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Tea Party tactics

WHEN these words were written, the latest reports from Washington indicated that the US political leaders were inching towards a compromise agreement to avert an economic catastrophe.

The compromise would reportedly allow the debt ceiling to be raised and fund the federal government’s activities for a few more months.

This would give them time to hopefully reach a broad deal about the Obama administration’s budget and agreement about how much the government may borrow to finance the budget deficit.

Apparently, the senators were inclined to reach a solution, but the most conservative Republican House members, as the New York Times put it, “were not going to go along quietly with a plan that does not accomplish their goal from the outset of this two-week-old crisis: dismantling the president’s health care law”.

If no compromise is reached, it means that the US government would have to default on its debts. According to Christine Lagarde, CEO of the International Monetary Fund, this would shatter the fragile economic recovery in America and the word.

Her warning was very stark: “If there is that degree of disruption, that lack of certainty, that lack of trust in the US signature, it would mean massive disruption the world over, and we would be at risk of tipping yet again into a recession,” she told NBC television.

The question is why some people are willing to drag their own country – and the rest of the world – into an economic Armageddon.

On the face of it, this is a power struggle between the Democratic Party (which controls the White House and Senate) and the Republicans (controlling the House of Representatives).

Under the surface, it is much more: it is an ideological battle for the soul of America and, more specifically, of the Republican Party. It has to do with much more than economics.

Those “most conservative” Republicans referred to are members of an informal coalition calling itself the Tea Party.

The Tea Party, which came into being after President Barack Obama’s election in 2008, has been exploiting a sentiment among Americans which harks back to the days when their forebears were fighting the British imperialists for their freedom in the late 18th century.

In accordance with pioneer societies elsewhere (as in South Africa), the colonists had a sweeping suspicion of all authority and and an unwillingness to be governed by laws.

As civilisation – and, therefore, laws, rules and regulations – caught up with the frontiersmen, most acquiesced. But some didn’t, and the Tea Party constitutes the modern form.

To give you an idea of the Tea Party’s ideology: in 1992, the United Nations general assembly passed a non-binding resolution called Agenda 21, encouraging governments to use fewer resources and conserve open land by steering development to already dense areas.

Last year Tea Party activists pressured the governor of the state of Maine to cancel a project to ease congestion along a certain highway. They complained that it was part of a UN plot to establish a worldwide government.

In the process Tea Party activists have conjured up a golden past full of purity, wholesomeness and freedom.

According to Harvard University historian Professor Jill Leopore, who wrote a book about the group, US history is being rewritten (and falsified) to serve the Tea Party’s present political agenda.

She writes about “a set of assumptions about the relationship between the past and the present that was both anti-intellectual and... antihistorical”.

Is the Tea Party right-wing, conservative or extremist? These tags do not fit easily.

Right-wing they certainly are. They regularly rail against everyone who does not fit the Wasp (white Anglo-Saxon protestant) description, such as blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Catholics, agnostics, atheists and so forth (even though one of their leaders, senator Ted Cruz from Texas is of Cuban descent).

The fact that Obama is black, is certainly one reason why they hate him so.

Conservative in the sense that it was understood by the intellectual father of modern conservatism, Edmund Burke, they are not. They want to change the status quo drastically, which makes them rather radical.

They are extremist, in the sense that they tolerate no other point of view except their own.

The Tea Party activists in the House - those who refuse a compromise with the Democrats even though it might push the entire American (and world economy) down a precipice - conduct themselves very much as extremists.

Their hatred of Obama – whom they regard as a dangerous socialist – is so all-encompassing that it is worth almost everything to them, even a restart of the economic crisis, to trip him.

The problem is that they have constructed an ideological world view just as far from reality as communism used to be. I remember, visiting the old communist East Germany for the first time in the 1980s, being told that air pollution did not occur in the country as it was typically a capitalist problem.

This was being said while the stench of pollution made it difficult to breathe!

In America the danger of such a one-sided ideological approach is presently illustrated very clearly.

Hopefully the Tea Party will never be more than a bothersome minority.

 - Fin24

*Leopold Scholtz is Media24's correspondent in Europe. Views expressed are his own.

 
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