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Frank Rich: GOP and Tea Party Fear Demographic Shifts, Not Reform

Posted April 1, 2010 by Ted Hesson
Categories: Federal Immigration Policy

Regardless of your views on the health care bill that President Obama signed into law on Tuesday, most people can agree that the legislation stirred the Tea Party crowd to a oppositional, and at times violent and unsettling, frenzy.

In a recent New York Times editorial, Frank Rich posits that the Tea Party anger over health care—stoked by Republican leaders like Sarah “Reload” Palin—has less to do with the legislation itself, and more to do with a political party, and race, seeking to preserve race, sex, and class power structures amid a changing America.

The Tea Party movement, as Rich points out, is “virtually all white,” and Republicans have only had three African Americans serve in Congress—yes, that includes both the House and the Senate—since 1935.

The racial component of the Tea Party movement is so close to the surface that it often boils over. Just look at the aftermath of the health care vote, when Tea Party protesters debased Congressmen Barney Frank (D-Mass.) and John Lewis (D-Ga.) with bigoted slurs, calling Frank a “faggot” and Lewis a “nigger.”

Emanuel Cleaver, a black congressman from Missouri, was spit on. Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.) had a brick thrown through her office window.

The outrage has less to do with health care reform, which gives comparably less control to the government than past landmark reforms like Social Security and Medicare, and more to do with a black president, a female Congressional leader, and national priorities that are shifting along with the country’s demographics. And whether they like it or not, Rich writes, demographic predictions over the coming years promise a more diverse country, and policies to match that diversity.

That a tsunami of anger is gathering today is illogical, given that what the right calls “Obamacare” is less provocative than either the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or Medicare, an epic entitlement that actually did precipitate a government takeover of a sizable chunk of American health care. But the explanation is plain: the health care bill is not the main source of this anger and never has been. It’s merely a handy excuse. The real source of the over-the-top rage of 2010 is the same kind of national existential reordering that roiled America in 1964.

In fact, the current surge of anger — and the accompanying rise in right-wing extremism — predates the entire health care debate. The first signs were the shrieks of “traitor” and “off with his head” at Palin rallies as Obama’s election became more likely in October 2008. Those passions have spiraled ever since — from Gov. Rick Perry’s kowtowing to secessionists at a Tea Party rally in Texas to the gratuitous brandishing of assault weapons at Obama health care rallies last summer to “You lie!” piercing the president’s address to Congress last fall like an ominous shot.

If Obama’s first legislative priority had been immigration or financial reform or climate change, we would have seen the same trajectory. The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House — topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman — would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play. It’s not happenstance that Frank, Lewis and Cleaver — none of them major Democratic players in the health care push — received a major share of last weekend’s abuse. When you hear demonstrators chant the slogan “Take our country back!,” these are the people they want to take the country back from.

But despite the spitting and demeaning name-calling during Tea Party protests, the movement hasn’t been jettisoned by Republican leadership. In fact, leaders like Palin are stoking the fires of the extremists, even while Tea Party protests make headlines for belligerent racism and violence.

Rich writes:

After the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, some responsible leaders in both parties spoke out to try to put a lid on the resistance and violence. The arch-segregationist Russell of Georgia, concerned about what might happen in his own backyard, declared flatly that the law is “now on the books.” Yet no Republican or conservative leader of stature has taken on Palin, Perry, Boehner or any of the others who have been stoking these fires for a good 17 months now. Last week McCain even endorsed Palin’s “reload” rhetoric.

With Senators Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) gathering support for an immigration bill, immigration policy may be the next American political battleground (Graham, it should be noted, hasn’t spoken very promisingly about the bill as of late). According to Rich, we shouldn’t be surprised if the Republicans continue to appropriate the ideals of the Tea Party-Glenn Beck crowd when it comes to immigration reform, as well.

What’s scary is that such support could, at the worst, encourage violence among extremists. While the majority of Americans support immigration reform, the potential for nativist backlask will likely increase once the immigration debate begins in full, as LIW blogger Patrick Young, Esq., wrote on Tuesday.

And, as Rich says, if Republican leaders like Lindsey Graham, John McCain, and Mitt Romney are so afraid of the Tea Party crowd that they can’t denounce extremist behavior, then “the rest of us have reason to fear them too.”

Tags : frank rich, graham, immigration reform, new york times, obama, palin, schumer, tea party

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