As from where the Tea Party sprung, I want to say shattered economic dreams, but that’s too simple. I was actually watching when Rick Santelli at CNBC had his famous rant that started the whole “Tea Party” thing. You can see the video here (http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=1039849853), and at 2:10 is when the “Tea Party” idea was coined. His rant is about how he (and the traders around him) didn’t want to pay taxes that would be used to bail out people who were underwater on their mortgages. Personally, I agree with this – If you thought you could afford a $400K mortgage on $40K/year of income, call it economic Darwinism or call it what you will, but your bank account ought not to survive. I remember talking about the rant a few days later with a friend who called me a (direct quote) “cold-hearted bastard” for that opinion, but I believed it then and I believe it now. Had the Tea Party stayed with this idea of personal and fiscal responsibility, I would be a Tea Party member today.

What happened after that, however, was that as the Tea Party movement really started to coalesce, the outrage at the people, corporations, and government policies that had caused the problems was supplanted by a far stronger outrage at the government alone. It’s ironic to me that a movement that started out as such an outcry for people and corporations to take personal responsibility for their actions became one where much of this responsibility was placed on the government. (Even more ironic is the notion that by making government smaller and reducing oversight that somehow these sorts of problems will right themselves and not happen again, but that’s a different issue…)

I think, though, that more than anything the Tea Party is a constituency of disappointed people. They had plans, those plans got wrecked along the way, and now there is a suspicion that somehow the government is at fault. And it certainly was for some things, one of them, in my opinion, being that the government fostered the bad behavior Rick Santelli talked about by bailing out large industries in the past, particularly the S&L industry. This incurs something called “moral hazard”. If you haven’t heard the term before, it is used by economists to describe policies that reward risky behavior by making the costs of that behavior not equal to the rewards possible by doing whatever it is that is risky. In this case, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and a slew of other government entities engendered moral hazard over decades by enabling government-backed mortgages and tax benefits from purchasing homes. The financial industry then exacerbated the problem by repackaging these mortgages into financial instruments that were understood by very few people and that were rated by companies who were getting paid by the very companies that wanted good ratings. When the bottom fell out, the government stepped in to prevent most companies from going bankrupt. This was done for a lot of good reasons, but it also jacked up moral hazard so that it is even higher than it was before.

The focus on bad government, however, I think also comes from the election of a Democratic President while all this was happening. A vast majority of Tea Party members are Republicans, so for them this was just another example of things going bad. If you look at the polls, you also see that the percentage of white, male, older-than-45, and evangelical Christians is much higher than in the general population. What you don’t see are significant participation by minorities, non-Christians, or recent immigrants. The election of a black man with a strange name and a childhood spent overseas in a largely Islamic nation as the son of a poor single mother didn’t (doesn’t) jive with either their politics or their sense of what America is or should be.

One thing that you also see if you look at the polls is that Tea Party members have a higher-than-average level of education and a higher-than-average income. This isn’t likely due to them being inherently more intelligent or hard-working than other groups – or at least I haven’t seen any data that shows this. What is almost certainly the largest contributing factor is that minorities and immigrants play almost no role in the Tea Party. Because minorities and immigrants have lower overall levels of education and income, their absence raises the Tea Party average. Another way of looking at it is that since the Tea Party members are largely white and born in the USA, they benefitted from the US education system and from the very government policies described above that boosted the values of homes across the USA for decades.

And this is where I think you find the genesis of much of the Tea Party popularity. People had a really, really, really good life in the USA in the 20 years from 1988-2008. But it was a standard of living based on misguided government policy compounded by weak regulation of corporations and underwritten by the past experience of the financial industry that if they really, completely, just totally screwed up that the government would come in, wipe their bottoms, kiss them on the cheek and send them back to try again. The financial community was right, and they got saved. People who shouldn’t have bought their homes in the first place, lost them. And people who did all the right things found their home value shrinking daily, driving many of them underwater and reducing their sense of security, their real wealth, and their faith in the American Dream.

As I said above, if that were it and the Tea Party was fighting solely to prevent these kinds of excesses from happening again, they would find me an ardent supporter. The inconsistency of the Tea Party (And I’ll catch hell for this opinion.) is that most Tea Particans don’t want to fix things – They just want it to go back to the way it was before. As much as they scream about entitlements such as Medicare or the healthcare bill, what I believe that they are really screaming for is to protect their own entitlements, entitlements they feel – perhaps unconsciously, but nevertheless — they have because they were born here as white Christians. They were born in the USA and it was good. Something happened – they’re not sure what – and it isn’t good anymore. The Tea Party movement is a classic reactionary movement that wants to go back to a supposed better time, nothing more and nothing less. The problem is that they have no rational plan or roadmap to get there other than promoting the political equivalent of comfort food. That means fund the military to fight off the scary Muslims while defunding almost any kind of activity that has to do with sex education or abortion. It means lowering taxes on corporations (Remember, they’re richer than the average American…) while reducing spending on the fine arts. It means promoting Christianity over plurality. It means feeling good about themselves again.

To me, if it were logical it would be more bearable, but the dual rallying cries of “Small Government!” and “Debt Reduction!” have been empty of anything except indignation and hot air. In Florida, Virginia, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Kansas, the hardest core Tea Party states out there, with hard right Governors and legislatures, the overwhelming trend since the November, 2010 elections has been more debt and larger, more intrusive government (In Florida, all state employees must undergo drug tests at least once a quarter now. Oh, and the Governor owns a drug testing company.).

You’re right that you can’t put all Tea Party members into a neat box. I try very hard to keep an open mind and not stereotype, so I realize that there are many Tea Particans that don’t fit the description I have made. There are many ex-Tea Party supporters who recognize that the Tea Party got hijacked and are disgusted with what has happened, but there are many more current members that feel somehow that a return to ever more conservative behaviors will somehow bring back past glories or at least a better lifestyle and more secure feeling about where they fit into the American puzzle. I can’t see how this would ever work, but I’m not a Tea Party member and at this rate never will be.

Wow. I wasn’t expecting this to come out this fast or be this long – Must have been building up for some time…