Tea Party: government anger and trust

08 March 2011 |permalink | email article

THE one thing we know about the Tea Party is that it is synonymous with anger. Anger defined it, fueled it, became its face and its heart. But anger, as the perceptive New York Times columnist Charles W. Blow noted, “is too exhausting an emotion to sustain.”

A poll released late last week by the Pew Research Center found some stunning results: anger at the government among Tea Party supporters fell by 40 percent from September 2010 to this month. Anger among Republicans fell by more than half, and anger among whites, the elderly and independents fell by 40 percent or more.

More stunning is the percentage of Tea Party supporters who said they trusted the government always or most of the time doubled from last March to this March, and the percentage of Republicans nearly doubled. The percentage of Republicans and independents saying so is now higher than it has been since January 2007 when George W. Bush was still president.

Why is there less anger and more trust? The answer lies in the midterms when it is pointed out elections have a way of cooling passions, especially when voters get what they want. But it is pointed out that Tea Party leaders still hold politicians to overreaching promises made and greater tax cuts when the electorate was still angry. Yet Tea Partiers regard any concession as a crime worthy of expulsion.

A September Pew Poll found that only 22 percent of those who identify with the Tea Party admire political leaders who make compromises, which is not the way the rest of the country feels. Fifty-five percent of Democrats and 36 percent of Republicans said they admirers politicians who compromise.

Staunch Tea Partiers, the poll suggests, are guided by the worst kind of fundamental political extremism which could well be their undoing. “Once an army of activism the movement is losing momentum.”

Quotable

“Conservative columnist George W. Will sees at least five plausible Republican presidents on the horizon: Mitch Daniels, Haley Barbour, Jon Huntsman, Mitt Romney and Tim Pawlenty. “But the nominee may emerge much diminished by involvement in a process cluttered with careless, delusional, egomaniacal, spotlight-chasing candidates to whom the sensible American majority would never entrust a lemonade stand, much less nuclear weapons.” 

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