Is the Tea Party really a cult, whose benighted members are manipulated by smooth-talking pitchmen into acting, and voting, against their own best interests?
In a speech delivered at the left-leaning Center for American Progress on Thursday, Sen. Chuck Schumer described the movement in similar terms, and offered Democrats a plan to help “break the hold the Tea Party’s generalized ideology has on its sympathizers.”
Democrats, he said, must confront the group’s “obsessive anti-government mania…by showing the people the need for government to help them out of their morass.”
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To be clear, the “people” Schumer was talking about are the members of the Tea Party themselves, whom he consistently described as though they were misguided souls, held in thrall by the “convoluted but convincing illogic“ of “the plutocrats and their allies.”
Schumer believes he knows how to break the spell. “The fundamental weakness in the Tea Party machine is the stark difference between what the leaders of the Tea Party elite, plutocrats like the Koch Brothers, want and what the average grassroots Tea Party follower wants,” he said.
Schumer based his claim on what he thinks he knows Tea Party members want, perhaps better than they do themselves. Even though polls show that most Americans see government as too large and powerful, individual government services like Medicare, highway systems, and countless other programs are actually highly valued by many voters. Though programs help their members, Schumer said, yet the masterminds behind the Tea Party do not support them.
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“To the plutocrats and their allies, government is the enemy,” Schumer said. “These people are wealthy, hard right, selfish, narrow; people who don’t want to pay taxes and don’t want government interfering with their companies no matter what damage their companies may do to their workers, to the environment or to anybody else.”
They manipulate their followers with a “powerful and successful message machine,” he said. “The Rush Limbaughs and the Fox Newses agree with the plutocrats and spread their propaganda to the masses. Their message machine spends virtually all its time – not in delivering objective news – but in tearing down government.
“They spend countless hours magnifying the smallest of government foibles and virtually no time recounting any government successes. They blame the failures of society on government, often with convoluted but convincing illogic.”
Schumer faulted his own party for failing to protect impressionable voters from the Tea Party message in the early days of the movement’s rise. But in Democrats’ defense, he said, “In late 2008 and 2009, we were busy fighting economic collapse, both with the financial rescue and the stimulus. The average American didn’t really understand what was happening.”
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To push back against the Tea Party’s overlords, Schumer proposed a “renewed and robust defense of government.” He also encouraged Democrats to coalesce behind a small number of popular proposals with widespread public support that can be used to highlight the Democrats’ support – and the Tea Party’s opposition – to initiatives favored by a large percentage of the population.
However, he warned that the issues need to be “apparent and intuitive” and that the party needs to avoid “trying to explain a complicated or abstract government program.”
There’s also a fairly obvious flaw in his approach. If your target audience is a bunch of people who generally view Democrats as insufferable know-it-alls who think they understand your interests better than you do yourself, giving a lengthy speech reinforcing that stereotype is probably a poor jumping-off point.
Follow Rob Garver on Twitter @rrgarver
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