Like many here, I followed the last ten days of the NY-23 race with special interest. I wondered what Sarah Palin really knew about Doug Hoffman that caused her to get involved in the first place. I still don't know.
I do know that for ten days, because of the actions of a single unknown and untested millionaire, the Tea Party people became the voice of the Republican party and threatened to control it. I do also know that Doug Hoffman took the "9/12 Principles" pledge of Glenn Beck. Democratic Americans may not be aware of the 9/12 Principles, but I think that will change in upcoming weeks. For instance, one 9/12 Principle is "My spouse and I are the ultimate authority, not the government"....
While that is seditious enough to encourage anyone who practices the tenet into action, it is also nigh impossible to reconcile with another 9/12 Principle: "If you break the law you pay the penalty." Unless...if the family is the ultimate authority, not the government, paying the penalty for breaking the law implies the administration of frontier justice (say, as the heinous stripe administered to Matthew Shepard?). The 9/12 Principles distill down to this: families and warring tribes punishing people with whom they simply disagree, say over gay marriage, or the right to choose.
I got into a Facebook argument with a tea partier a couple of weeks ago, which heightened my awareness regarding how little the average tea partier knows about his or her own nascent movement. I grew up in a very conservative neighborhood, and a neighbor of mine from childhood had posted on Facebook a sign she intended to take to some rally. The sign said, "OK, JOKE'S OVER, BRING BACK THE CONSTITUTION."
I asked she and her friends to identify precisely what part of the Constitution was in danger, and the only answer anybody could come up with was "School Prayer." I pointed out to the crowd that the US Department of Education provides very detailed (and to my mine, very accommodating) guidelines regarding prayer in school: basically, you can do it, as long as it's not involved in classroom teaching or an activity. After this argument, they lost interest. The conversation went about thirty responses deep.
That's the thing that most bothers me about Dick Armey's irregular army, which Palin co-opted over these past ten days--when pressed, you find they don't have real arguments. When I used to go to war protests (by the way, I stopped going), I encountered people like this too. But most of the war protesters had arguments in pocket, and were only too anxious to discuss the war with people not yet convinced.
I spent some time at a tea party myself two weeks ago, when their elaborately-designed "grass-roots" busses rolled into Los Angeles. (I couldn't stay long, because my partner Lynn, who has been through chemotherapy, was too disgusted by their attitudes on Obama and on health care and wanted to start screaming herself.) And here I found the same phenomenon---people who were proud to have sent $20 to Joe Wilson, people who were proud to be carrying around signs that suggested Democrats were socialists...you know them well by now.
To me, I feel like I've lived it before. I knew plenty of John Birch families in that same neighborhood in which I grew up, and the Birchers had their own grass-roots movement in the 1960s. They were openly hostile to civil rights, as the new Tea Partiers seem hostile to gay marriage. Ultimately, history is on the side of civil rights and truth, but lies do occasionally win out in the short term, and they won out in NY-23 for ten bizarre days. The Birchers of the 1960's achieved some short-term successes too, and even elected a Congressman in 1970. We're obliged to stay vigilant of Dick Armey's tricks and tea party nonsense for a good while longer, even as gay and lesbian rights move slowly forward, and a woman's right to choose remains a Constitutional right.
Disclosure: a couple of points in this post were lifted from my post this morning at 'minor-arcana.' But not many.
