The Tea Party movement is given far too much attention. The traditional media, always drawn to a spectacle, has flocked to the many spectacles provided by this movement far out of proportion with their import. Sarah Palin speaking to 600 people who've paid inflated ticket prices to cover her huge fee is treated as major news and given blanket coverage. That's absurd. The screamers bussed in to town halls in August were covered when the many calm, thoughtful participants were not. That's irresponsible.
At the same time, the Tea Party movement should be taken seriously, investigated and understood rather than treated as spectacle. That being the case, Ben McGrath's recent New Yorker article The Movement seemed promising going in. It's unfortunate that that promise was so wasted.
McGrath has clearly made a journalistic decision to take the tea partiers or 9/12ers on their own terms, to explain how they see what they're doing. It's worthwhile to go a ways with that. But at some point you have to step back and consider what you've just reported, or you're a stenographer. McGrath appears to be content mainly with stenography through much of an article that shows signs of having been rushed out in response to Scott Brown's victory in Massachusetts last month. Brown gives McGrath the tools to assemble an argument about the movement's power and get it out before it can be disproven. The fact that that argument, made in passing, ignores significant parts of the special election's story and anticipates its own undoing, I suppose we're intended to ignore.
But back to the stenography. If we're to understand the tea partiers, we have to understand the impulses behind what they do. McGrath mentions some of the relevant history -- the Know-Nothings and William Jennings Bryan -- but he never really ties that history to what's going on now or even ties the pieces of what's going on now to each other.
We learn that several of the people he talks to in researching the movement are the kind of people who would have multiple conspiracy theories about multiple things in any historical moment. In other words, the kind of crackpots that are going to attach themselves to whatever political movement is handy.
One of his main informants is a social conservative whose wife works at the Creation Museum. A meeting he attends is held at a facility owned by "a born-again car salesman." Ok...conservative Christians have been a mainstay of the right for some time now. What's different about their participation in this moment?
There's no serious attempt, either, to explain why these people are coming together with the former Fannie Mae analyst or the "self-described 'party animal' (in the night-life sense)," let alone the
footloose Ron Paul supporters, goldbugs, evangelicals, Atlas Shruggers, militiamen, strict Constitutionalists, swine-flu skeptics, scattered 9/11 “truthers,” neo-“Birchers,” and, of course, “birthers.”
So where is it coming from? McGrath talks to Dick Armey, who poo-poos the notion that he or his group Freedom Works is responsible in any significant way for the emergence of the movement. (N.B. When someone who heads a group reliant on donor funding denies in a major publication that they're responsible for something their donors would see as good, be suspicious.) Rick Santelli is mentioned and Glenn Beck recurs throughout the article but his role, or that of any other Fox personality, isn't deeply investigated. We're presented with multiple sources of massive publicity and significant funding and expertise...but in the end McGrath leaves it feeling like a peculiar alchemy, not something that can really be analyzed.
McGrath also punts on analyzing the 9/12 rally and the stories movement members tell about it. And that's where he really abdicates any kind of responsibility. He mentions a sign carried on 9/12 reading
“The Zoo Has an African Lion and the White House Has a Lyin’ African!"
Ok...that's racist, right? And it seems likely McGrath knows many of his readers will get that about it -- it's even possible it's intended to color our reading of the entire piece. But it's dropped in without ever being analytically tied to anything else about this movement. Given the many disparate components McGrath mentions, the racists could be a minority element. Or not. We don't know, because he doesn't even attempt to address the question.
Most egregiously, McGrath writes:
Politics is ultimately a numbers game, and the natural excitement surrounding 9.12 drove crowd estimates upward, from an early lowball figure of sixty thousand, reported by ABC News, into the hundreds of thousands and across the million mark, eventually nearing two million—an upper limit of some significance, because 1.8 million was the figure commonly reported in mainstream or “state-run” media outlets as the attendance at President Obama’s Inauguration. “There are more of us than there are of them, and we know the truth,” one of the Kentucky organizers, who had carpooled to D.C. with a couple of co-workers from an auto-parts warehouse, told me. The fact that the mainstream media generally declined to acknowledge the parallel, regarding the marchers as a loud and motley long tail of disaffection, and not a silent majority, only hardened their resolve.
Eric Boehlert:
Are you kidding me? According to the New Yorker, the "mainstream media" declined to acknowledge that 1.8 million people showed up at the Tea Party rally? Might that be because 1.8 million people didn't show up and that number was pure fantasy, whipped up by the likes of Michelle Malkin and Glenn Beck. Or, to put it another way, the press didn't report the 1.8 million number because it was off the mark by 1.7 million.
Faced with one of the Tea Party's truly monumental falsehoods (1.8 million marched on Washington!), the New Yorker, rather that highlighting the fictional streak that runs through the movement, instead treats the 1.8 million number as legit and seems to scold the "mainstream media" for not reporting the number. A number the Tea Party folks made up, which the New Yorker never makes clear.
UPDATED: Notice how ABC News reported the "lowball" figure of 60,000, according to the magazine. But that makes no sense because that 60,000 crowd estimate came from Washington, D.C.'s fire department. Meaning, it wasn't a "lowball" estimate. It was the official estimate. The other, larger numbers were simply fabricated.
It's plausible that McGrath assumed that references to "the natural excitement" indicate that these are exaggerations. But nonetheless it's an abdication of responsibility. And if it's the most egregious such abdication in the article, it's representative of the way he either accepts what he's told at face value, or assumes that his readers are so critical of his subjects that snide inference will do it. Either way, he's insulting someone's intelligence.
We continue to need informed analysis of what's going on with the new form of rightwing movement. It's unfortunate that McGrath and the New Yorker elected not to provide it.