This is a faux photograph, as these are my friends Brendan and Ray at the Love Park Tea Bag Party (where out of a city of six million, in a downtown that just had 2 million people line the streets for the Phillies, in a park that have over 100,000 show up for John Kerry and Bill Clinton in 2004….. 300 people showed up for the tea bag party).
As I told a friend yesterday, these tea bag parties have been the greatest unintentional innuendo of all time. And it has been fun laughing at all these conservatives, because their complaints are idiotic, illogical, insane and inane. But that is just me as a liberal Democrat talking, and maybe their own hyprocrisy does not bother them. But let us liberals now offer them some advice, and I will let ‘thereisnospoon‘ speak for me again. Because we all on the left side of the aisle have been where the right is now.
For many of you [teabaggers], these poorly attended, ill-considered events are your first foray into real citizen activism, and your first venture into the art of the street protest. Insofar as you have taken the opportunity to do in some small way the work that progressives have long done (and usually moved beyond in recent years), I applaud your efforts. It certainly beats slapping a useless yellow ribbon on your SUV and calling it an act of patriotism. For better or for worse, Americans have had a chance to see your ideas, such as they may be, on full display.
Personally, I believe (and the polls would suggest) that your doing so works to our advantage rather than yours, but that is neither here nor there.
Instead, what I want to address here is not what you did during your protests, but how you feel now. You’ve said your piece and waved your signs, marched in front of the taxpayer-funded buildings and heard the car honks voicing the approval of your compatriots speeding by on your taxpayer-funded roads. You took time off of work (if you haven’t found yourself laid off in the new Bush economy) to make yourself heard.
And now you’re back at home. Perhaps you’re working at the last minute to fill out your belated 1040, frothing at the mouth and cursing the fates with every stroke of the pen. I want to address the sense of helplessness you feel right now. The knowledge that, in the long run, nothing you did today made the slightest difference.
I know because I’ve been there. You may recall that about half of America disapproved of George W. Bush’s plans to invade Iraq. There was a huge public outcry both here and around the world: by some accounts, some 36 million people across the globe took part in 3,000 major demonstrations against Bush’s Iraq policy between January 3 and April 12, 2003 alone.
Over the years to come, millions of Americans repeatedly engaged in protests against the invasion, the war, and the occupation. They did so in numbers that dwarf by far the pittance that showed up to your tea parties–and they did so without the help and support of entire cable news organizations and the biggest voices in AM radio. Starting in about 2005, they did so with the support of a majority of American public opinion behind them in opposition to the war; by contrast, polling shows that your negative views of Obama’s economic policies are a small minority.
And none of it mattered in the least. All those people, myself included, speaking all that truth to power, accomplished precisely nothing.
Because at the end of the day, the American people had elected George W. Bush as president. At the end of day, the American people in their infinite wisdom had chosen to elect a majority of Republicans to represent their interests in the House and the Senate. At the end of the day, our traditional media outlets were controlled by a small cabal of corporate owners, and the journalists were each and every one scrambling for access to the very politicians whom they should have been holding accountable.
Public opinion was irrelevant. Protests were irrelevant. All that mattered was the individuals who controlled the levers of power. The only thing that mattered, in the end, was elections.
Having observed that grim reality, some of us (like Cindy Sheehan and those in Code Pink) were determined to dig in our heels in the pursuit of the sort of self-righteous hostility that only true political irrelevance can bring.
The rest decided it was time for effective mobilization in the pursuit of winning elections.
And now you know the rest of the story (doing my best Paul Harvey impression). This is the key to this tea bag movement right here. This is the conservatives’ defining moment: the decision they make right now. Do they continue in pointless protests a la Code Pink? Do they continue being the Party of No, shouting their opposition on talk radio and cable TV without any new effective plan of their own? Do the more extreme among them resort to violence and terrorism?
Or do they begin to mobilize like we did to win an election? It will be a harder road for them than it was for us, since two thirds of America disagrees with them now whereas two thirds of America agreed with us then and now. And patience is not a strong conservative character trait.
So we will have to wait and see I guess.