State of the Union: By No Means a Tea Party

January 27, 2010 by Rev. David L. Ostendorf
Filed under: Politics 
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After a year of abysmal sleepwalking, Congressional and Administration leaders are finally waking up to the growing restlessness—and yes, anger—across the Potomac. While the state of the union could be summed up in one word—disarray—it will not likely persuade the political class to start acting like grown-ups and settling in to address the nation’s fundamental challenges. We are in for a very perilous ride.

While both parties clamber to get in front of the restlessness and anger—and the President himself finally speaks of “fighting back” against entrenched interests—the rumbles of an incipient “tea party” movement lure politicos and pundits alike to the siren song of disaffected whites who “want their country back.” Record levels of Black unemployment; rising poverty, hunger, and homelessness; the exploitation of low-wage workers; and the rise of sheer destitution take backseat to the status quo as the ruling and writing classes rush to appease the so-called “populists.” Meanwhile, capital has its way—amassing, holding, wielding at will, and content to observe the disarray from afar. Progressives who thought winning the White House and Congress would suddenly, magically yield the change they believed in are slowly waking up to the need for continuing, relentless organizing far from the Potomac and its hallowed halls.

The tea party phenomenon must be addressed head-on, and it must be strategically engaged as a new manifestation of white reaction to political “elites” and, concurrently, to the masses of color “below” who are perceived as securing special privileges . We have been here before. In the 1980s a rural, populist movement emerged out of the chaos of an economic crisis that swept the nation’s countryside. Tens of thousands of farms, businesses, and jobs were lost during that era. By 1985 four years of grassroots organizing and coalition building burst into a social movement, replete with mass protests and meetings, political action, economic reform, and policy change. As the power of that movement became evident, bigots and racists attempted to siphon it off to their own ends, and politicos and pundits attempted unsuccessfully to get in front of it, to direct it. Only by relentless organizing, concurrent with counter-organizing to stop the bigots, was that social movement able to maintain its more progressive direction and to achieve its more progressive goals.

In the 1990s the far-right morphed into the “Christian Patriot:” movement, replete with its own common law courts, posses, and militias, and rooted in the racist and anti-Semitic ideology of “Christian Identity.” Now that fringe edge of the right is re-emerging in the West as riled-up citizens once again proclaim their “independence” from the federal government, challenge the legitimacy of their sheriffs, and chatter once again about their lost country. Shall we have tea?? Or shall we organize?

The political pendulum in the U.S. swings in an increasingly smaller arc. There can be no backing down from organizing to counter a re-emergent, racist right which already has secured mainstream legitimacy in the growing anti-immigrant movement and which seeks now to take root in a tea party. Nor can there be any backing down from organizing to advance and to secure social, economic, and racial justice with people and communities on the margins. Both organizing strategies must be rigorously pursued simultaneously and concurrently.

The tea partiers are right about one thing—Congressional and Administration leaders have lost touch with the deep and widespread suffering in the country, and have made little progress in addressing that suffering. But that suffering goes much deeper than the disaffected whites who cry for the return of “their country,” and who grab headlines with their antics. The State of the Union is in disarray for tens of millions of people who have suffered for generations and decades without voice in Washington, and who a year ago caught a new glimpse of possibility for a different future. It is with them that we must organize—not a tea party, but a progressive movement that will indeed bring about a new vision for a nation still struggling to be born.

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