Tea Parties or Garden Parties?

So I was in the neighborhood, and stopped by during the runup to the South Bay Tea Party at Dockweiler Beach. I left about the time the speeches started, but wanted to get a checkup on the attitudes and temperatures of the crowds.

So, for starters, here are three pictures:

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It was crazy windy…

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And here’s the crowd:

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I talked to a decent number of folks, and I’ll post more as I have time to make sense of my notes. I tried to guesstimate the size of crowd, and realized I had no clue. The Dockweiler lot holds 2000 cars, and the north lot was completely full when I left, and the south lot was about half full. Not everyone was at the rally, but it was a horrible day to be at the beach unless you were a master kite-flyer.

So, a few comments about the crowd.

I was given a pamphlet on monetary policy that was printed by the John Birch Society. Who knew they were still around? A smattering of Ron Paul and Fair Tax bumper stickers, and the usual truck decorated with slogans on every body panel.

But the overwhelming impression from the people I spoke with was of normal folks; call it 20% ideolologs and crazies, and 80% whitebread.

There are two interesting questions that will determine the future of the movement – if it has one.

And that is whether those ratios stay the same or change, and which way they change if they do, And whether the movement retains it’s political independence – the initial speakers were incredibly careful to point out that they were reaching out to Republicans, Libertarians, and Democrats; there was an invocation in Spanish (which wasn’t all that well-received). The organizers are clearly trying.

Will they succeed, or will this become a GOP mailing list? I can’t begin to say. I have to say that there were no signs of professional organization; as someone who has done a little bit of organizing, I know better than to try and do something where they did it – directly under the takeoff runway of LAX. Hard to make speeches…

I heard the intros so can’t comment on the content of the speeches.

My own attitudes toward the movement are kind of muddled. On one hand, I don’t have a lot of space for the Ron Paul folks; I’m a libertarian liberal, but a liberal nonetheless.

On the other, there really is a reservoir of populist rage that’s building as the political and financial elites work to saw off the limb they are sitting on in the hopes that it will stay in the air without the rest of the country that has been supporting them.

A long time ago, I wrote this:

ARE THERE ANY LIBERALS IN THE SKYBOXES?

I’ve been thinking about ‘Liberalism’ (as opposed to Lockean ‘liberalism’) for a while – after all, I need to justify the title of this blog. I am trying to unify the examples of what mostly goes for Liberalism in this day and age, which I’m calling ‘SkyBox Liberalism’ ‘ which is v. different from what I’m promoting.

While the theory percolates, let me explain by example.

In the late 1970’s, I was a graduate student at UC Berkeley. It was good for me, got me almost exactly the job I wanted when I got out, and convinced me that none of my sons will go to mega-public universities as underclassmen.

While I was there, there was a small controversy that I followed. It involved the effort of the student government to evict from the student union one tenant, and to replace it with another. This is to me, the perfect example of SkyBoxing, and I hope that telling the story will help define what I mean.

In the 60’s in Berkeley, there was a movement to create a series of co-ops that would allow student-radicals to both generate jobs outside the hated-but-paying-their-rent capitalist system, and provide a living example that (for all I know) Trotskyite anarcho-syndicalism could triumph in the Belly of the Beast.

Most of these communal businesses failed mercifully quickly, as far as I know (this is all ancient history to me, so if I’m getting part of it wrong, drop a note). By the time I got there, there were two survivors – Leopold’s Records (‘Boycott Tower Records, keep Berkeley Free’) and the Missing Link bicycle shop.

Leopold’s was off-campus somewhere near Telegraph, but the bicycle store was a part of the mini-shopping area that was in the ASUC building.

The student government decided that they were going to evict it to make room for a small-electronics (Walkmen, stereo, calculators, etc.) annex to the Student Store. Why??

The small-electronics store could pay as much as $50,000 more in rent every year.

Now this is an appropriately cold-hearted landlord kind of decision to make. But the people making the decision weren’t sweater wearing conservative Young Republicans, driven by their vision of the purity of the market.

They were a bunch of New Left, ethnic-identity, progressive communitarian kind of kids.

Why did they want to make this decision? Because it would mean $50K a year more for their organizing budgets; $50K more in pork they could carve up in the hopes of building their perfect communitarian future.

Now I don’t know about you, but I have a hard time imagining anything more keyed to a progressive communitarian future than a cooperatively owned bicycle store. I mean, how much better does it get? Nonprofit. Cooperatively employee owned. Bicycles, for chrissakes. If you really wanted to educate people in alternatives to the ‘mass consumerist repressive capitalist paradigm’ (I think I got the buzzwords right), wouldn’t that be a good way to do it?

But reality couldn’t stand a chance against the cold need for this elected group to make sure that they and their friends were rewarded.

See it’s not about what you really believe in, in the SkyBox world – it’s about making sure you and your friends can be very comfortable while you think and write and feel very very seriously about it.

I’m not touting bicycles or co-ops right now (although there are things to say for both); it’s the fact that one group put their beliefs into practice in the world, while another made it a point to live comfortably while thinking really hard about making the world a better place.

One of those is a Liberal ‘ the other is doing something else, but is definitely doing it from a SkyBox.

The folks that ran ASUC are now running the country.

And people who are real liberals – people who care about the working class, about public goods – the people who think a coop bicycle shop is a good idea – should be as pissed off as badly as the cnservatives are.

And so I believe there’s a lot of room for this phenomenon to do more than become the Moveon.org of the GOP, and I’ll be as dissapointed if that happens as I was when Moveon became the party shills they are today.

Because we need to empty the Skyboxes out, not fight over who is sitting in them.

And if this is that kind of garden party … count me out.

4 thoughts on “Tea Parties or Garden Parties?”

  1. Is either political party disconnected from ‘the skyboxes’. I don’t see any evidence to suggest this is true. They take what they need, and walk away behind the flag of their party. And how do they get away with this? The tea parties themselves are not dissimilar to the democratic rallies before them. You can always see the same trend:

    Everyone is outraged about something. I used to believe that anger was a solvable force. Short of a coup, I don’t see it’s function anymore. Anger is blinding, resenting. Anger is closing your eyes and ears and yelling as loud as you can. Anger is sticking your finger in someone’s face and shifting the responsibility of your shoulders.

    And doesn’t this remind you of the state of public debates these days? You can’t have a calm reasonable debate without the words _racist_, _hate-the-troops_, _nazi_, _commie_ (etc) thrown in. Our leaders are allergic to decisions that are not ideal, and must relent with anger instead of ideas. (Of course, there’s better compensation for anger…)

    And that’s a serious problem. Because there is not an ideal solution to the problems we face. And if we can’t have a decent conversation we will never tackle the REAL problems killing us: like social security (for example).

  2. I drove to one of these myself, and the ratios were pretty much what you saw, despite the distance separating them. If there were any GOP party organizers in the crowd, I missed them. And I was looking, so I could ask “when are you guys planning to get your act together?”.

    Instead, I asked a number of people if they’d ever been to anything like this before, and the general answer was “no.” But they agreed that this probably wouldn’t be the last such event they’d be at.

    Certainly the latest bit of “toxic assets” sleight of hand, that’s going to give bankers yet another risk-lite ride while soaking taxpayers with the losses, fits the Skybox “peasants don’t know what’s good for them” crony capitalism mentality perfectly.

    Once people twig to it, they’re going to be even madder. But that’s Geithner; no one should be surprised he’d take that approach. And Obama’s job is, as usual, to be the front guy saying the opposite, while the store is given away. Since the media won’t examine his claims, it’s a much easier job than it might otherwise be.

  3. So whose she going to vote for then? I’d bet money that by the next election she’ll have talked herself back into the RNC candidate.

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