More Than One Tea Party

There’s no denying that demographically speaking, tea-partiers tend to be white, male, Republican, middle-aged, and married. The makeup of this country is such that most large, organized political groups will end up having a sizable percentage of middle-class whites.

There’s also no denying that tea partiers are more conservative than those who call themselves Republicans and Democrats, and that they’re more likely to be opposed to the direction Washington and the Obama administration want to take the country.

But those on the Left who see a movement of rednecks and ignoramuses might be startled to learn that tea-partiers are better educated than the general public -- and they’ll be shocked to learn some of the other things about tea partiers that turned up in a recent New York Times poll:

• Most say the amount they paid in taxes this year was “fair.”
• Most of their children attend public schools.
• A plurality believe Sarah Palin is not qualified to be president
• A large majority support both Social Security and Medicare
• They are as likely as most other Americans to have turned in their census forms

Indeed tea partiers, like the American public, are temperamentally rather than ideologically conservative. While it’s true that Medicare and Social Security may be fiscal burdens, they are also promises — solemn agreements between the state and generations of Americans who have depended on the guarantee of a government-subsidized retirement as they've worked, saved, and planned for their futures. Honoring such agreements is as conservative as it gets.

This being said, the poll also revealed some interesting contradictions in the replies and attitudes of respondents:

Asked what they are angry about, Tea Party supporters listed three concerns: the Obama administration health care overhaul, federal spending and a feeling that their opinions are not being heard in Washington.

“The only way they’ll stop spending is if they have a revolt to deal with,” Terrence Fishkin, a 67-year-old retired lawyer in Georgia, said in an interview. “I’ve had it up to here with their wasting our money and doing what the founders never meant to be done with the federal government.”

Now, Mr. Fishkin may not have been among those who thought his taxes were "fair" or who gave his stamp of approval for big entitlements, but the fact that both his ideas and their polar opposites can coexist among those surveyed is telling in itself.

One of the things it says is that nobody ever went broke underestimating peoples’ capacity for self-contradiction. But another far more important thing it says is that there isn’t just one tea party, but many.

We’ve always known that the tea party movement is a grassroots, decentralized phenomenon. What we haven't guessed until now, perhaps, is the extent to which, in its essence, the basic idea of the tea party is plural. We have a pretty good grasp of what it means about someone when he or she identifies as a Democrat or Republican. But the tea party is too young, too undefined, too politically charged in the minds of its supporters and its foes, for us to safely say at this point that it can mean any one thing. 

And yet it’s fair to say that the tea parties, however many of them there are, are unified by a legitimate worry that government is too big, too expensive, too intrusive, and too unresponsive to the concerns of ordinary citizens. And though that concern hasn’t reached a critical mass in terms of a party platform or set of policies, the fact that the tea partiers are the most engaged and passionate force in American politics should be enough to give conservatives and proponents of limited government hope.

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