Opinion: There are moments in time when points of view gain enough glue to hold enough people together that they become “movements.” But while the rise of movements and their early days are always newsworthy because they reflect something new in terms of a group of people with a particular idea that seems to suddenly have gained center stage, the gradual weakening of movements is frequently less graceful as these groups, with their own infrastructure, offices, manifestos, individuals who have gained leadership become reluctant to accept that perhaps their moment is gone.
Sputtering along is Occupy Wall Street, barely relevant today. Could the Tea Party Movement be close behind? It is my hope that the Tea Party Movement becomes the happiest casualty of Obamacare. Too polarizing to endure endlessly, too vast in the endlessly predictable stance against government interference except for its own leaders’ hopes of infiltrating that government and dominating it for their own purposes, and too hostile to enormous segments of our population, I believe that Obamacare can, if Republicans are wise, be the flashpoint to resurrect their party’s relevance by abandoning the Tea Party Movement.
The problem is that “Movements,” that tend to create their own structure resembling a parallel bureaucracy frequently fail to recognize when their time is past.
Like Occupy Wall Street, the Tea Party Movement has hamstringed itself through its own philosophy from ever achieving perpetual relevance to society. Occupy Wall Street was against greed, OK, most of us are, but there are few places to go with that, especially since the target seemed to be the whole makeup of society rather than a particular piece of legislation or direction that the country was taking in that moment.
Similarly, the Tea Party is against big government, yet they are self-declared nay-sayers and therefore by their own definition can only legitimately take actions that Un-do government rather than achieving better government.
Obamacare is a perfect example of how the Republicans can take this opportunity to allow the Tea Party to gracefully dismantle itself, or less gracefully retain its branding but sadly fade into irrelevancy, much like Occupy Wall Street. We’ve already seen cracks in the Tea Party, as more moderate Republicans seem more willing to notice that most of America does not support the Tea Party, and that they are unlikely to regain control of the White House if they continue to be infected by the extreme attitudes of Tea Party members.
If not for the Tea Party, perhaps Republicans would have read through Obamacare, tackling the issues in the law before the law was passed, preventing the unpleasant surprise that is Obamacare.
Republicans did a terrible job regarding Obamacare, terrible in terms of identifying issues that are currently unpopular with many Americans, such as the individual mandate, or the unprecedented codification of a permanent shift in the idea of health insurance as a tool for prevention instead of as a financial product to help pay for health care when you’re sick, and instead put their hands over their eyes and ears and simply said, “No, we don’t want it.”
Instead of effectively bringing out the weaknesses in Obamacare, the Republicans allowed the Democrats to proceed virtually unchallenged as they publicized the law giving half-truth about covering the uninsured, going after those mean insurance companies, and on and on. Obamacare is an enormous law that each of us knew only about two or three things about before its passage, of course we supported it.
Even now, with declarations of success, Republicans are focusing on computer glitches instead of questioning what kind of success is being declared. We won’t know for ages whether the “number of uninsured” is impacted and how by enrollment on health exchanges. We won’t know for some time whether the products being sold, the actual health insurance plans help reduce financial ruin for families facing illness and the cost of treatment. We won’t know for years whether Americans’ life expectancy goes down as a result of new approaches to saving money.
I believe that Obamacare could end up being the best thing to happen to Republicans in recent times, an opportunity to clean house and get rid of extremist elements that have weighted it down and rendered the party almost cartoon-like in its no government good-government bad approach to governance.
As for the Tea Party Movement, they face the challenge of all movements, the choice of getting out before they become a tattered, irrelevant, throwback to their former moment in time or not.
