http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20091104_the_gops_toxic_tea_party/The GOP’s Toxic Tea Party
Posted on Nov 5, 2009
By Joe Conason
When Newt Gingrich warned Republicans that they were making a grave “mistake” by driving out moderates and enforcing the angry orthodoxy of the far right, the sober tone of his remarks was stunning.
This is a politician who is no stranger himself to the wilder shores of extremism, a populist and a purist who rose to great power against the GOP establishment, and a demagogue whose lexicon lacerated the “Democrat Party” as decadent, elitist, unpatriotic and immoral.
In his day, Gingrich channeled the same phobias and fury as the “tea party” activists whose growing influence in Republican ranks seems to have shaken him so badly. Why is Newt scared now?
Despite his habitual ranting against the Eastern elites, the former House speaker is a professional historian and an intellectual with wide-ranging interests—making him a figure of potential suspicion to radio talkers without much formal education and the raving mobs that follow them.
Much as he exploited the prejudices of the religious right and fantasies of the conspiracy crowd, Gingrich has always affected a more sophisticated and urbane attitude. He may be troubled to realize that he suddenly ranks far lower than Sarah Palin, who can barely muster a coherent political thought, or Glenn Beck, who enthralls his audience with weird, weepy rants.
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Most Americans don’t know much yet about the idiosyncratic ideology of the tea party crowd, beyond their conviction that President Obama was born in Kenya (and that his birth announcement in the Hawaii newspapers is therefore part of a plot that dates back to the Kennedy era). But what they have seen so far, they don’t seem to like: The more that Beck, Palin and kindred spirits appear to represent the Republican brand, the less appeal that brand possesses.
From the perspective of Gingrich and other veteran Republicans, there is deep irony in these untoward developments. Many of the tea party types actually hate Republican politicians, unless, like Ronald Reagan or Barry Goldwater, they are already dead. They hate Democrats, too, of course—and lots of other people—but their invective against Republicans is suffused with special outrage.
If they have their way, every Republican who doesn’t adhere to the Beck canon will be driven out at the end of a pitchfork, just like poor Dede Scozzafava.
Fifteen years ago, when Newt rode to power on the resentments of the religious right, the gun lobby and the economic royalists, he celebrated their extremism as the political style of “normal Americans.”
Today when he hears the violent rhetoric, the hateful threats and the fanatical intolerance, he knows they are talking about him, too.
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