Stefano has big goals for making the Republican Party more assertive. “The lower end of Bucks County [PA] is heavily Democratic,” she said. “We have to go out and start bringing the message to the people, recruiting people to run for vacant seats there. Democratic areas, working- and middle-class places, the conservative message has to be taken there.”
Stefano is emblematic of a striking trend: A significant portion of the Tea Party organizers are women, in a movement that nearly every poll suggested was supported mostly by men. A lot of these women feel called to action and spoke, as Stefano did, as mothers, concerned for their children’s future.
“Barack Obama’s fatal mistake was that he came between me and my child’s future. And the Republicans failed to put up a defense,” she said simply. “I don’t know who likes us less, the Democrats or the establishment Republicans. I don’t care.”
Very interesting profile of an until 2008 relatively unpolitical Mom who got involved in the Tea Party. She's not crazy. Far from it. But what Progressives need to understand better is why she's so riled up, and why she thinks Obama has come between her and her child's future.
Progressives are mistaken if they think the Tea Party comprises mostly morons manipulated by the political pros. Stefano is on a mission, but she's no tool of the GOP. People like Stefano are intelligent and shrewd, but they don't have a particularly sophisticated
political/economic analysis. Their gut instinct about what's wrong with
the country, however, is pretty understandable. Whatever the articulated political objectives might be, the underlying pathos of the Tea Party is defined by a middle-American longing for wholesomeness, and they reject both party
establishments for failing to deliver a politics that embodies
it. The longing might be somewhat naive, but it is grounded in something most of us should be able to recognize as basic decency, even if we disagree about what 'wholesomeness' means in a pluralistic society.
The Tea Party begins with the GOP, but it doesn't end with it :
“More people now realize there is a war on two fronts,” she said. “In D.C. with the Obama administration and at home against the Republican treachery that allowed people like Obama and the other progressives to flourish.”
She was taking the long view: “The people who have failed to represent us in the Republican Party have got to be targeted, they have got to go, if it takes four, six, eight, ten years. I think most machines look at people like us and think, ‘They will go away. These dumb housewives are going to go back and have babies and we’ll outlast these bastards.’ It’s not happening this time.”
At this point I'm just kind of fascinated by the Tea Party as a social phenomenon. I'll be very interested to see if they have the staying power that Stefano predicts. The energy and the passion are remarkable, and I think will be sustainable, and if anything will grow more powerful so long as both parties are perceived as fundamentally corrupt.
There is something going on here that has its own life and momentum, and there will be a certain amount of jockeying by pols to to get in front of the parade. There is an awful lot of raw energy to work with here, and while it's quite possible that it could be demagogued in a way that will take us to a bad place, I think that we have to look at the passion that is driving the Tea Party as neutral and rooted in a healthy need to rebalance things. It might be naive, but it's not at root a negative impulse.
Focusing on the crazier things that some Tea Partiers do and say is just a distraction and misses the point–and the opportunity. It's easy to make fun of Christine O'Donnell, for instance, and maybe she deserves it. There's an argument to be made that people advocating fringe politics should be pushed back to the fringe, but people like Stefano are not fringe, and yet they are attracted to Tea Party politics because of the energy that's there and because it gives them a way to work for a restoration of "wholesomeness".
But the people who dislike O'Donnell most are establishment types in the media and in politics. The typical Tea Partier is several steps ahead of the typical Progressive in finding a way to actively oppose the political and media establishments. They are just as much the enemy for Progressives, and Progressives do themselves by aligning with the establishment conventional wisdom. Establishment mockery is expected by the Tea Partiers and becomes bulletin-board material that just motivates them more. And the pity of it is that this energy could be channeled in a positive, progressive direction, but won't be because of abortion and gay rights and the cultural rift it causes with middle income cosmopolitans who share common ground with Tea Partiers on the economic issues.
Right now Progressives don't have a clue about how to channel this populist energy for progressive goals because they are too caught up in the cultural values differences, which is too bad, because it makes it more likely that this energy will be exploited by the Right. O'Donnell may lose in November–I hope she does–but that won't stop Stefano. Progressives should not be so concerned with the likes of the O'Donnells so much as they should be concerned with the Stefanos. I don't know whether she in particular could be persuaded to buy into a vision of progressive decency in a pluralistic society, but I think a lot of people out there will be attracted to the Tea Party by default because progressives are not even trying to compete.
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