday, looking at some tea party activists who got involved when they were unemployed, and the tricky line between government programs that are acceptable to the movement and those that aren’t.
Mr. Grimes is one of many Tea Party members jolted into action by economic distress. At rallies, gatherings and training sessions in recent months, activists often tell a similar story in interviews: they had lost their jobs, or perhaps watched their homes plummet in value, and they found common cause in the Tea Party’s fight for lower taxes and smaller government.
The Great Depression, too, mobilized many middle-class people who had fallen on hard times. Though, as Michael Kazin, the author of “The Populist Persuasion,” notes, they tended to push for more government involvement. The Tea Party vehemently wants less — though a number of its members acknowledge that they are relying on government programs for help.
The story brings in several activists who receive benefits like Medicare and Social Security, who explain that they paid into those programs, “so they are getting what they deserve.” And it helps show just where—and how—they draw that tricky line.
“All I know is government was put here for certain reasons,” Ms. Reimer said. “They were not put here to run banks, insurance companies, and health care and automobile companies. They were put here to keep us safe.”
She has no patience for the Obama administration’s bailouts and its actions on health care. “I just don’t trust this government,” Ms. Reimer said.
Another unemployed activist blames the government’s support for free trade for the loss of his auto-parts sales job.
He and others do not see any contradictions in their arguments for smaller government even as they argue that it should do more to prevent job loss or cuts to Medicare. After a year of angry debate, emotion outweighs fact.
“If you don’t trust the mindset or the value system of the people running the system, you can’t even look at the facts anymore,” Mr. Grimes said.
The tea party movement is going to be with us for a while. The MSM seems to be wrapping its mind around that idea.
I suppose it's good that the coverage of the tea party has evolved as the movement has gone on. It's obviously a political force that deserves to be treated as such.
The problem I have is that the inherent mission of that political force is paradoxical: Tea partiers want less government, fewer taxes, and ... unemployment benefits? Increased funding for medicare? I get the "we hate bailouts" argument, I just don't understand how it's supposed to motivate people to rail against programs from which they're benefiting.
If you didn't like the bailouts (and believe me, very few people did) why protest the government rather than the companies that got themselves into the mess in the first place? And why would you object to the government regulating the companies that it did bail out, when a lack of regulation is almost universally blamed for the problem in the first place?
The tea party movement is an important one that deserves coverage. But it's also totally incoherent and nonsensical one, and said coverage should reflect that fact.
#1 Posted by Ian, CJR on Mon 29 Mar 2010 at 03:41 PM
Ian,
That's just it - if you tried to distill a cohesive, unifying belief out of the coverage of the Tea Party - all you'd get is "We're angry at Government"
That's not to say there couldn't be a single unifying principle - but judging from the discontinuity on the protest signs, its just a buffet of political anger.
#2 Posted by murph, CJR on Mon 29 Mar 2010 at 04:13 PM
You miss a significant point in understanding things about medicare and small government;
Most people in the Tea Party movement have paid into Medicare for decades - they simply want what they have been paying for.
Understandable, wouldn't you think?
#3 Posted by Bill SAnford, CJR on Mon 29 Mar 2010 at 04:20 PM
Ian, I agree. It's one thing to cover a movement, another to do so without any critical analysis of that movement. It appears to me that these are people who are angry about our current economic and social crises, but who haven't taken the time to learn and understand why these crises happened and what the larger picture is.
I'm particularly interested in two quotes pulled for this piece:
" 'If you don’t trust the mindset or the value system of the people running the system, you can’t even look at the facts anymore,' Mr. Grimes said."
This really speaks, to me, of how divorced our political system has become from education and information, and from any concept of truth. I guess it is the unintended consequence of movements that sought to destabilize the idea that those in power construct the idea of truth. Now we have no truth, or a truth you can selectively choose, rather than multiple and co-existing truths, or even one institutional Truth.
I was also struck by the woman talking about why government was "put here." I'm really interested in this idea that government has some kind of purpose outside of the people by which it's created. And this idea that government is trying to run banks and insurance companies reveals that we have no concept anymore of what regulation means. I'm interested in hearing a little more about exactly what government was "put here" to do, especially when unemployment checks are ok but regulation of business, food safety, consumer safety, and environmental safety are out.
#4 Posted by laura k, CJR on Mon 29 Mar 2010 at 04:21 PM
Bill, it's understandable IF you don't understand how medicare and social security work. Namely, that these aren't accounts that you're paying into, from which you'll eventually get back just what you paid in. It speaks, again, to our lack of understanding of what the social safety net is, and why these kinds of taxes are paid.
#5 Posted by laura k, CJR on Mon 29 Mar 2010 at 04:25 PM
"You miss a significant point in understanding things about medicare and small government;
Most people in the Tea Party movement have paid into Medicare for decades - they simply want what they have been paying for.
Understandable, wouldn't you think? "
They've been ignoring the baby boom demographic catastrophe for decades. We've known for a long time that the Medicare was going to face a serious problem when the baby boomers started retiring, and they did nothing about it. They said "screw it, let the next generation worry about it," and now that a bunch of 20-somethings are demanding reform, they whine about it. If these people had their way, they'd bankrupt Medicare and Social Security both, because they're gonna die soon enough and then it won't be their problem.
And the funniest part is when they whine and complain about "generational theft" and "mortgaging away our grandchildren's future."
These people, who lauded Reagan while he tripled the national debt, are now whining about Obama's budget deficits. Hilarious.
#6 Posted by Hardrada, CJR on Mon 29 Mar 2010 at 05:33 PM
Critics of Tea Party people are ridiculed for opposing cuts in Medicare while supporting 'smaller government'. Perfectly legitimate.
Now I'd like more journalists to ask opponents of Bush's tax cuts, especially rich liberals, if they gave their own tax savings back to the federal government. I'd also like to know if any opponents of tax reduction or supporters of more governement spending take deductions on their own taxes.
I won't hold my breath; invariably, the other shoe never drops when journalists undertake these expeditions to oppose 'hypocrisy'. It just never even occurs to them to ask, which is why some of us think the problem is not even conscious bias, but a reflexive way of thinking.
#7 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Tue 30 Mar 2010 at 04:34 PM
Laura says: “Bill, it's understandable IF you don't understand how medicare and social security work. Namely, that these aren't accounts that you're paying into, from which you'll eventually get back just what you paid in.”
This statement is nonsensical. Medicare and Social Security constitute a pact between government and citizen whereby the citizen gets specified benefits in return for making agreed-upon payments. Of course anyone who has paid into these programs expect the government to uphold its share of the bargain. On what planet would this not be the case?
Need I remind you that Bush’s proposed overhaul of Social Security, which would have set up private accounts, was torpedoed by a Democratic Congress? The image of them standing up to applaud their own obstruction during the State of the Union address is indelible.
This whole “Tea Party is dumb/racist/violent” meme is a blatant attempt to smear voters who hold views different from those of the liberal MSM. The simple irony is that supporters of Obama's government expansion are every bit as ignorant as the Tea Partiers they decry.
#8 Posted by JLD, CJR on Tue 30 Mar 2010 at 08:28 PM