Tea Party Nation: Speaking in Tongues

“The rights that my son, as an infantryman in the United States Army is willing to die for… We’re going to bestow them on a terrorist who hates our Constitution and tries to destroy our Constitution and our country?”

As an unflappable national security dilettante, Sarah Palin, could not help but comment on the Christmas day suicide-bombing attempt in her keynote address at the recent Tea Party Convention. She proceeded to berate the administration for Mirandizing the suspect – Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab – after only 50 minutes of questioning.

It’s easy to dismiss Palin as a lightweight whose folksy charm should soon wear thin. But her Tea Party address was significant for the simple fact that it did not enrage her audience. Speaking at a convention for self-professed freedom lovers, Palin proposed making the rights that define freedom exclusive. That such an oxymoron proved viable points to an unnerving truth of US party politics: we are moving away from democracy towards logocracy – where words govern.

Americans no longer debate ideas. We now fight about the meaning of words.

The language employed by the Tea Partiers is a political dialect infused with emotion. While they employ the political terminology that our country has relied upon since its inception, in their hands such terminology is devoid of its former significance. Justice should be reserved for the deserving. Equality does not involve equalizing opportunity. Government institutions are inherently dysfunctional and should be limited. Nuance has left the building.

Viewed in the abstract, the Tea Party movement might even earn admiration. The Tea Party Nation (TPN)’s tagline is “Quench your thirst for freedom.” The TPN website aims to galvanize those who wish to protect “our God given Individual Freedoms which were written out by the Founding Fathers.” And the Tea Partiers recently established a Political Action Committee (PAC) called “Ensuring Liberty.”

In her speech, Palin implied that Abdulmutallab was undeserving of the “God given” rights and liberties that the Tea Partiers supposedly defend. Palin went on to denigrate the efforts of the Founding Fathers. Analyzing the attempted terrorist attack, she advised, “Treating this like a mere law enforcement matter places our country at grave risk.” If the US constitution is merely a tool of law enforcement, then the freedoms enshrined therein are not the first order God given rights that Americans, in general, and Tea Partiers, in particular, imagine them to be.

But the Tea Partiers did not take offense. They cheered. They received Palin’s message with glee. To them, her language and affirmations were perfectly congruous and resonant with their beliefs.

To the Tea Party Movement, concepts like “freedom,” “rights,” and “God” hold unique and unconventional importance. For them, if the rights that define freedom are God given, then God only meant to give them to those US citizens who love America. In turn, those freedom-loving good Americans should be able to dispatch such God given rights to justify discriminatory policy positions, like requiring voters to undergo literacy tests (which might pose a challenge to Tea Partiers themselves, especially if such appraisals included reading comprehension or problem solving).

Not so long ago, our Right and Left did communicate. Policy propositions were not so authoritarian. The right contemplated supply-side economics and the ethics of maintaining inherited wealth. The left hypothesized about the kind of welfare that works and how estate tax could prevent the emergence of a super-elite-cum-aristocracy. But the Tea Party Movement refuses to engage concretely with policy prescriptions. Taxation is always bad. Expansion of government inevitably leads to socialism (whatever that is). Welfare rewards the lazy. The “Death Tax” is unambiguously wrong.

Such political convictions are divined emotionally. The Tea Partiers are angry because post-Bush America no longer belongs to the undereducated, rural, socioeconomically stymied white population. Their anger – born, in part, from some fanciful nostalgia – informs their understanding of freedom, rights, justice, and equality. Their political dialect grows out of this anger. How can they believe in freedom for all and inalienable rights if such inclusive concepts produce policies that seem to disempower them?

In truth, the American political climate should breed camaraderie and empathy. Every citizen must wonder how the US, with all of our promising foundational principles, has stumbled into such a sad state of affairs. Our nation is hemorrhaging jobs; our government seems incapable of providing its citizenry with the education and opportunities we need, unable to help our underemployed and unemployed, while desperate to cater to a mysterious financial system and the elites it has crowned.

But we find ourselves separated by incompatible political dialects. For one camp, fervor demands that our most basic political concepts be defined exclusively, simplistically and provisionally. The other camp’s dialogue is deficient as well, steeped in the objectivity and uninspired logic that glorifies toothless pragmatism and ineffective compromise. Our best leaders have failed to overcome these linguistic hurdles. Our worst leaders – and Palin ranks among them – relish the opportunity to battle as logocrats, competing to generate and control the language that will enable them to dominate the political realm.

Their status as self-proclaimed revolutionaries has been mocked. But, as the progenitors of an overly simplistic and emotive political dialect that threatens to render our citizenry incapable of meaningful deliberation, the Tea Partiers are indeed revolutionizing American politics.