Tea Party to Nationalist Terrorism
by Tony Chavira
A KPBS segment yesterday entitled "Are Tea Partiers Hate Groups?" was interesting in a few ways. Here's the intro, for reference:
The murder-suicide of Andrew Joseph Stack, who flew a plane into IRS offices in Austin, Texas in February, drew praise from some in the Tea Party Movement, those who would have been considered fringe nutcases a year ago. Even some elected officials have seemed to endorse his action. Who are the Tea Partiers really? What do they believe, why does the movement attract the far-right fringe, and what do they really want from government?
The host of the show, Maureen Cavanaugh, is actually pretty great. She cuts right to the meat of the argument and holds the spokesperson accountable for the things she says on behalf of the tea party movement. Although the supposed tea party representative, for my tastes, wasn't as articulate as she could've been, how she reacted really said a lot about how the frustration this segment of America feels about how we're doing and where we're going. The complains are too numerous, the frustrations are too complex, and the addition of latent racist and cultural undertones have essentially developed a segment of society that have been looking for a government to vent toward for a long time now.
As these groups are typically socially conservative, it was simply too cognitively dissonant to lash out like this against a socially conservative-led government (regardless of how that government treated them in every other way). In voting Obama and a group of democrats into office, we have essentially helped the Edward Said concept of the "Other" into office. Wikipedia's definition of the "Other" is dead on:
A person's definition of the 'Other' is part of what defines or even constitutes the self (see self (psychology), self (philosophy), and self-concept) and other phenomena and cultural units. It has been used in social science to understand the processes by which societies and groups exclude 'Others' whom they want to subordinate or who do not fit into their society. The concept of 'otherness' is also integral to the comprehending of a person, as people construct roles for themselves in relation to an 'other' as part of a process of reaction that is not necessarily related to stigmatization or condemnation. Othering is imperative to national identities, where practices of admittance and segregation can form and sustain boundaries and national character. Othering helps distinguish between home and away, the uncertain or certain. It often involves the demonization and dehumanization of groups, which further justifies attempts to civilize and exploit these 'inferior' others.
I recommend you give the show a listen, it's definitely eye-opening to those who are trying to understand the mindset behind those compelling the tea party movement forward.
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