The Tea Party Movement
European
anti-Americanism is coming back into vogue. It reached a fever pitch during the
presidency of George W Bush, but was held in temporary abeyance after Barack
Obama pledged to recreate the United States in Europe’s image. Now that the
American Tea Party movement is poised to dash elite hopes for a more
Europeanized (i.e., sophisticated) America, a prolonged new wave of
anti-Americanism seems inevitable.
In the run-up to
the American midterm elections, European newspapers and magazines as well as
radio and television programs have been chock full with sensational reporting,
disparaging editorials, and derogatory commentary about America, American
voters, and the American political system.
European news
media have been especially obsessed with the Tea Party phenomenon, evidently
worried that a “government of the people, by the people, and for the people”
might be replicated on European soil and thus upset the big government/high
taxes status quo of European politics. (In fact, European Tea Party
movements [1] have already emerged in
several European countries, as have popular uprisings against multiculturalism [2] and runaway Muslim immigration [3].)
Rather than
commend the Tea Party movement as a refreshing and enviable display of American
political energy, European media elites have launched an all-out propaganda
assault on the movement and its supporters. The main tactic has been to seek to
discredit Tea Party sympathizers as poor, uneducated, unsophisticated, bigoted,
and right-wing, i.e., the exact opposite of ideal European citizens and their
elite masters.
Over the past
several weeks, for example, European media have used the following adjectives
to describe Tea Party supporters: ill-informed, wacky, dangerous, incoherent,
lacking in manners, intimidating, anarchic, buffoons, charlatans, irrational,
jackanapes, confused, inclined to committing malapropisms, extreme, perverse,
fruitcakes, nutters, nutcases, nutbags, wingnuts, frightening, mad, bad,
juvenile scaremongerers, pandering to the lowest common denominator, easily
influenced, prone to artificially-created righteous anger, cartoonishly evil,
religious extremists, sociopathic, weird, climate vampires, stupid, ignorant,
gullible, angry, poor, drooling imbeciles, poorly-educated, unwilling to think critically,
little capacity for logical thought, making ignorance heroic, Nazis,
ill-educated, driven by propaganda, idiotic, morons, incompetent, sucking the
life out of the world’s ecosystems, Taliban, rednecks, backwoods,
end-of-the-world culters, absurd, bigoted, duped, intolerant, ugly, toxic,
grumpy, losers, utterly beyond comprehension, bad spellers, ridiculous,
insentient, smug, gaffe-prone, of dubious integrity, dimwitted, populist
fanatics, dangerously eccentric, and a traveling circus of fools.
What follows is a
brief selection of some European media coverage on the American Tea Party
movement:
In Britain, the
left-wing Guardian has been obsessed with the Tea Party
movement all year, but the newspaper recently has ratcheted-up its verbal
attacks to levels that betray a mixture of contempt and paranoia. For example,
a typical story titled “The Tea Party: On the
Road with America’s Right-Wing Radicals [4]”
is laced with sarcasm, ridicule, and mockery. “These are ordinary folk from the
American heartland on a mission that will take them into the heart of enemy
territory – Washington D.C. America’s Tea Party is on the move. … Never much
thought about politics or even much cared. Now they’re riled up and fully
signed up to the Tea Party. … Tea Party activists approach the constitution the
same fundamentalist way they approach the Bible: literally. The words are
sacred and must be taken at face value. They should not be reinterpreted for
modern times. … The Tea Party is obsessed with myths about America’s past. The
Founding Fathers are revered as gods, the constitution is sacrosanct, America
was uniquely established to be the land of the free.”
Another article
titled “The GOP’s Coming Tea
Party Hangover [5]” mocks the “inherent weirdness”
of several Tea Party candidates: “[A] candidate who views global warming as a
‘hoax,’ equates homosexuality with addiction, suggests that an alleged rape
victim was suffering from ‘buyer’s remorse,’ and does not believe in the
separation of church and state. … [A] global-warming sceptic whose other
idiosyncrasies include apparent approval of armed action against the
government, and a desire to dismantle Medicare, social security and public
education.”
An opinion piece
titled “Tea Partiers Keep Low
Profile Shock! [6]” asks: “Could it be that
Republican handlers don’t trust their gaffe-prone candidates not to screw up?”
The article reads: “Over the past week or so, many Tea Partiers have been
forced to conduct one, and in rare cases two, debates with their opponents. The
effects have ranged from the embarrassing to the downright farcical. … But
apart from those rare moments, the political consensus in Washington is this:
Tea Party candidates themselves are ducking. They are avoiding conducting
campaign stops; they have noticeably reduced or even pulled out of debates with
their opponents at the last minute; they don’t publicize events they are
conducting until the very last minute — so the other side doesn’t get a chance
to put a camera in the audience. … The reason is simple. Tea Party political
handlers have little if any trust in their candidates not to
screw up public appearances.”
Other Guardian headlines
include: “Tea Party Climate Change
Deniers Funded by BP and Other Major Polluters [7],”
“US Veteran Who Killed
Unarmed Iraqis Wins Tea Party Support [8],”
“America’s Toughest
Sheriff Rallies Tea Party Troops Against Illegal Immigrants [9],”
“Guns, Palin and
Washington (George, not DC): A Few of the Tea Party’s Favourite Things [10],”
“Why Tea Parties are
Perfect for a Disgruntled, and White, Middle Class [11],”
“The Tea Party Movement:
Deluded and Inspired by Billionaires [12],”
“US Midterms: Change
without Hope [13],” and “Report Links Tea Party
Movement to White Supremacist Groups [14].”
In Austria, the
center-left Der Standard published a story titled “In Despair Over Democracy [15],”
which asserts that democracy often leads to economically destructive decision-making:
“If Obama made a mistake, it was that he should have spent even more and
increased the deficit further — even if it is already at ten percent of GDP.
But politically, that was simply impossible. … Any halfway-intelligent citizen
should realize that the populist resistance of Tea Party leaders Sarah Palin
and Glenn Beck, as well as the opposition of a great majority of Democrats to
Obama, is nonsensical in terms of economic policy. … The majority of Americans
will probably vote against their own interests and those of their country in
November. Unfortunately, that’s not unusual.”
In Germany, the
left-wing magazine Der Spiegel, in a front-page cover titled “The Desperate United States: A
Country Loses Its Optimism [16],”
writes: “Good night, America: Americans dreamed a dream that made her the
nation of dreams of advancement and wealth for all. Now the United States must
realize how fragile its system is, and how bitter the reality — the superpower
cannot find a way out of crisis and threatens the global economy.”
Another Spiegel article
titled “Poverty in America: It
Has Never Been So Bad [17],” writes: “American society is
falling apart. Millions of citizens have lost their jobs and are sinking into
poverty. Among them many middle class families. … They have no prospect of
receiving help: country and society have left them in the lurch. … Although Wall
Street is once again chasing new profits, for much of the nation, the myth of
advancement, home ownership and self-made wealth is shattered. The middle
class, America’s backbone is crumbling—its ‘American Dream’ is over.”
A Spiegel essay
titled “Right-Wing
Revolutionaries: Tea Party Movement Mirrors a Deeply Divided America [18],”
writes: “In 2008 alone, the first year of the recession, an additional 2.5
million people fell below the poverty line. Tent cities populated by the
homeless are growing outside of major cities. People are camping out in the
yards of their foreclosed houses, while long lines form in front of soup
kitchens. In 2008, almost 50 million Americans didn’t have enough to eat at
some point in the year, an increase of more than a third over the previous
year. … For the first time since the global economic crisis more than 80 years
ago, questions are being raised about America’s success model, the principle
that this country without a welfare state has always been more successful than
Europe. It has made the United States the world’s strongest economic power. The
country has never had to pay attention to its poor and to the people who had
lost their jobs, but now the poor can no longer be ignored. What’s at stake is
nothing less than the future of the U.S., a country with white, Protestant
roots that knows that non-whites will most likely constitute the majority by
the middle of the century.”
The left-wing
magazine Stern, in a story titled “Obama’s America: Painful
Standstill [19],” writes: “Americans are
greeting the end of the American dream with frustration and anger, anxiety and
panic. Millions of Americans are beginning to realize what they wanted to
ignore for so long: the great stagnation. America is in steep decline, the
country urgently needs a comprehensive economic and social modernization, to be
fit for the 21st Century.”
The influential Die
Welt, in a story titled “Nightmare Opponent [20],”
asserts that “Christine O’Donnell is even more simplistic than Sarah Palin —
but the Democrats are afraid of her.” The front-page story is accompanied by an
unflattering photo of O’Donnell with the caption: “A typical American.”
In Luxembourg, the
center-left Tageblatt, in an editorial titled “Prepare for ‘Tea Time’ in
America [21],” writes: “They are white, they
are male and female and they are conservative. They are mostly populist and
constitute a bizarre blend of Christians, right-wing anarchists and
disappointed Republicans. Their idol is the fanatic presenter Glenn Beck of the
horrid Fox TV network, and their heroine is the hysterical former Republican
nominee for vice president, Sarah Palin. … They detest Democrats and loathe
President Obama, accusing him of all evils of the world, consider Republicans
to be traitors, but before that, had failed to criticize George Bush Jr. …
Convinced that the panacea is to turn back the clock by centuries, they dream
of the America of the Mayflower, Sir Walter Raleigh (who gave his name to the
capital of South Carolina), thrive on open-air events with pom-pom girls where
they can feel the red, white and blue, and are convinced that the original sin
— treason — was committed in 1912 by a one Woodrow Wilson. … The Tea Party
dreams of ‘saving America’ by constraining the White House and the Federal
Reserve, cutting taxes, abolishing the Department of Education and the
Environmental Protection Agency, and promoting free enterprise without any
constraints or controls. They seek to abolish unemployment insurance, even if
seeking to preserve (at first) public health insurance for seniors — doing
otherwise would cost too many votes. Finished, too, would be the ‘socialist’
policies of Obama, the left-wing press, indeed, the left in general, and the
oppression of the White minority. … As amazing as it sounds: The Tea Party has
considerable campaign funding and has used it against the ‘Kenyan crypto-Muslim,’
read Barack Obama.”
In Spain, the
left-wing El País published a story titled “Tea Parties Against Obama [22]”
which asserts that the Tea Party is an “extreme right movement linked to the
Republican Party. … The Tea Party is a grassroots movement that brings together
middle-class white men in a panic who have been hit by the economic crisis and
the arrival of a black man to the White House, who the same consider a Marxist
a Nazi or a racist against whites.”
Another El
País article titled “The Tea Party Takes
Control of the American Right [23],”
writes: “The resounding victory of the popular movement known as the Tea Party
… definitely puts the extreme right at the helm of American conservatism and
opens a difficult period of uncertainty about the fate of the historic
Republican Party and American politics in its entirety. … Apart from the impact
the rise of the Tea Party is having in the intra-party struggle, as the United
States faces one of its gravest political crises ever, how will it affect the
governability of the world’s only superpower?”
Elsewhere in El
País an “analysis” titled “The New American
Conservativism [24]” asserts: “If anyone thinks that
Bush / Cheney is the most extreme version of American conservatism, they will
soon be proved wrong. The conservative movement that has emerged in recent
months in the United States, fueled by the resentment of an impoverished middle
class and the ambition of a new post-partisan political class, breaks the mold
of traditional Republicanism and evokes a character that is racist, nationalist
and fascist fanatical. The only ingredient still missing is violence. … This
new conservatism reflects much of the frustration of white men accumulated
since women’s liberation, civil rights, and all of the laws for equality that
have been subtracting power from this once-dominant sector of society. That
white man has not been helped by good contacts, useful friendships and easy
money, and that frustration has been swelling in recent decades in a middle
class which was the pride of the nation in the fifties, but has been
mercilessly beaten by the latest technological revolution and the recent
economic crisis. … From a European perspective, this combination of
demagoguery, racism, nationalism and xenophobia, hoisted by a hurt and troubled
middle class, is a recipe well known and even feared.”
The center-right El
Mundo, in an article titled: “Glenn Beck, Consort of
Sarah Palin and Scourge of the White House [25],”
asserts: “The United States has rediscovered the wild seasoning at its essence.
It’s the umpteenth return of those who see the state as a hunting ground for
the idle. Beck serves as the prophet and Sarah Palin, the commander-in-chief. …
Beck proclaims the return of a purer America — the one preceding feminism, rock
and the sexual revolution. It’s a mythical country, with covered wagons
crossing prairies or neon gas station signs that light up when he evokes them
on behalf of the middle class. Beck knows how to excite his audience. He knows
well the source of its melancholy, its nostalgia for paradise lost. With his
own junk, fast-food intellectualism, he has led a renaissance of an extremism
that has never gone away.”
In Switzerland,
the center-left Le Temps, in an article titled “America’s Cry of Agony [26],”
writes: “Where did the Tea Party movement come from? It is the result of the
recession and the tremendous rage that seizes Americans when they think of the
behavior of their elites. It is also a consequence of the financial crises,
bank rescues and financial excesses that caused millions of people to lose
their jobs. Lastly, it is the fear of a loss of American ‘values,’ from the end
of its role as a model envied by the whole world, to leading pointless and
bloody wars, and a realization that debt and deficits render illusory a dream
once thought to be eternal.”
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