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The Rise and Potential Fall of the Tea Party: the Fundamental Flaw in the Tea Party’s Premise

and What Democrats Can Do to Exploit It

Remarks by Sen. Charles Schumer, as prepared for delivery:

 I come before you today to address a question that has befuddled Democrats and most Americans  since 2009: Why does the Tea Party, a group that seems to represent a small but extreme part of  America, have such undue power, which, all too often, results in a stranglehold over our politics and  policies?  Ever si

nce its rise in 2009, the Tea Party’s influence has been undeniable. They’ve won elections,

 stymied Democratic priorities and taken a sledgehammer to programs that are important to tens of millions of Americans. That sledgehammer approach has had a devastating effect on

 

domestic investments like scientific research, education, and infrastructure.  Even with the cuts that were restored by the Murray-Ryan budget agreement, we're still spending less on these crucial programs than we were before the Tea Party's advent.

 And that’s only the beginning of their influence. Voting rights are being rolled back even though most Americans don’t support the changes.

The Senate-passed immigration law was overwhelmingly  supported by most Americans but it has been stonewalled thus far in the House. The Tea Party shut down the government in October and has blocked infrastructure bills that previously enjoyed bipartisan support. What gives this group such undue power? The ascendency of the Tea Party can partially be explained through structural factors. The capacity of a select few to quickly spend millions of dollars on 501(c)(4)s, the ability of legislatures to  gerrymander with reckless abandon, the power of a message machine led by Fox News, the Drudge  Report and the Rush Limbaughs that can broadcast the same exaggerated and even false messages instantaneously all are the means that the Tea Party has used to gain ascendency.  Each of these are important, but the fundamental power of the Tea Party rests on a little explored and ultimately false premise that can be exploited to greatly weaken its power. The Tea Party elites - with little rebuttal - have been able to make

“government” the boogeyman.

They have convinced too much of America that government is the explanation for their ills. Even though most Americans and even most Tea Party adherents like much of what the government does, the Tea Party elites proclaim that everything that is wrong, even non-economic and private sector  problems, can be blamed on the government.

Their mantra “dramatically shrink government and our problems will end”

 is the fundamentally  false, but not effectively challenged premise, that is the core weakness of the Tea Party, and one we can exploit to turn American politics around to the benefit of our nation. The Tea Party fuse was lit by reactions to two events: the backlash against the emergency policy of bank rescue to avoid financial collapse and the backlash against election of Barack Obama, a

 

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 Democrat, as President. The compounding friction of these two events caused the spark that ignited the Tea Party torch.  But the underlying unrest that allowed the movement to ascend can be found in economic as well as cultural and social forces that, in combination, have greatly unsettled the American psyche. The first and most important force is a phenomenon that Democrats have recently begun to address: the decline in middle-class incomes.  Everyone knows middle class incomes are declining. It has been happening for decades, but the

issue has received greater attention in recent years because the Tea Party’s intransigence has

 prevented all efforts to reverse the trend.  Elizabeth Warren, while still a professor at Harvard, was one of the first to sound the alarm bell on this issue and give it the attention it deserved. She showed that the decline in median income actually  started during the years 2001-2007 - before the recession and at a time generally regarded as  prosperous. This phenomenon was masked by the fact that average incomes were rising.

 If you remember your high school mathematics you’ll recall the difference between mean and

median. If you made $10 million dollars in 2001 and $20

million in 2007 you’d bring the national income average up but you wouldn’t affect the median income at all. The national average can be raised by a lucky few, but the median doesn’t lie.

 

So it’s time we deal with the reality that

- for the first time in American history -middle-class  American incomes have declined for almost a generation. The effect of that decline is remarkable. Consider the fact that, since 2001, the median income has dropped at least 10%, an astoundingly large amount.

 If you’re a family trying to put food on the table and save some money for the kids’ college, and

maybe put some away for one modest vacation each year, that drop can be devastating. Optimism, growth, hard work and shared prosperity are bedrock American beliefs, but when middle class incomes decline over a period of time it changes the American psyche and character. There is a statue in the harbor of the city I represent, a beautiful lady holding a torch. The torch represents the American dream. And if you ask average Americans what the American dream means

to them, they wouldn’t put it in fancy textbook language or academic terms. They’d say, “It means if  I work hard I’ll be doing better in 10 years than I’m doing today, and the odds are even higher my

kids will be d 

oing better than me.”

  However, if that light flickers or the torch is no longer lit, we become a different more sour America.  In their hearts, Americans are a naturally optimistic people. Optimism is woven into the very fabric of our sense of who we are as a people, the core belief in the exceptionalism of our society and the unique role our nation plays in the world.

 

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 And Americans are

not a jealous people. They don’t mind if incomes of people at the top go up 20%

as long as theirs go up 3-4% This is different than most countries. Felix Rohatyn, the famous New York banker who spent much of his youth in France, once articulated to me the difference between the American character and the  French character. To paraphrase Felix, In America, when Joe Bailey, a typical American, wins the

lottery, the average American says "Hey that’s great! Joe and his family are set for life." 

  But when Pierre DuPont, the typical Frenchman, wins the lottery, the average Frenchman says,

"That Pierre he doesn’t deserve that. I should have won." 

 

 Americans don’t begrudge the successful, but they do expect to share in the prosperity.

 So if middle class incomes continue to decline, we will have a dramatically different America, a less optimistic, more sour America.  A recent news story I read quoted a college student as saying the American Dream was not having a crushing debt load at some point in the future. It took my breath away: If the American Dream is being defined down so that treading water is success, then we have a very serious problem. The second deep-seated force that fueled the emergence of the Tea Party is the rapid pace of change

in America’s c

ultural, technological and demographic makeup. These changes have created an eye-popping revolution in our social construct, which in turn has  fostered deep-rooted uncertainty: globalization, deindustrialization, and automation; the collapse of  private sector unionization; massive demographic changes; shifting public and entertainment values and mores; and the exhilarating, yet terrifying, innovation of the information age, to name but a few.

This reaction against social and cultural changes isn’t new to us. Edward Shils, a professor from the

University of Chicago, wrote about the Temperance Movement identifying that it was about much more than abolishing liquor.  In the 1880s the U.S. was a rural country and people were on farms and small towns living a clean, God-fearing life. By 1920, America had been urbanized and diversified because of manufacturing, immigration, and so many other forces. And the cities were a totally different way of life with slums, bars and dance clubs, emerging suburbs and country clubs.  Prohibition was not simply about abolishing alcohol; it was an attempt by rural Americans to pull their country back to a Jeffersonian agricultural ideal that was being rapidly replaced by a new cultural and economic order. Today, we see the Tea Party doing much of the same thing. Tea Party adherents see an America that's not reflective of themselves, and the America they have

known, and they just don’t like it.

 Just consider the changes in the past few decades. Technologically, our world is absolutely unrecognizable to the world when Reagan entered the White House

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 what some have labeled,

“The