John B. Judis: Four Myths About the Tea Parties

[John B. Judis is a senior editor of The New Republic.]

On the eve of the November elections, we are suddenly awash in books, articles, and monographs about the Tea Parties. Some of these—I would single out Sean Wilentz’s historical piece in The New Yorker—deepen our understanding, but most of them don’t get it right. They are too quick either to dismiss or to stigmatize the Tea Parties. And the mistakes they make are not just academic; they contribute to a misunderstanding of what it will take for liberals and the left—not to mention the Obama administration—to turn around American politics after November.

Here are some of the most common misconceptions:

1) “The Tea Party is not a movement.” In a front page story in last Sunday’s Washington Post, Amy Gardner wrote that the Tea Parties are “not so much a movement as a disparate band of vaguely connected gatherings that do surprisingly little to engage in the political process.” As evidence, Gardner cites the lack of a common platform, the lack of a common national candidate, and the absence of a single dominant national organization. The Tea Parties, the author suggests, are a much weaker brew than commonly thought.

But many powerful movements lack one or more of these features. In their first years, the Populists (aka Farmers Alliance, etc.) lacked all these of these features. In 1892, they came together around a candidate and a platform, but that didn’t last. The populist movement of the 1880s and 1890s was basically a highly decentralized and fractious movement. Or consider the New Left of the 1960s, of which I can speak personally. There was a multiplicity of organizations: student, black, Chicano, feminist. And some of the organizations that claimed to have thousands and thousands of members were themselves disorganized and decentralized. I belonged to an SDS chapter in California, but we never—and I mean never—consulted the national office in Chicago. When some would-be Leninists tried to consolidate SDS into a cadre organization in 1969, it splintered and eventually dissolved....