Rand Paul and Tea Party on the rise

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On March 19, libertarian and first-time candidate Rand Paul defeated the GOP establishment-backed Senate candidate, Trey Grayson, in the Kentucky primaries. Paul used his victory as a platform to deliver a message from the Tea Party, which fueled his campaign: “We have come to take our government back.”

Before there was time to wonder what the Tea Party might do with state power, Paul appeared on national radio and television to support dismantling the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Only the “public sphere” and not private property, Paul said, ought to be covered by the law, a view he made public as early as 2002, long before the Tea Party became a force in society.

Paul’s positions echo those of his father, Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.), who cast the lone “nay” vote in the House commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act. Father and son follow in the footsteps of Barry Goldwater, the racist Senator from Arizona who voted against the original historic legislation. Goldwater specifically opposed Title II and Title VII, arguing that the Constitution could not be interpreted to allow government regulation of private businesses.

Fox News, which has effectively become the official network of the Tea Party movement, rushed to Paul’s defense on May 20. Fox commentator John Stossel gave a distilled version of the Tea Party view: “It’s time now to repeal that part of the law because private businesses ought to get to discriminate. And I won’t ever go to a place that’s racist and I will tell everybody else not to and I’ll speak against them. But it should be their right to be racist.”

When the Tea Party isn’t arguing for the right to be openly racist, they use code to hide their bigotry: “middle class,” “family values,” “taxpayers,” “patriots,” “law-abiding”—“terms which, although literally applicable to people of every ethnicity,” writes Glenn Ford of the Black Agenda Report, “are understood to mean ‘good white American citizens.’”

The Republican Party establishment seeks to harness this racist, white backlash that has grown since the election of the first Black president. “These [Tea Party members] are Americans who are concerned about the government and spending and debt, so we ought to be able to find a way to be responsive to them,’’ said Sen. John Cornyn, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “I don’t consider them outliers or unwelcome.’’

Generally speaking, both capitalist parties have been pulled further to the right by the Tea Party. Their mobilizations against “socialist” health care helped the Democrats pass a reactionary health-care bill without a single Republican vote. They’ve also created room in national politics for former Klansman David Duke, whose website announced that he is embarking “on an extended, year-long speaking tour across the United States to gauge support for a possible entry in the next race for President of the United States.” Origins of the Tea Party Among its constituent groups, the Tea Party movement has two major wings: Tea Party Patriots, which claims 15 million members, and Tea Party Nation. The latter group says it stands for “limited government, free speech, the 2nd Amendment, our military, secure borders and our country.” It has announced a National Tea Party Unity Convention for this July in Las Vegas. Meanwhile, Tea Party Patriots describes its mission as, “fiscal responsibility, constitutionally limited government, and free markets.”

Mainstream media tends to portray them as “grassroots” formations spurned to action by the government-funded bank bailouts. But, behind the handmade signs and the 60,000 who descended on Washington D.C., on Sept. 12 last year—tens of thousands have participated in subsequent rallies throughout the country—is corporate funding and an ideology that combines racism with antipathy for the working class, and holds private property rights above all else.

Americans for Prosperity, who, for the past two years were central organizers of the Tea Party Tax Day rallies in Washington D.C., receives major funding from Koch Industries, a corporation with a multibillion-dollar fortune derived from the oil industry.

FreedomWorks, a major Tea Party Patriots backer, went to bat for the health-industry profiteers while the debate raged over national health-care legislation. FreedomWorks is headed by Dick Armey, House Majority Leader during the “Republican Revolution” Congress of the 1990s, who is employed by a firm that lobbies on behalf of the health industry. Its website urged “grassroots” action against “socialized medicine,” and the conspiracy theories it helped to spread—death panels and unplugging grandma— whipped the “grassroots” into a frenzy.

Their fury was aimed mostly at the Democratic Party and union-organized “Town Hall” health-care meetings. Right-wing mobs tried to break up the meetings, while right-wing shock jocks, Glenn Beck of Fox News, and Republican legislators cheered the attacks.

The vision for a Tea Party-like movement appeared in a 1992 essay, Right-Wing Populism: A Strategy for the Paleo Movement, authored by a close Ron Paul associate, Murray Rothbard. In the essay, according to reason.com, a libertarian website, Rothbard “pointed to David Duke and Joseph McCarthy as models for an ‘Outreach to the Rednecks,’ which would fashion a broad libertarian/paleoconservative [anticommunist/anti-imperialist] coalition by targeting the disaffected working and middle classes. … They championed an open strategy of exploiting racial and class resentment to build this coalition….

“Their populist outreach program centered on tax reduction, abolition of welfare, elimination of ‘the entire civil rights structure, which tramples on the property rights of every [white] American,’ and a police crackdown on street criminals. ‘Cops must be unleashed,’ Rothbard wrote, ‘and allowed to administer instant punishment, subject of course to liability when they are in error.’”

Rothbard collaborated with Lew Rockwell, a fellow libertarian and, like him, a supporter of Pat Buchanan’s 1992 presidential campaign. Together, they authored many articles that appeared in Ron Paul’s magazines in the late 1980s and early 1990s—the Ron Paul Political Report and the Ron Paul Survival Report. Reason.com provided excerpts:

• “‘Order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks.’”

• “Martin Luther King ‘seduced underage girls and boys.’”

• “Black protesters should gather ‘at a food stamp bureau or a crack house’ rather than the Statue of Liberty.’”

• “AIDS sufferers ‘enjoy the attention and pity that comes with being sick.’”

Reason.com continues: “‘State-enforced segregation,’ Rockwell wrote, ‘was wrong, but so is Stateenforced integration. State-enforced segregation was not wrong because separateness is wrong, however. Wishing to associate with members of one’s own race, (Above) U.S. Senate candidate Rand Paul.

(Left) Protesters outside Republican Party unity meeting in Frankfort, Ky., May 25.

nationality, religion, class, sex, or even political party is a natural and normal human impulse.’”

Neo-fascist Pat Buchanan recently wrote an article, “Tea Party Tribe,” in which he explained that the Tea Party has a strong “enthonationalist” drive, a “natural and normal and human impulse to associate with one’s race.” Put in other words: white-nationalism.

The Council of Conservative Citizens—the largest and most influential white nationalist group—has dozens of chapters nationally, many of which have organized Tea Parties. The Council’s membership is secretive, but counts elected officials among its membership. This organization is the descendant of the White Citizens Council, who took on anti-segregationists in the 1960s. Their leadership considers the past year (since the election of Obama) as their most dramatic period of growth.

Racism doesn’t just spring from the minds of bigots like Buchanan or the Council of Conservative Citizens. It is endemic to capitalism and is a major pillar propping up the system. By dividing workers along the artificial lines of race, the bosses thwart the unity required among working people to effectively challenge their common class oppressor.

Danger of fascism?

The backbone of fascism in Germany and Italy before World War II was the middle classes, victims of capitalist competition and the organization of credit. Today in the United States, likewise, a high percentage of those who identify with the Tea Party movement are disaffected layers of middle-class people (small business owners, small farmers, landlords), as distinguished from the working class.

Politico, an on-line political magazine, conducted a poll at this year’s Tea Party Tax-Day rally in Washington, D.C., which determined that “29% are smallbusiness owners.” Judson Phillips, an organizer of the National Tea Party convention in Nashville in January, told The Wall Street Journal that “Tea Party rallies draw a lot of small businessmen and women frustrated at their own inability to get capital while big banks prosper, and thus inclined to think the deck is stacked against them.”

Characteristic of fascist organizations in Italy and Germany before World War II was their financial support from big business. When the capitalist class is faced with a political and economic crisis that threatens the very foundations of its system, it may resort to full support to fascism in order to beat back the working class. Today, the Tea Party movement has the backing of at least one giant corporation in the United States, though the capitalists do not as yet have the need to fully unleash a mass fascist movement.

Yet far-right and incipient-fascist organizations have made gains in certain parts of the world. The British National Party, for example, has been polling nearly 20% of the vote. There is a neo-fascist movement among youth in Japan that is very much anti-China and anti-North Korea. And, anti-immigrant pogroms have sprung up across Italy.

The only way to fight what the Tea Party represents is to rebuild and strengthen the social movements against the war, for immigrant rights, for LGBT rights, for a reinvigorated labor movement, for women’s liberation and for Black self-determination. At the same time, revolutionary socialists, like Socialist Action, have the vision and a program to challenge capitalism itself, the very system that is keeping the fascist threat alive and in reserve. Join us and fight back! n Socialist Action june 2010 7