Tea Party is America’s natural defense against alien doctrines.
At the outset of Steven Spielberg’s 2005 remake of H. G. Well’s sci- ence fiction classic, “The War of the Worlds,” Dakota Fanning’s character explains to her dad how there is no need to pull the splinter out of her finger – “When it’s ready, my body will just push it out.” This foreshadows the means through which humanity will be saved from the invading Martians who begin obliterating the human race just a few moments after cute little Dakota’s prescient statement.
The Martians end up succumbing to biological attack launched not by the militaries of Earth, but by the Earth itself. Biological agents which are harmless to the human race because of natural immunities built up over the course of man’s existence on our planet, prove to be deadly to the aliens. After inflicting great harm and generally creating havoc and annoyance everywhere they went, the aliens suddenly just up and croak.
As it turns out, this also is an apt literary device for understanding what is happening now across the American political landscape.
According to the Associated Press, “House Speaker John Boehner said he and President Barack Obama ‘have a very good relationship’ although they come from different worlds and sometimes their conversations are ‘like two different people from two different planets.’ “
Mr. Boehner is not the first to note the president’s ideological other-worldliness. As early as spring 2010, pundits began commenting on the foreignness of our president’s ideology:
“I finally realized that the Obama administration and its congressional collaborators almost resemble a foreign occupying force, a coterie of politically and culturally nonindigenous leaders whose rule contravenes local values rooted in our national tradition. It is as if the United States has been occupied by a foreign power, and this transcends policy objections,” wrote Robert Weissberg in the American Thinker on April 29, 2010.
“A great part of America now understands that this president’s sense of identification lies elsewhere and is in profound ways unlike theirs. He is hard put to sound convincingly like the leader of the nation, because he is, at heart and by instinct, the voice mainly of his ideological class. He is the alien in the White House,” Dorothy Rabinowitz wrote in the Wall Street Journal on June 9, 2010.
Early on in his presidency, Mr. Obama, working in conjunction with the 111th Congress, began a mission of transformational change, quickly passing sweeping, new laws, including the $825 billion stimulus package, health care reform and Wall Street reform, while also planning to pass innocent-sounding legislation dubbed “cap-and-trade” and “card check.” The new legislation was so dense, so long and complex, the ramifications of these laws are still not fully understood by the American people or even the legislators themselves. The menacing new laws might as well have been written in some unknown Martian tongue because they are not understandable to human beings.
During the past couple of years, we have seen the early stages of the Wellsian undoing of Washington’s political establishment. It is not microbes causing their ouster. However, it is something just as ubiquitous – something benign and benevolent to Main Street Americans, while at the same time representing an existential threat to the political class and all those who seek to engineer change to the nature of America and her people. That “something” is American exceptionalism.
American exceptionalism cannot tolerate or coexist with legislation and leadership antithetical to the nature of America and her founding and trajectory. Like Dakota’s body detecting the presence of a splinter and, in its own time, naturally expelling the foreign presence, so too is America naturally rejecting the presence in Washington of ideologies foreign to her very soul.
The healing is ongoing. The 2009 off-year elections of Scott Brown to Sen. Edward M. Kennedy’s former seat, and Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey and Bob McDonnell of Virginia were the first manifestations of this ideological rejection. Then the November 2010 elections brought a tidal wave of Main Street American sanity to Capitol Hill and statehouses across the country.
And the healing continues: Last week’s special election in New York’s 9th Congressional District, won by Republican Bob Turner – the first Republican to win that seat in more than 80 years – was more than a repudiation of the Obama presidency. It is the steadily advancing, very natural rejection of an ideology and all its accompanying legislation, regulations and control that are incompatible with the very notion of America and, therefore, cannot abide for long in our land.
The New York election tells us loud and clear that Tea Party-type sentiment – the common sense of Main Street America – has risen to the forefront not just within the vast center of our nation, but in places like Queens and Brooklyn as well. Even Beverly Hills hosted its second annual Tea Party Rally on Sunday.
It’s not simply the ideology of the left that is being rejected, it is Washington’s entire political establishment, which has been so amenable to the advancement of big government. The overreaching, over-controlling Leviathan that Washington has become is being brought down by a simple belief held by all on Main Street but viewed as banal by the political class – American exceptionalism.
In March, a Rasmussen Poll found that 83 percent of mainstream voters are angry about the government’s policies while 76 percent of the political class are not. Clearly, these numbers have not diminished. The president’s and Congress‘ approval numbers keep hitting historic lows. And the latest CBS News/New York Times poll reports that “72 percent of Americans think the country is off on the wrong track.” Washington and, in particular, this president, think that Washington holds all the answers to all our problems and the key to all our dreams. The rest of America is now dead-certain that Washington does not.
On Sunday, Christiane Amanpour, host of ABC’s “This Week,” suggested, “There is the Tea Party and many say they are outside the establishment [of the Republican Party].”
George Will’s response: “They are the establishment today.”
Tea Party sentiment represents not just the prevailing thought of Republicans and independents. More and more Democrats are embracing its core principles of fiscal responsibility, constitutionally limited government and free markets. Most of all, they embrace its esprit de corps – American exceptionalism.
The locus of the new American political establishment is not Washington, it is Main Street and it is pure grass roots, as it should be.
* Doug Mainwaring is a member of the National Capital Tea Party Patriots.
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