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Jewish World Review Sept. 16, 2009 / 27 Elul 5769 The Political Establishment Ignores the Tea Party Movement at Their Peril By Robert Tracinski
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
On the way back home from Saturday's tea party rally on the mall in Washington, DC, on a bus chartered by the Jefferson Area Tea Party, Charlottesville's local branch of the tea party movement, I heard one question asked over and over again: "Do you think they can they still ignore us now?"
Well, they're going to try. The mainstream media, the Democratic establishment, the Obama administration—they can all keep pretending that this grassroots rebellion against big government doesn't exist. But they do so at their own peril.
Or as one of the fellows on the bus put it, "Don't make us come back there, because next time even more of us will come, and we'll be even more angry." Except that he didn't use the word "angry"—he used a more colorful phrase.
How big was the tea party rally? Don't believe the absurdly low estimates you are likely to see in the mainstream media, which is reporting that "thousands" showed up for the rally. Sure, they did—but how many thousands?
The New York Times published a reasonably balanced (if superficial) report on the event, but with a ridiculous estimate of the crowd at 60,000 to 75,000 people, which was later replaced by the vague phrase "tens of thousands." Apparently, the New York Times counts anti-big-government protesters the same way it counts scientists who don't believe in global warming.
I'll tell you what: look at the photos, and you tell me how big the crowd was.
The most telling detail is a graphic from USA Today's coverage of Obama's inauguration, giving figures for the number of people who will fit in the DC mall. The chart indicates that the west lawn of the Capitol and the area around the reflecting pool holds 240,000 people. I can tell you that those areas were packed. The west lawn was so full that police were blocking anyone new from entering, presumably out of fear that we would trample each other to death. I was one of the people turned away, so I ended up in between the lawn and the reflecting pool, and this area was also completely filled, as was the area on the other side of the reflecting pool. Thus, 240,000 is a good minimum for any objective estimate of the attendance. But based on the aerial photos, which show crowds stretching all the way back to the Washington Monument, a credible estimate would have to be somewhere in the area of one million people.
There is a clear motive behind the absurd lowball figures—and the press has a record of extreme dishonesty on this issue. In poking around for articles on this issue, for example, I came across a typically pompous and condescending New York Times analysis from early in last month's town hall rebellion, complaining that the raucous crowds at the town hall meetings were preventing congressmen from "reconnecting with the folks back home." Yep, nothing prevents you from meeting with your constituents like having a whole bunch of them show up to meet with you.
That's the left's world view right there. They are all in favor of "the people"—in the abstract. But the actual American people are too cantankerously independent. They aren't docile cattle willing to accept the left's leadership and eager for their congressman to offer them help and handouts. So their actual existence cannot be admitted to be real.
The fact that they exist anyway—and that there is now, clearly, a large minority that is passionately opposed to the expansion of government power—has big implications for the current debate over the health-care bill. But even more important is who these people were and the manner in which they arrived.
If the absurdly low turnout estimates are supposed to make these people disappear physically, much of the rest of the media coverage is meant to make them disappear ideologically—to ignore or misrepresent what they stand for.
What I saw at the tea party were ordinary people of varied and interesting backgrounds—a lady next to me had escaped as a child from Communist Eastern Europe—holding up mostly homemade signs with an enormous variety and creativity of messages. I particularly liked one that portrayed Obama as "The Borg" from the "Star Trek" series and bore the mottos "Resist the Collective" and "I Will Not Be Assimilated."
Yet the mainstream media is trying to smear these people as racists. Let me tell you again what it was like in the tea party crowd: if you looked around you, you would observe a sea of posters, each proclaiming, over and over again, in every conceivable variation of wording, the idea of a conflict between the individual and the collective, between freedom and state control. There was no way to avoid that message—no honest way to look at the crowd and conclude that the real issue here must be race. That is a leftist preconception arbitrarily imposed onto the events. In that sense, one of the posters I spotted was prophetic. It read: "It doesn't matter what this sign says. You'll call it racism anyway."
The consistent theme of the event—both from the signs and from the speakers—was individual rights versus collectivism, an advocacy of limited government held to the restrictions placed on it by the Constitution.
On the bus back home, I asked another attendee what he liked best about the day, and he named two things, which I think were typical of everyone's reaction: he liked the signs, and the sheer number of people who were there.
Saturday's enormous turnout had an energizing effect on everyone who was there. On the way up to DC, I talked with a few other people on the bus about why they were going, and one of the words I kept hearing was that they were "afraid"—afraid of the growth of government and the loss of our liberty. The events of the past months had them asking: "What is happening to this country?"
Well, by the middle of the day, we could look around us on the DC mall and ask that question again, in a very different context. What is happening to this country? What is happening is a grassroots revival and rejuvenation of the pro-free-market right.
What was really interesting, though, is that everyone mentioned the signs carried by the protesters, but no one I talked to described the day's speakers as the high point of the event. The speakers didn't include any really famous names—Dick Armey doesn't really pack in the crowds—and while many of the speeches were good and people listened attentively to what they had to say, there was no one person in particular that people came to see. There was no one for whom the crowd was anxiously hanging on his every word.
Which made Saturday's event the exact opposite of an Obama rally. The contrast makes a certain amount of sense. Statism needs a charismatic figure at its center, someone capable of convincing a large mass of people to surrender power to the government he represents. But Saturday was what a movement of individualists looks like. Everyone came with his own sign bearing his own thoughts, centered around the common cause, not of a person, but of an idea: the idea of liberty.
The un-coordinated, individualistic nature of this movement is what makes it such a seismic political event. It is something that you don't see often: not just a grassroots movement, but a movement without leaders. I brainstormed later with some other folks on the bus whose political memory goes back to Barry Goldwater's campaign in 1964, and we agreed that we had never seen anything quite like this before. Other big political movements had a leader to rally around—Goldwater, for example, or Reagan—or they were spurred on by some initiative coming from the top down (1994's Contract with America). But the most striking feature of this movement is that all of the energy and impetus is coming from the bottom up—which is why attempts to portray it as somehow manufactured by some inside-the-Beltway operation are so absurd and dishonest.
The "tea party" movement is not the expression of an inchoate, inarticulate rage. It is proof that the principle of free markets and the vision of limited government held by America's founders is still alive and strong and commands the enthusiastic support of a mass, grass-roots movement.
If the Democrats and the mainstream media know how big this grass-roots movement is, and they are deliberately lying about it, that's bad. But if they really believe it doesn't exist, that's worse—for them. That would mean that they have become unmoored from reality and will become increasingly disoriented, unable to respond to actual political events on the ground. They have no idea what they have awakened, and they have no idea what's going to hit them.
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© 2009, Robert Tracinski |
Arnold Ahlert | |||||||||||||
