The morning after the Tea Party

It is easy for Britain to dismiss the Tea Party movement as some weird Americanism and the dubiously eccentric candidates, incoherent policies and populist elections slogans all backed by the likes of Fox News add to this conclusion. This view is even felt amongst American liberals who seem to think the world would be such a peaceful place were it not for those ‘crazy, ignorant’ Tea Party supporters and other conservatives. Yet perhaps to understand the Tea Party, one shouldn’t look at the movement itself but should scrutinise the liberal politics that dismisses the movement with such ease.

The American civilisation was built upon liberal values and it has long championed the liberalist tradition even more than Britain has. This liberal understanding that focuses thoroughly on the welfare of the individual compounded with the pragmatism and the free market orientation of American politics has become such an obsessive feature of the United States that to this day it has not ratified the International Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights. Yet these very values that American liberals so feverishly cherish are creating the handicaps that are feeding the sense of discontent that feeds the Tea Party movement. Freedom of the individual from the state is the biggest argument used against the healthcare bill Obama managed to pass, and taxation for some Tea Party supporters is little more than theft. The Tea Party therefore is the fly at the backside of Democrats, the persisting symptom, annoying them, reminding them that everything is not under control. This perhaps out of everything else is why they’ve been so vindictively mocked by the liberal press.

Yet none of this tempts liberal Democrats to ask bigger questions about their own presumptions of freedom and justice. Still they are merely looking for compromise with the Republicans rather than more radically rethinking their own position, content and reaffirmed by watching late night comedy shows in which the ‘tea baggers’ are ridiculed. So the question to ask today is: “Was Obama’s change too much for the average American?” The high approval of Obama outside his country and especially in Europe seems to indicate that this view is prevailing. However might it have been that the kind of change Obama was offering was indeed “not enough?”