Tea Party: the American right’s political tantrum

This article was published in Spiked-Online 21 September 2010

In New York state, multi-millionaire real-estate developer Carl Paladino wins the Republican gubernatorial nomination and declares that he’s leading a ‘people’s revolution’ against the ‘ruling class’.

Running as an anti-establishment insurgent, Paladino naturally neglected to mention that under cover of various corporate entities, he’s contributed about half a million dollars to Democrats and Republicans over the past 10 years, receiving valuable tax incentives from state government. Instead, he railed against legislators who defer to lobbyists and campaign contributors, promising to ‘bring a baseball bat’ to the notoriously dysfunctional state capitol. His other policy proposals have included housing welfare recipients in state prisons. Of course, this populist poseur is a Tea Party favourite.

No wonder pundits struggle to make sense of the Tea Party movement; it’s a political nonsense, or, rather, a political tantrum, largely and quietly funded by the gazillionaire Koch brothers (as Jane Mayer recently reported in the New Yorker). Ordinary citizens who associate or sympathise with this movement may not know or care about the goals of its financial backers, and it’s a bit hard to generalise about the motives and agendas of so many loosely organised voters.