NY Times' Frank Rich Says "Tea Party Outrage isn't About Reform" it's About the "Rise of Minorities"

New York Times columnist Frank Rich says Tea Party Movement isn't about health care reform, but about the "rise of minorities" and the white establishment losing power.

Tea Party Outrage (NY Times/Barry Blitt)

New York Times columnist Frank Rich wrote a riveting article in Sunday's paper about the fear among whites in this country that they are becoming a minority, from a demographically speaking. He claims that the uproar and Tea Party demonstrations are really about health care reform, but are a result of the prospective of the rise of "minorities" in this country. Here's an excerpt from the article:

In fact, the current surge of anger — and the accompanying rise in right-wing extremism — predates the entire health care debate. The first signs were the shrieks of “traitor” and “off with his head” at Palin rallies as Obama’s election became more likely in October 2008. Those passions have spiraled ever since — from Gov. Rick Perry’s kowtowing to secessionists at a Tea Party rally in Texas to the gratuitous brandishing of assault weapons at Obama health care rallies last summer to “You lie!” piercing the president’s address to Congress last fall like an ominous shot.

If Obama’s first legislative priority had been immigration or financial reform or climate change, we would have seen the same trajectory. The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House — topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman — would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play. It’s not happenstance that Frank, Lewis and Cleaver — none of them major Democratic players in the health care push — received a major share of last weekend’s abuse. When you hear demonstrators chant the slogan “Take our country back!,” these are the people they want to take the country back from.

They can’t. Demographics are avatars of a change bigger than any bill contemplated by Obama or Congress. The week before the health care vote, The Times reported that births to Asian, black and Hispanic women accounted for 48 percent of all births in America in the 12 months ending in July 2008. By 2012, the next presidential election year, non-Hispanic white births will be in the minority. The Tea Party movement is virtually all white. The Republicans haven’t had a single African-American in the Senate or the House since 2003 and have had only three in total since 1935. Their anxieties about a rapidly changing America are well-grounded.

If Congressional Republicans want to maintain a politburo-like homogeneity in opposition to the Democrats, that’s their right. If they want to replay the petulant Gingrich government shutdown of 1995 by boycotting hearings and, as John McCain has vowed, refusing to cooperate on any legislation, that’s their right too (and a political gift to the Democrats). But they can’t emulate the 1995 G.O.P. by remaining silent as mass hysteria, some of it encompassing armed militias, runs amok in their own precincts. We know the end of that story. And they can’t pretend that we’re talking about “isolated incidents” or a “fringe” utterly divorced from the G.O.P. A Quinnipiac poll last week found that 74 percent of Tea Party members identify themselves as Republicans or Republican-leaning independents, while only 16 percent are aligned with Democrats.

 It is interesting to note that when Social Security, Medicare and the Civil Rights Act passed, there was widespread anger and it showed in demonstrations across the country. What I find interesting is the fact that many Tea Party demonstrators are on Social Security and Medicare and some are even collecting unemployment benefits. So, clearly, this isn't really about a government take-over of health care. It's a little disingenuous to claim it is. The hate-mongering of some Tea Party supporters proves it's all about race and gender. How dare a black president, a female Speaker of the House of Representatives and the gay head of a powerful House committee dare tell them what to do? Shameful and disgraceful, but it is the reality of the fringe element of the Tea Party movement, with their de-facto leaders -- Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck.

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Frank Rich, The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth in Bush's America.