I don’t really have a lot to say about Michele Bachmann other than to note that her decision not to seek reelection seems to be a bellwether for the entire Tea Party movement. Listening to her over the last several years, especially in her bids for the GOP nomination for president, has been like watching old episodes of the Twilight Zone, where the protagonist wakes up in a world that is similar to but not the same as the one with which he or she had lived in the day before.
Bachmann put herself forward as some kind of Original Intent Constitutionalist during her last campaign, but any examination of what she said and a look at the actual history she was touting seemed to show that her version of what that meant was much like anyone’s version of something they think they understand but haven’t actually studied. One of her major gaffs was her claim that the Founders had “fought diligently to end slavery.” I don’t know what was said in her classes about that, but slavery was an off-the-table subject for most of the drafting of the Constitution because everyone knew the southern states simply wouldn’t have anything to do with attempts to outlaw it. The closest thing to a “diligent fight” among the Founders was an address to congress well after the ratification by an aging and ill Ben Franklin and a few others and then the efforts of John Quincy Adams—son of John Adams, not a Founder—who proved an unpopular one-term president.
Her grasp of the basics of constitutional history seem tenuous at best. What she did firmly grasp was the underlying sentiment of those who comprise the staunchest support for the Tea Party—white males with above-average incomes who don’t like taxes.
The Tea Party itself seems to be devouring itself. We may be seeing its death rattle. One can only hope. In terms of social dynamics, the Tea Party’s closest comparison would seem to be one of the extremist groups like the KKK or the John Birchers. Unlike them, the Tea Party appears more mainstream because it has never espoused racial hatred, so seemed rooted in ideas people could embrace without embarrassment. But when you look at it, the Tea Party merely replaced ethnic groups with political ideology as the focus for prejudicial treatment. You can’t accuse them of being racists when it’s not even people they attack but institutions.
Perhaps if they had been more thoughtful about their attacks…
But at base they seem incapable of being thoughtful, at least in aggregate. One of the reasons they may be falling apart is that individuals who previously identified with them are thoughtful and have been finding the movement less and less congenial because of certain unreasonable positions. They in fact have no solid core to pull people together. It’s all based on personal prejudice, a poor grasp of realities, and a tacit insistence on absolute individual license—except when it’s for something they don’t like.
What it has been has been a social hissy-fit about the fact that the country is changing and instead of participating in any kind of constructive dialogue to accommodate the inevitable, they dedicated themselves as a group to obstructionism, as if to say “We won’t let anything pass that legitimizes what we don’t like.”
Whether the architects of the movement intended that, this is the result in action. The Tea Party has lowered public confidence in congress to all-time lows, cost us billions in pointless exercises in ideological spleen, and damaged institutions which previously served necessary functions, all in the name of reinstating a kind of America that seems to exist only in their imaginations. Imaginations fed more on dinner table jeremiads than actual history.
You can see their lack of real representation in two facts—one, almost all Tea Party candidates benefited primarily from newly gerrymandered congressional districts that went to great lengths to isolate just the right constituency to put them in office. And even then, fact number two, their greatest successes have all been in midterm elections during low voter turn-out. The 2010 debacle saw all those Tea Party seats taken with less than a quarter of eligible voters. In 2012, they began losing those seats. Bachmann herself barely hung onto hers, and she ran in one of the most tortuously contrived districts in Minnesota.
What successes remain have to do with reactions among independents who are more rationally uncomfortable with some of the policy changes coming down the pike. Even so, one hopes that people in general are growing weary of the tactics of obstruction which seem to be the only card the Tea Party and its coincidental allies know how to play. Standing in the way of policy, “just say no” rhetoric, is not policy, it’s irresponsible.
We do need people to represent us who see the world as it is, not dismiss it out of hand and insist on their conception of what it might once have been and could be again, especially when that conception is built on the fabulations of a poor understanding of history and personal prejudice masquerading as thoughtful deliberation.
Farewell, Ms. Bachmann. Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.