Matt Yglesias

Racist Signs at Tea Parties

I mentioned this the other day, but one of the hallmarks of contemporary American conservatism is that while it’s no longer a white supremacist movement, it is a movement marked by a combination of tolerance for racism with massive oversensitivity about the idea that “PC” forces are stifling freedom. Thus it’s no surprise to me that Dave Weigel’s photo essay from today’s tea party included this sign:

Meanwhile, on Fox News today I saw about a million hours of Tea Party coverage, plus a little coverage of Jamie Foxx allegedly making “racially charged” comments against white people, but nothing about racism at tea parties.

Conservatives Analogizing Themselves to Violent Terrorists

Dave Weigel points to a telling op-ed in The Austin American-Statesman by Republican political operative and former Press Secretary to U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) Matt Mackowiak:

The coming revolution is akin to “Fight Club,” the 1999 film that follows the struggles of day to day life for a regular guy who starts an underground fight club as radical and not terribly productive psychotherapy.

As Brad Pitt’s character, Tyler Durden, says in the movie, “Fight Club was the beginning, now it’s moved out of the basement, it’s called Project Mayhem.”

Dave reminds us that Project Mayhem, of course, was the militarization of the Fight Clubs into terrorist cells that blow up banks.

Now I’m not one to begrudge someone a little over-the-top rhetoric. But if you go around analogizing yourself to terrorists, then you don’t get to be shocked and outraged that the Department of Homeland Security might think there will be a problem with fringe members of your organization. I seriously doubt that Mackowiak intends to dynamite any buildings, but that is what he’s saying, and I wouldn’t be terribly shocked if some troubled people wind up taking this kind of talk too literally and hurting themselves or others.

Tea Bagging

I wanted to note that I’ve seen some liberals accused of sullying the purity of our political discourse by deriding the “tea party” movement with jokes about “tea bagging.” I, personally, have tended to eschew such rhetoric. But I did want to cite this late February Dave Weigel post that provides clear photographic evidence that the other side started it:

Reminiscent of Thomas Jefferson himself.

Tea Parties Analogize Obama to a Monkey

ProgressNow Colorado calls the sign below “overt racism” though I think to be more correct, it’s slightly sublimated racism:

They’ve also got photos of a couple of signs comparing Obama to Hitler.

Voters Think Their Tax Burden Is Fair

Many media reports such as this article from The Wichita Eagle are acting as if the public’s view of the “tea party” astroturf protests is some kind of unknowable mystery:

More than 750 people, including U.S. Sen. Sam Brownback, are expected to gather near Wichita Mid-Continent Airport post office on Wednesday for a taxpayer “tea party” to protest the federal economic stimulus package, organizers said. [...] Supporters of President Obama and the stimulus say the protesters are a small, vocal minority, and that most families will see an $800 annual tax cut from reduced withholding that’s part of the stimulus.

One gets hoarse repeating this sort of thing, but not only do “supporters of President Obama” “say” “that most families will get an $800 annual tax cut,” it’s actually the case that most families will get an $800 annual tax cuts. It’s true that the White House says this and that many of its supporters say this, but lots of people say lots of things. This thing happens to be true.

As for the “small, vocal minority” we saw this morning that 71 percent of Americans say they have confidence in Obama’s economic policies and this other Gallup poll shows that most Americans think their current tax burden is fair and reject the tea party overtaxation argument:

Now how small a minority is Brownback standing with? Well, we’re talking about 30-40 percent of the population. So it’s not that small a minority. Hostility to Obama’s economic policies is slightly less widespread than support for legalizing marijuana—much more than a fringe view, but clearly less than a majority. But in a country as large as the United States, adherents to minority viewpoints can often convince themselves that they’re in the majority. I frequently here people say that marijuana legalization is popular, presumably because it is popular in the sort of circles they/I travel in.

The American Tea Party Anthem

I’m reliably informed that this is for real and not a parody:

One sociologically fascinating aspect of this tune is that it includes a little attack on those people who are always going around trying to silence critics of Obama’s economic stimulus plan by calling them racists. I’m not, of course, aware of any actual instances of people suggesting that stimulus critics are motivated by racism. But this idea that all critics of Obama’s policy are being smeared as racists seems extremely popular on the right.

And that, in turn, is just part of a more generalized phenomenon in which you virtually never see a conservative get worked up and personally outraged about an actual instance of racism but the slightest hint of “political correctness” run amok drives many conservatives into a rage.