Tea Parties, Part Two

Where is all this rage coming from? Where was this anger when it came to wiretapping American citizens without warrants? Where was it in response to torture? It wasn't there.

No, the rage has some sociological (and, likely, psychological) causes. When you look at these people, what you see is that the vast majority are white men in late middle age. In other words, they were born in the 1950s when white men were very privileged. They probably missed Vietnam, and didn't tune into politics until Reagan started selling the fantasy of restoring America to the fictive golden age before the 1960s - an age golden only for white males and not for women or minorities, the bulk of the population. Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama embody the loss of privilege.

Psychologically, they also embody the emasculation that age has wrought on them. The late middle-aged man and the middle-age crisis is all about adolescent fantasies that went unfulfilled. A party of women, minorities, and gays only makes them feel weaker and angrier. (This is why they love Sarah Palin - she represents what they wish they could have had, a spunky, pretty, but subordinate woman who shares their anger and looks up at McCain with those dreamy eyes. A true helpmate.)

Listen to what they are saying and how they are saying it. They are projecting onto Obama their fear and rage that something is being taken from them. They don't know what it is, of course, because it's a projection. They make it up as they go along, using catchphrases of hate ("you're going to make us like Russia") from a cold war childhood. That rage is not about health care or anything else. It's about blaming the government for their own loss of power in their lives (something that would more plausibly be directed at the banks and companies that have, in fact, rendered them so impotent in their daily lives).

Is it any wonder that the popular image is the tea party? Tea is regarded as effeminate in American culture, a "tea party" is more so. But in this sense, the tea party is about a band of young men dressing up as figures of independence and violence with outsider status (the Indian in popular culture) and committing raucous petty vandalism: a masculine and adolescent play on the feminine "tea party."