The Tea Party movement, having evolved into a kind of en rouge conservative zeitgeist more than a group of people representing a set of ideals, seems to have swept aside the potential for any meaningful conservative dissent.
The resonance with the voting base is simply too strong. Republicans know that they've got a good thing here; if anything, it is an effective unifier of the Republican rabble. As such, all conservative pundits, figureheads and personalities, from Rush Limbaugh to Karl Rove, have realized that not only is the Tea Party not worth openly questioning, but it is worth embracing.
Rove happens to be perhaps the finest example of this phenomenon. Not long ago, he had been openly questioning the emergence of candidates like Christine O'Donnell, who had recently crawled out of the primordial Tea Party ooze, but after a public rebuttal from Palin, Rove has quickly switched his tone to that of optimism and enthusiasm.
While the tone of the movement is admittedly over-generalized, perhaps nothing is more to blame than the movement itself; the political emotion (practically an oxymoron) that gives the Tea Party its mass appeal and accessibility also gives it the appearance of being a negative, highly disorganized and directionless forum of arbitrary grievances.
People becoming absolutely hysterical last year at "town hall" meetings designed to inform the public of the contents of the health care bill and claims of government "death panels" by movement officer Sarah Palin are all associated with the Tea Party's abuse of free speech for the sake of conflict-based rabble rousing. The Tea Party is a nationwide emotional support group for the superficially politically involved, which has actually produced some high-profile candidates.
While the movement is far more emotional than objectively issues based, that doesn't mean that there isn't an exceptionally unified foundation at the heart of the vast majority of things that fall under the monolithic Tea Party umbrella. It's all rather critical of the government.
Anti-government sentiment is neither controversial nor new and neither is a resentful suspicion of our government's most basic functions. The over-indulgence in emotional anti-government rhetoric, at the rate that it is portrayed in the media, is just kind of embarrassing. Apparently real people are getting fed up with an unresponsive government and getting involved in something meaningful to promote the awareness of an unprecedented dysfunction (insert polarizing political issue here).
While it's probably too general to say that the Tea Party itself lacks appropriate historical perspective, emotional conflict-based rhetoric, a critical part of this movement, is characteristic of such a lack. Unfortunately, history is very susceptible to emotional, self-serving analysis, but for those of us who aren't interested in politics for the stimulation of identity reinforcement, objectivity is hopefully not an unreachable ideal.
The movement's American Revolutionary name is a reference to taxation without representation, but we have that. What is constructive about such a careless exaggeration? Doubting the economic sustainability or effectiveness of Keynesian economics, the economic justification of stimulus money, is completely valid, but it shouldn't result in a polarizing attack on Obama, when both parties are on board with it.
For those philosophically opposed to socialism, universal health care should be given the benefit of a doubt, if only for the fact that you simply cannot get any more socialist than Medicare and Medicaid, which are completely funded by tax dollars; only seeing it as a worthless safety net or as a government mandate that is a slippery slope to other government mandates ignores the economic reality that we're in and the government's integral role in the economy since the beginning.
America has been bailing out business since George Washington ran out of money for a canal he was trying to build; his investors ran off, a testament to the impossibility of privately owned public infrastructure, so he appealed to the Virginia General Assembly, which happily funded the project. "Cost plus 30" ensured our involvement in WWII by guaranteeing the American auto industry 30 percent profits (an astounding amount) and covered costs if they converted their factories for the war effort; they certainly wouldn't have done it on their own. The government has always been a sheep dog, herding American business in the direction of everyone's interest. But that is a roundly ignored, even vilified reality.
There's nothing immediately wrong with getting mad at the government; it can be a healthy exercise in light of the oppressive status quos of only a few centuries ago. There is currently a bipartisan bill being pushed through Congress, which will give the government the ability to censor the Internet at will — certainly that brings up a valid debate about government power? Curious that we've heard nothing about it.
—Wiley Robinson is an undecided sophomore. He can be reached at rrobin23@utk.edu.