From the John Birch Society to the Tea Party

Sean Wilentz’s New Yorker article, “Confounding Fathers,” is the most thorough and precise piece on the Tea Party movement I have encountered. It explains how the movement’s ideas are not original but rather a regurgitation of crazy conspiracy theories promulgated by the John Birch Society, and it depicts just how extreme, dangerous, apocryphal, hypocritical and, most important, pervasive they are.
Wilentz calmly describes how Glenn Beck loves to tout Birch Society books and opinions. The Society, which emerged in 1958, provided an outlet for McCarthy sympathizers. Its founder, Robert Welch, claimed that President Eisenhower spent his entire life serving as a secret Communist spy. More generally, Welch considered government to be “always and inevitably an enemy of individual freedom.” In particular he saw the Progressive era as a singular threat, labeling Woodrow Wilson the man who “started this nation on its present road to totalitarianism,” mainly because he created the Federal Reserve and graduated income tax. The “master conspiracy” was allegedly hatched by the Federal Reserve, the IRS, and “Insiders” such as the Rothschilds and Rockerfellers, all bent on doing “evil work under the guise of humanitarian uplift,” as Wilentz puts it.
But the most insane and polarizing figure in connection with this movement was Willard Cleon Skousen, whose book— “The 5,000 Year Leap,” which argues that the U.S. Constitution was really founded on Biblical principles and not on the Enlightenment tradition—is at the top of Glenn Beck’s required-reading list since it is “essential to understanding why our Founders built this Republic the way they did.” To give you an idea of how paranoid and nihilistic Skousen really was, consider the following. In 1971, he started a group called the Freemen Institute, which went after: “the Environmental Protection Agency… all subsidies to farmers, all federal aid to education, all federal social welfare, foreign aid, social security, elimination of public school prayer and Bible reading, and (that familiar right-wing nemesis) the United Nations.”

Back then the Birch Society and Skousen were widely regarded as pariahs. Celebrities such as Bob Dylan and cartoonist Walt Kelly regularly poked fun at the Society’s extremist reputation, and in 1962 the American Security Council, an ultraconservative organization, kicked out Skousen, asserting that he had “gone off the deep end.” J. Edgar Hoover monitored his actions closely, noting in an F.B.I. memo that “Skousen has affiliated himself with the extreme right-wing ‘professional communists’ who are promoting their own anti-communism for obvious financial purposes.” Last, a Mormon journal called Dialogue denounced Skousen, a Mormon himself, much like Glenn Beck, for promulgating opinions that came “perilously close’ to Nazism.”

For a long time, according to Wilentz, the conservative movement was able to distance itself from these figures because of comparatively moderate leading organizers such as William F. Buckley Jr., who dismissed the Birchers as Fascists and embraced less extreme candidates like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

But those days are long gone. Instead of the Birch Society we now have the Tea Party movement, which pushes the same outlandish conspiracy theories, revisionist interpretation of separation between Church and State, and lies about the Founding Fathers’ disdain for taxing the rich (Wilentz does a nice job at quoting Thomas Jefferson’s 1811 declaration in favor of taxing the wealthy: “the farmer will see his government supported, his children educated, and the face of his country made a paradise by the contributions of the rich alone, without his being called on to spend a cent from his earnings.”) Furthermore, instead of Welch and Skousen we now have Beck and Limbaugh and Palin and Hannity and O’reilly, etc. And in place of local underground get-togethers we have FOX News and blogs and forums and flamboyant Tea Party protests, which feature ugly racial slurs about Obama and Muslims, and which feature treasonous lies about the President’s citizenship. Most frightening is the fact that, to quote Wilentz, “according to a recent poll, more than 70% of Republicans support the Tea Party.”

Those who attempt to restore sanity—the would-be Buckley’s— are hastily bullied and ostracized. David Frum, who dared to speak out against Republican obstructionism of health-care reform, was promptly fired by the American Enterprise Institute; Bob Inglis of South Carolina, who lost the primary mainly because he supported Bush’s bailouts, was “confronted on the campaign trail by voters who were convinced that numbers on their Social Security cards indicated that a secret bank had bought them at birth” according to Wilentz; and Karl Rove was immediately forced to backtrack after describing Christine O’Donell as “nutty.”

How did it come to this? Wilentz offers an intriguing theory, though I disagree with it. Reagan, whom Wilentz considers a moderate, ironically paved the way for extremism because he was too successful: “no other Republican could come close to matching his public appeal and political savvy… It is the absence of a similarly totemic figure, during these past twenty years, that has allowed the resurgence of extremism.”

I blame Regan for a less ironic reason. True, his undeniable popularity has played a significant role in shaping today’s conservative agenda. But this is not because Reagan was a moderate. He may have been moderate compared to today’s establishment Republicans and Tea Party candidates, but his enduring legacy remains the radical notion that government is the problem. And this nonsense permeated Washington politics for 30 years, prompting Bill Clinton to pronounce the end of big government and inspiring Bush to casually cut taxes while starting two foreign wars, an unprecedented move, and run up record deficits for no urgent reason. Obama’s election was thought by many to restore faith in government, and the Tea Party emerged in reaction to the perceived shift. This resurgence motivated the Republicans in Congress to oppose all Obama initiatives. In ordinary times most Americans would likely shun such radicalism and obstructionism, but stubbornly high unemployment brought about by failed conservative policies have left the population confused and disenfranchised.

What we now have is the apparent rise of a dangerously extreme political force that Wilentz, a professor of history at Princeton, deems “unprecedented in modern American history.” To offer a glimpse of how bizarre and potent the Tea Party really is I need look no further than my family. They receive nearly all their information from Rupert Murdoch and Conservative talk radio, and they never fail to attend local Tea Party meetings and rallies. It is worth noting that they were once Democrats who praised Clinton and voted for Al Gore in 2000. But endless hours of FOX News and Rush Limbaugh later, they now regularly claim that Obama is a modern day Hitler bent on creating a Gestapo-like secret police force and obtaining power to shut down the internet whenever he wishes, “just like Hugo Chavez or China.”

Even more astonishing, my parents are in the process of purchasing guns because they fear Obama’s out to get them. In justifying this transformation—they used to speak out against owning firearms—they point to the self-contradictory theory that the Founding Fathers included the right to bear arms in the Constitution because they feared that the federal government might one day become tyrannous and the citizenry would need a means to protect itself. I say this is self-contradictory because, even though there may be some truth to this, a—it implies that the Framers had little faith in their system of checks and balances and b—it makes piffle out of the Tea Party’s purported faith in the Founding Fathers’ ability to construct a properly functioning democracy. This paranoia and persecution-mania would be comical if not for the alarming fact that millions of people believe this, and a bewildered electorate appears ready to embrace such ignorance and insanity.

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