Tea Party Turned Three

I publish this as April 15th has only a couple of hours left. I know that in most people’s minds, this date marks the third anniversary of what has come to be known as the tea party movement. I know why people think that, of course. The majority of people first heard about modern day tea parties when events were organized across the land in April 2009. And the overwhelming majority of those were held on Tax Day, April 15.

It just so happens the one at the Capitol in Lincoln was not on Tax Day – it was on Saturday, April 11.

There were a number of reasons for my decision to schedule the event on April 11. I publicly stated the practical reasons, such as choosing a Saturday at the State Capitol so Nebraskans could gather at the seat of their State government.

But my other reasons were only shared with a few people because they were directly tied to how the tea party movement started, which had not been in April, but many weeks earlier in February.

I know, because I was there and I was directly involved.

Regular, long-time readers of this site might be a bit surprised, unless they were at that first event and remember anything I might’ve said about the beginnings of the movement. I didn’t have prepared remarks for that April 11 rally, so even I have trouble remembering exactly what I said.

No matter what it was, it couldn’t have been very detailed. And that was for good reason.

The people who showed up at the Capitol on that beautiful, warm, April Saturday three years ago, were so excited to be there. That excitement – motivated by the realization that none of us were alone in our growing discontent – was nearly palpable. You could almost feel it in the air.

Linda (she was there) is probably the only person I’ve ever told how much I wish I could bottle up the sensation of what it was like to stand in front of the crowd that day, to see so many people together who seemed so like-minded. I counted it as one of the blessings to remember for the rest of my life.

The closest I can come to sharing that sensations is one of my favorite pictures from that day:

At the Capitol, Saturday, April 11, 2009 – looking west

Increasingly, during the past six to nine months, I’ve seen and heard assertions the tea party movement is waning and others who respond, vehemently deny that the tea party is over.

I can’t help but think of the first stanza of a Dylan Thomas poem:

“Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

Even before April 11, for me, the light had already dimmed. The reason I remember the excitement and the palpable energy so vividly is because I realized that, despite whatever had occurred up to that point, whatever else I knew, the people in Nebraska who’d shown up that day were sincere. They were genuine.

Their discontent was real and they wanted to do something about it.

In the past three years, increasingly, I’ve realized an important fact no longer taught in our education system. When a war is fought and won – to the victor goes the spoils. And one of the things that the victor gets to spoil is the history of that conflict.

That fact explains a lot about some standard beliefs we’ve all held about our own history which are erroneous – like FDR is the greatest President in American history, government stimulus helps the economy, and the American dream is a house with a white picket fence.

The fact that the victor spoils the history explains why so many people think the tea party movement began on April 15, 2009, and that the tea party movement started out of discontent, simply, over taxes and reckless spending.

I’ve been working on a series of articles for a while now, which I intend to publish here over time. In that series, the history of how this movement started from the perspective of a number of people who were there, myself included, along with other facts I’ve since learned.

If it seems to you that I’ve alluded to an idea that there was a war fought over the tea party movement and there was a victor to whom the spoils have largely gone and that the history, as largely understood, is not accurate – that’s correct, that IS what I’m saying.

A bold assertion likely to ruffle many feathers, I’m well aware. But, in the words of John Adams, “Facts are stubborn things…“, so, by my way of thinking, denying what is true only causes problems. Just as clinging to inaccurate (spoiled) history such as government stimulus helps the economy has landed us in debt as a nation at a level that now exceeds the value of all the labor, goods, and services we produce in an entire year, and the debt of the European Union. Clinging to inaccuracies is harmful, whether it is about policy or a political movement.

With that in mind, I will conclude for now by pointing to two pervasive problems (there are more) that have plagued the tea party movement from its inception:

Poorly formulated messages and strategies that lead the movement away from fundamental causes for fundamental problems
Hi-jacking and parasitic entities and organizations whose motivations for injecting themselves into the movement has little to do with addressing any issue of substance

Since it is April 15, traditional tax day, and the anniversary of the movement as understood by most, I am providing an example of these two pervasive problems, found in an early episode from the movement’s history.

I’ll address, in full, on another day, why pegging the tea party movement to Tax Day, was actually a poorly formulated strategy, generally. My example of problem #1 noted above, though, is directly attached to the fact that the movement was pegged to Tax Day in most people’s minds. That example, specifically, is found in the use of the word “Tea” in tea party, to coin the following:

Taxed

Enough

Already

“Taxed enough“?

I assert we are taxed too much. 53% of Americans pay income tax and the tax system is Progressive – “the more you make, the more they take”. A fundamental punishment for success and a redistribution of wealth. Some of have no skin in the game at all, and consequently, have added incentive to push officials to take from others and give to them.

If you’re a Constitutional originalist, you recognize that the 16th Amendment empowered the federal government to levy an income tax. Go look at the explosion of the federal government’s size and power since 1913 when that amendment passed.

Does the slogan, “Taxed Enough Already”, really encapsulate the proper objections to a redistributive, Progressive tax structure which is fundamentally unjust? Or does it actually say that we’re OK with the status quo?

If you DO think the “Taxed Enough Already” slogan encapsulates the proper argument, you just think that YOUR group shouldn’t pay anymore in taxes than you do right now, and you’re ok if other people have to. You are not objecting to the tax structure itself, you’re just objecting to paying anymore than you pay right now.

A proper objection, meaning a proper slogan, would attack the heart of the problem, which is the Progressive nature of the current tax structure.

The former position is truly insane. It leads us to a point where we have a President of the United States whose evolving articulation of tax policy has no rational basis.

First, Obama seemed to be all about “spreading the wealth around.” Taxation was all about redistribution of wealth (2008).

When that proved unpopular, he attempted to sell his class-based tax increase proposals as a way to raise sufficient funds to defray the debt and the deficit.

“The case for the Buffett tax keeps eroding. When President Obama announced the idea, he said it would help “stabilize our debt and deficits over the next decade.” Then came the inconvenient revelation that the new 30% millionaire’s tax would raise only $46.7 billion over 10 years, and would leave about 99.5% of the deficit intact in 2013. It was a far cry from ‘stabilizing the debt.’ – from “The Buffet Tax Loss”.

Following that thorough debunking…It was suddenly an issue of fairness. NOW, it’s some schizophrenic idea which somehow involves all three:

“Now, I want to emphasize, this is not simply an issue of redistributing wealth. That’s what you’ll hear from those who object to a tax plan that is fair. This is not just about fairness. This is also about growth.” – President Obama from a speech on Wednesday, April 11

And to illustrate pervasive problem #2, noted above – of hi-jacking and parasitic entities – the entity that coined the phrase Taxed Enough Already (TEA) was wholly unconnected with any of the grassroots organizers who pulled together to start the larger tea party movement. In fact, this entity created nothing but a total nightmare for those of us who were involved and had already scheduled events. They injected themselves into the movement by creating a website none of us asked for, which provided no coordination with existing organizers in localities, and which purportedly provided the ability to make necessary changes, etc., but, in fact, did not.

The Taxed Enough Already (TEA) sloganeers created chaos and ignored many attempts to correct errors and complaints about their handling of the whole affair. Many of us concluded that the sole rationale for creating a “TEA” Party page was to appear as if involved in this new movement somehow officially in order to generate revenue through the sale of “Taxed Enough Already” (TEA) merchandise. If there’s an organizer anywhere in the land who received revenues from the sales of merchandise to defray the expenses of events, boy, I’d love to hear about that, because that’d be a first.

As far as the whole TEA “Taxed Enough Already” concept is concerned, I have the following response…