Tea parties: A true expression of discontent?

In Manhattan, one protester waved a flag with the 18th-century colonial slogan, “Don’t Tread On Me.” In Washington, one protester’s sign said, “We are spending money from people who are not even born yet, and that is immoral.” In 344 other cities across the country, said Wesley Pruden in The Washington Times, some 300,000 Americans chose April 15—tax day—to protest President Obama’s plan “to plunder the nation’s wealth in behalf of mismanaged banks, bankrupt automobile manufacturers, greedy states and cities looking for a handout, and anyone else who can think up a reason to tap the public till.” These “tea parties,” named for the Boston variety that preceded the American Revolution, represent democracy in action, said Glenn Reynolds in The Wall Street Journal. This mass uprising was not a partisan Republican event but a true grass-roots phenomenon of “ordinary folks using the power of the Internet to organize” against the free-spending Washington establishment.

Actually, said Joe Conason in RealClearPolitics.com, the tea parties were as artificial as AstroTurf. FreedomWorks, a conservative action group run by former House Majority Leader Dick Armey—now, ironically, a corporate lobbyist—organized the protests. Fox News, meanwhile, shamelessly hyped them with more than 100 promotional ads. For all their sound and fury, the Tea Party “protests” represented nothing more than the bitter bleating of conservatives who ruled Washington for eight years, nearly doubled the national deficit, and were rightly thrown out of office. Besides, Obama has actually cut taxes for the vast majority of Americans, said USA Today in an editorial. This year, the average U.S. taxpayer will pay just 28.2 percent of his or her income in taxes—the lowest level in a generation.

It’s easy to dismiss the tea parties as the braying of angry “wingnuts,” said Zephyr Teachout in TheNation.com, but the reality is that they “represent real, and justified, anger that the public has been largely shut out of the most important public decisions of our time.” Our government has given more than $1 trillion to failing banks and Wall Street con artists. With whose approval? Someday, said Steve Chapman in the Chicago Tribune, someone will have to pay for the “stimulus,” the bank bailouts, and the skyrocketing federal debt. The resulting tax increases will be massive, and they won’t be limited to the very rich. “The tea-party protesters see that and are angry. Can the rest of the country be far behind?”

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