Care for some tea?

I think Mark Di Ionno is overplaying the meaning of the tea-party movement — saying the seeds of a new American revolution can be found in it — but I do think these little protests present a challenge to government.

As with the Goldwater campaign of the early 1960s, which essentially was a fringe movement of libertarian conservatives that took over the Republican Party, the tea-partiers appear at first blush to be curiosities. Their calls to arms are taxes, government spending and a visceral dislike of socialism and their early protests have featured some rhetoric that came as close as you can get to crossing the line into xenophobia and racism.

But they are plugging into something bubbling up from the depths of the American psyche, the discontent that has been festering since the economic crash and that has not been adequately addressed by the federal government. (State governments are not equipped, because of their balanced-budget requirements, to deal with much of this mess.)

As much as we on the left like to make fun of the so-called tea-baggers, we have to acknowledge their potential power. Consider the Goldwater campaign. Barry Goldwater lost his presidential race in 1964 to Lyndon Johnson in one of the biggest landslides in American history. Within two years, Ronald Reagan would rise from the ash heaps of the Goldwater movement, using much of his rhetoric to charge into the California state house; Richard Nixon would build his 1968 presidential campaign on the same lingering resentments and the conservative movement would make steady inroads into government, eventually taking it over.

There was a political tone-deafness among liberals at the time, due in part to LBJ’s success. LBJ, however, knew that the liberal moment was passing — he famously predicted the Republican takeover of the South after he signed the Civil Rights Act.

Fast forward to today and we have to ask whether liberals already have grown comfortable with their newfound power, whether they are misreading the election of Barack Obama as something more than a complete disenchantment with the last eight years. Obama made his campaign about change, but what we’ve been witnessing during his first six months in office has been a timid incrementalism, one that has left much of the bankrupt power structure in place.

This is not the kind of change that was envisioned.

There always will be a fringe element on the right, a Goldwater/Reagan faction that views any government action as anti-American. Its power will wax and wane.

If liberals do not act more aggressively, if they cannot explain their approach clearly and transparently, if they do not demonstrate to the disenchanted and discontented middle that they are moving the country in the right direction, then this supposed liberal moment will be a short one and the Goldwater/Reagan trajectory of the second half of the 1960s could play out once more.

Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie. View all posts by hankkalet